NYU is a big bully of a university with over 45,000 students and no real campus.  Well, it has a sort-of campus as in “The Entire New York City Bohunk Neighborhood Called Greenwich Village” — and it isn’t folly to argue NYU not only wants to own all of Greenwich Village, it wants to be Greenwich Village… and probably re-brand the area, “The NYU Green.”

As you can imagine, the non-NYU students who currently reside in Greenwich Village despise the school’s ongoing and aggressive attempts over the last couple of decades to undermine the status of their lives by buying up and tearing down the real estate that makes up their little corner of the world:

New York University says it needs more dormitories, classrooms, athletic and performance spaces and a hotel to accommodate its burgeoning student body and compete with national universities, and it wants to erect four buildings amid two sprawling apartment complexes north of Houston Street.

The square footage of the four buildings, the tallest of which would be 25 floors, would nearly equal that of the Empire State Building.

The local community board recommended unanimously last month that the Council reject the university’s plan — known as NYU 2031 — and the zoning changes it would require. The board said that the proposed buildings were too dense and tall and that the addition of thousands of students and workers would erode the character of a still quaint and offbeat city quarter.

Continue reading → NYU Razes Greenwich Village