Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
It’s a freezing Thursday in February, the kind of day that feels like it’s in the single digits, and Tina Ruyter just wants to go to the farmers’ market. I meet the 67-year-old at her apartment on Morningside Drive and 116th, and we start walking her usual route: west on 116th Street until we hit the gates of Columbia University, at which point we walk south on Amsterdam to 114th, then back up Broadway to 116th again. It’s been nearly a year since Columbia closed the portion of 116th that cuts through its campus, forcing everyone without a school ID to do this kind of circuitous rerouting. “I’m lucky because I’m healthy, but it’s a huge inconvenience,” says Ruyter, who had hip surgery in January and currently walks with a cane. “More important is the principle of the thing.”
The principle of the thing, as Ruyter sees it, rests on the fact that the walkway has been open to pedestrians for as long as Manhattan’s street grid has existed. Which is also why she sued, joining a class-action lawsuit led by Toby Golick, a lawyer and friend who lives in her building. The case rests on a deal that Columbia made in 1953, when the city closed the stretch of 116th between Broadway and Amsterdam to cars and ceded it to Columbia University for a “token payment of $1,000.” In exchange, the university agreed to grant the city access and an “easement over the proposed pedestrian walk” that would be built by the school. For the next 70 years, the walk through campus was a particularly nice way to get to the 1 or go grocery shopping. Ruyter has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years and used it regularly. Everyone did.
Then Columbia started closing the walkway intermittently in response to students protesting the war in Gaza and the school’s investments in Israel. In April the university addressed the closures in an email to the student body, calling them a “cautionary step.” Time passed and the gates stayed closed, and security checkpoints for students entering the campus have remained in place long after the university called in the NYPD to arrest students and clear the encampments. In what’s been nearly a year since, locals complain about being cut off from their own neighborhood while students complain about long lines to get to class. (One grad student told me she stopped going to campus because of the hassle.) There’s been little explanation why the closures remain necessary. In a January update, the school wrote that the walkway would remain closed, since “our community continues to face a significant risk of disruption on the Morningside campus, including from outside demonstrators, threatening our community members’ sense of safety, and creating the potential need to bring the NYPD on campus.”
“I’m really quite passionate about this, and I know it’s a little nutty,” Ruyter, a self-described lefty who seems charmingly self-aware, tells me on our walk, pointing out how the security tents also block the sidewalk, leaving just a few feet of space for strollers and wheelchairs. She used to walk through the campus despite the objections of the school’s security guards, but then she felt bad about it since they weren’t the ones making the rule. (“These poor guards. What do they do with an eccentric old lady like me?” she says.)
Suing, then, felt like a more direct way to register her disagreement. Ruyter is one of four plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, which was filed on January 15. She is joined by 92-year-old Barbara Griffiths; Mary Allen, who is 86; and Philippe Auffray, a senior citizen taking care of his 97-year-old mother. Each has the same complaint: Columbia University’s closure of the walkway, beyond being a wild inconvenience, violates the deal it made with the city in 1953 to keep it open. The closure has impacted elderly and disabled people, per the suit, “to the extent that they have had to limit or entirely stop their activities in the neighborhood.” It goes on to claim that the detour adds at least 15 minutes of extra walking, which, from my morning with Ruyter, sounds right.
Tina Ruyter standing outside the street she used to be able to walk through freely.
Photo: Clio Chang
Prior to the suit, Columbia agreed to give out QR codes to residents of two buildings on Morningside Drive — that workaround included Ruyter’s apartment, but she saw it as a half-measure that left out the rest of the neighborhood. “They seem to think it’s a good thing for them to privatize and close up the campus,” Ruyter says. “I do not anticipate that they will open it up unless they’re forced to.” In a statement, a Columbia spokesperson wrote that the university was evaluating campus access “on an ongoing basis” and that “the daily experiences of our neighbors weighs heavily on our decision-making.”
Setha Low, an anthropologist at the CUNY Graduate Center who studies public space, says these kinds of closures — justified by amorphous claims about security — have become more common since the 1980s. “There’s been a slow progression, and universities have always been part of it,” Low says. And there’s a lot of space to negotiate: Columbia is the city’s largest private landowner, acting as both an educational institution and a de facto real-estate firm (that also receives $182 million annually in property-tax breaks from the city).
In some ways, Columbia’s refusal to unlock the gate mirrors broader trends across the city: Benches are being removed; gates are closed around what are meant to be public plazas; barriers are erected around public buildings. A New York Times investigation of publicly owned private spaces — lobbies, plazas, and parks that are supposed to be open to the public in exchange for granting developers more space — found that many of the developers were quietly reneging on their end of the deal. While the high-rises grew, New Yorkers watched as their public spaces continued to shrink. Why wouldn’t the school dig in?
And Columbia isn’t alone in moving to close off once-public spaces to the rest of the city. Last year, NYU restricted access to previously open areas on campus ahead of anticipated protests. The school similarly walked back an agreement it had made in 2012 to keep its Paulson Center’s atrium open to the public, citing a clause that states it can close the lobby on a “temporary basis” for “security reasons.” (Students and land-use experts have questioned the legality of this interpretation.)
For her part, Ruyter says she’s sympathetic to the school’s desire to keep students safe, but where do you draw the line? The seemingly permanent closure of a major street feels “completely disproportionate,” she says. “I think this is a New York City struggle to maintain our public space and walkways,” Low says, referencing Columbia. “The city has got to fight it.” (Local politicians wrote an open letter to Columbia last month denouncing the closure: “It appears that Columbia is attempting to ease its way into a new normal — one in which the public is permanently excluded from a space they are entitled to access.”)
Once we make it to the farmers’ market, Ruyter picks up a loaf of bread and prepares for the long walk home. As we part ways, I watch as she heads back to 114th Street. Ruyter refuses to use the QR code that Columbia gave to the residents of her building. Again, it’s the principle of the thing. “I don’t want to give authority to people who have no legitimate authority to check my comings and goings,” Ruyter says.
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