Photo of the Day: Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, NYC

The other day, I posted about the Jerome L. Greene Science Center at Columbia University. Today’s post concerns the second in the triad of buildings at the southeastern quadrant of the university’s 17-acre Manhattanville campus that opened in 2017 and that I saw and photographed a few weeks ago.

The Lenfest Center for the Arts, part of the university’s graduate School of the Arts, was, like the Greene Center, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with Davis Brody Bond as executive architect. 

This 60,000-sq. ft., glass-enclosed structure contains publicly accessible facilities of the free Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery; the Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room for film; a flexible performance space for theater, music, dance and cross-disciplinary productions; and a flexible presentation space for readings, lectures, exhibitions and symposia.

Though it was anchored in the media and financial capital of the world, Columbia for decades claimed its lack of space left it at a competitive disadvantage with the other Ivy League schools and other major selective universities. The acquisition of land once devoted to manufacturing in Manhattanville went a long way towards correcting that.

In particular, Lenfest Center draws on resources from the university as a whole. Columbia stated when the center opened that it wanted to be “open to and engaged with the surrounding West Harlem community.”—and the university has pledged $170 million to the streets near the Manhattanville project.

It is good that the university has bowed in the direction of better community relations, particularly given a notorious history that may have reached its low point with its notorious and losing 1968 struggle to build a gymnasium in Morningside Heights.

But, as a New York Times article in late September noted, the university’s expansion into Harlem now makes it the largest private property company in New York City. And opinion remains divided as to how much Columbia has hired residents and local companies.

Lenfest Center has worked to draw from and contribute to the cultural landscape of New York City. 

But at a time when, as the Times article observes, it has benefited from 200-year-old legislation that allows it and other local nonprofits to pay almost no private property taxes—an advantage over its Ivy League rivals—questions will probably raised more insistently on how this cultural center could benefit the community more.

Photo of the Day: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, Columbia University

Sixteen years ago, at a college class reunion, I heard a presentation about Columbia University’s proposed Manhattanville project—a projected 30-year plan that, the administration believed, would keep the school competitive with other Ivy League universities with far more space. 

But I wondered how on earth the university hoped to put together something so sprawling that it would not only enlarge the school’s footprint, but utterly transform the West Harlem area just north of the school’s reach at the time.

Above all, I questioned how easily the university could steer the project to completion, given its fraught history with its own Morningside Heights neighborhood.

I shouldn’t have wondered. Columbia already owned much of the land, and in July 2008 The Empire State Development Corporation gave it a powerful weapon for rolling up the rest by declaring the 17-acre site in Manhattanville blighted. 

You won’t find the storage facilities, gas stations and auto-repair shops that gave rise to that designation, anymore than you’ll find traces of what used to be “San Juan Hill” in Lincoln Center. I’m sure many West Harlem residents continue to question the university’s resort to eminent domain and the displacement that followed. 

Only time will tell just how well the university fulfilled its claim that it wanted to “facilitate the revitalization, improvement, and redevelopment” of this section.

But, driven by curiosity, I walked up from Morningside Heights a couple of weekends ago to see how the focus of all this frenetic building (and legal) activity looked. 

Just west of Broadway between 129th and 130th Streets, I sighted the 450,000-square-foot Jerome L. Greene Science Center, home to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. 

The nine-story glass structure, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and completed in 2017, seeks to bring together neuroscientists, engineers, statisticians, psychologists and other scholars to collaborate on research, teaching and public programming.

Standing close by Lenfest Center for the Arts and the University Forum, the Greene Center is transparent on its ground floor, conveying a feeling of openness differing from the university’s prior reputation of being closed off from its neighbors. 

The building has surely advanced the school’s desire to be a hub of scientific research and collaboration. How well that will soothe some residents’ long memories of the bruising battle to build it and the project it's a part of is another matter.