journal of planning history fighting the war against 2011

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Fighting the War againstBlight: Columbia University,Morningside Heights, Inc.,and Counterinsurgent UrbanRenewal

Micheal Carriere1

AbstractDuring the post–World War II era, Columbia University undertook a bold and comprehensiveexpansion and redevelopment initiative to remake their immediate surroundings. Drawing upon thelanguage of Cold War anticommunism, the university—in partnership with such redevelopmentgroups as Morningside Heights Inc.—undertook such a self-proclaimed ‘‘war on blight’’ in an attemptto ‘‘liberate’’ the surrounding community from the horrors of urban decay. This essay positions the1968 student–community campaign against a proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park within thislonger narrative of university-sponsored urban renewal. In light of such a history, those that campaignedagainst the university’s expansion efforts also adopted a language clearly influenced by the imagery ofwarfare in the mid-twentieth century: the language of anticolonialism.

KeywordsColumbia University, New York, Harlem, Morningside Heights, urban renewal, African Americans,student movement

By the late 1950s, it appeared as if Columbia University, like its fellow institutions in Cleveland and

Chicago, was on its way to becoming a model neighbor for both Morningside Heights—the area

from about West 106th Street to about West 123rd Street between Morningside Park and Riverside

Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—and the nearby Harlem community. Starting in the

early years of the decade the university, with the establishment of the Columbia University–Com-

munity Athletic Field at the southeast end of Morningside Park (near West 111th Street), had begun

to develop parkland for the benefit of both Columbia students and community members. On the sur-

face, such a development project seemed like a model of a successful private/public partnership.

While numerous public and private schools had used public park facilities without having con-

structed them, Columbia built recreational facilities on public parkland, which were planned to

be accessible to both students and Harlem/Morningside Heights community members. At the same

1Milwaukee School of Engineering

Corresponding Author:

Micheal Carriere, #103, Whitefish Bay, WI 53217, USA

Email: [email protected]

Journal of Planning History10(1) 5-29ª 2011 The Author(s)Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1538513210392882http://jph.sagepub.com

time, the parks department agreed to pay to maintain these Columbia-constructed facilities. By 1957,

Columbia—at a cost of approximately $200,000—had constructed two baseball/softball diamonds,

three touch football fields, and a soccer field in Morningside Park. The university also installed a

fence around these playing fields, which took up close to five acres of park space. Columbia also

constructed an office and locker room adjacent to these diamonds.1

As the decade came to an end, Columbia officials began to discuss the need for even more recrea-

tional space for their growing student population. With the success of these earlier community out-

reach efforts in mind, university leaders sought to include neighborhood needs when they

announced, in 1961, that they had signed an agreement with the city of New York to build a Colum-

bia/community gymnasium in public Morningside Park (Figure 1). James Young, Director of Com-

munity Activities at the Columbia–Community Athletic Field, noted that such a project would be

open to all in the community and would put on display the best values of American pluralism.

According to Young, ‘‘Through this new gym many boys will be encouraged to develop healthy

bodies, learn the meaning of fair play and develop tolerance of racial difference.’’2 And it seemed

that community members shared Young’s early sentiment on the project. Harlem and Morningside

Figure 1. Site of proposed Columbia–Community Gymnasium, circa 1968.

6 Journal of Planning History 10(1)

Heights organizations initially saw very few problems with the gymnasium project and even often

complimented the university on its ability to listen to community concerns. When local newspaper

The Morningside Citizen, for example, raised question over community access to the gym at night-

time in October 1962, the publication was ‘‘impressed with the willing and effective cooperation of

the Police and University in solving this community problem,’’ by improving lighting at one of the

gym’s entrances.3

After close to a decade of fund-raising efforts, Columbia began clearing the gymnasium construc-

tion site on February 19, 1968, cutting down trees, uprooting park benches, removing parts of a stone

parapet, and digging a large hole. Just two days later, on February 21, 1968, the West Harlem

Morningside Park Committee—itself a successor to a group called the Ad Hoc Committee for Mor-

ningside Park—organized a twenty-five-person demonstration, calling for a halt to the construction

of the gymnasium. Twelve individuals were arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct. On Feb-

ruary 28, 1968, a protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Graduate Stu-

dent Council, and the College Citizenship Council against the gym project drew 150 demonstrators.

A number of these demonstrators tore down a section of fencing surrounding the construction site,

attempted to stop a truck entering the site, and sat in front of a bulldozer. Thirteen people were

arrested, including twelve Columbia students (the nonstudent arrested was the Reverend A. Kendell

Smith of the Beulah Baptist Church in Harlem). The gym would go on to become a powerful symbol

in the uprisings that gripped Columbia during the spring of 1968, as the student protesters—along

with their allies in the broader Morningside Heights/Harlem community—took over the campus and

called upon the university to immediately cease construction on the gymnasium project. To such

protesters, the gym, with its separate entrances for Columbia students and Harlem community mem-

bers (a design strategy that the university insisted was forwarded due to pragmatic concerns; the

structure was to be built on a hill), had become nothing more than a visual symbol of undemocratic

planning and architecture. Here the protesters scored a somewhat rare victory, as Columbia officials

shelved plans to build the gymnasium in Morningside Park. The project was never completed in that

location.4

How did a project that was originally lauded as a means to make park land more ‘‘usable,’’ to help

make the park safe, to showcase the university’s commitment to modernity, and to create a bridge

between the university and the neighborhood become so despised by the very people it was meant to

assist—both students and community members?5 Why did the gymnasium become a structure that

inspired so much antipathy, and even outright hatred, among so many associated in some way with

Columbia University and its surrounding community? It is the contention of this essay that attention

must be paid to the built environment of Columbia University during the postwar era, to the ways in

which the school sought to present itself to both the surrounding community and the world-at-large.

For it was at this historical moment that Columbia, like such institutions as the University of Chicago,

Case Institute of Technology, and Western Reserve University (the latter two merged in 1967), saw

itself as coming to play a new—and vital—role in American culture. To many postwar liberal leaders,

the university was fast becoming the engine of Cold War-era economic growth, while providing

necessary training for those that would help the nation beat back the communist threat—a reality that

provided the intellectual impetus for university expansion. To stress the newness and vitality of such a

mission, institutions like Columbia embraced a strong vision of modernist architecture and modern

urban planning, as a means to assert their importance in these matters of global affairs.6

Yet, such a mission came to be threatened by the urban blight that Columbia officials believed

was threatening to overrun the community surrounding the university. Here, the design and planning

strategies of the university served another purpose: to reclaim and reorder the broader Morningside

Heights/Harlem community. Throughout Cold War-era American culture, as historians such as

Elaine Tyler May have shown, the concept of ‘‘containment’’ came to be applied to a host of

domestic concerns (including familial structure and dynamics).7 Urban planning was no different.

Carriere 7

As Columbia officials came to see the university as playing a fundamental role in the struggle

against the Soviet Union, they concurrently embraced the rhetoric of Cold War anticommunism

to address the perceived threat in their own backyard. But university administrators—and their allies

in such pro-development groups as Morningside Heights, Inc.—sought to not only ‘‘contain’’ urban

blight but to also wage an offensive against such conditions, a fight that would help ‘‘liberate’’

countless urban dwellers from the dangers of the unplanned city. Within this self-proclaimed ‘‘War

on Blight,’’ the aesthetics of modernism would help the university and its allies create a new citys-

cape: modern urban planning, through the razing of blighted structures and the creation of superb-

locks, would allow the community to escape the dangers of the street while the architecture

associated with modernism, marked by an aesthetic devoted to clean lines, ‘‘minimal detail and

abstract bulk,’’8 would help the school create buildings that would become physical bulwarks in the

struggle to stop the continued spread of blight. In many ways, the gym campaign was a culmination

of such efforts, a final stand against urban blight in the Morningside Heights/Harlem community.

The gym was to be a visual reminder of Columbia’s convincing victory in the battle against per-

ceived urban decay.9

And while this battle had been going on for years, it heated up dramatically during the time

elapsed between the initial discussions on the need for the gym (the late 1950s) to the eve of con-

struction of the facility (the late 1960s). More specifically, it was at this time that Columbia launched

a robust campaign to rid Morningside Heights of single-room occupancy buildings (SROs). At the

root of this campaign was the idea that specific spatial arrangements were best for the community-

at-large, as certain ill-planned structures often turned into sites of social disorganization that bred

illicit behavior. Here, the university came to pay close attention to the daily life of the community’s

residents—in this case in the realm of housing. In cities such as New York, as architectural historian

Paul Groth has noted, ‘‘Urban renewal was also a period of hotel resident removal.’’ Such was the

case at Columbia, where it was believed that such living accommodations functioned as a ‘‘Threat to

Urban Citizenship.’’10 Clearing such spaces from the urban landscape, Columbia was able to con-

struct a series of buildings that contributed to both the mission of Columbia and the health and order-

liness of the community, including the imposing School of International Affairs, constructed from

1966 to 1970 (Figure 2).

Morningside Park, the proposed home of the Columbia gymnasium, also came to be seen as such

a threat to urban order. The gym was yet another attempt to shape the behavior of neighborhood res-

idents, in this case by attempting to police the day-to-day recreational activities of such individuals.

The park itself, like the SROs, came to be seen as an unsafe site known for gambling, drinking, and

other vice-related activities. Columbia officials believed that the new facility would provide a well-

planned urban environment that encouraged healthy recreational activities among all community

members. Not surprisingly, advocates of the gym drew upon the language and tactics employed

throughout the campaign against the SROs to make their case for the validity of the gymnasium proj-

ect (and it was often the same group of individuals leading both efforts), while the successes these

actors achieved in that earlier campaign pushed them to further remake the built environment sur-

rounding Columbia.

Yet, many within the broader Columbia community noted this relationship between the campaign

to eradicate SROs and the proposed gymnasium project and viewed the gym as a continuation of the

university’s push to re-order Morningside Heights and Harlem only on their terms. With this history

in mind, the gymnasium quickly became a symbol of university occupation. The war against

blight—even by the admission of Columbia officials and others—had casualties, and those who

found themselves in the crosshairs of university policy began to see themselves as the victims of

a form of university-sponsored imperialism. Protesters, both from Columbia’s student body and

from within the Morningside Heights/Harlem community, came to condemn not only the tools of

the university’s campaign against urban decay, which often resulted in rounds of forced evictions


and the loss of affordable housing, but also the intent of the buildings that Columbia was construct-

ing—seeing them as serving the needs of policy makers who advocated war in faraway places like

Vietnam (as in the case of the School of International Affairs). In light of such a development, those

who campaigned against the university’s expansion efforts adopted a language also clearly influ-

enced by the imagery of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: the language of anticolonialism. And

Figure 2. Columbia School of International Affairs. Ground was broken at the site on the southeast corner ofW. 118th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in 1966, and the building was completed in 1970. Photo by BrianTochterman.

Carriere 9

by equating their own struggle to events in Vietnam and around the globe, these protesters were able

to draw from simultaneous campaigns against the policies of the university. This ability to conflate

the local with the global gave the arguments of the anti-gym protesters a sense of resonance and

depth that they would have been unable to achieve in a purely domestic context. It was due to such

a reality that the struggle against the gymnasium evoked such strong support from many Columbia

students and those living within the university’s immediate surroundings.11

Fighting the War against Blight: The Rise of Morningside Heights, Inc.

It is impossible to fully understand the 1968 gymnasium episode—and student and community

responses to such a plan—without placing the gym in the broader context of urban renewal efforts

in the Harlem/Morningside Heights community in the postwar era. And many of these efforts were

spearheaded by one group, Morningside Heights, Inc. The group, founded in 1947, headed by David

Rockefeller, and made up of a collection of fourteen Morningside Heights institutions including Bar-

nard College, Riverside Church, Jewish Theological Seminary, and St. Luke’s Hospital (though it

was clear that Columbia held the most sway within the organization), made its mission quite clear:

through a commitment to modernist urban planning, it was to wage a war on urban blight in the com-

munity in an effort to remake the urban landscape. According to the group, Morningside Heights,

Inc. was charged

To foster, plan, develop, and promote the improvement, redevelopment, and advancement of the

Morningside Heights district of the Borough of Manhattan, City and State of New York as an attractive

residential, educational, and cultural area.12

From the onset, the group displayed a strong commitment to inclusive, large-scale, centralized plan-

ning. All aspects of community life, no matter how small or trivial, would be studied and planned

out. To Morningside Heights Inc. members, such a comprehensive plan was needed because the ear-

lier growth of the community was entirely too chaotic and unplanned. Central to the problems of the

neighborhood was the condition of the buildings themselves. As the group bluntly stated in 1950:

The physical condition of the community you live in is not good. The houses you live in are old, run-

down, or unventilated. Many are infested with rats and mice and are unhealthy. They stand helter-

skelter among businesses and industries. They are dark and there is not enough room near them for your

children to play in the open air.13

This idea of the unhealthiness of certain patterns of urban living was a predominant theme within the

literature of Morningside Heights, Inc. Such living standards were seen as a sign of a sort of urban

‘‘sickness,’’ a disease brought on by unplanned and unchecked growth, the lack of segregation

between work and home (‘‘a bad jumble of businesses and homes, instead of a proper arrangement

of businesses and industrial centers and residence blocks,’’ noted the group), and an absence of green

recreation space. And if left unchecked, such sickness could spread to other healthier areas of the

city.14

Almost immediately, the group attracted the attention of the New York Times and many liberal

leaders throughout the city. What the New York Times and others admired about the group was the

fact that it was not only trying to stop the spread of blight, or to contain or segregate it to one section

of the city. Instead, Morningside Heights, Inc. declared that they would actually defeat urban blight.

‘‘Since World War II,’’ the group announced in 1950, ‘‘a fight has been made against bad houses and

run-down neighborhoods. It is a ‘war’ to re-make crowded neighborhoods.’’15 Echoing the language

of Cold War liberals in the foreign policy arena, Morningside Heights, Inc. officials saw their war as


concerned with more than simply containment: for the good of the city, the group sought to liberate

urban dwellers from the dangers of rapidly spreading blight. Early efforts in the group’s war against

blight focused on issues of public surveillance and safety. By the early 1950s, the organization had

established a public safety committee, secured better street lighting, and hired an outside security

firm to increase foot patrols in the area. It also sought and secured parking meters from the city. Here

were the first tentative campaigns in the broader struggle against urban decay.16

On Containment and Liberation: Columbia University and the Waragainst the SRO Building

As the decade progressed, the group took a more activist stance in this battle to save Morning-

side Heights. In 1957, David Rockefeller stepped down as president of Morningside Heights,

Inc. His successor, Columbia University president Grayson Kirk, immediately installed Colum-

bia treasurer William Bloor, who had been Columbia’s chief acquirer of neighborhood proper-

ties, as Morningside Heights Inc.’s principal operative. And so began a period in which

Columbia became the most prominent actor in the organization—a development that dramati-

cally affected the group’s policies and plans. Understanding that Columbia needed more prop-

erty to continue its plans for further expansion, Bloor targeted a series of buildings for purchase

that many institutional leaders viewed as a threat to the security of the Morningside Heights

community: SROs. These buildings, according to Bloor, had become centers of prostitution,

drinking, gambling, and other illicit activity.17

Marching in lockstep with prevailing Cold War attitudes, Bloor, Kirk, and other members of both

Columbia and Morningside Heights, Inc. drew upon the language and ideas of anticommunism as

they continued the ‘‘war’’ against urban blight. They portrayed blight, like communism itself, as

a parasite that was able to infect a healthy host body. And, as in the case of communism, there was

a sense that there were actual carriers of blight, who were often described as harmful and ‘‘alien’’ to

the general public.18 Not surprisingly, the notion of containing such blight became a central compo-

nent of the rhetoric of Morningside Heights’ leaders, which can be seen in Stanley Salmen’s ‘‘dom-

ino theory’’ on the subject of SRO buildings within the immediate Columbia community. This idea

came into play when, in July 1962, Salmen, who served as head of university planning and also func-

tioned for a stint as director of Morningside Heights, Inc., urged Columbia to buy the Yorkshire

before another SRO owner could do so. ‘‘If the Oxford (SRO) operator secures control,’’ noted

Salmen, ‘‘the Broadway frontage between 113th and 112th Streets will be the home of about

1,000 persons alien to an institutional environment.’’19 Columbia needed to buy the Yorkshire in

order to contain the further spread of blight. The spread of blight also led Columbia officials to

employ another usage of the domino theory, one that hoped to contain—and retain—faculty mem-

bers within Morningside Heights. As the neighborhood surrounding Columbia began to decline,

many faculty members sought academic opportunities elsewhere. Columbia dean Jacques Barzun

went as far as to describe the late 1950s and early 1960s as ‘‘the era of the packed suitcase’’ for

Columbia faculty members. What was driving such a mass exodus? To Salmen and other Columbia

leaders, it was the physical state of the neighborhood and the characteristics of the ‘‘aliens’’ taking

over the community. And these aliens had distinct characteristics. Psychologist Henry Garrett left in

1956 for the University of Virginia, when, according to fellow department of psychology faculty

member William McGill, ‘‘the blacks got too much for him.’’20

As such a comment suggests, there was a definite racial component to Columbia’s urban renewal

strategies in the postwar era, as the battle to contain blight often seemed to become a battle to contain

the population of nonwhite community members, which had grown tremendously throughout the

twentieth century: in 1930, there were only a handful of residents of color in Morningside Heights’

total population of close to 70,000. By the 1950s, the neighborhood’s population remained the same,

Carriere 11

but there were now 6,652 Puerto Ricans and 6,671 African Americans. These new residents replaced

middle-class whites abandoning Morningside Heights for flourishing suburban communities and

found affordable housing in the neighborhood’s SRO buildings. As architectural historian Andrew

S. Dolkart points out in his Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development, a

large number of apartment buildings in the community were converted into SROs in the 1950s as a

means of avoiding the city’s postwar rent-control restrictions. Incoming Morningside Heights’ res-

idents who called such buildings home found themselves forced to deal with both absentee landlords

and neighboring institutions that viewed their presence with growing suspicion.21

And, as one might expect, those ‘‘alien’’ carriers of blight were often the African American or

Puerto Rican residents of Morningside Heights. At its most innocuous, such a mindset often trans-

lated into a sort of detached liberalism. When asked whether integration was important, Stanley Sal-

men, then head of university planning, agreed that it was. However, he clarified his endorsement by

noting that it wasn’t the right answer in all situations, and, while noting that Columbia faculty was

aware of and accepted integration as a positive development, concluded that ‘‘I don’t think they have

to live in it to understand it.’’22

Yet, this rhetoric often took on a more sinister tone. For example, Salmen often referred to

these newcomers as a ‘‘dirty group’’ and saw them as sources of social disorganization. To Sal-

men, ‘‘These newcomers create an unsettled population, always pressing to secure cheap accom-

modations in this area. They are mobile with no interest in community.’’23 Columbia dean

Jacques Barzun, in a statement before the Board of Estimate on the Morningside General Neigh-

borhood Renewal Plan (the GNRP, a federally funded, large-scale urban renewal program in

Morningside Heights) in March 1965, described the community as ‘‘uninviting, sinister, danger-

ous,’’ and the mindset of both students and faculty as requiring ‘‘the perpetual qui vive of a para-

trooper in enemy country.’’24 By 1967, Columbia had installed new gates on Broadway and

College Walk, and the school clearly saw itself as a bulwark against (racially coded) blight. Any-

one who was not white was viewed with suspicion by university security forces. An African

American Department of Architecture faculty member remembered that well into the 1960s,

before he had been issued his University ID card, guards would stop him and not let him onto

the campus. ‘‘Every time I wanted to get on the campus, I’d have to come to the gates where

there were guards and call Dean [Kenneth] Smith [of the School of Architecture] and tell the

guards to let me onto the campus. So it was very odd and strange.’’25

Blight Fights Back: From Surveillance to Removal

Despite the best efforts of Morningside Heights, Inc., by the late 1950s it appeared as if the SRO

building was in danger of becoming a permanent aspect of the landscape of Morningside Heights.

In 1958, the New York Times ran the headline: ‘‘Slums Engulfing Columbia Section.’’ To the repor-

ter, ‘‘The Cancer of Slum Housing Mars the Face of Morningside Heights.’’ Such a reality did not fit

the mission—as well as the image—that Columbia wanted to portray to the world. ‘‘Across the face

of Morningside Heights,’’ the Times piece continued, ‘‘which has the greatest concentration of insti-

tutions of learning and worship in the United States, a vicious cancer of slum housing is creeping.’’

The reporter found the beautiful ‘‘green campus’’ of Columbia was still relatively safe, and that stu-

dents were still blissfully unaware of the chaos outside of the school’s gates. ‘‘Unless they stop and

look closely, they will never realize that here and there behind the imposing stone and brick facades

of once splendid apartment houses are labyrinthian hells filled with vice, filth and disease as sordid

as any in the world.’’ Yet unless such disease was dealt with, it threatened to overtake even Colum-

bia’s immediate surroundings. And, once again, the chief engine of infection was the SRO

building.26


It was this fear of contagion that motivated Columbia, often through Morningside Heights, Inc.

and its real estate arm Remedco, Inc., to buy up as many SRO buildings in the community as pos-

sible. An example of such a strategy can be seen in Columbia’s treatment of the Bryn Mawr Hotel, a

six-story building at the northeast corner of the Columbia University campus that housed close to

135 residents. The university bought the structure in July 1964, as they saw the building as a haven

for prostitutes and drug users. They announced that they wanted to clean up the building and they

installed a manager who had previously served as assistant superintendent of Columbia’s faculty

apartments at 560 Riverside Drive. On his plans for the building, new manager Mr. John E. Chandler

noted that ‘‘First, we’re going to improve it physically—clean it up, paint, make it a decent place to

live in.’’ But there was more to Columbia’s plans than a new paint job. A spokesperson for Morning-

side Heights, Inc. stated that they planned ‘‘to use this building for research to find out how to help

these people.’’ A social work program was started under the guidance of Mrs. Jane Shapiro of the

Community Psychiatry Center of St. Luke’s Hospital. ‘‘Sixteen tenants have undergone voluntary

detoxification at Manhattan General Hospital,’’ said Shapiro in the spring of 1964, who also added

that prostitution in the building had been ‘‘greatly reduced.’’27

Going hand-in-hand with such social engineering programs was a greater commitment to the

surveillance of tenants’ personal behavior. Tenants no longer were allowed to have front-door

keys, as Chandler announced that the main entrance ‘‘will be locked after midnight and a clerk

will let them in after they buzz the buzzer.’’ Chandler also noted that surveillance of outsiders

entering the building would be increased. ‘‘The building had already become one of the city’s

most heavily protected,’’ the New York Times found in May 1965. ‘‘Patrolmen and plainclothes-

men have inspected it regularly at night.’’ If nothing else, such surveillance undoubtedly con-

vinced the tenants of the Bryn Mawr that the institutions of the community were keeping a

close eye on them.28

To University and Morningside Heights, Inc. leaders, such surveillance was necessary to

keep the buildings—as well as the larger community—safe. And those that were seen as threa-

tening such security were marked for eviction. By January 1965, residents were receiving John

Doe eviction notices from Remedco, who reported that, despite their best efforts, the building

was still being used for ‘‘illicit and immoral purposes.’’ Yet, reporters noted that common

spaces and many individual apartment units within the building (even those marked for evic-

tion) were well maintained. One tenant remarked that the Bryn Mawr was ‘‘one of the

best—a palace compared to places in Harlem and the Lower East Side.’’ To such tenants, it

had become clear that Columbia was now only interested in policing the space, and these indi-

viduals begin to believe that the building would soon be razed to make room for a new insti-

tutional structure. Columbia and Morningside Heights, Inc., in turn, seemed to do whatever

they could within their power to make the Bryn Mawr a less than inviting place to live. The

New York Times noted that in the winter of 1964–1965, a 6 foot 2 inch, 265-pound security

guard patrolled the grounds, turning away any unannounced guests. On the night the Times’

reporter paid a visit to the Bryn Mawr, he found that, between 8:30 and midnight, two of the

four uniformed policeman who patrol the block made three half-hour inspections, finding the

building quiet each time. Two plainclothesmen who had the building under surveillance also

paid the building a visit. Finally, shortly after midnight, two firemen in helmets, slickers, and

boots showed up to inspect the night watchman’s time clock.29

To the surprise of very few, Columbia treasurer William Bloor announced, in November 1965,

that the Bryn Mawr was to be demolished. By that point, only two tenants remained in the building,

with 130 tenants having left the hotel since late September 1965. Remedco offered each tenant $100

for relocation expenses. The structure was sold to Barnard in 1966, which planned to raze the build-

ing and use the space to build the fifteen-story modern Plimpton Hall. The building, part of the

school’s ‘‘New Chapter’’ program in redevelopment, was completed by the fall of 1968.30

Carriere 13

Bringing the Fight to the People: Counterinsurgency and UrbanRenewal

Yet, Columbia had begun its broader assault on SRO buildings well before 1965. Columbia and

Remedco began providing tenants of such SROs with relocation payments and services in January

1963. In that same year, the university founded the Office of Neighborhood Services (ONS), whose

goal was to assist tenants in finding suitable relocation housing after their buildings had been pur-

chased by Columbia. The ONS helped in the process of finding these new apartments and often pro-

vided a small stipend to those who had to move. According to Bertram Weinert, ONS’s first director,

the establishment of the agency was an attempt to ‘‘polish up its tarnished image’’ by instituting a

more human tenant removal program. Columbia, university administrators wanted the community to

know, wished to provide better living arrangements for all.31

In December 1964, however, Weinert was fired. According to Lawrence Chamberlain, the vice

president of Columbia, Weinert was moving too slowly in removing tenants from the School of

International Affairs construction site. According to Weinert, Chamberlain and the Columbia Board

of Trustees were incredibly eager to begin construction of the new school building, and they were

‘‘very upset’’ at the trouble Weinert was having in relocating tenants. In explaining his decision to

fire Weinert, Chamberlain concluded: ‘‘We want to be fair and humane, but we do have to move

people out and start demolition inside of our deadlines.’’ According to the Columbia Daily Specta-

tor, Weinert’s successor placed greater emphasis on meeting the deadlines set by Columbia

administrators.32

Yet, Columbia carried on a dual campaign in its renewal and relocation strategies, one that can

best be described as guerilla in nature. As in the case of the Bryn Mawr example, Columbia and Mor-

ningside Heights Inc. officials launched counterinsurgent campaigns against the residents of SROs,

in an attempt to create a desolate, unfriendly atmosphere. Apartment units that were vacated were

not re-rented, even when scheduled demolition was often years away. At the same time, the physical

and security conditions of such buildings were allowed to deteriorate. The Columbia Daily Spectator

reported on October 3, 1966, that Columbia had destroyed a furnace that supplied heat to a still-

occupied building in the International Studies construction site. The newspaper also noted broken

windows, splintered doors, and garbage in the halls of this university-owned building. In Conhar

Hall, a Columbia-owned building that the university began to evacuate in the summer of 1966,

Inspector Antonio J. Amato of the New York City Department of Housing and Buildings discovered

sixty-three violations when he inspected the still-occupied building on October 24, 1966. According

to his report of the inspection:

Upon our first visit, we found the tenants without heat or hot water, without a properly functioning ele-

vator, with broken windows and plaster in public parts, with unlocked doors in both public parts and pri-

vate apartments, with rat and roach infestations, with improper removal of refuse and garbage and

sporadic maid service in some single rooms. An inspection of Jesse Black’s dwelling unit revealed that

the bath, sink and toilet needed repair or replacement; faulty and exposed wiring needed correction; the

fire exit lights in the apartment were not on and not working; and large holes and cracks were visible in

the walls.

Similar conditions, noted Amato, were found in other apartments.33

Those affiliated with the institutions of Morningside Heights also often resorted to the harassment

of tenants. Many tenants noted that building managers would board up windows of vacated units,

even when the majority of apartments within the building were still occupied. Others note that man-

agement had gone as far as to paint large ‘‘Xs’’ on windows of apartments to be vacated, even while

people were still living in these units. One tenant of the Oxford SRO returned home to his room in


the winter of 1965 only to find that the keyhole had been plugged. Another tenant of the Oxford,

Bernard Moore, also reported that his keyhole had been plugged. He also noted, in the summer

of 1965, that he believed the management used the police to harass him. He told the West Side News

that ‘‘the police had entered and searched his room for narcotics while he was attending a meeting of

the Riverside Democrats.’’ Other tenants of Columbia-owned SROs noted the implementation of

restrictive security procedures. According to one such tenant, one Columbia-owned SRO suddenly

stopped allowing residents to entertain guests in their private rooms. After tenant outcry, the build-

ing announced that residents would be permitted to entertain one guest after 11:00 p.m.34

If such strategies failed, rents in such occupied SROs were increased exponentially, as SROs

were not covered by any rent control rules. If this did not work, rent was refused and eviction pro-

ceedings began. This happened at the aforementioned Oxford, when a tenant named Yvelle Walker

reported that, in July 1965, she attempted to pay rent to building manager Philip Kelman. According

to an account that Ms. Walker gave of her conversation with Kelman, ‘‘He said to keep the rent

because Columbia had bought the building and is going to use it for offices and everyone has to

move.’’ She attempted to pay her rent again a number of days later, and ‘‘Mr. Kelman refused rent

again and said: ‘Keep your rent, hurry up and find a place to move.’’’ That same night, Ms. Walker

came home to find her keyhole plugged.35

Sadly, many other tenants of Columbia-owned SROs relayed similar stories. According to an affi-

davit filed by one George Stevenson, one of the last remaining residents of Conhar Hall, Mr. Chand-

ler, the Columbia-employed manager of the building, had come to his apartment every Monday to

collect the weekly rent. On Monday, March 13, 1967, Stevenson noted that Chandler had curiously

missed their weekly appointment. He further stated that, when he finally saw Mr. Chandler on March

16th, he refused to accept any rent payment and advised Mr. Stevenson that he was ordered not to

take any payments from building residents. Not wanting to fall behind on his rent payments, Mr.

Stevenson mailed a money order for $60.00 on March 19, 1967. The money order, according to Ste-

venson, was sent by registered mail to 400 W. 119th Street. On or about March 24, 1967, Stevenson

received a 72-hour notice to vacate, along with a letter returning his $60.00 money order and a note

declaring that summary proceedings were now pending against. Mr. Stevenson was soon forced to

leave his apartment.36

And, according to such resident complaints, there was little doubt as to who was behind such

orders to vacate: the university itself. According to Maria Hall, a resident of an SRO at 510 West

113th Street, the manager of her building refused to accept her rent payment on April 17, 1967,

‘‘[s]tating that he was so instructed by Columbia University.’’ On April 28, a 72-hour eviction notice

was placed on her door. Such actions had tremendous results for the community of Morningside

Heights. Some estimate that between the years of 1960 and 1968, approximately 9,500 tenants were

forced to relocate. In 1960, there had been 309 residential buildings in Morningside Heights, with 34

of these structures being rented on a predominantly single-room basis to families of one, two, or

three persons. These 34 SROs contained 4,840 rooms, housing approximately 9,600 people. The

other 275 residential structures were apartment buildings that contained 10,140 housing units, in

which close to 26,500 lived.37

A Strategic Strike: Morningside Park and the Construction of theColumbia–Community Gymnasium

Not surprisingly, the gym backers tied the construction of the gymnasium facility to both Colum-

bia’s large-scale postwar planning effort and its efforts to free the greater community from the con-

tagion of blight, represented by such structures as SROs. Serious discussion on the gymnasium

project began in 1958, when the Columbia Gymnasium Committee issued its first report on the need

to modernize recreational facilities at the university. Following the issuing of this report, Columbia

Carriere 15

began the process of planning and negotiating with the city for potential space for the gymnasium

project. Also in 1958, University officials met with representatives of the Parks Department to dis-

cuss the possibility of placing the gymnasium in Morningside Park. Robert Moses, who was then

Parks Commissioner, reached an initial understanding with Columbia President Grayson Kirk that,

if the University would build a public gymnasium for community use, the Parks Department would

allow Columbia to build its gymnasium on top of the public building. New York courts, at that his-

torical moment, had held that cities, as agents of the State, held park property in trust for use by the

public. Therefore, a municipality could not lease park property to others without express approval of

the State Legislature. A request by the Mayor of the City of New York, concurred by the City Coun-

cil, was a necessary prerequisite to enactment of any special act by the State Legislature. Finally,

because the New York State Constitution prohibited a city from aiding any private corporation with-

out adequate consideration, it was decided that appraisals by an independent appraiser and by New

York City’s Department of Real Estate would be necessary if Columbia decided to attempt to build-

ing within Morningside Park. Both of these appraisals found Columbia’s proposed plans well within

the law. All of these discussions were highly secretive and involved no feedback from the commu-

nity-at-large.38

By August 1961, city and university had agreed to terms for a lease for the property in question.39

To university officials, the gymnasium project came to be seen as almost the perfect urban renewal

project, as it seemed to be the ideal way to address a series of issues that had begun to vex the sur-

rounding community. Through a Columbia-community gym, the school could clean up a blighted

urban park and provide a usable space for the community—with minimal intrusion into the sur-

rounding neighborhood. It was a strategic strike in the war against blight, one that would carry for-

ward the strategies first articulated in the campaign against the SROs, while avoiding some of the

problems associated with such earlier efforts. As Columbia noted in its sale’s pitch to the

community:

By using the park site instead of a city block, University officials note, no residents of the community are

being displaced. At the same time, it is expected that the existence of a much-used facility like the gym-

nasiums will help make Morningside Park considerably safer. The park has long been a dangerous area

with more than its share of broken bottles and benches, crumbling cement stairs, and crime.40

As one might expect, the architecture of the gymnasium was also seen as contributing to this sense of

urban order. The initial plans for the project, drawn up by the architectural firm of Eggers & Higgins

(a firm not noted for innovation in design) saw the building as modern in design, and, most impor-

tantly, highly functional. The two entrances, one at the top for the University and one at the bottom

for the community, were planned that way because the gym was to be built on a slope (Figures 3–5).

The simple fact was that the University was at the top of the slope, while the community found itself

below. Such a perceived commitment to the functional, along with the clean, concise lines of the

box-like structure—as well as its sheer size—spoke volumes about how Columbia was still

approaching architectural and urban development in the 1960s.

Yet, there was also a sense that the gymnasium would bring order to the actual inhabitants of Har-

lem. There was a strong belief among Columbia administrators that Morningside Park had become,

like the SROs, a center of urban disorganization, a place where predominantly young men would

congregate and engage in such illicit behavior as drinking, swearing, and gambling. The ways in

which these administrators saw the physical conditions of the park—dirty, trash-strewn, and covered

in broken glass—only served to strengthen the image of the park as a site of disorder. First and fore-

most, the construction of the gymnasium in this space would lead to at least the cleanup and physical

turnaround of the park, a development that would inevitably rub off on all nearby residents. Perhaps

more importantly, advocates of the gymnasium also believed that the project, through its


commitment to ‘‘modern’’ team-oriented sports, would provide the residents of Harlem with oppor-

tunities to participate in activities built upon well-known rules and regulations and offered on a set

schedule. Such exposure would build discipline and foster teamwork, all the while keeping young

people away from the disorganized world of the street. Parks Commissioner Harris stressed this

potential when discussing why Harlem would benefit from the gym. ‘‘The community,’’ noted Har-

ris, ‘‘should welcome this new facility which will include space for community recreation on a full

time basis.’’ Here, to Harris and others, was a chance for a new understanding of urban recreation to

take hold in the Morningside Heights community.41

After the lease was executed, the gym dropped out of the spotlight, as the university began to

focus, from 1961 through 1965, on fund-raising for the project. By 1965, the estimated cost for the

project had reached $11.6 million. By this time, aesthetics of the structure were fairly set as well.

The 2.1-acre, vertical gymnasium was a stunning addition to the community landscape: it literally

reshaped the park. The plans for the building called for radical alterations to the existing 113th Street

entrance to the park, where the gym’s west main facade would be located. Large trees and rocks

would be replaced by an obtrusive 27-foot solid masonry facade (originally, this facade was to be

Figure 3. Proposed Columbia Gymnasium, preliminary design, west view, November 1960. ColumbiaUniversity Archives.

Carriere 17

even bigger). On the Harlem side of the structure, the building would plunge 126 feet, housing four

levels of facilities, including some nine stories. Within the building, there was no contact between

Columbia students and community members, as the Columbia students would enter at the top of the

bluff while Harlem residents would enter at the bottom of the hill. The entire community gym mea-

sured 100 by 80 feet or smaller than the student swimming pool alone by 5,440 square feet. It would

mainly be a ‘‘multi-purpose gymnasium and sports area.’’ Columbia planned to staff and administer

the community gym itself.42

Yet, Columbia’s activity in the community throughout the 1950 and 1960s—as seen most clearly

in their campaign against SROs—led many within Morningside Heights and Harlem to question

both the need and the design of the gymnasium project. As details of the proposed design began

to trickle out, community activists took note of its sheer size and the fact that its bland modern look

did not fit in with the surrounding architecture. ‘‘Columbia,’’ one community opponent of the gym

noted simply in the fall of 1966, ‘‘is not erecting a handsomely designed building.’’43 Yet others

Figure 4. Proposed Columbia Gymnasium, preliminary design, south elevation, November 1960. ColumbiaUniversity Archives.


offered more political critiques of the gymnasium project. Columbia CORE came out against the

gym in February 1966, around the same time when President Kirk announced an October 1966

groundbreaking for the project, on the grounds that the design seemed to endorse a brand of univer-

sity–community segregation and that the school had no business taking public land for private use.

In March 1966, Columbia University’s Student Council, concerned about the lack of transparency in

the decision-making process, urged the school to suspend its efforts to build the gym at the proposed

location, and to hold ‘‘immediate’’ discussions with community groups and members. That same

month a group of local residents came together under the name of the Ad Hoc Committee for

Morningside Park. The group, according to acting chairperson Amelia Betanzos (who was also a

District Leader in the Riverside Democratic Club), was calling for the ‘‘complete cancellation’’

of the city’s agreement to allow Columbia to build on city-owned property. One month later, Parks

Commissioner Thomas P.F. Hoving—who had voiced his displeasure at the plan inherited from his

predecessor Newbold Morris—led a rally against the park, declaring that he was ‘‘dead set against

this gym,’’ and that he would ‘‘fight as hard as I can to stop it.’’ At this event, Hoving brought a large

Figure 5. Proposed Columbia Gymnasium, longitudinal section, November 1960. Columbia UniversityArchives.

Carriere 19

wreath of gladioli, placing it before a headstone to mark the ‘‘death’’ of the public park. White crepe

paper marked the area to be leased, as a burial plot would be. Several of those in attendance wore

black arm bands. Yet, the ‘‘mood of the gathering,’’ according to The Morningside Citizen, ‘‘was far

from funereal. Dogs barked, children scampered about in the underbush and a friendly atmosphere

prevailed.’’ Such activity, protesters noted, illustrated that the park land was incredibly usable.

Speakers addressed the taking of public park lands by a private institution, dissatisfaction with the

community’s share in the facility, and Columbia’s overall role in community redevelopment—all

within a setting that showed the park hadn’t been overtaken and lost to urban decay. Reverend Henry

A. Malcolm, Counselor to Protestant Students at Columbia, concluded the rally by accusing the Uni-

versity of thinking ‘‘in terms of paternalism and power and not in terms of one man one vote self-

determinism.’’ It was not just the design and placement of the gym that bothered such community

protesters; it was also the secretive process—one that relied solely upon the judgment of

‘‘experts’’—that produced such a plan44 (Figure 6).

Just over a month before the larger protests at Columbia, 200 picketers—made up predominantly

of community members—interrupted an event at the university ‘‘to hiss, boo, and argue’’ with

Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent Shriver, who was participating in a meeting titled

‘‘The Urban Struggle for Power.’’ Initially barred from entrance to the event, many protesters stood

outside of the closed doors chanting ‘‘We want the park.’’ Others help up signs denouncing the gym,

Columbia’s broader expansion efforts, and the war in Vietnam. Once allowed into the conference,

the protesters peppered Shriver and other panelists with questions about their stance on the gym proj-

ect, and offered their critique of an urban politics that seemingly had no role for them. ‘‘We need to

control our own communities,’’ one man shouted, while another protester, placing the gymnasium in

the broader context of the school’s urban renewal policies, exclaimed ‘‘Columbia is destroying the

community.’’ Shriver’s attempts to placate the audience only worsened matters, particularly when he

referred to these attendees as ‘‘ghetto people.’’ In response to such language, one woman yelled:

‘‘Stop calling us ghetto people. We are not ghetto people. We are colonized Africans.’’45

Taking on ‘‘Gym Crow’’ and ‘‘Urban Removal:’’ The Politics of Space andthe Uprisings of 1968

This notion of community members as ‘‘colonized Africans,’’ as victims of university actions,

would come to play a major role in the events at Columbia during the spring of 1968. The nar-

rative of these events has been well told elsewhere, so there is little to be gained by providing a

blow-by-blow account of the uprisings that gripped the campus during this historical moment.46

What is lacking from our collective understanding of these events is a greater attention to the

role the gym controversy played in the uprisings. To student and community activists, the gym

quickly became a symbol of the university’s postwar urban renewal strategies. Yet, there may

be a reason why the gym became such a powerful symbol: the protesters’ ability to link this

local concern with broader, international events. The student protesters and their allies in the

broader community were able to turn the university’s belief in its privileged position within

postwar liberalism—along with their concurrent employment of the language of Cold War

anticommunism in discussing university expansion—on its head. By linking Columbia’s urban

planning practices to the university’s complicity in events in Vietnam (and by showing that

both were the result of a certain undemocratic culture of expertise), the protesters were able

to connect the university to the dark sides of both campaigns. Morningside Heights, Inc. had

gone to great lengths to discuss their efforts as constituting a ‘‘war on blight’’ within the com-

munity. Those protesting Columbia’s policies were only happy to run with such an analogy,

recasting the university as an imperialist power bent on subjugating the citizens of Morningside

Heights, Harlem, and Vietnam.47


There is little doubt that the student protest movement at Columbia did see the gym as illustrative

of Columbia’s broad war against urban decay. One begins to see how student protesters cast the

Figure 6. Front page of The Morningside Citizen Newsletter, May 6, 1966. Christiane C. Collins Collection,Schomberg Center.

Carriere 21

gymnasium project as a symbol of university imperialism in a quote from Columbia SDS leader

Mark Rudd:

The issue of the gym was one of the most important issues of the student strike, not only because we and

the people of Harlem felt the gym itself was segregated and was an insult to the people of Harlem, but

because the gym was also symbolic of the whole way in which the university faces the community—its

exploitation of the community. To be more specific, Columbia, as an institution, had the policy of

clearing out blacks, Puerto Ricans and other ‘undersirables’ from Morningside Heights. We believed this

policy of expansion into the community and the policy of removal of people to be racist. The gym was

representative of this.48

Looking into the statements, flyers, and position papers drafted by strike organizers and sympathi-

zers, it becomes clear that the evolution of the gymnasium into such a powerful symbol didn’t hap-

pen overnight—and it was not simply a means to reach out to the community. Instead, the issue of

the gym was incredibly important to all organizations active in the strike, one that they had clearly

thought about for a significant period of time. According to an April 1968 document authored by

SDS, the Student-Afro Society, and the Strike Coordinating Committee:

Our actions cannot be viewed in isolation: they were in fact a reaction to University actions, the culmi-

nation of months and years of demands by different groups of black and white students and affected com-

munity people that Columbia account for and justify its actions and policies.49

To such individuals, the gymnasium controversy represented the breaking point for those concerned

with Columbia’s development policies. To these strike leaders, the fact that the University did not

deign to address such concerns (continuing a policy that the University had followed for much of the

postwar era)—‘‘There has been no response,’’ strike organizers noted—only further illustrated the

need to take collective action against the aggressive actions of Columbia. Interestingly, strike orga-

nizers then began to tie such local policies to developments occurring outside of Morningside

Heights. As the above document continued:

the Columbia administration everyday holds violent demonstrations disruptive of people’s lives—in

Morningside Park, in the Institute for Defense Analysis headquarters in Washington . . . in every build-

ing on Morningside Heights (except, of course, Riverside Drive), and many buildings in Harlem and the

Westside.50

As one can see from such a passage, the two main issues that the student protesters wished to address

were the presence of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) on campus and the gym project. As the

Student Strike Committee noted in another document, the ‘‘IDA and the gym’’ were the ‘‘substantive

issues’’ in the uprisings of 1968. What is quite remarkable is the fact that, to student protesters and

their allies, these two issues were intimately intertwined. On the issue of the gym itself, strike leaders

offered a surprisingly coherent and insightful understanding of history of the project, and, more gen-

erally, of urban renewal in the Morningside Heights community. According to the Student Strike

Committee’s ‘‘Student Strike at Columbia’’ announcement:

The construction of the gym under present plans would allow the University—which pays no taxes—to

use public parkland for the nominal rent of $3,000 per year. The University would have 85% of the gym’s

facilities plus the main entrance for its sole use, while community people would be allowed in only by the

back entrance to use their meager 15%. Even in the summer, when no students would use the gym, the

community would be denied the use of the main facilities. This ‘separate but unequal’ arrangement, as a


faculty member described it, clearly subordinates the interests of the many to those of the few, and is a

blatant proclamation of the University’s supercilious attitude to the community.51

On a broader level, strike participants saw the ‘‘Gym Crow’’ scandal as just another example of

Columbia’s commitment to ‘‘Urban Removal,’’ two phrases used in ‘‘Columbia Liberated,’’ a doc-

ument penned by the Columbia Strike Coordinating Committee. Columbia’s policies were described

in war-like analogies, with the school carrying out ‘‘a sort of urban ‘manifest destiny,’’’ one which

sought to ‘‘‘clean up’ Morningside Heights, to rid the area of ‘undesirables’ and create a white

middle-class enclave suitable for the ‘university’s people.’’’ One student protester saw the gym

as yet another example of Columbia’s commitment to taming the urban, of wanting to create ‘‘a nice

white suburban buffer zone in the middle of Manhattan.’’52 More importantly, many strike partici-

pants began to see the close relationship between Columbia and the U.S. government, and how this

relationship was affecting the spatial dimensions of Morningside Heights. As the ‘‘Columbia Liber-

ated’’ document noted:

What is the institutional use to which the vacated buildings or land were put? What is Columbia’s expan-

sion all about? By and large, new facilities supply growing needs of U.S. business, government, and mili-

tary for manpower and knowledge.53

To the authors of ‘‘Columbia Liberated,’’ there was a surprising sense of continuity between pro-

tests against U.S. foreign policy, Columbia’s involvement in the creation of such policy, and

issues of university ‘‘imperialism’’ in Morningside Heights. On one level, these protests often

occurred simultaneously. On February 28, 1968, the day that 150 Columbia students and sym-

pathizers protested against the gym project, over 200 Columbia students took part in an SDS-

sponsored sit-in at Dodge Hall, frustrating appointments between students and recruiters for Dow

Chemical Company. Yet, there was more than mere coincidence to such simultaneity. A closer

look at the issue of IDA’s presence on Columbia’s campus shows how critiques against both uni-

versity involvement in such conflicts as the Vietnam War and the school’s policies toward urban

renewal came together within the student protest movement at Columbia. Though thousands of

miles apart, student protesters cast both conflicts in terms of institutional oppression, individual

autonomy, and the need to create an environment based upon participation and self-

determination.

The notion of IDA as a point of contention among student protesters at Columbia made a great

degree of sense, as it fit in nicely with rising sentiment against the Vietnam War. And much was

made of Columbia’s role in this Cold War-era think tank by strike leaders. IDA was organized in

1955 when Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson asked M.I.T. President James B. Killian to set

up a university research institute on military science (twelve other universities, including Princeton,

UC-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Stanford also participated in the program). Their pri-

mary task, according to one contemporary report, was to ‘‘furnish scientific and technical services to

the Defense Department’s Weapon’s System Evaluation Group (WSEG), which conducts systems

analyses on new weapons.’’ In the 1950s, the group concentrated on improvements in thermonuclear

warfare and ballistic missile delivery systems. During the Vietnam era, IDA worked on the devel-

opment of techniques and weapons for use in counterinsurgency activities. Studies from this period

had titles such as ‘‘Small Arms for Counterguerilla Operations,’’ ‘‘An Evaluation of Various Aircraft

for Counterinsurgency Missions,’’ and ‘‘Chemical Control of Vegetation in Relation to Military

Needs.’’ To many protesters, Columbia’s participation in the IDA illustrated the university’s com-

plicity in the war effort.54

Yet, protesters also began to make a connection between IDA and events on the domestic scene.

Movement sympathizer Michael Klare, in an article on the IDA, noted that the Johnson

Carriere 23

administration had asked the group to modify Vietnam-oriented warfare tactics for domestic use.

One strike document found that the group,

apart from its research work on deadly weapons such as napalm and tactical nuclear weapons for use in

Southeast Asia, also does research on ‘counter-insurgency in the ghetto’—in other words, it investigate

means of preventing oppressed people in their own cities from rebelling against a system which is set up

to keep them down.55

‘‘IDA invented Mace,’’ found one document, ‘‘the newest form of non-violent chemical warfare for

use in ghettos.’’ To many student protesters, such a development perfectly illustrated that the cold

war had come home.56

Such a reality made it possible for protesters to make an explicit connection between events in

Vietnam and Columbia’s urban environment, as they were both ‘‘battles against policies which

oppress the community.’’ The Strike Co-Ordinating Committee at Columbia issued a fascinating

flyer in August 1968 titled ‘‘Vietnam is Here!’’ which read, in part:

Refugees! In Vietnam millions have lost their homes. On Morningside Heights 10,000 people have lost

their homes . . . 10,000 more are slated to go!

Brutality! Tenant harassment: no heat, no water, repairs; tenants locked out of their homes; evictions.

And when we protest too strongly, pure force—police—is used

Racism! In Vietnam & on the Heights, people’s lives are disrupted & destroyed simply because they

have different skin or language, or are poor and uneducated and have no means to fight back.

Imperialism! In both Vietnam and the Heights, giant corporations grab land and homes, building

empires on the suffering of people57 (Figure 7).

At the core of both critiques of Columbia’s policies was the belief that the school had helped to wage

war on a victimized population, and that the university was acting undemocratically and was not

giving individuals—whether they reside in Vietnam or Morningside Heights—the chance to govern

themselves. Columbia, according to an April 28, 1968, press release from the Columbia Strike Steer-

ing Committee, was ‘‘governed undemocratically . . . . It has expropriated a neighborhood park to

build a gym. It has participated through I.D.A. in the suppression of self-determination throughout

the world.’’ The striking students believed ‘‘in the right of all people to participate in the decisions

that affect their lives,’’ and they saw their actions as an initial effort ‘‘to create a functioning parti-

cipatory democracy to replace the repressive rule of the administration and trustees of the Univer-

sity.’’ Commenting further on such a possibility, the strike steering committee found that

Our collective struggle is both the only way we could defeat the existing structure, and achieve our alter-

native to it. Control by an irresponsible elite implies the exercise of institutional power in its interest. The

trustees support Columbia’s participation in the I.D.A. because they are part of an elite which benefits

from American domination of the oppressed peoples of the world. Implicit in our I.D.A. demand is the

right of these peoples, like us, to determine their own lives. We do not want students to take over the

university’s function of slumlord and expropriator of park lands in Harlem and Morningside Heights.

Our demands around the gym were not intended only or even primarily to stop a particular injustice, but

to support the right of the people of these communities to exercise control over the use of their

neighborhoods.58

Other community members agreed and started to work on the very issues that strike leaders had

addressed in their actions. During and following the events of spring of 1968, community organiza-

tion designed to counter Columbia’s influence in the neighborhood seemed to spring up on a daily


Figure 7. Anti-Vietnam, Anti-Urban Renewal Flyer, Strike Co-Ordinating Committee, Columbia University,August 1968. Courtesy of Protest and Activism collection, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University,New York.

Carriere 25

basis. The Program to Activate Community Talent, for example, endorsed ‘‘the current demonstra-

tions against an intransigent, insensitive landlord, Columbia University.’’ To this group, ‘‘property

rights can never be cherished against human rights and human rights were never furthered by inad-

equate, squalid housing.’’59 A group called Morningside Independents drafted a flyer with the telling

title ‘‘People of the Community Support the Strike,’’60 while other neighborhood organizations came

to voice similar critiques of Columbia. The Community Committee to Support the Columbia Strike,

in a flyer titled ‘‘Demand an Open Campus: Support the Student Strike,’’ focused on the university’s

position as embattled outpost. To this group,

Local residents have been forcibly barred from the center of action and prevented from participating in

demonstrations on campus. This use of force to separate the community from the University is only the

logical extension of the University’s continuing separatist policy, the same policy that supports research

on counter-insurgency in the ghetto, that builds a gym with a back entrance for community people, and

that evicts them from their homes to accommodate University expansion. These racist policies cannot be

allowed to continue.61

In all of these examples, one sees the community using the language and imagery of warfare once

exclusively employed by Morningside Heights, Inc. and its allies in both the SRO and gymnasium

campaigns. In the long term, it was unclear whether or not such strategies would have any impact in

the larger struggle against the expansion policies of Columbia. Yet, it was clear that they had pro-

duced a great defeat for the university in the spring of 1968, and, in the aftermath of such struggles,

new ideas on urban design, urban renewal, community participation, and city living began to take

hold—in Morningside Heights and across the nation.62

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of

this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. ‘‘Columbia Students and Teen-Age Neighbors Get New Athletic Field,’’ New York Times, May 11, 1957.

Columbia was not the only institution using public space. By the mid-1950s, the City had allowed the

Tavern on the Green restaurant to set up shop in Central Park for a nominal fee. See ‘‘Moses Plan Opposed:

Citizens Union Backs Mothers in Fight for Park Area,’’ New York Times, April 23, 1956.

2. ‘‘The Columbia and Community Gymnasiums: A Background,’’ Columbia University, Office of Public

Information, March 1968, p. 4, Historical Subject Files, Buildings and Grounds Collection, ‘‘Gym-

Community Opposition’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

3. ‘‘New Gym Access,’’ The Morningside Citizen, October 10, 1962, Christiane C. Collins Collection, Box 6,

‘‘Morningside Heights Organizations’’ folder, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York

Public Library, New York.

4. ‘‘13 Held in Protest Over Columbia Gym,’’ New York Times, February 29, 1968, 44. For more on the details

of the gym’s place in the events of April 1968 at Columbia, see Stefan Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia:

Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 2009).

5. Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘‘How Not to Build a Symbol,’’ New York Times, March 24, 1968, D23.

6. For the case of the University of Chicago’s place in the postwar world, see LaDale Winling’s essay in this

issue. For more on this relationship between Cold War America and universities, see Margaret Pugh

O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton:


Princeton University Press, 2005); Richard M. Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massa-

chusetts, 1945-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold

War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Stuart

W. Leslie, Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stan-

ford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond, The

Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1997).

7. For more on the concept of ‘‘containment’’ within the domestic sphere, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward

Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

8. Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2010), 189. My understanding of the aesthetics of urban renewal in postwar New

York has been shaped by Zipp’s groundbreaking work.

9. I am not the first historian to note this relationship between Cold War anticommunism and urban renewal.

Arnold Hirsch, in his recent article ‘‘Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy

from the New Deal to the Cold War,’’ finds that ‘‘‘Containment’ became as much a hallmark of racial

housing programs as it was of American foreign policy,’’ as federal housing initiatives and urban renewal

programs only served to reinforce existing patterns of segregation—a fact that helped ‘‘contain’’ African

Americans in the worst neighborhoods in America. In such accounts, urban renewal becomes something of

a defensive strategy, a means to maintain the status quo in urban life and its residential patterns. It is my

intention to highlight another side to such renewal campaigns, one that stresses that the end goal was not

merely containment—but was the creation of an entirely new urban landscape. See Arnold Hirsch,

‘‘Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,’’

Journal of Urban History, January 2000: 158-89, 170.

10. Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1994), 273, 222.

11. My work on opposition to university-sponsored urban renewal efforts builds upon LaDale Winling’s intro-

duction of this subject in his essay in this issue.

12. Certification of Incorporation, Morningside Heights, Inc., 1947, p. 1, Historical Subject Files, Community

Affairs Series, ‘‘Morningside Heights, Inc., 1950-9’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia

University, New York.

13. Here is Manhattanville: A Report to the People,’’ p. 4, Community Advisory Committee, Morningside

Heights, Inc., 1950, Historical Subject Files, Community Affairs Series, ‘‘Morningside Heights, Inc.,

1950-9’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

14. Ibid., 3.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. ‘‘Morningside-Manhattanvile: A Pioneer Urban Redevelopment Program,’’ The American City, May 1953, 94-6.

17. Robert A. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York,

1754-2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 408.

18. Cultural critic Andrew Ross has termed this imagery ‘‘the Cold War culture of germophobia.’’ See Andrew

Ross, ‘‘Containing Culture in the Cold War,’’ in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York:

Routledge, 1989), 46.

19. Stanley Salmen quoted in Marc Rauch, Bob Feldman, and Art Leaderman, Columbia and the Community:

Past Policy and New Directions (New York: Columbia College Citizenship Council Committee for

Research, 1968), 8.

20. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 409.

21. Andrew S. Dolkart, Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1998), 328. In many ways, my work can be read as an extension of Dolkart’s

excellent study of the Columbia community, as my period of investigation—Columbia in the second half of

the twentieth century—warrants only a brief afterword in Dolkart’s book.

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22. Salmen quoted in ‘‘The Wider War on Morningside Heights,’’ The New York Post, May 11, 1968.

23. Salmen quoted in Rauch, Feldman, and Leaderman, Columbia and the Community, 7.

24. Barzun quoted in Joanne Grant, Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest

(New York: Signet Books, 1969), 29.

25. Melvin Melcher, ‘‘Letter to the Editor,’’ Columbia Daily Spectator, December 12, 1967; Transcript of

interview with Max Bond, conducted by Richard Oliver, July 8, 1981, 4, Columbia University Centennial

Collection, Box 11, ‘‘Interviews, Bond’’ folder, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Archives,

Columbia University, New York.

26. ‘‘Slums Engulfing Columbia Section,’’ New York Times, June 9, 1958, 25.

27. ‘‘A Negro Becomes Manager of the Bryn Mawr,’’ New York Times, May 8, 1965.

28. Ibid.

29. ‘‘Hotel’s Tenants Fight Evictions,’’ New York Times, January 4, 1965.

30. ‘‘The Hotel Where Addiction and Violence Once Thrived is Being Closed,’’ New York Times, November 3,

1965; ‘‘Barnard to Build a New Dormitory,’’ New York Times, February 24, 1967; ‘‘Plimpton Hall

Dedicated,’’ New York Times, November 9, 1968.

31. Rauch, Feldman, and Leaderman, Columbia and the Community, 36.

32. Ibid., 37.

33. Ibid., 38. This was part of a longer, wider pattern of behavior. In October 1961, for example, tenants at the

Columbia-owned Devonshire Hotel (542 West 112th Street) filed charges against Columbia with the State

Commission Against Discrimination, charging that the university was evicting tenants based upon their

race. See ‘‘Tenants Accuse Columbia of Bias,’’ New York Times, October 4, 1961, 39. Such findings sug-

gest that the threat of blight was indeed a reality in the Morningside Heights community, and that those

most concerned with such conditions often allowed them to fester—in an attempt to convince city officials

of the need to raze such structures. More work is needed on the relationship between the reality and per-

ceptions of blight, and how all parties involved in urban renewal reached such conclusions on the subject.

34. ‘‘The Wider War on Morningside Heights,’’ The New York Post, May 11, 1968.

35. Rauch, Feldman, and Leaderman, Columbia and the Community, 39.

36. Ibid., 41.

37. Ibid., 31-35.

38. ‘‘Crisis at Columbia:’’ Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances

at Columbia University in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 76.

39. Ibid., 77.

40. ‘‘The Columbia and Community Gymnasiums: A Background,’’ 2, Columbia University, Office of Public

Information, March 1968, Historical Subject Files, Buildings and Grounds Collection, ‘‘Gym-Community

Opposition’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

41. Ibid., 4.

42. Rall, ‘‘A Call to Reaction: Harlem and the Morningside Gym, 1961-1968,’’ 9, 10.

43. ‘‘Morningside’s Late, Late Show,’’ 56.

44. ‘‘Columbia Students Ask Reconsideration of Gym,’’ New York Times, March 11, 1966, 16; Hoving quoted

in Rall, 13; ‘‘Ad Hoc Committee Will Meet Hoving to Oppose CU Gym,’’ Columbia Daily Spectator,

March 8, 1966; ‘‘Citizens Protest,’’ The Morningside Citizen, May 6, 1966, 1-3.

45. ‘‘Protesters Boo Shriver at Talk on ‘Struggle for Urban Power,’’’ New York Times, March 3, 1968, 50.

46. Jerry L. Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York: Atheneum, 1969),

52-3. Other works that provide detail of the 1968 Columbia uprisings include Roger Kahn, The Battle for

Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970) and

Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances

at Columbia University in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968).

47. This is not to suggest that student protesters and Morningside Heights/Harlem community activists expe-

rienced Columbia’s renewal strategies in the same ways: these policies clearly affected the lives of


nonstudents in ways that Columbia students did not have to worry about. Yet by making the connection

between Columbia’s attempts at urban renewal and their complicity in the Vietnam War effort (the latter

being a primarily student-driven movement at Columbia), both sets of actors were able to rally greater

support for their respective causes.

48. Mark Rudd, ‘‘Events and Issues of the Columbia Revolt,’’ in The University and Revolution, ed. Gary R.

Weaver and James H. Weaver (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 133-40, 133-4.

49. SAS, SDS, and the Strike Coordinating Committee, ‘‘What We Want . . . ,’’ April 1968, Protest and

Activism Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives.

50. Ibid.

51. Student Strike Committee, ‘‘Student Strike at Columbia,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection,

Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

52. James S. Kunen, ‘‘Why We’re Against the Biggees,’’ in Essays on the Student Movement, ed. Patrick

Gleeson (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970), 45-8, 47.

53. ‘‘Columbia Liberated,’’ Columbia Strike Coordinating Committee, September 1968, 7, Columbia Univer-

sity Archives, Columbia University, New York.

54. Michael Klare, ‘‘IDA: Cold War Think-Tank,’’ The Rat, May 3-16, 1968, 15. For more on the I.D.A., see

‘‘A Target of Campus Protesters Is a Think Tank,’’ New York Times, April 26, 1968, 50. Not surprisingly,

there have been no historical studies undertaken on this incredibly secretive organization.

55. Student Strike Committee, ‘‘Student Strike at Columbia,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection,


56. SAS, SDS, and Strike Coordinating Committee, ‘‘What We Want . . . ,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism

Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

57. ‘‘Vietnam is Here!’’ Strike Co-Ordinating Committee, Columbia University, August 1968, Protest and

Activism collection, Box 12, folder 1, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

58. Columbia Strike Steering Committee, Press Release, April 28, 1968, Protest and Activism collection, Box

11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

59. The Program to Activate Community Talent, untitled flyer, May 1968, Protest and Activism Collection,


60. Morningside Independents, ‘‘People of the Community Support the Student Strike,’’ May 1968, Protest and

Activism Collection, Box 7, folder 16, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York.

61. Community Committee to Support the Columbia Strike, ‘‘Demand an Open Campus: Support the Student

Strike,’’ May 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 7, folder 16, Columbia University Archives,

Columbia University, New York.

62. For more on the post-1968 demise of large-scale urban renewal, and the rise of more equitable and

democratic methods of planning, see Christopher Klemek, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of New Left Urbanism,’’

Daedulus, Spring 2009, 73.

Bio

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses

on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently preparing his disserta-

tion, titled ‘‘Between Being and Becoming: On Architectures, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of Liberalism

in Postwar America,’’ for publication.

Carriere 29

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