Obama library would add to revitalization taking place in West Harlem
In the West Harlem neighborhood where Columbia University would build the Obama presidential library, residents are accustomed to change. But they have not always welcomed it.
The proposed library would be a cornerstone of Columbia's massive expansion into the mostly poor and working-class neighborhood of Manhattanville, one subway stop north of the university's sprawling main campus in Morningside Heights. With views of the Hudson River to the west and a cluster of public housing high-rises to the east, the Obama library and museum would serve as a bridge between the old and the new.
As one of the four semifinalists for hosting the Obama library and museum, Columbia has emerged as a formidable challenger to Chicago's two bids one by the University of Illinois at Chicago on the Near West Side and another by the University of Chicago on the South Side.
In some ways, the West Harlem site mirrors the Chicago neighborhoods offered for the library. Its residents suffer from high unemployment, poverty, inadequate public schools and gang-related violence, all in the shadows of an Ivy League university that continues to encroach on the community's borders.
But unlike Chicago, where sites in neglected neighborhoods in North Lawndale, Washington Park and Woodlawn are competing to win the library for its economic benefits as much as its historical significance, West Harlem already is in the cusp of an economic revival.
The community's physical transformation began in the past decade, fueled in part by more than $7 billion in construction by Columbia that increases its footprint in the area while promising an infusion of new shops, restaurants and open space for the community.
About a mile from booming central Harlem, home of the landmark Apollo Theater and former President Bill Clinton's office, West Harlem is a community in transition. Having been sidestepped by the African-American cultural movement of the 1920s and '30s known as the Harlem Renaissance, Manhattanville developed instead as an industrial corridor. It was once home to a dairy, a brewery and automobile plants that included a Studebaker factory that the university preserved and uses as an office building.
Over the past decade, West Harlem, like the rest of Harlem, has undergone a rapid demographic shift to a more diverse population that is now 38 percent Hispanic, 27 percent white and 25 percent black. Storefront markets and family-owned businesses are nestled among low-income apartments and ornate tri-level brownstones that sell for an average of $1 million.
Over the next 25 years, Columbia plans to develop a four-block area from 129th to 133rd streets between Broadway and 12th Avenue. Its plans also include a parcel of land on the north side of 125th street as well as three properties on the east side of Broadway from 131st to 134th Street.
Columbia officials have not disclosed exactly where the library would go on those properties and declined to speak to the Tribune on the record about their proposal.
Original post:
Obama library would add to revitalization taking place in West Harlem