Viewpoints

NYU Expansions Angers Longtime Lower East Sider

By Uma Patla
Spectrum staff

Ask Steven Marcus, 31-year owner of Speedy Lock & Door Co., to tell you what the most important news is in his Lower East Side neighborhood, and he will give you an earful. First, he will shake a finger at New York University, which, to Marcus, has really undone Lower East Side culture. NYU’s steady expansion has changed his neighborhood’s ethnic mix, Marcus charges, and caused a lot of longtime residents to move out.

“NYU was, at one point on the cutting edge—and not the problem. Where did it go wrong and why?” Marcus said.

One summer day, he talked for six, non-stop minutes about how aggravated he was at NYU for buying up so much real estate, bringing so many transient students into the community and causing already high housing costs to go even higher.

Sure, when people with money to spend move in, that’s good for his and others’ businesses. “People come in here [now] and want to spend our, five and six dollars a key and don’t question it,” Marcus said. “It works well for me in that way.”

But making more money isn’t what he cares about.

He cares that few of the newcomers know about the old-timers or Lower East Side history. His own memory is long. “My dad came down here to see Normie Cohen to do his taxes. Normie Cohen used to have a bottle of vodka in his lower drawer. Then, afterwards, we’d go [to the] deli. This was a big treat. It’s all gone.”

Some residents share Marcus’ opinions. But others sort of shrug their shoulders about the whole subject of neighborhood change.

“It would take an atom bomb to affect the culture here. It doesn’t affect me,” said Fred Stern, president of Best Housekeeping, which has operated in the East village since 1924. Stern doesn’t care about NYU’s influence in the area, and doesn’t believe its growing real estate holdings are damaging the area.

Gringer and Sons, an East Village appliance store since 1918, won’t be closing its doors or moving any time soon. NYU’s doings, said Sebastian Thompson, a sales clerk at the store, “don’t affect me one way or another.”

As a property owner, NYU has 97 buildings in Manhattan, and 10 at its downtown Brooklyn campus. Not included in those figures—as another measure of NYU’s reach—are the private apartments and other housing that students rent.

Ten years ago, the university introduced its Core Plan, which concluded that NYU “would need approximately six million square feet [of space] over the next twenty-five years.”

“Do you realize there used to be four delis?” Marcus said, still protesting NYU’s expansion. “The Crown Deli, the Henry, and Katz’s, and the Second Avenue Deli? Do they really need another bar?”

He was referring to all the new restaurants and bars that, in his mind, have flooded the Lower East Side, along with those NYU students and other newcomers.

“Have you been to the Little Red Lighthouse?” Marcus asked this reporter. “I bet you don’t even know what it is.”