Foes of NYU Expansion Win a Round in Court

BY DINA EXIL

Opponents of NYU’s plan to expand by 2 million square feet in Greenwich Village won a legal skirmish on Tuesday when a state judge ordered the city to provide the plaintiffs with documents outlining the project, called in legal terms “discovery.”

Supreme Court Judge Donna Mills also ordered the parties to present legal briefs by mid-March over whether there will be a separate proceeding on the status of  “pocket parks”, where NYU wants to build. The issue comprises one element of the larger case.

A group of NYU faculty, preservationists and community groups have filed a lawsuit asking the city to reverse its decision to approve the project and halt any construction or transfer of land until the case can be heard.

The groups opposed to NYU’s expansion call the project “a land grab” , arguing, among other things, that the move violated the law by taking over public parkland was without approval by the State Legislature.

The group’s lead attorney Randy Mastro labeled his opponents an “eight-hundred-pound gorilla” and accused them of “cherry-picking” legal rationales for the project.

“If it walks and talks like a park and the city treats it like a park, it is a park,” said Mastro. former deputy mayor in the Giuiani administration, referring to the tracts of land NYU has appropriated for the project.“There is no reason why anyone expected for someone to give it away.”

NYU and the City have asserted that the four park strips on the superblocks designated for the project — Mercer Playground, LaGuardia Corner Gardens, the Mercer-Houston Dog Run and LaGuardia Park—are not strictly-speaking parks run by the Parks Department. Attorneys for the city and NYU argue that the city “unequivocally and repeatedly refused to demap or transfer” the tracts to the Parks Department. If the city never regarded them as parks, NYU could seize those parcels and build on them, without prior approval by the state legislature.

“They cannot take these precious parks from away from the public” said Greenwich Village resident  Sabrina Gavish, a kindergraten teacher. “The land is our land and these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods. It belongs to us and we fighting for it.”

At one point in the proceedings  Mills ejected two community protestors who disobeyed her admonishment not to applaud Mastro’s statements. The audience included celebrity Villagers such as actor Matthew Broderick.

The suit also charges that the rezoning that allows for the expansion violates a number of technical land-use issues, including the alienation of parkland, prior deed restrictions and the destruction of historic buildings and features within the community. Opponents also the argue that the construction would cause decades of  pollution and construction noise in the neighborhood