On Thursday, March 28, 2008 on the front page of the print edition of Spectator, large, bold letters announced “CU, City Sued Over M’Ville: Sprayregen Suit Targets Underground ‘Bathtub.’”

      Nicholas Sprayregen, who died this past summer, was the owner of Tuck-It-Away Storage, whose painted sign could until recently still be seen on the wall of one of the new campus’ buildings. He was the largest property owner in Manhattanville, so when his local dominance was challenged by the second-largest landowner in the city, he was, naturally, unhappy.

      This was Sprayregen’s second time going to court over Columbia’s campus plan. The first, which took place about a year earlier, concerned the West Harlem Business Group’s access to information regarding the possibility that the University may use eminent domain to acquire the campus land.

      But this  time, Sprayregen was suing the school over the probability of Jacob’s apocalyptic image of the campus that was explained at the beginning of this article. As Norman Siegel, Sprayregen’s lawyer, said to Spectator in 2008, “‘If there were a storm surge, you could have water coming out and going into the Harlem community—with possible toxic materials.’”

      The fears of Sprayregen, Siegel, and Jacob all stemmed from the fact that the new campus is inconveniently located both along an earthquake fault line and in an area that Jacob says in the Village Voice article “sooner or later, is going to be flooded.”

      Before anything like the Manhattanville campus can be constructed, federal law requires that an environmental assessment be conducted and an environmental impact statement written up that describes all of the definite and possible effects of construction. Section 21C of the Manhattanville campus’ final environmental impact statement asserts that the basement “would be designed to resist … temporary flood conditions” and that “sufficient studies have been conducted to confirm that design elements can address potential flooding.”

      Even so, Sprayregen still claimed that the city had “failed to carry out its duties as required by law to fully evaluate the serious environmental impacts of the construction and the on-going operation of the proposed ‘bathtub.’” Six months after Siegel and Sprayregen first brought the case to court, however,  it was dismissed.

      Nevertheless, the fears surrounding the Manhattanville bathtub were far from dispelled.

      Whereas the initial argument against the bathtub was based off of its safety concerns, stories began to circulate that the University might have been using the bathtub as a reason to acquire the Manhattanville property through the process of eminent domain.

      In addition, there were theories that the University may use the basement, which is planned to extend underneath street level, to restrict public access to the roads like it did with College Walk, which was a part of 116th Street until 1953. Some argued that the bathtub was “an excuse to throw residents, workers, and businesses out of their locations so that Columbia can control all the property.” Some supported the alternative below-grade space proposal created by Manhattan Community Board 9, the local governing body whose jurisdiction includes Manhattanville. There were rumors that the University doesn’t have enough money to build a bathtub. There were those who thought that the basement could be a target for terrorism. There were even some people who didn’t think that the bathtub would ever come into existence.

      Walter South, currently a member of CB9 and former co-chair of the Community Board’s Housing, Land Use, and Zoning Committee, said at a City Council meeting in 2007, “Of course, this bathtub is a complete fantasy. When the bill for this tub comes in, and the logistics for moving probably 100,000 trucks of this dirty dirt out of the City is clarified—it will never be built.”

      Ten years later, South’s words remain the same. “[The University is] not doing anything [underground],” South tells me over lunch at Floridita. “The only thing that’s going under the streets apparently from what I can tell are the sewer lines, drainage, and stuff like that … That’s the only thing.”

      So what’s the truth? What are the facts of the seemingly fictitious underground factory?

  Amanda Frame

      “I don’t think the issue of eminent domain is dead. I don’t think the issue of protesting and resisting Columbia is dead. I think it’s alive and well.” Tom DeMott’s words seem drastically displaced, not only because he graduated from Columbia College as part of the class of 1980 but also because his place of protest on this chilly Thursday night last March is within the very University he is accusing.

      DeMott is one member of a five-person panel, including one other Columbia College alum, speaking about the negative effects of the University’s Manhattanville expansion. The speakers are an accompaniment to an exhibit organized in part by former Spectator  City News  editor Deborah Secular, who is moderating the discussion.

      Although it is in Lerner’s fancy fifth-floor conference room, this is intended to be a community event. There are no podiums behind which the panelists can proselytize.

      Some of the panelists choose to stay seated while they speak. DeMott, however, is standing, hands raised and grasping onto the invisible form of the big idea he is about to present to us.

      “They’ve been caught with their hands in the cookie jar by lying to everybody,” DeMott charges. “And it’s plain to see. Go look. Walter, you looked. Was there a bathtub the last time you looked?”

      South shakes his head.

      “No,” DeMott says. “Tom, you looked. Was there a bathtub?”

      Tom Kappner, CC ’66, who lives in short walking distance of Teachers College, also shakes his head no.

      “There’s no bathtub,” DeMott announces, and it seems as if everyone in the audience believes him.

      However, when I speak about this a few days later with Marcelo Velez, vice president for Manhattanville development within the Columbia Facilities department, he has a very different idea of things.

      The below-grade space, Velez reiterates, exists. It is safe. It is paid for. The public streets will not become private. According to Vice President for Strategic Communications and Construction Business Initiatives at Columbia, La-Verna Fountain, eminent domain had nothing to do with the basement.

      What is interesting about DeMott’s and Velez’s arguments is that, in spite of their opposing positions, both find the truth to be clear.

      “From any sort of common sense standpoint, it’s an inactive fault,” Velez says of the earthquake fault line near the Manhattanville site.

      “This ain’t rocket science,” DeMott tells me about the existence of the bathtub. “[The University] figure[s] they can say any old bullshit to people because you’re not gonna use your common sense.”

      Both DeMott and Velez use the visual as their ultimate recourse.

      “Today, anyone can walk to the site to the second block and look in the hole and see that we’re about 50 feet deep and continuing to excavate,” Velez explains. “So it should be no mystery.”

      Similarly, DeMott encourages me to see for myself. “Go to the [Riverside] Viaduct now. Look down with your own eyes,” he says. “Take your own pictures. Take your own video. Look at the building they’re building now.”

      What would ostensibly be obvious—whether or not the bathtub exists—has sunk into the realm of belief. There is something almost religious about conversation around the basement: the divide between believer and non-believer, the strident affirmations of one’s own truth based upon alleged facts and personal visual experiences.

      It was Palm Sunday when I finally took my own trip up to Manhattanville in search of its mythical basement, and as DeMott advised, I brought a Spectator photographer along with me, who incidentally studies civil engineering at SEAS. This is what we saw.

  Jaime Danies

      There is undoubtedly a large hole in the Manhattanville campus, but it remains unclear whether or not this is, in fact, the bathtub. To the photographer, the answer was plain, right there in front of our eyes. He called my attention to pieces of the hole that looked small from where we were standing way up on the Riverside Viaduct, and he pointed these out as proof that we were staring straight down into the naked truth of the tub. I, however, remained unsure. I have seen quite a few construction sites with large holes, and most of them do not have giant bathtubs beneath them. When we tried to enter into the Jerome L. Greene Science Center to visit the completed section of the supposed basement, we were stopped at the door. Our Columbia IDs did not allow us access into the locked building. Quickly, the photographer and I had become victims of the same powerful force of uncertainty that has plagued the pages of this story.

      When I send the photo to DeMott, he writes to me that “this is a picture of a foundation being laid for a building, not a bathtub that goes many stories below ground.”

      Yet when we sent a reporter down to the site yesterday afternoon to speak with a land surveyor, we were told that what we were looking at was, in fact, the below-grade space, although some bathtub non-believers have testified to speaking with construction workers who have provided them with conflicting accounts.

      But what if the bathtub really does exist—what if Columbia really is building a two million square foot, 70-foot-deep pit whose existence is completely denied by some members of the local community?

      Earlier, I promised that, in writing about the past, we find things of value for the present. The fact that the very veracity of the University’s words about this construction site is being questioned speaks to a pervasive problem. What the heck happened? How can it be that when Columbia advertises a big, safe, below-grade space, the community hears “toxic floods,” “terrorism,” and a ton of make-believe? With University offices dedicated to communications and community affairs, where does the administration’s miscommunication with the community stem from?

      The University has received an award for its Manhattanville communications. The words the administration uses to speak about the Manhattanville campus are all carefully constructed. It is for this reason that, throughout this article, I have avoided paraphrasing the University’s speech, lest I sacrifice the integrity of their strategic communications.

      Fountain explains that Columbia has organized information sessions, weekly and monthly newsletters—online and in print, in English and in Spanish. Community members can sign up for email listservs with construction updates and information. There are diamond-shaped cut-outs in the wall surrounding the site that make it easy to peek inside to see what’s going on at all angles.

      While there are currently no metrics to measure the reach and success of Manhattanville communications efforts, Fountain does not think that the past and present disconnect between the University and some students, faculty, and community members about the bathtub is Columbia’s fault.

      “In the end, it is what it is,” Fountain says. “There are people who choose not to believe despite Columbia’s best efforts—people who may never believe. [There’s] nothing I can do about that. I’m not going to try to convince someone of what we’ve already done.”

      Ultimately, Fountain trusts that the misunderstandings over the bathtub and other aspects of the Manhattanville campus will be best resolved by time.

        “In the next few months as the community starts to get more comfortable being able to come over to Manhattanville, I think you’re going to see it will be a little bit different,” Fountain says. “We’re at this juncture where there’s probably a significant turn coming, a very significant positive turn coming.”

      If the error then lies not with Columbia, the communicator, that leaves only one other option: the people to whom Columbia communicates, the Manhattanville community itself.

      I do not believe that Jacob and South and DeMott and others are wrong to believe what they do. I believe that the ideas that some members of the community have about Columbia and its campus are the result of a long and difficult history between the University and everyone else that has fostered a disenchantment so deep-seated that it even blocks out the vision of an enormous basement, a basement that the photographer saw, that Columbia sees, and that you too may see for yourself around the streets and through the diamond cutouts of the Manhattanville site.

      When I explain to DeMott that the below-grade space visibility issues may be due in large part to the top-down construction method being used to build the Manhattanville campus, he remains insistent.

      “That is the kind of utter, enraging doublespeak that Columbia would come up with,” DeMott protests.

      For DeMott and for others who have lived for years in and around a near constant struggle against the University and its “colonial project” in the community, Bollinger is Big Brother. For them, the administration’s strategic communications are strategic contortions of the truth.

      The relationship between Columbia and the community has been decaying for over half a century. According to Spectator archives since 1950, the University has been involved in or has been held responsible for at least 39 disputes regarding land acquisition or University-owned property, not including the numerous conflicts over the Manhattanville campus. At least once a decade since 1950 and, during certain periods, once or even multiple times a year, Columbia students, former employees, and non-affiliated community residents have accused the University of a litany of charges from eminent domain abuse to wrongful evictions to destruction of  historic structures.

      In 1995, two Columbia Public Safety officers even “evicted” two homeless men who were sleeping on the grates outside John Jay Hall, seeking warmth in the late January snow.

      Fountain acknowledges Columbia’s troubled past.

      “You can never go backwards and undo history,” she says. “What you can do is decide how you move forward.”

      In spite of this view though, Fountain says that, in planning marketing materials for the community, the University’s historical relationship with it is not taken into consideration.

                                                                   Amanda Frame

      “I don’t know that it’s the history itself that shapes the communication program as much as it is just understanding the diverse population we’re communicating with,” Fountain says. “I don’t know that [the community’s misunderstandings are] as much of a historical thing so much as everybody busy. Everybody’s busy.”

      This is a century of instant information and a city of fast walkers who don’t like to be slowed down, but perhaps this view that the past is the past and that everyone’s too busy moving on to remember it is exactly the University’s mistake.

      People are busy, but they are not too busy to take the University to court over the bathtub. They are not too busy to publicly protest the expansion. They are not too busy to speak out about the University’s new campus within the very walls of its old one to rally support for the community from the Columbia students who were not too busy to fill up the seats in the Jed D. Satow Room on a school night at the tail end of midterm season.

      The solution to the Manhattanville communications problem may not simply be the passage of time but also a recognition of and response to times past. When the University speaks, its words have unintended echoes in the community. Columbia says “a city campus built for people,” and the community hears Susana Acosa-Jaafar, a resident of 536 West 113th Street whose Columbia eviction notice in 1987 sparked significant protest and controversy. Columbia says “honoring Manhattanville’s history,” and the community remembers when, in 1994, the University demolished the Audubon Ballroom, where the prominent civil rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated. Columbia says “growing together,” and the community can only think of 2009 when they fought to preserve three historic brownstones on West 115th Street that the University decided to destroy.

      It doesn’t help that much of the bathtub-specific rhetoric also directly harkens back to certain historical images. Fountain mentions that, in calling the below-grade space the underground factory, Piano “thinks about the old, industrial space it used to be, and he makes all the connections back to that.” The Manhattanville below-grade space is sometimes compared, including by Velez, to the bathtub at the World Trade Center, which, according to the authors of the book New York: An Illustrated History, “represented one of the largest and most destructive urban renewal projects ever undertaken.”

      In a 2006 New York Times  article “The Manhattanville Project,” which is about the University’s expansion, Harvard University urban planning and design professor Alex Krieger says that “such conflicts are as much emotional as they are rational.”

      Fountain spoke about “understanding the diverse population we’re communicating with,” but what the Manhattanville administrators are unable to understand about their audience is that, to a community charged with emotion about the expansion, it is not enough to speak in facts. Much of the community communicates in feelings.

      What the bathtub doubters are afraid of is not really another Hurricane Sandy. They are trying to protect themselves from “Hurricane Columbia,” coming in to swoop their apartments and businesses off to Oz or to New Jersey or to just anywhere out of the way.

      On the construction side of things, the bathtub may be safe against a second Sandy. As Velez explains, in building the bathtub, “We did not just go and design to the minimum requirement. The basement was built to a standard that was substantially higher.”

      But on the communications side, the University has been busily preparing for the wrong disaster. How can Columbia ensure the community of its safety from a storm that is itself? How can Columbia tell its neighbors not to worry about the rain when it is Columbia’s own dark clouds that community members feel quickly encroaching over the horizon, its own torrent of construction trucks and teachers and tenant evictions descending and dooming and drowning what once was their West Harlem?

 

  Jared Orellana

Imagining Nieuw Haarlem

      All communities have a founding myth, and one of Harlem’s begins with Dr. Johannes Mousnier de la Montagne.

      In 1636, de la Montagne, a Huguenot fleeing Catholic France, arrived in the Dutch village of Capsee—present-day Battery Park. He came with his wife, his son Johannes Jr. (who liked horseback riding), and their newborn daughter Marie.

      It was from there, within the imaginings of Manhattan’s first physician, residing on the southern tip of the island, that “Harlem” was born. Shortly after arriving in America, de la Montagne and his family, equipped with only a wooden dugout canoe and a paddle, made their way up the East River.

      His trip is described in mythical beauty by Carl Horton Pierce in his 1903 book New Harlem Past and Present: The Story of an Amazing Civic Wrong, Now at Last to be Righted.

      “This dauntless medical student took the paddle in his own uncalloused hands—a modern Ulysses, steering his way through strange and hazardous channels. … The lonely heron’s shrill cry alone broke the ‘sabbath stillness of the wilderness,’ and it may be supposed that as the Montagnes reached the end of Blackwell’s Island, and heard the roaring ‘as of a bull’ of Hellgate, their hearts were touched by some emotion of dread,” Pierce wrote.

      De la Montagne and his family landed on the shore of the Harlem River at 105th Street. Following an American-Indian trail on Lenape hunting grounds, now St. Nicholas Avenue, de la Montagne made his way to where it now intersects with Seventh Avenue. Here, he constructed a wooden cabin for himself and his family.

        By the time winter arrived, there were three settled households in Harlem. In March 1658, by the ordinance of New Netherland Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, the village of New Harlem, or Nieuw Haarlem, named for a small Dutch town, was officially established.

      Families migrated uptown, paddling the three hours’ commute from New Amsterdam to New Harlem. When they arrived, they surveyed the land and staked plots in a stockaded village that, by 1664, had a church, a militia, and 23 families. It is said that back in those days, the area was so forested that one could shoot a deer for dinner from their kitchen door.

      These Harlemites were farmers. Harlem women, dressed in short gowns and slippers, stayed inside spinning wool and flax to make clothes and bedsheets for themselves, their husbands, and their children.

      On winter Sundays, the congregation would all sit in the pews with foot stoves to keep warm as they studied their silver-clasped Dutch bibles.

      After doing business, Harlemites would gather for drinks at the Indian Trail Inn, chatting in Dutch about crops and horses and cattle.

      This was their Harlem, but as a new addition to Columbia’s own landscape reminds us, it was by no means the first one.

Preserving amid a history of displacement

      “Your time is coming, you white motherfuckers,” a black Harlemite spits out at the un-coloreds in my tour group as we pass 135th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. About an hour later, underneath the ugly overhang of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, another black Harlemite feels that it’s his turn to make a guest appearance, overpowering the speech of our guide.

      The old-timer, who unlike me is well dressed for the fall, soliloquises under the State Office Building: “Black spirit is here. All this gentrification stuff is gonna backfire. This is the beginning of the end,” he says ominously.

      But displacement has been the recurring chorus in the song of Harlem’s history.

      The beginning of the beginning of the end in Harlem actually reaches all the way back to the mid-17th century, when that one Huguenot landed off of the East River with his family. The idea of Harlem has its origins in the de la Montagnes’ bold trip, but the reality is that a neighborhood in the neck of Harlem’s woods had already been established by the Lenape Amerindian tribe.

      Dressed in deerskins and smoking red copper tobacco pipes just south of current day Mount Morris Park Historic District, an area where bulrushes grew, the Lenape lived in longhouses furnished with mats and hatches and wooden dishes and more stone pipes for tobacco.

      It is through the Dutch descriptions of the native people at this time that evidence of the first antagonistic reappropriation of Harlem emerges.

      “The Indians are indolent, and some, crafty and wicked … but hospitable when well treated, ready to serve the white man for little compensation,” Dutch geographer Joannes de Laet wrote in 1625.

      Over 250 years after the Dutch drove the Lenape from their land, the white people who lived in Harlem in the late 18th and early 19th century saw the migration of blacks, who were running away from racial violence and poor housing conditions, up to Harlem as just as much of a threat to their neighborhood as Columbia and other gentrifying agents are seen today.

      “The Negro invasion … must be vigilantly fought,” reads a July 1911 edition of the now out-of-print Harlem Home News. “The invaders will slowly but surely drive the whites out of Harlem. We now warn owners of property. … The negro must have some place to live, but why must he always drive the white man out of his home in order to find a home for himself?”

      It is likely that no homes now survive from this early era of Harlem. Michael Henry Adams, an historian and a founder of the preservation advocacy organization Save Harlem Now, writes in his book Harlem: Lost and Found that “the architecture of the first inhabitants of Harlem left almost no trace; even shortly after these [Native American] hunters and gatherers moved on, there would have been little sign of their early shelters.” And today, it seems that the most Dutch thing about Harlem is Amsterdam Avenue.

      Considering this deficit in the history of Harlem, Columbia, as a piece of Harlem’s history itself, must, in all of its elements, continue to dedicate itself to the historical preservation of the many characters of this neighborhood.

Spaces to preserve

      The daunting drizzle has come out of its clouds. Our guide smartly directs us to take shelter beneath the scaffolding surrounding the demolishment of what was once the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom.

      It is clear that Bontemps’ Negrodom is now threatened. The sense of the loss, or death, of a neighbourhood is a reality for today’s Harlemites, and even for the tourists who can only imagine the long-gone glamour of landmarks left unpreserved.

      The preservation movement in Harlem has largely been a losing battle. Carolyn Johnson, whose mother worked at Columbia for 35 years, is the owner and founder of Welcome To Harlem, a Harlem history tour company. She admits that finding parts of old Harlem on her tours is “like a scavenger hunt.” Moreover, what is preserved are those elements that are valuable in the eyes of the newcomers and not necessarily those meaningful and important to long-term residents.

      The “Harlem” page on Wikipedia, whose collaborative platform makes it a more accurate reflection of people’s opinions than more restrictive organizations like the National Park Service and New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, lists at least 56 places in Harlem (not necessarily including Morningside Heights) that it considers to be historically prominent. These include the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Harlem YMCA, and El Museo del Barrio.

      Few would deny that these places are significant to Harlem. But what is even more significant to 23-year-old Hugo Torres-Fetsco, who has lived in the same apartment on Tiemann Place and Riverside Drive since the age of two, is the playground nicknamed “Dolphin Park” where he used to play as a child.

      To Rodanne Smith, who’s been a resident of the Grant Houses located between 123rd and 125th streets for 50 years, it’s the supermarkets, the florists, the cleaners, the free student lunches and children’s summer camps and church programs.

  Jared Orellana

      For Maritta Dunn, who grew up in Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s, much of her Harlem is already gone: Prelude Club, Broadway Bar, a couple of Chinese restaurants—all have been swept away by the familiar tides of gentrification.

      The 197-a plan, the proposal for neighborhood development by Manhattan Community Board 9 (the local government body whose jurisdiction includes Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, and Hamilton Heights), suggests 31 sites for study toward designation as historic landmarks in the district. Seven of these sites—Meeting with God Church on 130th Street, the Nash Building at 3280 Broadway, the Studebaker Building on 131st Street, Lee Brothers’ storage building on Riverside Drive, West Market Diner on 131st Street, and Skyline Windows on 130th Street—are owned by Columbia. Teachers College’s Bancroft Hall is one of 15 places proposed for designation as historic landmarks. Morningside Heights is one of five areas CB9 proposed for study toward historic district designation.

      John Reddick, an architect, former member of the West Harlem Local Development Corporation’s board of directors, former co-chair of CB9’s Landmarks Preservation and Parks Committee, and a Columbia community scholar, says that “people come with a kind of mythic sense of [Harlem],” and certainly in writing about this neighborhood, myths have become a motif, most significantly the myth of a single, unified Harlem. Also, there is the myth of a single, unified Columbia as varying parts of the University work both towards and against the preservation of the neighborhood’s historic character.

      Columbia exists in an interesting spot within Harlem. Not only because its campuses and its community are often seen as discordant with the neighborhood that surrounds it, but because, as Columbia helps to shape Harlem’s future, it simultaneously works to remember its past.

Columbia preserving the bones

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                                         Jared Orellana                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

      “It is dawn on 125th Street. Families are rising. The train booms overhead; trolley tracks run between the cobblestones and the early morning traffic. Workers hurry to their jobs at the local automobile factories, printers, and storage companies. The largest employer in the area is the Sheffield Farms dairy, whose proud billboard boasts the motto, ‘For the Rising Generation,’ and shows a healthy child enjoying a glass of milk. Horse-drawn wagons emerge from a nearby stable building to distribute bottles across upper Manhattan.”

      This is the Manhattanville that Columbia is preserving, as described in the online iteration of a University exhibit about the neighborhood in 1929. The exhibit, which is currently displayed in the Nash Building, tells the story of Sheffield Farms, a bottled milk manufacturing facility whose remains are being replaced by our new campus.

      Columbia’s preservation of Manhattanville is contractually binding, as a result of Columbia’s voluntary signing of the Declaration of Covenants and Restrictions. While CB9’s 197-a plan is only a suggestion, the contract Columbia signed sets guidelines for the University’s expansion and requires that Columbia preserve the historic character of the Manhattanville neighborhood. It obliges the University to maintain the architectural integrity of the Prentice, Nash, and Studebaker buildings and to create an interpretative multimedia exhibit to document the history of the Sheffield Farms milk producing complex that used to exist on the current campus.

      Beyond Manhattanville, Columbia has been engaged in the architectural preservation of Harlem since 1985, and for the past 20 years, preservation of the historical heritage of Morningside Heights has been a part of University policy. The Capital Project Management and Planning department of Columbia Facilities has an Exteriors and Historic Preservation team, which dedicates itself primarily to Morningside Heights, fixing damage and providing facelift to historic buildings.

      Since July 1, 2007, the University has mandated that only Columbia Facilities or its associates may work on Columbia buildings so that, as is written in the University’s statement on the issue, “the design, construction, maintenance and repair of university facilities [are] accomplished in a manner consistent with the university’s … historic preservation concerns.”

      So far, Columbia has restored over 250 buildings.

        Columbia has also agreed to reduce displacement of current Harlem residents. In documents like the Manhattanville Community Benefits Agreement and the 197-a plan, the preservation of people through low-income housing and job creation is distinguished from historic preservation. But preserving people is preserving history, argues community activist Tom DeMott, who graduated from Columbia College in 1980.

      “If you’re talking about historic preservation, you have to be talking about seeing the value of the Harlem community,” DeMott says. “One very significant part of the Harlem community is the damn people who live here.”

        But in a neighborhood whose strong sense of community is being dashed into a new wave of nebulousness as a result of present social change, retention of today’s Harlem residents may seem an uncomfortable anachronism. Like Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater—now bookended by a GameStop and a Red Lobster—the low-income residents that Columbia seeks to save risk becoming out of place in their own home. None of the Harlemites interviewed for this story, however, seemed fearful that, in spite of keeping their houses, they may lose their sense of home.

      “There’s just somethin’ about [Harlem],” Johnson says. “As much as it might change, some things are going to remain the same, and even with all of those people that are moving in, some of them will try to preserve and keep as much of that [Harlem] as possible.”

Beyond administrative preservation

      The reality of this university is that, beyond the work of the administration, there is a committed cast of characters—disjointed faculty members, staff, and students—who are each working in ways both large and small to recognize and preserve the neighbourhood we live in.

      My tour guide’s name is Clay Eaton. He’s a seventh-year Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the department of East Asian languages and cultures. All of the tour guides at Big Onion Walking Tours, a New York City walking tour group started by a former Columbia American history Ph.D. student in 1991, are Columbians. I actually found out about Big Onion through a Facebook advertisement in February advertising a free historic walking tour hosted by Undergraduate Student Life on the Columbia class of 2019 Facebook page.

      “Given Columbia’s location, it is helpful for students to learn about Harlem,” Chia-Ying Pan writes to me via Facebook. Pan is Undergraduate Student Life’s director of education, outreach, and international student support, and she paid for the March tour.

      But Eaton and the others at Big Onion represent just one layer of how common Columbians are preserving the history of Harlem.

      A December 22, 2008 post on the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York called “Capturing Manhattanville” tells the story of Daniella Zalcman, a 2009 graduate of Columbia College and a former managing editor of The Eye.

      Zalcman, an architecture major, created for her senior thesis an encapsulation of time—a textual, pictorial, and videographic record remembering the history of Manhattanville and the state of the neighborhood as she witnessed it in the early phases of construction in 2009.

      The Making of Manhattanville—what Zalcman named the website where she has displayed her work—“is an attempt to capture the neighborhood as it appears now,” as explained on the website’s “About” page. “Teetering on the cusp of that next great change.”

      The capturing of Harlem and its neighborhoods is a task not only in the minds of Columbia students; it is an effort equally as present in the minds of many of their professors too. Harlem is one of the few New York neighborhoods specifically highlighted by Columbia history professor Kenneth Jackson in his popular course History of the City of New York. A professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Andrew Dolkart wrote the book Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development. In 1953, the late John Atlee Kouwenhoven, who received a master’s degree at Columbia in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1948 and was a Barnard English professor, published The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York; An Essay in Graphic History in Honor of the Tricentennial of New York City and the Bicentennial of Columbia University, which included a variety of historic images of Harlem.

      In 2004, as a part of the Columbia 250 project—“a digital memory box of Columbia history” in honor of the University’s 250th anniversary—the contributions of Dolkart, Jackson (who was one of the co-chairs of the project’s steering committee), and others manifested in a section of the project called “Harlem History.”

      As the director of the Lehman Center for American History, Jackson also contributes to some of the historical exhibitions at the Columbia libraries such as “Harlem Views: Perspectives from the Collections of Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library,” which ended on July 31.

      Enter the word “Harlem” into the search bar of the Columbia University Directory of Classes, and 13 results appear.

      Type it out again onto the Teachers College course schedule search, and there will pop up one more. On most Wednesdays from 5:10 to 6:50 p.m., assistant professor of history and education Ansley Erickson teaches a class called Harlem Stories, a two-semester course that focuses “on the history of education in Harlem.”

      Erickson’s class is a supplement to a much larger project that she’s been working on for the past few years with professor of education Ernest Morrell called Educating Harlem, which their website describes as “a collaborative investigation into the history of education in 20th century Harlem.”

      Morrell stresses that his and Erickson’s research is not only analytical but is inclusive of the Harlem community. “There’s all sorts of tools that Columbia has,” Morrell says. “We have people that can devote their entire lives to studying history, but the community itself is an asset. The model of history work that we are trying to engage in is one that engages with the community, not one in a community or about a community.”

Restricted access

      Restrictions on certain aspects of Columbia, though, can make community access and engagement challenging, presenting an obstacle to the University’s ability to preserve Harlem’s history not only for Columbia, but for Harlem itself.

      Located next to Blue Java Coffee Bar on the first floor of Butler Library, the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, an in-house group that creates classroom new media supplements, has at least 10 projects that either directly or tangentially relate to the history of Harlem. Of those 10, two are public access, three private access, and half are Columbia access only.

      Maurice Matiz, the director of the CTL, believes that many of the private or Columbia access only projects could benefit the public.

      The problem, he explains, is copyright. Much of what the CTL makes draws heavily upon material not owned by Columbia. For example, the Harlem Health History project, which was “created to enhance students’ historical research on health-focused social movements in an African American community,” includes “health reports and studies, news articles, advertisements, images, and interviews,” many of which Columbia did not receive permission to publish. To pay for permissions for each piece of material would be very costly, but reuse of material isn’t an issue when it is kept confined to the private classroom.

      Regardless, lack of public accessibility and community engagement is one of the most prominent criticisms waged against Columbia’s attempts at preservation.

      Many of the Columbians and all of the Harlemites interviewed for this story had never heard of Columbia’s Sheffield Farms exhibit. This even includes those like Walter South, former co-chair of the CB9 Landmarks Preservation and Parks Committee and the vice chair of the 197-a planning committee, who lives in the old headquarters of the Pure Milk League near Riverside Drive.

      Currently, the exhibit is advertised through fliers handed out to different Columbia departments and at some schools near the Manhattanville campus, but Leonard Cox, the assistant vice president of strategic communications and the film producer for the exhibit’s senior project team, admits that, in spite of these efforts, there have been only about 100 visitors to the exhibit since its opening six months ago.

      Even if someone is able to learn about and locate the exhibit, its position in a Columbia office building makes it feel inaccessible and unappealing to the community according to Reddick.

      “Most people don’t have that comfort factor [to go to a Columbia building],” Reddick points out. “To say there’s an exhibit in the Nash Building and think in any way it has outreach. … Why don’t they put it somewhere where the community really goes all the time? … It’s like saying, ‘It’s hanging in the closet on the fifth floor of the Nash Building.’ Who gets there? It’s a joke.”

      None of the preservation at the Manhattanville campus seems to extend beyond the University’s 17 acres. Our preservation of Manhattanville, it seems, is limited to the memorializing of Columbia’s Manhattanville.

      Many community members criticize the University’s 197-c rezoning plan as preservation that focuses only on the bare minimum and that still sacrifices important historic value in the neighborhood for the sake of an architecturally out-of-context new campus.

      The 197-a plan’s proposed historic preservation is far more extensive than that included in Columbia’s 197-c rezoning plan. A framework comparison between CB9’s 197-a plan and Columbia’s 197-c plan created by the Pratt Center for Community Development supports the assertion made in CB9’s review of the 197-c plan that “the neighborhood’s dynamic, richly layered historic, ethnic and cultural character, that would be preserved under the 197-a Plan, would be eliminated under Columbia’s 197-c proposal.” In other words, Columbia’s plan is more historically destructive than the community’s.

      The 197-a plan recommends that, for contextual zoning of the neighborhood, the traditional street walls should be maintained. The 197-a plan “also preserves diverse architectural styles and historic character.” Columbia’s plan sets the street wall back along the majority of 12th Avenue, allows for taller buildings than the 197-a, “and requires the demolition of most of the properties considered by the 197-a Plan to be of historic value.”

      Whereas CB9’s plan “identifies 14 buildings, Riverside Drive and IRT viaducts, and the Third Avenue Railway Turnaround on 12th Avenue between St. Clair Place and 125th Street for preservation through formal designation,” Columbia’s plan “does not seek formal designation and the resulting regulation of any historic properties.”

      Prentis, Nash, and Studebaker are the only buildings of historic value on the Manhattanville campus that the University has preserved. In addition, it has saved the West Market Diner and the façade of the old Sheffield Farms Stable building, which it has moved to a location off campus, further uptown.

      “How can only three or four buildings preserve the character of a neighborhood?” community scholar and neighborhood historian Eric K. Washington asks in a June 18, 2007 article in Architectural Record titled “Piano, SOM’s Columbia Plan Stirs Controversy.” “That’s a lot of responsibility for four buildings.”

      Furthermore, the loss of the Sheffield Farms Stable, according to the Manhattanville campus’ Final Environmental Impact Statement—a predictive analysis of the expansion’s effects on the surrounding neighborhood—is a “significantly adverse” impact to the maintenance of the historic architectural context of the area.

      Anne Whitman, the former owner of the stable building and the owner of Hudson Moving and Storage, was unable to speak on the record for this story due to a confidentiality agreement she signed with Columbia about the Sheffield Farms building.

      However, an October 18, 2006 post on a blog called Eminent Domain Abuse hints at what may still be Whitman’s feelings about the Manhattanville project’s preservation efforts.

      “They want to bulldoze my property after they steal it away from me for their private purposes through eminent domain abuse,” Whitman writes of Columbia and the historic stable building. “Their plan is anti-affirmative action and anti-historic preservation.”

      Even in Morningside Heights, Columbia’s historic preservation of the neighborhood has been the cause of controversy—particularly a 2008 plan to demolish three historic brownstones on 115th Street.

      One of the most popular arguments in support of keeping old buildings like the Sheffield Farms Stable building and the 115th Street brownstones is that they keep the old stories of an area.

      “Old neighborhoods go through changes,” says Barnard urban studies assistant professor Aaron Passell, who studies the relationship between historic preservation and gentrification. “If we can find the structures that have formed the physical environment of that neighborhood, we can connect social moments to those structures, but if those structures are gone, we lose that opportunity.”

Completing our history

      For the oldest of old neighborhoods in New York City, that opportunity seems to have already been lost. Out of the four books, one zine, and countless online articles used as research for this article, only one—Adams’ Harlem: Lost And Found—gives more than a cursory description of the Lenape: the people who lived in Harlem before it was hip, who lived in Harlem before it was Haarlem.

      Perhaps this scarcity of a native historic narrative is only the result of the random happenstance of which books I brought out of Butler Library, but historic preservation can be a sad business. Many things can be constructed out of existence, beyond recognition and repair, and today, only 0.3 percent of Harlemites are Native American or Alaskan.

      Columbia has had for a while a plaque dedicated to the Battle of Harlem Heights in 1776, but it was only this year that plans were carried out to memorialize those people who have been here since before anyone had ever heard of New Harlem or New York or even the New World. The whitewashing and black-washing (most of the descriptions of Dutch Harlem also came primarily from only one of the books used in research for this article) of Harlem’s history certainly seems to be much more than an historical happenstance.

      Two evenings ago, through the open cracks of the windows of my third floor Contemporary Civilization class in Hamilton Hall, I heard Harlem music. Not a saxophone or a zither—I heard a drum, beating to the chants of the Native American Council, huddled out in the crisp fall chill to dedicate a plaque of their own to this land.

      It was only a few minutes before my professor asked someone to close the window. We had shut them out, metaphorically speaking, or so it seemed, but the new plaque here is a vital indication of the resilience of all of our Harlems.

   Xavier Dade

The end of the tour

      We finish a few minutes late. I am rushing back to Columbia in the rain, trying to make it to Dodge Fitness Center in time for my lifeguarding shift at 3. Once I’ve relaxed into the chair, the sight and sound of the steady swoosh of fingertips that glide across chlorinated water lulls me into recollections of a passage from a book I borrowed from Butler.

      “From 1666 to 1668, the Hudson River formed the western boundary of the Harlem lands and properties. The same Hudson River flows between the same banks in 1903, although made up of different particles of water. The Town of New Harlem existed in 1666; and the same Town of New Harlem exists today, in 1903, although made up of different ‘particles,’ or members.”

      On the tour, we saw a Popeyes, an IHOP, a parking lot, a hair salon. Later, I ask Eaton why he didn’t show us pictures of the ballrooms and headquarters and housing that once occupied the space of this now-nondescript city scenery. He has pictures, he says, and shows me that they are tucked with his notes inside the crook of his arm.

      “It’s important to see the neighborhood now,” he tells me, “rather than as it existed.”

      The sad reality, though, is that Harlem’s present transformation affects our vision of its past. When we reached one of the last stops on the tour, a street corner from which Eaton told us to direct our eyes at City College of New York’s Shepherd Hall, we had to step off into the street in front of a dumpster. The scaffolding at an adjacent construction site was obstructing our view.

 

      DeMott completed his bachelor’s in English at Columbia College in 1980. “Naturally, I didn’t go to my graduation,” he says, chuckling.

      Long after the age of “gym crow” and the end of the Vietnam War, DeMott has continued to fight against Columbia. Spend just a short amount of time speaking with DeMott, and it won’t be long before he brings up his “10-year battle” against the University’s Manhattanville campus expansion or tells you about how “the presence of Columbia [is] so damningly elitist.”

      Nowadays, DeMott speaks about the battle in past tense, although he says, “If we have a thinking and reflective mind, we are always in the middle of battles.”

      Recently, DeMott has occupied himself with other activities: his short stories, his music, his songs, his poems, his paintings, taking care of his mother who passed away last spring, tending to his three cats (Twilly, Iris, and Homes), and warbling “Help me Jesus” to Shailaya.

      This is the first personal profile of a man whom the media most often depicts shouting, not singing. His house, filled with old records and books like Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids and Games for Reading, reveals that there may be a person behind the political character. I wondered whether DeMott’s experience at Columbia had shaped anything other than his activism.

      “I had a couple of professors who really encouraged my writing,” DeMott says. “That was helpful, and that gave me a sense of confidence.”

      But DeMott’s identity as a Columbian, not as an anti-Columbian, is tenuous. He doesn’t consider himself a Columbia Lion. He finds the term “Columbian” too limiting, although he points out that he is also hesitant to label himself an activist. He is not proud of having gone to Columbia.

      “I would be proud of it if everybody had a chance to go there,” he says. “I don’t worry about and never thought about being a part of the Columbia community. The whole idea scares me. … I certainly felt a sense of community while I was at Columbia. It just wasn’t Columbia University.” It was the student activist community.

      DeMott’s relationship with the University is, and perhaps has always been, divided between loving his classes and hating his college. A poster of Bob Dylan, a man whose song had helped to bring him here, was up on the wall of the dorm room his first year at Columbia, where he would pin a political button on his chambray shirt before going outside to demonstrate. For DeMott, though, such a division is not a conflict nor is it a hypocrisy. He says that his relationship with the University is like a person’s relationship with a musician: Some songs are “the greatest thing in the world,” and some are “a piece of crap.”

      “I can really point to Columbia University as an institution and really think that it reflects some of the worst things about culture and about civilization,” DeMott says. “At the same time, I can love the classes. I can love the intellectual experience that I had even fighting against the place.”

      A few days prior to our interview, I hung out with DeMott for an hour at what he calls the 29th annual West Harlem Anti-Gentrification Street Fair, a low-key block party on Tiemann Place. There, I told him that WikiCU had named him “enemy of the state.” He laughed.

      As the light dims in the comfortable apartment, I confess to him that I didn’t want to use WikiCU’s words to name this article. “Frenemy of the state” I thought would be more accurate.

      “Frenemy of the state,” DeMott repeats. “I don’t quite buy that. I think enemy of the state is a closer truth, and I think it’s funny too, by the way, and I actually think it’s quite complimentary.”

      At the end of our interview, DeMott is still sitting on the piano bench. He cradles his guitar like a soft kitten. He plays an original, “On The Shoreline.” I halfway expect to hear a lamentation of the loss of some of the old Manhattanville—after all, DeMott now lives in the shadow of the Columbia campus expansion he’s spent the past decade protesting. But I’ve assumed too soon.

      “He came along one step at a time down the shoreline to love me. She came along in wind so strong down the shore line, down the shore line to love me,” he croons.

      “Maybe this is the man behind the Manhattanville Tom DeMott,” I think to myself, and then I notice the large and colorful canvas partially obscured behind the bench.

      “HARLEM IS NOT FOR SALE,” DeMott has painted on it in red, black, and green. I realize then that I’ve been looking at it all wrong: the Bernie Sanders sticker on the front door, the outsider art on the walls, the books (Junk Politics: The Trashing of the American Mind, which was written by his father Benjamin DeMott, is shelved alongside The Baroque Poem)— “A part of my everyday life is always resisting bullshit,” DeMott had told me.

      There is no person behind the politics. Activism is behind Tom DeMott.

       

   Facebook

        In spite of the tacit silence, another of Lederer’s current students claims that all 14 people enrolled in her class are well aware of their teacher’s past. In fact, the student tells me that, when deciding which of the three spring trial practice sections to take, they were cautioned by their advisor “that Professor Lederer is very good but that she also is a controversial figure.”

        It is the controversy of a person who, as one of her students describes her, “seems like somebody who really just wants to put people in cages”, that caused 8,635 petitioners, including many Columbia affiliates, to advocate against Lederer working in our school, and yet, she remains, returning to the Law School’s Room 107 every Wednesday night to teach.

        The significance Lederer’s presence as a living artifact of this history holds for Columbia and its surrounding neighborhood, the same Harlem community that raised those five young boys before they completed their childhoods in prison cells, is one story of the Central Park Five that has not yet been told. However, it is this Central Park Five story that is, perhaps, most relevant to us as students, staff, faculty, administrators, or simply curious observers of the school that has hired the person at the contentious center of the Central Park Five case.

        Professor Lederer is infamous for allegedly forcing false speech and mobilizing it as a weapon against five innocent children. In exploring the ramifications of the silences surrounding her story, we can clearly see the role that University affiliates and non-affiliates have had in sustaining the symbolic power of Lederer’s legacy.

•     •     •

        To most people in Harlem, the name Elizabeth Lederer means nothing, Michael Henry Adams, a well-known Harlem activist and historian, tells me.

        “Many Harlem people, just on principle, they looked at the prosecutors and the whole police force just as pigs,” Adams explains. “And they wouldn’t see [Lederer] as any different or more benign than any of the rest of them.”

        Adams references a long and well-documented history of racially-biased interactions with representatives of government and law enforcement in Harlem. The relationship between Harlemites and law enforcement has been one of distrust and abuse, qualities not all that different from Columbia’s own relationship with Harlem.

        In July 1964, four years before Harlemites and Black Columbia students rose up in response to the University’s proposal to build a segregated athletic facility in Morningside Park, riots broke out in Harlem and various other parts of the city and country in response to the murder of a Black high school student in Harlem by an off-duty, White police officer.

        These riots occurred only 21 years after another Harlem riot, in 1943, in response to a White police officer who shot an African-American soldier in Harlem and only 25 years before the Central Park Jogger case, which Adams cites as one of only two times that there were almost riots since he moved to Harlem in the 1980s.

        Within the context of these spectacular events and other more everyday forms of racial bias and abuse experienced by people in Harlem, the importance of Lederer as a figure, Adams explains, is diluted. It was not Lederer who shot and killed James Powell in 1964, nor was it Lederer who shot and wounded Robert Bandy in 1943.

   Dick De Marsico

        With a consistent pattern of negative law enforcement interactions, the exact identity of a particular prosecutor or police officer, Adams tells me, loses its importance with time.

        “For many people,” Adams says, “[Lederer is] just part of the nameless, faceless police, so Columbia students know who she is, but…” I interrupt Adams, and I tell him that for us she is also without a face, seemingly even without a uni, as her page on the Law School website shows.

        Although Lederer may remain an anonymous figure for much of the neighborhood, the impact of the Central Park Five case is still a very real, lived experience for a lot of people in Harlem. At the time of the case, although the majority of mainstream media was ready to blame the five boys, a large community of people in Harlem doubted their guilt and pushed back against what they felt was a racially-biased trial.

        “I don’t feel that I am very protected in an incident that I may be near or may be close to,” Belkis Valerio, a resident of The Bronx who works in Harlem, tells me in Spanish. “Because of discrimination or whatever it may be, I could become involved in a situation like that [like the Central Park Five].”

        Many people of color in Harlem, like Valerio, believe that they could have taken the place of The Five and still can if they were to become involved in a similar situation today.

  New York City Law Department

        “It was because of their skin color,” says Donna Gooden, a Black Harlemite explaining her interpretation of the 1989 case. “It just breaks my heart because our Black kids, our Black boys are targets and victims.”

        “Virtually most people in Harlem said ‘that could be my child,’” Adams says.

        The community’s feelings about Lederer herself though are much murkier, even among The Five.

        Santana, one of The Five, signed the petition against Lederer, but Wise, who served the longest sentence even though he wasn’t even in Central Park that night, feels more ambivalent about her.

        “So what where she work at,” Wise says. “She’s doin’ her job.”

        To some others in Harlem though, Lederer wasn’t doing her job at all.

        “She wasn’t a good prosecutor,” says Miguel Clemente, a lifelong East Harlemite. “To me, my opinion, she wasn’t if she got these kids sentenced.”

        Regardless of Lederer’s culpability for her work on the Central Park Jogger case, the fact is that, for many people in Harlem, Lederer is more than just a reflection of a racially-biased legal system. In continuing to hire Lederer, in staying silent about her role in the Central Park Five case, and in its lack of response to the 2013 petition, Columbia speaks to the Harlem community about its values.

        As Derrick Moore, a Black Harlem resident who grew up across the street from the Central Park Five, explains “[Columbia] should take a more active role about who they hire and how it affects the people here in the community… Maybe, she is qualified to teach, or maybe not. I’m not sure about that, but it’s kind of disheartening that the process continues to be like ‘hell with the people that live here.’”

        What residents like Moore feel is The University’s disregard for their community is exemplified by the fact that Columbia Law School has become a safe haven for Lederer in the middle of a neighborhood full of people who once actively despised her.

        As the case went on, Lederer would commute to and from court surrounded by an outfit of police officers to protect her from the angry citizens outside, particularly people of color, who would yell insults and threaten her in outrage over the case and trial proceedings.

  Chester Higgins, Jr.

        Even Wise, 16 years old at the time and the only one of The Five currently living in Harlem, turned to Lederer just after being charged for first-degree assault, sexual abuse, and riot and said “you bitch, you’ll pay for this. Jesus is going to get you.”

        In 2013, Lederer received death threats as Burns’ documentary about the case as well as the petition to remove Lederer from Columbia renewed old anger against her.

        Nowadays though, Lederer seems to be neither crowd-fearing nor God-fearing. When she finishes her class on Wednesday night at 8:10, she walks out of the front door of the Law School, crosses Amsterdam, and continues on through College Walk to Broadway alone.

        While Lederer herself may feel secure on her way through campus, her presence at the school makes some students uneasy.

        “I’m always gonna be wondering what that turning point would be for any of her Black students,” says Ayomide Omobo Law School ’21. “When do they stop being the good kid that she actually likes in her class and just be another Black child in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

        Some other students though believe that having a controversial professor contributes to the intellectual diversity of the Law School.

        “It’s another facet of education,” says one of Lederer’s current students. “It makes your legal education more real.”

        Many students point out that Lederer’s story is only one out of many examples of systemic injustice at Columbia.

        As Céline Zhu BC ’20, co-president of the Columbia Pre-Law Society, puts it “[at Columbia] we also have professors on this campus that do literal acts of violence that we turn a blind eye to… There’s so many other professors… that we allow to go through life and not really question either.”

        Just this year, The Spectator discovered that the University has never taken tenure away from professors, even in instances where professors have been convicted of sexual harassment or assault.

        In 2010, the same year that Lederer was hired, Gaviota Velasco SEAS ’11 reported being sexually harassed by a staff member in the Earth and Environmental Engineering Department and told The Spectator that “she never received a response from EOAA [the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action] and had to continue working with her harasser”.

        In November 1986, about two and a half years before the Central Park Five saga began, an anonymous student’s allegations of sexual harassment by then political science professor Seweryn Bialer were denied, and the University’s General Counsel pinned the problem as simply arising from Bialer’s “gregarious and open manner.” Bialer, who passed away this February, continued teaching at Columbia for another 11 years.

  Columbia Daily Spectator/Nov. 19, 1986

        It is darkly ironic that these three incidences, which are only a portion of the published examples of faculty and staff misconduct against students, all involve ignored allegations of sexual harassment or assault. Lederer’s job is to prosecute exactly these kinds of crimes. Yet for those who view her as one in a number of implicit or explicitly violent faculty members at Columbia, Lederer is aligned with people like Velasco and Bialer. Like them, she is a faculty member with questionable morals and actions and whose presence causes some people to feel unsafe.

        Even one of Lederer’s current students expresses their moral qualms about taking her class. They joined her class in spite of her history only because of what they say is the difficulty getting into any section of sample trial practice, much less guaranteeing that they are not in the one run by Lederer.

        “Ethically, it’s conflicting” the student says. “It’s sort of hard to sit there and not consider her past… It’s in the back of my head the whole time, like especially when she says things about criminal defendants that seem somehow disrespectful.”

        Omobo emphasizes that safety is not just physical but mental and emotional as well. Therefore, while Lederer, unlike Velasco or Bialer, does not commit any form of physical violence, she does cause some people, like Omobo, to feel emotionally violated.

        Echoing Zhu’s comments though, Omobo says that, when she thinks more about it, she is actually not too shocked that Lederer works at Columbia.

        “I’m surprised that this person did this thing, and then over the next couple of hours, I’m like ‘why am I surprised,’” Omobo reflects. “This is what it is. This is what it always is. This is what they always do. Columbia doesn’t care about us… This is just another way that they show it.”

  Steve Schapiro

        Similar to Omobo, when I speak to Eric Seiff Law School ’58, who was Wise’s lawyer during the 2002 case, he tells me that the Law School’s continued hiring of Lederer is just “Columbia being Columbia.”

        If Lederer is unexceptional, a mere manifestation of Columbia’s role as, what Omobo calls, “an instrument of White supremacy,” then maybe it makes sense that, in spite of a petition with thousands of signatures, an op-ed in The New York Times and a counter op-ed in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates along with articles by BET, The New York Post, The Hollywood Reporter and others all about Lederer and her faculty position at our school, the majority of the people that I spoke to, including students at the Law School, had no idea who Lederer is or knew that she works at Columbia.

        Before the publication of this article, Lederer’s name only appeared in The Spectator three times, each in relation to a rape case involving a Columbia student that Lederer worked on over four years prior to the Central Park Five case.

        When I speak to the editor in chief and city news editor of The Spectator from 2013, the year that the petition encouraged coverage of Lederer in national news outlets, they both tell me that they don’t remember ever hearing about Lederer but that the story would have been one that The Spectator would have had an interest in covering.

        The Spectator’s silence on this issue may be read as a testament to how insignificant Lederer’s story may seem against the backdrop of the many similar machinations of a University that, Zhu says, is “self-serving… [and] has an interest in maintaining itself” at the expense of some of its students and surrounding community.

  Columbia Daily Spectator/Apr. 11, 2019

        The other importance of the absence of Lederer from the pages of our publication is that it reveals how The Spectator itself fits within a larger framework of media violence against the Central Park Five.

        The response of The Spectator to Lederer is opposite that of many other media organizations, like the ones listed above. Instead, The Spectator, in choosing silence over speech, most resembles  the responses of Lederer and of the University administration itself. However, the violence associated with Lederer’s silence, the University’s silence, and the silence of The Spectator is just one of many acts of violence mainstream media has wrought against The Central Park Five and people affected by the case.

        The media plays an especially complicated role in the story of The Five. Sometimes through its silence and other times through its speech, media outlets have been accused of participating in the harm caused by the case and its aftermath.

        In 1989 for example, the speed and voracity with which the media covered the Central Park Jogger story attributed an act and attitude of violence to “the wolf pack” even before they ever entered a courtroom.

        By contrast, historian Craig Steven Wilder says in an interview for the The Central Park Five documentary that, in 2002, “I felt ashamed, actually, for New York, and I also felt extremely angry because their innocence never got the attention that their guilt did. The furor around prosecuting them still drowns out the good news of their innocence.”

                                                                              New York Daily News/Apr. 21, 1989

        During the original case, there were only a handful of newspapers that would publish Meili’s name, the victim of the crime. The constant speech expressed about the five young suspects was almost entirely absent for Meili, whose identity most mainstream media felt should be protected.

        The Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper located in Harlem and one of the papers that decided to publish Meili’s name, made sure to break the silence about Meili in response to what they viewed as the unequal treatment afforded to Tawana Brawley, an alleged African-American rape victim who about a year earlier had had her image and name spoken all over national media.

        Just as it was The Amsterdam News, the oldest Black newspaper in the country, who broke the silence about Meili, it is I, one of the few Black journalists at The Spectator, who break our 34-year silence about Lederer.

        Following the publication of this article, there will be at least one more important speech act made about the Central Park Five. This summer, African-American director Ava DuVernay will release a Netflix miniseries, a narrative retelling of the Central Park Five story, called When They See Us.

        Continuing to speak about the Central Park Five through media like this article or like DuVernay’s show is a crucial part of retaining an historical memory about an ever-repeating past, Adams tells me. Being an historian, it makes sense that Adams stresses how crucial history is to our understanding of the world and, by extension, to how we act in it.

        It is a history of negative interactions with the police that affects how some Harlemites feel about the Central Park Five case. It is a history of allegedly violent faculty and staff members who maintain their employment at Columbia that affect how some students feel about the University. It is a history of loud media made about Lederer’s employment at the Law School that makes The Spectator’s silence so striking.

  Dimitrios Kambouris

        With an historical consciousness and knowledge, Adams sees how much of the past remains present in Harlem, especially regarding policing and violence against young Black men.

        “Of course [people in Harlem are affected by the Central Park Five case today],” Adams tells me. “Because nothing’s changed… Amadou Diallo [a 23-year-old African-American man murdered in 1999 by four New York City Police Department officers, who were tried and acquitted] is no different than a Trayvon Martin or a Tamir Rice, so it just continues.”

        And it continues not only in Harlem but also at Columbia.

        On the night of Thursday, April 11th, nearly 30 years to the date of the Central Park Jogger crime, I, a 23-year-old African-American man, walked onto the campus of Barnard College, a school where many students are much like Meili: elite, young, White women. At the Milstein Center, I was confronted by a group of five to six Public Safety officers and was physically restrained and pinned against a countertop after non-violently refusing to show my Columbia ID.

        The Barnard administration initially responded with silence, vaguely referring to an “unfortunate incident” in their original statement on the issue. Like Lederer, who declined our request to be interviewed for this article, the Barnard administration kept its mouth shut when asked to speak out against the racial bias of its Public Safety staff.

        When Barnard finally changed its rhetoric, one Columbia student criticized what he called “cowardice at Columbia” as the administration gave in to pressure to acknowledge the racism involved in what had happened. When the charges against the Central Park Five were overturned, one of the case’s detectives, Michael Sheehan, similarly commented that “to vacate every one of these charges seems to me an act of moral cowardice and political correctness in the worst degree.”

        When I reveal to Omobo who Lederer was in 1989 and who she is at our school today, she complains that “instead of hiring people who can make Columbia feel safe for everyone, you’re hiring someone who does the exact opposite”.

        Columbia University Public Safety states that its mission is “to enhance the quality of life for the Columbia community… where the safety of all is balanced with the rights of the individual,” but not all of the individuals in the Columbia community see Public Safety officers as people who make them feel safe.

        At the April 12th listening session about Barnard Public Safety’s treatment of me, one Black student says “We’ve all seen these highly publicized incidents of police brutality… [with] local police forces, but now it’s on campus police forces… Is the way that [a Black person] would interact with an outside police officer the same as how you would interact with a Public Safety police officer?”

        Speaking to Omobo in the lobby of her residence hall just across the street from the Law School, she says “being Black in the US is always looking over your shoulder… [Knowing that Lederer works here] just means I’m gonna look over my shoulder just as much inside of Columbia Law School.”

   Ian@NZFlickr

        In thinking about why the Central Park Five case received so much more media attention than other similar cases at the time, University of Connecticut sociology professor Gaye Tuchman theorizes that the location (Central Park), the timing (two years after the similar Tawana Brawley case), and the demographics (an upper-class White woman allegedly brutalized by lower-class Black men) made it the perfect story for mainstream media. The location (an Ivy League campus), timing (videos of police brutality have recently received a lot of press), and demographics (a Black man walking into a school of predominantly White women) of what happened to me was also a potent mix that made my story go viral.

        The problem with these events though, Adams says, is that be it a Black man murdered by police, a Black student battered by campus safety officers, or Black boys wrongly incarcerated for a rape, the speech about the event eventually ceases to be spoken, and when it does, memories start to fade.

        “Although people have been critical and say ‘oh! We must take this down. This is terrible,’ We forget,” Adams says. “We forget. Every bad thing, we forget it.”

•      •      •

        On May 1st, 1989, 12 days after she was attacked, Meili awoke from her coma. In Burns’ documentary, some of The Five recall feeling relieved. Meili was so severely battered that it was unclear if she would survive, but when she woke, there was hope that her testimony would reveal the truth of what had really happened. When asked though, Meili couldn’t speak about the crime. She had forgotten. Reyes had beaten the memory right out of her brain.

        Of all the absent statements in this story, Meili’s is the only one that was forced. Meili’s silence was an unwanted effect of her trauma, like the Central Park Five’s speech in 1989 was an effect of theirs.

   Kaila Jones

        Unlike Meili, people at Columbia and people in Harlem do remember the relevant past, and the University administration does too. Although time may make our speech about injustices gone by whittle down to whispers, there is no coma that keeps us from contextualizing Columbia’s actions. The question to consider then is how do we manage this memory. Do we say something, or do we, like Lederer, stay silent?