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December 07, 2007, 07:34 AM ET
Shop Talk: Preservation, Planning, and a Craigslist Ad for a Tulane Building
History in West Harlem: New York’s City Planning Commission may have approved Columbia University’s 17-acre expansion into the West Harlem neighborhood, but preservationists continue their protests, Newsday reports. Historians say the neighborhood was home to meatpacking businesses, milk-bottling plants, and auto-assembly facilities that included a Studebaker plant (above), and all those enterprises left notable structures behind. “Manufacturers used to take great pride in the buildings,” said Mary Habstritt, president of the Society for Industrial Archaeology. Columbia plans to put research labs and housing in the area, and has said it has no plans to tear anything down.
Planning in Buffalo: The State University of New York at Buffalo is working on its first master plan in 30 years, according to The Buffalo News. The university, which has both a downtown campus and a campus in the suburbs, expects to enroll 10,000 additional students and hire 750 more faculty members by 2020. The architecture and planning firm hired for the project, Beyer Blinder Belle, has been frank about the challenges it faces. Frederick A. Bland, a managing partner with the firm, said of the suburban campus: “There’s too much concrete, not enough glass. It’s not welcoming. You don’t have a sense of place. Often, you don’t know the front of the building from the back of the building, which is a problem.” Meanwhile, he said that decades-old “temporary” annexes on the downtown campus create “an awful first impression.”
Classified ad in New Orleans: In the market for a 20,000-square-foot structure? Tulane University put up a Craigslist ad seeking a buyer for a four-year-old metal-frame Sprung Instant Structures building for a price that is negotiable, according to New Orleans City Business. The university’s ad promises that the building comes with “many additional mechanical and electrical equipment items that really make this a valuable package.” But keep in mind that before you cart it away — at your expense — you’ll have to take down the interior mezzanine, which the university installed when it used the structure as bookstore and food court. Anthony Lorino, Tulane’s senior vice president for operations, said the structure was “occupying one of the green spaces in one of the quads that we need to return to green space, and we don’t have an alternative use for it.”
Tulane U. seeks a buyer for this temporary structure.
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