Why Should Columbia Keep Out Its Neighbors?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/columbia-university-college-walk.html

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As Christine Ruyter began resuming her routines last spring after hip replacement, she encountered an obstacle a block from her Morningside Heights home. College Walk, the tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare across Columbia University between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, was indefinitely closed to the public. To control the chaos of anti-Israel unrest after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the university had uniformed guards at the walk’s entrances bar anyone without a Columbia ID or pass.

Columbia, which has long enjoyed the benefits of being in New York City, has been keeping the city out when the city becomes inconvenient.

Columbia claims New York City ceded control of College Walk in 1953, when it sold the university the deed to that portion of West 116th Street for $1,000. In Columbia’s telling, allowing the public to walk through had been a lengthy act of kindness.

Ms. Ruyter and three neighbors are plaintiffs in a lawsuit claiming otherwise. Toby Golick, their lawyer, argues that the city retained the right of way because of a half-sentence from the transfer that reserves “an easement over a proposed pedestrian walk to be constructed by the university.” But the sentence continues: and “so much of the property of the university as will be necessary for the maintenance, repair and relocation” of city infrastructure. Columbia argues that the easement only allows access for utilities or public-safety vehicles such as fire trucks. The Eric Adams administration agrees.

But as recently as 2021, the university’s official alumni magazine described College Walk as a “tree-lined public walkway.”

Sid Davidoff was a key aide to Mayor John V. Lindsay in spring 1968, during the most serious period of campus unrest, when students took their dean hostage, and the college closed the gates. Mr. Davidoff says he believes Columbia has a right to bar outsiders “only in exigent circumstances.” “It was never the intention to close the walk permanently or even for a longer period of time” beyond days or weeks, he says.