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Abstract
During the post—World War II era, Columbia University undertook a bold and comprehensive expansion and redevelopment initiative to remake their immediate surroundings. Drawing upon the language of Cold War anticommunism, the university—in partnership with such redevelopment groups as Morningside Heights Inc.—undertook such a self-proclaimed ‘‘war on blight’’ in an attempt to ‘‘liberate’’ the surrounding community from the horrors of urban decay. This essay positions the 1968 student—community campaign against a proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park within this longer narrative of university-sponsored urban renewal. In light of such a history, those that campaigned against the university’s expansion efforts also adopted a language clearly influenced by the imagery of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: the language of anticolonialism.
| ‘‘Columbia Students and Teen-Age Neighbors Get New Athletic Field,’’ New York Times, May 11, 1957. Columbia was not the only institution using public space. By the mid-1950s, the City had allowed the Tavern on the Green restaurant to set up shop in Central Park for a nominal fee. See ‘‘Moses Plan Opposed: Citizens Union Backs Mothers in Fight for Park Area,’’ New York Times, April 23, 1956. Google Scholar | |
| ‘‘The Columbia and Community Gymnasiums: A Background,’’ Columbia University, Office of Public Information, March 1968, p. 4, Historical Subject Files, Buildings and Grounds Collection, ‘‘Gym-Community Opposition’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| ‘‘New Gym Access,’’ The Morningside Citizen, October 10, 1962, Christiane C. Collins Collection, Box 6, ‘‘Morningside Heights Organizations’’ folder, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York. Google Scholar | |
| ‘‘13 Held in Protest Over Columbia Gym,’’ New York Times, February 29, 1968, 44. For more on the details of the gym’s place in the events of April 1968 at Columbia, see Stefan Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 2009). Google Scholar | |
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Ada Louise Huxtable , ‘‘How Not to Build a Symbol,’’ New York Times, March 24, 1968, D23. Google Scholar | |
| For the case of the University of Chicago’s place in the postwar world, see LaDale Winling’s essay in this issue. For more on this relationship between Cold War America and universities, see Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Richard M. Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Stuart W. Leslie, Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond, The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Google Scholar | |
| For more on the concept of ‘‘containment’’ within the domestic sphere, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Google Scholar | |
| Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 189. My understanding of the aesthetics of urban renewal in postwar New York has been shaped by Zipp’s groundbreaking work. Google Scholar | |
| I am not the first historian to note this relationship between Cold War anticommunism and urban renewal. Arnold Hirsch, in his recent article ‘‘Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,’’ finds that ‘‘‘Containment’ became as much a hallmark of racial housing programs as it was of American foreign policy,’’ as federal housing initiatives and urban renewal programs only served to reinforce existing patterns of segregation-a fact that helped ‘‘contain’’ African Americans in the worst neighborhoods in America. In such accounts, urban renewal becomes something of a defensive strategy, a means to maintain the status quo in urban life and its residential patterns. It is my intention to highlight another side to such renewal campaigns, one that stresses that the end goal was not merely containment-but was the creation of an entirely new urban landscape. See Arnold Hirsch, ‘‘Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,’’ Journal of Urban History, January 2000: 158-89, 170. Google Scholar | |
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Paul Groth , Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 273, 222. Google Scholar | |
| My work on opposition to university-sponsored urban renewal efforts builds upon LaDale Winling’s introduction of this subject in his essay in this issue. Google Scholar | |
| Certification of Incorporation, Morningside Heights, Inc., 1947, p. 1, Historical Subject Files, Community Affairs Series, ‘‘Morningside Heights, Inc., 1950-9’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| Here is Manhattanville: A Report to the People,’’ p. 4, Community Advisory Committee, Morningside Heights, Inc., 1950, Historical Subject Files, Community Affairs Series, ‘‘Morningside Heights, Inc., 1950-9’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 3. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 3. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Morningside-Manhattanvile: A Pioneer Urban Redevelopment Program,’’ The American City, May 1953, 94-6. Google Scholar | |
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Robert A. McCaughey, Stand , Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 408. Google Scholar | |
| Cultural critic Andrew Ross has termed this imagery ‘‘the Cold War culture of germophobia.’’ See Andrew Ross, ‘‘Containing Culture in the Cold War,’’ in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 46. Google Scholar | |
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Stanley Salmen quoted in Marc Rauch, Bob Feldman, and Art Leaderman, Columbia and the Community: Past Policy and New Directions (New York: Columbia College Citizenship Council Committee for Research, 1968 ), 8. Google Scholar | |
| McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 409. Google Scholar | |
| Andrew S. Dolkart, Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 328. In many ways, my work can be read as an extension of Dolkart’s excellent study of the Columbia community, as my period of investigation-Columbia in the second half of the twentieth century-warrants only a brief afterword in Dolkart’s book. Google Scholar | |
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Salmen quoted in ‘‘The Wider War on Morningside Heights,’’ The New York Post, May 11, 1968. Google Scholar | |
| Salmen quoted in Rauch, Feldman, and Leaderman, Columbia and the Community, 7. Google Scholar | |
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Barzun quoted in Joanne Grant, Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest (New York: Signet Books, 1969), 29. Google Scholar | |
| Melvin Melcher, ‘‘Letter to the Editor,’’ Columbia Daily Spectator, December 12, 1967; Transcript of interview with Max Bond, conducted by Richard Oliver, July 8, 1981, 4, Columbia University Centennial Collection, Box 11, ‘‘Interviews, Bond’’ folder, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Slums Engulfing Columbia Section,’’ New York Times, June 9, 1958, 25. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘A Negro Becomes Manager of the Bryn Mawr,’’ New York Times, May 8, 1965. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Hotel’s Tenants Fight Evictions,’’ New York Times, January 4, 1965. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘The Hotel Where Addiction and Violence Once Thrived is Being Closed,’’ New York Times, November 3, 1965; ‘‘Barnard to Build a New Dormitory,’’ New York Times, February 24, 1967; ‘‘Plimpton Hall Dedicated,’’ New York Times, November 9, 1968. Google Scholar | |
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Rauch, Feldman , and Leaderman , Columbia and the Community, 36. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 37. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 38. This was part of a longer, wider pattern of behavior. In October 1961, for example, tenants at the Columbia-owned Devonshire Hotel (542 West 112th Street) filed charges against Columbia with the State Commission Against Discrimination, charging that the university was evicting tenants based upon their race. See ‘‘Tenants Accuse Columbia of Bias,’’ New York Times, October 4, 1961, 39. Such findings suggest that the threat of blight was indeed a reality in the Morningside Heights community, and that those most concerned with such conditions often allowed them to fester-in an attempt to convince city officials of the need to raze such structures. More work is needed on the relationship between the reality and perceptions of blight, and how all parties involved in urban renewal reached such conclusions on the subject. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘The Wider War on Morningside Heights,’’ The New York Post, May 11, 1968. Google Scholar | |
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Rauch, Feldman , and Leaderman , Columbia and the Community, 39. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 41. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 31-35. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Crisis at Columbia:’’ Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 76. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 77. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘The Columbia and Community Gymnasiums: A Background,’’ 2, Columbia University, Office of Public Information, March 1968, Historical Subject Files, Buildings and Grounds Collection, ‘‘Gym-Community Opposition’’ folder, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid., 4. Google Scholar | |
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Rall, ‘‘A Call to Reaction: Harlem and the Morningside Gym, 1961-1968,’’ 9, 10. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Morningside’s Late, Late Show,’’ 56. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Columbia Students Ask Reconsideration of Gym,’’ New York Times, March 11, 1966, 16; Hoving quoted in Rall, 13; ‘‘Ad Hoc Committee Will Meet Hoving to Oppose CU Gym,’’ Columbia Daily Spectator, March 8, 1966; ‘‘Citizens Protest,’’ The Morningside Citizen, May 6, 1966, 1-3. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Protesters Boo Shriver at Talk on ‘Struggle for Urban Power,’’’ New York Times, March 3, 1968, 50. Google Scholar | |
| Jerry L. Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 52-3. Other works that provide detail of the 1968 Columbia uprisings include Roger Kahn, The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970) and Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). Google Scholar | |
| This is not to suggest that student protesters and Morningside Heights/Harlem community activists experienced Columbia’s renewal strategies in the same ways: these policies clearly affected the lives of nonstudents in ways that Columbia students did not have to worry about. Yet by making the connection between Columbia’s attempts at urban renewal and their complicity in the Vietnam War effort (the latter being a primarily student-driven movement at Columbia), both sets of actors were able to rally greater support for their respective causes. Google Scholar | |
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Mark Rudd , ‘‘Events and Issues of the Columbia Revolt,’’ in The University and Revolution, ed. Gary R. Weaver and James H. Weaver ( Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 133-40, 133-4. Google Scholar | |
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SAS, SDS, and the Strike Coordinating Committee , ‘‘What We Want . . .,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives. Google Scholar | |
| Ibid. Google Scholar | |
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Student Strike Committee , ‘‘Student Strike at Columbia,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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James S. Kunen, ‘‘Why We’re Against the Biggees,’’ in Essays on the Student Movement, ed. Patrick Gleeson (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970), 45-8, 47. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Columbia Liberated,’’ Columbia Strike Coordinating Committee, September 1968, 7, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| Michael Klare, ‘‘IDA: Cold War Think-Tank,’’ The Rat, May 3-16, 1968, 15. For more on the I.D.A., see ‘‘A Target of Campus Protesters Is a Think Tank,’’ New York Times, April 26, 1968, 50. Not surprisingly, there have been no historical studies undertaken on this incredibly secretive organization. Google Scholar | |
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Student Strike Committee , ‘‘Student Strike at Columbia,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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SAS, SDS, and Strike Coordinating Committee , ‘‘What We Want . . .,’’ April 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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‘‘Vietnam is Here!’’ Strike Co-Ordinating Committee, Columbia University, August 1968, Protest and Activism collection, Box 12, folder 1, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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Columbia Strike Steering Committee , Press Release, April 28, 1968, Protest and Activism collection, Box 11, folder 41, Columbia University Archives , Columbia University, New York . Google Scholar | |
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The Program to Activate Community Talent, untitled flyer , May 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 7, folder 22, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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Morningside Independents , ‘‘People of the Community Support the Student Strike,’’ May 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 7, folder 16, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
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Community Committee to Support the Columbia Strike , ‘‘Demand an Open Campus: Support the Student Strike,’’ May 1968, Protest and Activism Collection, Box 7, folder 16, Columbia University Archives, Columbia University, New York. Google Scholar | |
| For more on the post-1968 demise of large-scale urban renewal, and the rise of more equitable and democratic methods of planning, see Christopher Klemek, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of New Left Urbanism,’’ Daedulus, Spring 2009, 73. Google Scholar |
