Making/marking the old fortress

In an interview with Associate Vice President of the Office of Government and Community Affairs for Columbia University, Victoria Mason-Ailey, she affirmed that the CBA was an exemplification of Columbia working with the community in partnership to an extent. She motioned to the various poster-boards depicting the Manhattanville Expansion plan and historical narratives about the “old industrial neighborhood.” On a shelf beside her desk sat Andrew Dolkart’s book on the history of Morningside Heights. An urban planner for Columbia University for 11 years, she acknowledged that the gymnasium plan in Morningside Park of the 1960's was a turning point and that the community protest against it provided Columbia University with an important hurdle. She claimed that the walls of the main campus were often been seen as barriers to the community, which was not the original intention of its creators but became the outsider perception. In contrast, the new Manhattanville campus was to have a more open plan, with no walls or gates and a connection to the network of streets. She argued that the name of the University was “Columbia University in the City of New York,” meaning that their focus was on the interface with the community and on transparency.