If approved, NYU is proposing to replace the Coles gym with a multi-use building dubbed the “Zipper Building” along Mercer Street, which would include a 299-foot tower on the corner of Mercer and Houston, and several other buildings of varying heights. The single-story Morton Williams grocery store would be replaced by a 14-story building with a dormitory, faculty housing, hotel space, a below-ground gym and a 100,000-square-foot space NYU would donate to the New York City Department of Education for use as a public school.

Weighing the short-term versus the long-term consequences, Hilary Ballon, deputy vice chancellor at NYU Abu Dhabi and professor of urban studies and architecture at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, said it “is essential” for a city and a thriving university to grow – or else, it becomes static.

“A research university can’t thrive without additional space, and knowledge growth and space to produce that knowledge to develop new programs to meet the issues of the 21^st Century are space dependant,” she said. “I believe that the great universities of our city and of our country will need to grow to thrive and be the leaders that they are around the world.”

Gary Hack, professor of urban design and former dean of PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, said there needs to be some way the university can accomplish their objectives and the neighborhood “to feel OK” about those objectives, but those concerns need to be thoroughly ironed out.

“Because they are adding more space, there is an assumption that is growth,” he said. "For NYU to survive, that future education is going to be much more about people coming together for education, and the kinds of spaces they are proposing are ones that give them the capacity to grow as an institution, but not grow in terms of numbers. If they are proposing more housing and not adding more students, then those students are living somewhere now and they are in the adjacent neighborhoods. It is really important to see this for what it is, which is a change in the nature and the character and the capacity of the university.”

Citing concerns about density, shadowing and loss of public space, Brad Hoylman, a council member on Manhattan’s Community Board 2, argued that NYU is "walling itself off" from the neighborhood instead of integrating itself into the fabric of the Village.

“Most of us on the Community Board were scratching our heads when we heard about the proposal because we thought this was a plan to increase academic excellence, and generally speaking, hotels don’t do that,” he said, calling to protect the public parkland that the Zipper Building would replace. “Their first step was to acquire public parkland for private development, and I just thought that wasn’t the best way to introduce the community to their project,” he said.

Conversely, both Hack and Ballon said a hotel could be utilized as a valuable academic tool based upon its capacity to host educational conferences and help the flow of faculty and visitors to the school. “It is an important piece of the future, because more and more, people are going to be studying in irregular ways,” Hack said.

In discussing how the planning process could have been improved, Hack said other cities—such as Philadelphia and Boston—have institutional master plans set by the municipality that determines a blueprint for how universities can grow, which New York does not have. Panelists agreed that the implementation of such a plan would encourage developers and institutions to work with the community to achieve a common goal.

But Shiffman said protecting the city’s “diversity and heterogeneity” is the most important planning element.

“If we just become these concentrated institutions in community after community, we are going to lose that diversity, we are going to lose the attraction that people will come to New York to study or to visit and work,” he said. “Should a university expand for the quality? Yes. There is a need for a certain level of expansion, but for every university to think that every few years, they need to develop a million square feet, I think that’s become a formula that really is a formula for disaster.”

John Alschuler, chairman of HR&A, moderated the debate, and MAS president Vin Cipolla delivered the opening remarks. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is expected to vote on a resolution by April 12.