Fifteen years ago, the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) was in a position not unlike the one it is in today: with a burgeoning enrollment, it was crowding 17,000 students into a building designed to fit almost half that, and it desperately needed space.
Then, on Sept. 10, 1993, philanthropist Miles and Shirley Fiterman donated to BMCC their 15-floor, 375,000 square foot office building, conveniently located at 30 West Broadway, just blocks south of the college’s main hub at 199 Chambers Street. The estimated $30 million gift was, at the time, the largest private gift to a community college in U.S. history. Tragically, just eight years later Fiterman Hall was destroyed when 7 World Trade Center collapsed across Barclay Street during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of Fiterman Hall, BMCC is asking students, faculty and staff to join hundreds on the west side of the remaining hulk of Fiterman Hall on Sept. 10 at 2 p.m., where BMCC President Antonio Pérez will recall what Fiterman was, and New York City Council member Alan Gerson (District 1), chair of the Council’s Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee, and Council member Charles Barron (District 42), chair of the Council’s Higher Education Committee, will call for the funding needed to erect a new Fiterman Hall.
“The first goal of the event is for people to physically see the site,” said Angela Sales, director of community and government relations at BMCC. “It’s an historical site because we are the only college impacted by a terrorist attack. We want to educate the college community and the Lower Manhattan community about what happened.”
Second, Sales said, “We also want to bring attention to the fact that our building still needs to be built. It has been seven years. We want to bring public attention not just to what Fiterman was, but what Fiterman can be — not only for BMCC, but for the entire community. We need to be as active as we can in making sure that legislators stay on point, ensuring that there are no delays. We need to make sure no one drops the ball.”
Chronology of Fiterman Hall: 1993 – 2001
In an effort to alleviate the space shortage BMCC was experiencing, the then City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds was in serious discussions with the Fitermans in August 1993 over leasing the building they owned. During those talks, the couple made an astonishing offer: they would donate it to BMCC, and pay off the $8 million mortgage on the property.
“We are thrilled to contribute our building to where it really counts and where it will do so much good for deserving, hard-working students,” the Fitermans said at the time (Real Estate Weekly).
Renamed Miles and Shirley Fiterman Hall, the building’s offices were quickly converted to classrooms, and that fall about 3,000 students were already attending roughly 100 different classes there.
According to BMCC President Antonio Pérez, “the gift of the structure was an unqualified windfall that, at a single stroke, solved both an acute space shortage at the College and worries about how to pay for more room.”
In 2000, the building — which opened in 1959 — was being renovated into a $275 million facility, receiving new windows and infrastructure. Even during renovations, 6,000 BMCC students took classes there daily.
Sept. 11, 2001
The renovations were only six weeks from completion when 7 World Trade Center collapsed during the terror attacks, tearing open a gash on Fiterman Hall, and piling rubble high against its facade. While everyone got out safely, the building was irreparably damaged.
With the loss of Fiterman Hall, BMCC’s instructional space was reduced by one third. Moreover, one floor of Fiterman was home to the college’s innovative Telemedia Accelerator, an incubator for emerging high tech companies (New York Times). Two other floors housed the CUNY Research Foundation, an agreement that gave BMCC $400,000 in lease income every year.
With the renovations, Fiterman was to be the new home of BMCC’s business and technology degree programs, along with the Continuing Education and Workforce Development and its new state-of-the-art center. It was also to include a virtual library available not to just those affiliated with BMCC, but to all downtown residents. In addition to losing the building, BMCC lost new computer equipment and new furniture, items which had just been moved into the building.
Since then, BMCC has had the largest student body of any CUNY community college, but the smallest square footage per student of any community college in New York State. The college was forced to use trailers that line the Westside Highway along the campus, but at a recent City Hall Council meeting, Horace Henry, vice president of BMCC’s Student Government Association, said that these classrooms are demoralizing.
“BMCC is lacking the true spirit of a college environment,” he said. “How would you feel as a freshman if you walked into a classroom that is a trailer sitting on the sidewalk of the Westside Highway?”
2001 – Present
In 2004, CUNY chose Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects LLP, an award-winning architecture firm that designed the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, to plan the deconstruction of the old Fiterman Hall, and design the new building. The new structure would house a number of classrooms, a new virtual library, meeting rooms, student lounges and all of the faculty and staff space that was going into place during renovations (a slideshow can be found on BMCC’s Fiterman Hall News page, while an in-depth video describing the design can be found here).
However, there have been a number of delays. The first holdup came just after Fiterman’s destruction, when CUNY was locked in a long legal dispute with the university’s insurance company, FM Global. When the case finally ended in late 2004, the building owners — CUNY and the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (DASNY) — began to collaborate with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the recently hired Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects LLP, to formulate a safe building deconstruction plan. Deconstruction was scheduled to be complete by February 2007, but environmental impact concerns and funding issues temporarily prevented the project from getting started.
In early 2008, the EPA finally approved the building for its long-awaited cleaning and decontamination, making Fiterman the last structure in the immediate World Trade Center perimeter to begin decontamination. Work on the site was set to begin in March 2009, and take roughly two-and-a-half years, so that by fall 2011, classes could resume in the new building. But funding — which will come from the insurance settlement, the New York State and City budgets, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and the September 11th Fund — has continued to be a major issue.
An 18 percent hike in cost per year, the consequence of increased construction and steel costs, has raised the estimate for the project from its original pricetag of $160 million to $325 million, according to Iris Weinshall, CUNY’s vice chancellor for facilities planning, construction, and management. Weinshall said the deconstruction and redevelopment project cannot begin until all the money is in place, and for that, she is looking to the city.
“Simply put, to make all this happen on schedule, $71.2 million is needed from the city,” in addition to $20.8 million worth of city money that must be moved forward from the 2010 budget, she said.
And move forward it must, according to CUNY Senior Vice Chancellor for University Relations, Jay Hershenson. In a Letter to the Editor in the New York Post on Aug. 21, Hershenson wrote that, “Before construction costs escalate again, let’s get the city match in place and get the job done.”
For more information on Fiterman Hall, visit BMCC’s Fiterman Hall News page.
