Self-Storage King Takes a Moment to Savor His Victory Over Columbia

Outside, in the sharp wintry light that makes you squint when the No. 1 train pops out of the tunnel past 122nd Street, the banners were still flying high. Among them was the one that reads, “Stop Columbia! We Won’t Be Pushed Out!”

Inside, in the softer, dimmer light of an office that has 10 lights in the ceiling but no windows, Nicholas Sprayregen was working his way through an in-box suddenly filled with e-mail messages from people he did not know. “Thank you for standing up and fighting to keep the American dream alive,” one wrote. Another said, “It’s like David versus Goliath, and you’re David.”

Mr. Sprayregen, the self-storage impresario who has been fighting Columbia University’s expansion plan, spent much of Friday reveling in a court ruling that had gone his way. It said that New York State could not use eminent domain on Columbia’s behalf to clear parcels along Broadway that Mr. Sprayregen owns.

So, after a five-year fight that he said had cost him more than $2 million, was he celebrating?

“I wouldn’t say it’s a victory dance,” said Mr. Sprayregen, 47, who runs self-storage warehouses in squat brick buildings where Columbia wants to build shiny new high rises. “It’s more a big sigh of relief.”

The ruling by a panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, released Thursday, said the state’s condemnation procedure in taking land for the Columbia project, in the Manhattanville neighborhood, was unconstitutional. Justice James M. Catterson, who wrote the majority opinion, was withering in his criticism of way the state agency that approved the use of eminent domain had reached its decision.

The agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, said it would appeal the ruling to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Mr. Sprayregen said that no matter who won there, the case would almost certainly go to the United States Supreme Court.

Two weeks ago, the Court of Appeals ruled that the state had the power to use eminent domain in taking private property on behalf of the developer behind the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn.

In Manhattanville, Columbia, which owns or controls 61 of the 67 parcels on the 17 acres it wants to build on, issued a statement Friday saying it was going ahead with the project. It said demolition and “other preconstruction work has already begun and can continue.”

Mr. Sprayregen spends his days a stone’s throw from the Columbia campus, but has no old-school ties. He did his undergraduate work at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., earned an M.B.A. from New York University and spent a year at the London School of Economics. He took over his father’s storage business in 1990.

He said the first he heard of the expansion plan was in the summer of 2004, when Columbia officials invited him to lunch.

“It was a pleasant meeting,” he said, “but a little strange: ‘Are you interested in selling your buildings?’ ” (Columbia officials noted that the first public announcement had been 18 months earlier, and that by the summer of 2004 the plan had gone before Community Board 9.)

“They were going around trying to buy buildings,” he said, “and before long the offer changed: ‘If you don’t sell, you’ll face condemnation.’ I looked on that as offensive, coming from an institution as large and powerful as Columbia.”

He said he had offered to trade property he owned on one side of Broadway for property Columbia owned on the other. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do a swap?’ ” he recalled. “That went absolutely nowhere with the school.”

He pulled out a copy of the inaugural address by Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, in 2002, and read several passages. In one, Mr. Bollinger described the university’s need to expand and said, “I will do everything in my power to build this new Columbia.”

“That almost sounds like it’s coming from a religious figure,” Mr. Sprayregen said. “Do they think this is fallow land with no one on it, and they’re settlers and there are a bunch of illiterate Indians here and it’s their God-given responsibility to tame us and take control?”

So how much money would he have taken from Columbia?
“I never really got that far,” he said. “The point was, I attempted to compromise. I didn’t want to succumb to eminent domain abuse for the benefit of a private institution.”

Mr. Sprayregen has made his position loudly and clearly for several years in the banners he has hung on the faces of his buildings along Broadway. He said Friday that he was well aware that the Court of Appeals had ruled the other way in the Atlantic Yards case. But judges have been known to catch people off guard. “I didn’t necessarily think,” he said, “that we were going to win at this level.”


News Source: nytimes.com


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