By Max Abelson

April 7, 2009 | 7:05 p.m

What with the fiery collapse of the magazine and newspaper industries, Condé Nast’s Newhouse dynasty has graver concerns than getting top-dollar for company apartments around town. Still, it had to be at least mildly annoying that their five-bedroom duplex at East 76th Street’s Promenade, listed last December for an outrageously fair $4,995,000, just sold for only $2,925,000, according to city records.

And it has to be even more irksome that their buyer, next-door neighbor Nick Sprayregen, the self-storage executive who’s become relatively famous for his fight against Columbia University’s uptown expansion, was once going to buy the 3,578-square-foot place for $3.5 million. “After offering that, I realized that my ability to get a mortgage was more problematic than I had realized, and so it was revised downward,” he said this week. “They were very unhappy. But I think they knew they had someone who could follow through with the deal, albeit at a lesser price.”

But that price comes out to only $817.49 per square foot, which is astoundingly inexpensive. Last quarter’s average in Manhattan was $1,259, and apartments with four or more bedrooms averaged $2,831 last year.

The Times reported that the duplex had been used by Condé Nast International’s Jonathan Newhouse. “I think he was constructing or renovating a brownstone downtown; that’s what caused him to finally sell this,” Mr. Sprayregen said. City records don’t show any townhouse deals in Mr. Newhouse’s name, though in 2005 he spent $3,375,000 on an East 29th Street co-op.

The mini-storage executive, who is suing New York over eminent domain (he’s the last major private landowner left in the West Harlem area Columbia wants to expand into), has tentative plans to combine his two apartments into a seven-bedroom condo. “We just had our fifth child,” he said, “so we’re kind of busting out.”

Mr. Newhouse and his broker, Elliman’s Richard Ozada, did not return interview requests.

mabelson@observer.com

 

By Tom Acitelli

September 5, 2008 | 9:14 a.m.

"Any neighborhood in Manhattan that is home to several warehouses including 'Tuck-It-Away self storage' definitely deserves to be called 'blighted.' This guy is a selfish joke. How inconsiderate Columbia must be to pay him millions of dollars for dilapadated warehouses and replace them with state of the art medical facilities, schools and dormitories. Shame on you, Columbia." ["Columbia Holdout: Eminent Domain 'Not Necessary or Appropriate'"]

By Tom Acitelli

September 3, 2008 | 9:39 a.m.

Nick Sprayregen, the landowner leading the final hold-out against Columbia's 17-acre West Harlem expansion, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal. In it, Mr. Sprayregen (profiled by The Observer in July) attacks Columbia's threatened use of eminent domain to take his storage company's property.

By Eliot Brown

July 22, 2008 | 5:52 p.m

For more than three years, Nicholas Sprayregen has kept his word to Columbia University.

The largest private landowner in the footprint of the university’s planned 17-acre West Harlem expansion, he has vowed time and again to fight the university’s attempts to oust him, so long as the school threatens the use of eminent domain.

Now, as the bulk of the area’s politicians have endorsed the expansion, community opposition has gone from a boil to a simmer and all but one other private-property owner has agreed to sell to the university, the fight’s final chapter is poised to be strictly a legal one between two parties: the university and Mr. Sprayregen.

Last Thursday, New York’s Empire State Development Corporation declared as blighted the area northwest of Columbia’s main campus, starting the process to acquire Mr. Sprayregen’s four properties through eminent domain. The action sets the stage for a lengthy legal battle with the institution, as the owner of Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage vows to keep the challenge going.

Still, speaking from his West Harlem office on Friday, the energetic 45-year-old seemed to have adopted, at least temporarily, a more somber outlook than he usually conveys.

“I’m pessimistic that we will be successful,” he said, surrounded by piles of documents related to the expansion. “I have a feeling that if we’re going to get anything, the only way it’s going to happen is that we’re first going to have to lose in the New York courts and then appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and hopefully have them take on the case, and then win.

“That’s obviously a long shot.”

 

SINCE THE UNIVERSITY first announced its intention to expand in the area in 2002, and especially in the past year, as the proposal made its way through the city’s rezoning process, Mr. Sprayregen has watched the landscape around him shift dramatically, with a constant stream of victories for the university.

Three years ago, he was joined by five other business owners in a group that opposed the expansion and vowed to fight property takings. But as of mid-June, he is now the only member left, and just one other private landowner—the Singh family, which owns two gas stations—remains without a deal with Columbia.

Mr. Sprayregen met community opposition last year in an attempt to rezone his properties himself, and he has all but given up hope on a land-swap proposal he made to Columbia, saying university officials in a recent meeting seemed unwilling to part with the property he was eyeing.

The bulk of the political process surrounding the project has also come and gone as well. The local community board opposed the plan, but after a concession package, the City Council voted for the university’s requested rezoning, clearing the way for the school to proceed.

It was through this seven-month rezoning approval process that Mr. Sprayregen sought to gain enough momentum to leverage a deal with Columbia in which it would drop eminent domain from its plan. Local elected officials, particularly members of the City Council, are highly influential in this process, and at least in Mr. Sprayregen’s thinking, could have pushed Columbia to reach a deal he considered fair.

But Columbia proved successful in swaying the Harlem politicians to its side, perhaps the most significant element of its success with the expansion to date.

Enlisting the help of lobbyist Bill Lynch, a former aide to Mayor David Dinkins, the university emphasized the effect the expansion would have on creating jobs and providing housing. Just before the passage of the rezoning in December, it reached an agreement with the elected officials and members of the community to provide tens of millions in commitments to below-market-rate housing, open space, hiring practices and other concessions.

The plan won an easy approval in the City Council, and when the state released the blight study and a general project plan last week, it came with statements of support from, among others, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, Assemblyman Keith Wright and Governor David Paterson, who once represented the area and who previously called for a statewide moratorium on eminent domain.

Not on that list is State Senator Bill Perkins, the former councilman who took Mr. Paterson’s seat in 2006. Since the rezoning passed, Mr. Perkins has been the lone elected official in the area still critical of the expansion, saying there is a “hue and cry” in the community against the plan, and preparations for the use of eminent domain seem like a “cooked process.”

“The community does not feel as if their needs have been taken into consideration, and they do not feel that, in the end, they will be in the picture,” he said. “I think [Columbia officials] have done a poor job addressing some of the concerns that they have, and I’ve tried to help them recognize it, but I guess they felt they had what they needed in terms of so-called political support and decided to move on.”

By Eliot Brown

July 15, 2008 | 4:35 p.m

The major landowner fighting Columbia University's expansion, Nick Sprayregen, today came out victorious over the state's Empire State Development Corporation today in an appellate court ruling on a case involving the Freedom of Information Law.

The case concerned the release of documents and correspondences between the state and its contractor AKRF, mostly surrounding the creation of a blight study (slated for release Thursday).

Mr. Sprayregen, represented by attorney Norman Siegel, defeated the state at the first level last year, with the court offering criticism that the same contractor, AKRF, was used for both the blight study and the environmental review.

"It basically says that we're entitled to all these development documents because AKRF was not neutral and represented the interests of Columbia," Mr. Siegel said.

ESDC spokesman Warner Johnston said in a statement that the state would release the remaining documents.

"The vast majority of documents that the court ruled were subject to FOIL, ESDC had already made public," he said. "To the extent that there are additional documents subject to FOIL, we will release them expeditiously. We are gratified that the court rejected plaintiff's additional claims."

By Matthew Schuerman

December 13, 2007 | 4:49 p.m

Nick Sprayregen, one of the last property owners resisting Columbia’s expansion into West Harlem, has rarely had nice words to say about the university. But today, following a 50-minute meeting, it sounded like he had found new friends—or, more accurately, potential business partners.

“The subject of the conversation moved to my swap idea, and they were interested in discussing it, which was the whole point of them calling the meeting,” Mr. Sprayregen, whose family owns four Tuck-It-Away storage warehouses in the expansion footprint, told The Observer. “I told them I would be prepared to provide more details if indeed it is something in conceptual form that they would be prepared to entertain. That’s the way it was left, basically with us agreeing to get together again. In the meantime, they will continue doing their thinking and they asked me to give them more details of the swap.”

The university's overture would help remove any possible objection that City Council members might have against the expansion with just a few weeks to go before they vote on the project. If successful, the swap might also help meet one of the university's recently announced goals: new housing for university affiliates to alleviate the influx of new residents that the expansion is expected to create.

In September, Mr. Sprayregen outlined “the swap” for The Observer: He trades three properties west of Broadway for two properties Columbia owns to the east. Mr. Sprayregen would end up with more total land mass but would save the university the trouble of going through eminent domain.

He said the university, represented at the meeting by Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president, and Bill Lynch, a lobbyist, wanted more details about how many apartments Mr. Sprayregen would want to build on the new site and how many would be affordable. He said he expected they would meet again before the holidays.

By Matthew Schuerman

December 12, 2007 | 3:48 p.m

Nick Sprayregen and Columbia University, who have been staring each other down over the ownership of four properties in West Harlem, are going to talk again tomorrow, Mr. Sprayregen said.

It would be the first time in more than three years. At that time, Mr. Sprayregen made it clear he did not want to sell his properties to make way for the university’s expansion as long as Columbia was threatening eminent domain.

“I want to keep my properties where they are,” Mr. Sprayregen told The Observer today outside of a City Council public hearing on the expansion. “Failing that, I would entertain a swap of a few properties across the street so that I can remain in the community. But besides that, unless they want to first take eminent domain off the table or are forced to, I do not want to negotiate my removal.”

He said he did not know what Columbia wanted to discuss, but that he received a call a few days ago from the office of Robert Kasdin, the university’s senior executive vice president who is in charge of the expansion. He outlined the property trade he is thinking of to The Observer and other newspapers back in September, but has not approached the university with the idea directly.

Columbia does not, as a rule, comment on negotiations. However, earlier today, Mr. Kasdin said to the City Council that the school had decided not to acquire the Cotton Club and turn the property, at 125^th Street and 12^th Avenue, into a park as it had considered doing earlier this fall, but instead would preserve the famous music venue at the current location somehow.