The wide sidewalk behind a gleaming new building on the small campus of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art has become a stomping ground for homeless vagrants doing disgusting things.
The shenanigans of the scruffy drifters are on full display for Cooper Union students, faculty members and staffers thanks to the impressive glass facade of $111 million building, reports the New York Post.
“I have seen drug deals, public urination, defecation, masturbation in broad daylight in the Taras Shevchenko alley,” one Cooper Union professor told The Post.
Cooper Union, a prestigious and historic school in New York City’s East Village neighborhood, also houses Preschool of the Arts, a pricey private daycare.
Part of the problem is the very design of Cooper Union’s newest building at 41 Cooper Square. The wavy feat of geometric modern architecture features several angled beams which Manhattan vagabonds have found especially appealing.
“It’s a place where many homeless congregate to sleep,” the same Cooper Union professor told the Post, “right in front of a church and between a high school and a college.”
It’s less than pleasant “when you’re sitting in a classroom and someone urinates right in front of you,” the prof added.
The high school directly across Taras Shevchenko Place — which is little more than an alley — is La Salle Academy, an all-boys Catholic school.
When a Post reporter and an accompanying photographer tried to get the vagrants’ side of the story, the bums promptly chased the pair away with verbal abuse, splays of water and thrown food.
“If I ever see you or that photographer again, I’ll kick the shit out of you,” one grubby guttersnipe reportedly warned.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned heavily on reducing record high homelessness, has proposed several plans to reduce rampant vagrancy, but to no avail. De Blasio’s last budget proposal pledged $100 million to combating homelessness, the New York Times reported, while a more obscure plan offered landlords cash for taking in homeless tenants.
Bums across the city have also praised de Blasio for rolling back enforcement against panhandling and public loitering, the Post has reported.
“I want to thank de Blasio for taking it easy on us. It’s easier for me to get by. Because of him, nobody bothers me,” one homeless man told the Post.
The nine-story, 175,000-square-foot Cooper Union academic building at 41 Cooper Square was completed in 2009. Cooper Union and the architects proudly trumpet its encouragement of social interaction, its “green design” and its use of natural light to reduce energy costs.
Cooper Union offers degrees in engineering, architecture and art. It was established in 1859 and had been remarkable for over 150 years for charging no tuition. However, serious financial difficulties have beset the school in recent years.
As of the fall of 2014, students now receive a half-tuition scholarship of $20,400 per year and must pay the rest of the tuition.
Notable alumni include Daniel Libeskind, architect for the reconstructed World Trade Center, and physicist Russell Hulse, a 1993 Nobel Prize winner. Thomas Edison was a frequent visitor to the school in his formative years.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered a pivotal and celebrated address at Cooper Union. In the speech, Lincoln — then still a presidential candidate — declared his view that slavery should have been prohibited in the then-western territories of the United States.
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