Biotechnology, Race, and Memory in Washington Heights
By Robin Wolfe Scheffler
Amidst the economic and human toll inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic on the City of New York, one industry still thrives: the city’s Economic Development Corporation trumpeted the news in June that biotechnology companies were still “gobbling” up space in an otherwise sagging real estate market.[1]
Biotechnology has always behaved differently from its counterparts in the “knowledge economy.” Even as commentators predicted years ago that ease of transit and communication coupled with urban decline would draw these industries to the suburbs, as had happened in Silicon Valley, biotechnology bucked this trend. It sought out sites in urban neighborhoods close to universities. Its return was one of the first signs of the important role that universities, hospitals, and medical schools would play in the economies of postindustrial American cities.[2]
But if they have appeared to some as saviors in a time of crisis, urban development plans for biotechnology have also produced conflicts over social and spatial relationships. This was the case for the first biotechnology development in Manhattan, Columbia University’s Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park.
In the early 1980s, New York City was still reeling from the economic shocks of the previous decade. Biotechnology provided a beacon of hope for new growth. Analysts suggested that this new industry would be capable of everything from cleaning toxic waste to producing cures for dread diseases. Manhattan appeared to be an ideal site for the new industry. It hosted many of the world’s leading biomedical research institutions such as Columbia, CUNY, Rockefeller University, NYU, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Mt. Sinai.[3]
Moreover, unlike corporations, the academic anchors for the new industry were unlikely to relocate for favorable tax-breaks.[4] These conditions seemed ripe for urban planners discussing how to land a “new economic golden goose.”[5]
Yet nurturing this new industry was another matter. New biotechnology start-ups promised great rewards, but their initial circumstances were precarious. Start-ups could wait a decade or more to produce a product, let alone make a profit. Their fate was closely tied to the scientific productivity of their researchers — which was why they sought to be as close as possible to the academic wellsprings of cutting-edge ideas.[6]
Laboratory space for research in such settings was very expensive. Start-ups required specialized laboratories, ventilation, and power sources that most buildings did not offer. Early costs could run into the millions of dollars, and start-ups could not draw on federal and philanthropic funds to outfit their laboratories as universities could. Necessary renovations were all the more difficult to finance given that the risky nature of biotechnology start-ups made them ineligible for many types of business loans.
In the early 1980s Columbia University saw an opportunity in these facts. Already a nationwide leader in engineering, medicine, and molecular biology, Columbia had been eyeing the success of Stanford University’s Industrial Research Park and MIT’s Technology Square as incubators for entrepreneurial industries. Its administrators craved a comparable research park for biotechnology on the borders of its academic community.[7]
From the University’s perspective, the Audubon Ballroom complex, which occupied a full block at the intersection of Broadway and 165th Street in Washington Heights, presented an ideal site. It was located just east of Columbia’s biomedical research campus and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Moreover, while assembling large parcels of land in Manhattan was always expensive, the Ballroom had already been seized by the city after its owners fell behind on tax payments. With an eye towards new growth, the Office of Economic Development was happy to pass the property to the University. Celebrating the transfer in 1983, Columbia’s Provost boasted that it would be a hub for laboratories working in the new field of “biotech.”[8]
The William Fox Audubon Theater, 1917. https://onceuponatown.tumblr.com/image/124151997534
The Audubon Ballroom facade and Mary Woodard Lasker Biomedical Research Building, 2014. Wikimedia Commons.
The announcement of Columbia’s first plans in 1987 made the front page of The New York Times, delighting city leaders anxious over the migration of biotechnology and high technology businesses out of the City.[9] University, state, and city officials hailed the $200 million development plan — overseen by Columbia and supported by state and city loans — as an anchor for biotechnology entrepreneurship and a means of reviving the fortunes of Washington Heights, a neighborhood then grappling with poverty and drug use.[10]
Malcolm X, 1964. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c15058.
The Audubon Ballroom, however, was a potent site of racial and political memory. The complex, built around a 2,368-seat theater, had served many roles. Built in 1912 by the Hungarian immigrant William Fox, the complex had first been a part of the Fox theater empire — a fact attested to by the fox heads on its famed façade. In the 1930s it was locus of efforts to organize transit workers as well as hosting a Jewish congregation. In the 1940s, as the San Juan Theater it presented Spanish-language movies and performances. In the 1950s the Ballroom was a gathering point for the Harlem and Washington Heights African American communities, presenting major jazz performances as well as an annual Mardi Gras festival. When Malcom X left the Nation of Islam to found the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964, he held weekly meetings in its rooms there until he was assassinated during a rally there in 1965.[11]
As interest in Malcom X’s legacy grew, the Ballroom had become a site of remembrance. The plan to destroy the complex for Columbia’s research park drew heated criticism and evoked memories of Columbia’s heavy-handed expansion into Morningside Heights in the 1960s.
In 1989, the Save the Audubon Coalition (STAC) formed, uniting Columbia students with anti-police brutality organizations such as the December 12th Movement. STAC staged protests and sit-ins at both the Audubon and the main Columbia campus.
Protest by Columbia students and local activists of proposed biotechnology park, 1990. Image from the Columbia Spectator.
Students linked the destruction of the Ballroom to ongoing debates regarding the Eurocentric nature of their core curriculum and its erasure of non-white history. “If the goal of the university is to educate, I’m sure that the destruction of history does not constitute education… but hold up, it’s not history being destroyed, it’s just my story, which is already doomed to be irrelevant,” one student wrote.[12] At an especially heated meeting in April of 1990, one activist from the December 12th Movement equated the destruction of the Audubon with an act of cultural genocide.[13]
The University rejected demands by STAC to preserve the Ballroom as a memorial to Malcom X. Columbia’s President insisted that the benefits of the project far outweighed the loss of the site, maintaining, “Biomedical research is glorious, because not only does it generate jobs… it saves lives.” [14] The University’s director of planning and development added dismissively that “we are not in the business of building museums.”[15]
But the protests also challenged the project’s economic benefits. Rather than bringing uplift, protesters highlighted the fact that most of the high-paying jobs in laboratory research required advanced degrees that residents of Washington Heights did not possess. The jobs created for the community would be lower-paid service jobs. “I think my people have been window washers, elevator operators, and janitors for much too long,” said Natasha Russell, a December 12th activist.[16]
In a more conciliatory vein, Columbia’s team offered medical research as a more fitting memorial to Malcom X than the physical preservation of the building itself. They highlighted support for the project from Malcom X’s widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz, who had worked as a nurse, and oversaw the creation of a “Malcom X Medical Scholarship” for minority students at Columbia Medical School. [17]
These gestures did not placate their critics. Meanwhile, Columbia’s reliance on public subsidies to finance the project opened it to forms of political pressure beyond protests and sit-ins. Despite support from David Dinkins, New York City’s first (and thus far only) African American Mayor, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger was sympathetic to the objections raised by STAC and other preservationists. She announced in the summer of 1990 that she would veto loans from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to the project. “We cannot in good conscience put tax dollars at risk solely to support the speculative goals of a private institution,” argued Messinger. [18]
The speculative nature of biotechnology start-ups provided Messinger with a legal pretext for blocking the loans, which she argued could only be spent on “fiscally responsible proposal[s].” While Messinger’s interpretation was open to dispute, her veto appeared to have been aimed at improving her negotiating position rather than stopping the project. Preservation advocates and Columbia renegotiated the design of the building — obtaining additional city funds to rehabilitate 55% of the Ballroom as well as preserving its façade. Mayor Dinkins hailed this compromise as “a fitting memorial” in Malcom X’s honor that would create “the first major biotechnology center in New York and the linch pin [sic] in the city's long term economic development plans to foster new growth industries.”[19]
Columbia’s Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park underwent several more challenges, protests, and adjustments in the ensuing years. The first laboratory spaces opened for tenants in 1996 — thirteen years after the idea for the development emerged.[20] The Malcom X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial Center opened in 2005 in a part of the preserved rooms.[21]
In its first decade the Park claimed to have nurtured several successful biotechnology companies working Alzheimer’s, cancer, and other dread diseases.[22] However, the local economic impact of this activity was not as expansive as promised. A trade publication informed its readers in 2012 that among the advantages of relocating to the Park, biotechnology companies could still claim special benefits through the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone — an initiative created to address the neighborhood’s ongoing poverty.[23]
Faced with such a contentious development process, other planners may have turned away from New York. But Columbia, like most other US universities that provided the indispensable resources for biotechnological development, could not flee its urban environs. This fact, and the reliance of biomedical developments on direct and indirect public subsidies, has continued to intertwine the creation of spaces for biotechnology with questions of justice and accountability in America’s urban landscapes.
Science and business historians have been content to let the story of biotechnology stop at the threshold of the laboratory, clinic, and boardroom. This brief account of the Audubon suggests the limitations of this perspective. Within the broader cut and thrust of municipal development politics, biomedical research has been quick to claim a “glorious” future — both as an engine of urban economic growth and as a fount of lifesaving cures. Yet debates over these developments lay bare larger questions regarding whose future is being planned, and by whom.[24]
As the African American journalist and activist Peggy Dye commented regarding the Audubon: “In a city where the poor cannot afford to take care of their health… the working poor… will subsidize a new frontier adventure for profit-making biology research that they cannot afford.”[25]
Today, these points are underscored by the racial health disparities in the deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and beyond. Biotechnology companies race to be the first to provide advanced treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus next door to communities that will be the last to receive them.[26] Indeed, the questions raised by the Audubon development should be posed everywhere as cities work to make space for biotechnology and the future it promises. Despite the assurances of its promoters, health does not trickle down.
Robin Wolfe Scheffler is Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a historian of the modern biological and biomedical sciences and their intersections with developments in American history, themes which he explored in his first book, A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine. His current project, Genetown, explores the history of the biotechnology industry in Boston.
[1] Natalie Sachmechi, “Laboratories Gobbling up Space in Pandemic-Battered City,” Crain’s New York Business, June 8, 2020.
[2] Carolyn Adams, “The Meds and Eds in Urban Economic Development,” Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 5 (December 1, 2003): 571–88; Guian A. McKee, “The Hospital City in an Ethnic Enclave: Tufts-New England Medical Center, Boston’s Chinatown, and the Urban Political Economy of Health Care,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 2 (March 1, 2016): 259–83.
[3] Peter Hall et al., “Where Biotechnology Locates,” Built Environment 13, no. 3 (1987): 154.
[4] LaDale C. Winling, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Steven J. Diner, Universities and Their Cities: Urban Higher Education in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
[5] Kelvin W Willoughby, “Technology and the Competitive Advantage of Regions: A Study of the Biotechnology Industry in New York State” (Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, 1993), 1.
[6] Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 107–89.
[7] “Audubon Center for Biomedicine Begins Leasing Space to Firms,” Columbia University Record, October 7, 1994.
[8] “Columbia Is Buying Audubon Ballroom; Demolition Planned,” The New York Times, February 24, 1983.
[9] Samuel Weiss, “Biotechnology Park For Washington Hts. Is Close to Approval: Plans to Build Research Park Near Approval,” New York Times, June 11, 1987.
[10] Robert W. Snyder, Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[11] http://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/audubon-ballroom/#description [accessed July 20, 2020]; Eric Allison and Kate Lauber, “Audubon Theater and Ballroom,” in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson, 2nd ed (New Haven : New York: Yale University Press, 2010), 76.
[12] Dylan Powe, Letter to Editor, Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 113, 16 April 1990: 2
[13] Jeffery Krantrowitz, “Audubon Meeting Erupts into Shouts,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 106, 5 April 1990: 1 & 6.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Kris Kanthak, “Audubon Plan Could Stop Columbia Research Center,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 130, 11 July 1990: 3.
[16] Jeffery Kantrowitz, “Protesters Blast Plan to Raise Audubon” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 113, 16 April 1990: 1 &12.
[17] Jeffery Krantrowitz, “Audubon Meeting Erupts into Shouts,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 106, 5 April 1990: 1 & 6.
[18] Kris Kanthak, “CU biomedical center plan ‘dead:’ Haeckel,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 134, 8 August 1990: 6; Jean Lee, “New Compromise Saves Audubon, Biomed Center,” Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 3, 6 September 1990: 1&4.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Tracie Rozhon, “Research Park Rising on Site of Audubon Ballroom: Money Is Needed for a Memorial There to Malcolm X.,” New York Times, June 11, 1995.
[21] Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas, 2005), 128–32.
[22] “Columbia and the Continuum of Biomedical Science [Sponsored Article],” The Scientist Magazine, November 21, 2004.
[23] Biotechnology Calendar Inc., “Science Market Update,” May 22, 2012. Available at https://info.biotech-calendar.com/bid/85232/columbia-s-biomedical-scienc... (Accessed 3 August 2020)
[24] Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Cleveland Versus the Clinic: The 1960s Riots and Community Health Reform,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 11 (October 10, 2018): 1494–1502; Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 142–223; Winling, Building the Ivory Tower.
[25] "High tech ballroom; research center to rise where Malcolm X was felled." Village Voice v.3A, no.49 (December 5, 1989) p.10-18. Quoted in Living Black History.
[26] “Debate Begins for Who’s First in Line for COVID-19 Vaccine,” The New York Times, August 2, 2020.