As New York University has grown and gobbled up ever more of Manhattan, it has also enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the peak of its popularity and prestige. Many of NYU’s schools and departments now compete with and sometimes surpass those of Ivy League schools. As reported in The New York Sun on March 22, a Princeton Review survey named NYU for the third year in a row as the first choice college of graduating high school seniors, over second-place Harvard. Undergraduate applications to NYU have risen to 35,000 from 10,000 in 1990.

This is a far cry from 1972, when, according to the New York Times, a blue-chip panel advised NYU President James Hester that unless drastic measures were taken, NYU would be “the victim of the largest and most spectacular financial collapse in the history of American higher education.” NYU faced three big problems: siphoning of potential students by a rapidly expanding and improving State University of New York system, inflation, and New York City’s increasing and generally well-deserved reputation at the time as an unsafe city. The subsequent combination of drastic retrenchment in the 1970s followed by explosive growth during the past two decades has made a monumental mishmash of NYU’s physical plant, over which New Yorkers scratch their heads – and grit their teeth.

NYU, where I have taught as an adjunct in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, was founded in 1831. Its first building opened in 1835 at the southeast corner of Washington Square East and Waverly Place. Designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town, it is said to have been the country’s first university building in the Collegiate Gothic style. (A finial preserved from that building stands as a monument in the pedestrian passage between Bobst Library and Shimkin Hall, on the axis of Washington Square East at 4th Street.) Directly across Washington Place stood the Washington Square Dutch Reformed Church (1839-40), designed by Minard Lafever, also in the Gothic style.

Davis, Town, Lafever – there were no architects in New York more stellar. Also built in the 1830s were the fine row houses, in the Greek revival style, on the north side of Washington Square North. In those days – at the time in which Henry James’s “Washington Square” is set – the neighborhood of the square was undoubtedly the handsomest it has ever been. Alas, today it is a hodgepodge, thanks largely to NYU.

In spite of its auspicious beginnings with the Davis and Town building, the Manhattan campus of NYU has since lacked buildings of distinction. Nor has NYU ever had an inner-focused or otherwise clearly demarcated campus in Manhattan. Columbia, by contrast, has had three in succession; the current one, begun in the 1890s by McKim, Mead & White, is as fine an urban campus as there is in the country. Note that I say “Manhattan campus.” In its never-ending quest to compete with Columbia, NYU built its own splendid 1890s campus, in the Bronx. (It was also designed by McKim, Mead & White.) It long seemed as though NYU was going to make the Bronx campus its “main” campus, and so establish a true campus identity. It didn’t happen.

NYU has had growth spurts that leave one slack-jawed. Lacking an endowment sufficient to the university’s size, the building program became one of perennial stopgaps. The Bronx campus was supposed to mark the end of that, but, as its surrounding neighborhood declined, came to be seen by university administrators as more of a burden than a panacea. In 1973 NYU sold the Bronx campus to the city. (It’s now Bronx Community College.)

NYU refocused its energies at Washington Square, undertaking a vast build-out of classroom, laboratory, and dormitory buildings, faculty housing, a new library, and a new student center. It hasn’t been easy. When Columbia purchased the grounds of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum on Harlem Heights, the university had a large blank slate upon which to group its buildings in harmonious ensemble and hierarchic order. By the time NYU finally, belatedly, realized that Washington Square was its true home, the university was forced to expand throughout an already intensively built-up part of the city. We could call it an “infill campus.”

Today the “campus” comprises buildings stuck here and there into the urban fabric of an area stretching from Houston Street on the south to 16th Street on the north, and from Second Avenue on the east to a point just in from Sixth Avenue on the west. Within this area, by my unofficial count, NYU occupies 57 buildings – double the number of two decades ago. And this does not count the many NYU buildings “off campus,” like the residence hall across from the South Street Seaport, or the classrooms in the Woolworth Building, or the NYU Midtown Center on 42nd Street.

The most conspicuous of NYU’s buildings are the ones that arose from a never-completed 1960s master plan prepared by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster. Johnson had lately been experimenting with allusions to canonical architecture, as in the colonnade of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Soon after his work at NYU, Johnson went in for a showy “late modernist” style in buildings like the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and the IDS Center in Minneapolis. (He’d then go whole-hog “postmodern” with the former AT&T Building.)

The NYU interval produced buildings of no known stylistic tendency, although Johnson did continue his classical allusions with the Palladian floor pattern of Bobst Library, inspired by the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Venice. I do like that floor. Alas, it is the only thing, inside or out, that anyone I know likes about that building, which because of its yawning, vertigo-inducing atrium, has corridors only around the building’s perimeter.

But it’s the outside that’s really unusual, with that reddish sandstone coating that Johnson and Foster and NYU somehow thought was just the right thing to give formal coherence to the jumbly buildings of the “campus.” Bobst Library, Tisch Hall to its east, and the Meyer Physics Hall at Broadway and Washington Place were, so far as I can count, the only buildings completed in a plan abandoned when the university went into its financial doldrums in the 1970s.

West 4th Street/Washington Square South is the only solid row of “signature” university buildings on the “campus.” From east to west are Tisch Hall, Bobst Library, Kimmel Center, Judson Church, and Vanderbilt Hall. Kimmel Center is the recently built student center building, unaccountably designed in a forbidding, monumental style without warmth. Judson Church is a beautiful building, by Stanford White, but was not built by or for NYU.

The last building, dare I say, is NYU’s best on campus. Vanderbilt Hall is the main building of NYU’s lately ranked-higher-than-Columbia law school. (You can bet some champagne corks popped at that news.) Either blithely ignored or teased for being “out of its time,” the large neo-Georgian block was designed by Eggers & Higgins, not long after they’d worked for John Russell Pope, and built in 1951. With its superb arcade, warm demeanor, and outstanding proportions, this is the building that should have served as NYU’s place prototype. Alas.

For a university of such stature, NYU has had problems getting big donations from alumni. (As of 2004, Harvard had 20,000 students and a $23 billion endowment; NYU had 40,000 students and a $1.3 billion endowment.) The reason, as I see it, is that NYU has never had the kind of campus, with vine-covered buildings, shaded walks, rolling lawns, and crenellated towers, that inspires in its students the sentimental attachment to place that impels alumni giving.

Beauty, in the end, is practical, both for a university and a city.

fmorrone@nysun.com