At 96 years old, Connie Masullo still shops for her own groceries.
Masullo said that she walks at least once, sometimes twice, a day to the Morton Williams supermarket located at 130 Bleecker Street. She lives on the same block as the market, in an apartment building where her sons and their families also reside. Her favorite items to purchase are Italian staples —pasta, chopped beef, and meatballs— that she uses to cook meals for her family.
Masullo recalls frequenting the Morton Williams since she moved to 505 LaGuardia Place in 1967 as part of the first family to live in the building.
But Masullo may not be able to continue her grocery-shopping routine. The Morton Williams on Bleecker Street now faces potential closure due to a New York University development plan for the location. For many locals, the thought of losing a fixture in their neighborhood has sparked frustration and concern —emotions that they have directed toward the university.
“I hate NYU, don’t even mention NYU,” Masullo said. “They’ve done some good things around the neighborhood, but mainly they are ruining the neighborhood.”
In 2012, NYU offered the supermarket site, land it had bought in 2001, to the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA) for the construction of a new public school. The SCA is set to announce its decision by the end of this year, a deadline that has galvanized many residents into voicing support for the supermarket. While centered on Morton Williams, the conflict also reflects tensions between residents’ vision for their community and NYU’s drive for expansion.
“I don’t think there’s really an equivalent”
At a protest on September 27 organized by the Save Our Supermarkets (SOS) group, residents, Morton Williams staff, and Council Member Christopher Marte gathered outside NYU’s Bobst library to speak against the supermarket’s potential closure. The demonstration drew around 175 people, The Village Sun reported.
“Morton Williams is a focal point of our neighborhood,” said Judith Callet, a co-chair of SOS, which formed in 2022. “It is the only full-service supermarket in nearly a half-mile or more radius.”
Residents say that Morton Williams provides a key source of food to elderly members of the neighborhood. The supermarket is located on the same block as 505 LaGuardia Place, a naturally occurring retirement community, and the two Silver Towers, which also house seniors. Other nearby grocery stores (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Wegman’s) are each nearly a half-mile from the block.
Keith Torjusen, a chairman of the Co-Op board at 505 LaGuardia and member of SOS, said that he cannot imagine the elderly residents of 505 LaGuardia making the walk to one of these grocery stores or using technology like Instacart.
“They can’t walk to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, it’s just not in their hearts,” Torjusen said. “More importantly, they can’t afford to pay higher prices at Whole Foods or have [food] delivered.”
Local residents echoed Torjusen’s concerns. “I don’t think there’s really an equivalent,” said Lawrence Mead, 80, a professor of politics at NYU who has lived in the neighborhood since 1980. “The convenience of Morton Williams is unbeatable. It really is right across the street.”
The prices at Morton Williams aren’t as affordable as, say, Trader Joe’s; Masullo even called them “outrageous.” But she finds them preferable to the difficulties of a longer walk.
“We would have to carry packages back from wherever we go,” Masullo said. “No, no. Oh, that would really be a horror, especially for senior citizens.”
Carlos Mora, an employee at Morton Williams, emphasized that the loss of the supermarket would impact more than just elderly locals. The Morton Williams also serves businesses in the neighborhood, as well as NYU students and faculty.
“We’re talking about a one-kilometer to two-kilometer radius,” Mora said. “It’s going to be devastating for everyone.”
Back and forth on the superblock
Development on the supermarket site can be traced back to NYU’s Core Plan, a strategy drafted by NYU in 2007 to acquire 6 million square feet over the following 25 years. In this plan, as well as in its 2012 proposal to the New York City Council, NYU focused its development on two superblocks that it owned—one of which is the block containing the Morton Williams.
In a letter to the New York City Planning Commission in 2012, NYU’s then-President John Sexton emphasized the university’s need for additional classrooms and housing. At the time, Sexton said, NYU was providing less than a third of the adequate number of study seats to students, and the Tisch School of the Arts had experienced a 300% increase in student population without any increase in the square footage of its buildings.
“The inability to develop these blocks to meet the needs of its schools will arrest NYU’s academic momentum and advancement,” Sexton wrote.
NYU initially intended to use the Morton Williams site to build a dormitory for its own community. In 2010, the university announced it would build a tower on the block.
But Manhattan Community Board 2, which encompasses Greenwich Village, advocated for the building to include a public school, said Patricia Laraia, who is chair of the community board’s Schools & Education Committee. She said that NYU capitulated in 2012, promising to use the building for a public school as a “give back” to the local community.
In NYU’s 2012 construction proposal to the New York City Planning Commission (CPC), it stated its intention to build a public school on the Morton Williams site and a dormitory above that school. However, the CPC modified the proposal, removing the dormitory from NYU’s plan.
After NYU offered the Morton Williams site to the SCA, the university promised members of the community that it would relocate the supermarket to a dormitory slated for construction on the same block, said Conor Allerton, the director of land use and housing for Council Member Marte.
Yet that promise never appeared in NYU’s design plans for that building, the John A. Paulson Center. Construction for the building was completed in 2022 without a supermarket on site.
“It felt sort of pulled out from under everybody,” Allerton said.
John Beckman, a university spokesperson, said that NYU had agreed to make space for the supermarket in the Paulson Center if the SCA moved ahead with construction for the school by 2014. He added that this promise was not part of the university’s written agreement.
Upon approval of its construction plans in 2012, NYU gave the SCA until the end of 2014 to decide whether to construct a school on the supermarket site. At the request of former Council Member Margaret Chin, NYU extended the deadline to the end of 2018. Since then, it has extended the deadline twice more, first to the end of 2021 and now to the end of this year.
Beckman said that during the seven years between 2014 and 2021, the university had to move ahead with construction for the Paulson Center. Due to the SCA’s indecision on whether to build a public school, NYU believed that Morton Williams could remain at its current location.
Because of that belief, Beckman wrote that “it made no sense for the University, which has many pressing academic space needs for the Paulson Center (a building that was, in any case reduced in size through the approvals process) to leave an unoccupied commercial space in the building.”
“As we have communicated to members of the community, the SCA will make a decision on the site by the end of the year,” said Kevin Ortiz, an SCA spokesperson, when asked for comment.
Although a new public school would provide benefits to the community, NYU may have an ulterior motive, said Allerton. He speculated that NYU hopes the SCA will back out of constructing the school, thereby leaving NYU with the option to develop the Morton Williams building.
“The Morton Williams site right now is like an incredibly underdeveloped site from a real estate perspective,” Allerton said. “It’s a single story and it could be much bigger. It’s prime real estate.”
Laraia also expressed concern that NYU could profit if the SCA does not decide to build the public school. Manhattan Community Board 2 has estimated that NYU would receive $65 million in taxpayer-funded value transfers if given the option to develop on the Morton Williams site.
“We’re talking about money that is tax dollars that NYU would just get free and clear,” Laraia said.
A “false dichotomy”
NYU has so far shirked the responsibility of relocating the Morton Williams. Instead, the university has suggested that the supermarket and the new public school could be co-located, said Allerton. He said that school co-locations are common, but there would be one issue in this case: the Morton Williams would have to close during the construction of the public school.
For Judith Callet, co-locating the school and the grocery store does not make sense. She said that construction would entail the temporary closure of the supermarket, risks to students’ safety due to increased traffic on the narrow Bleecker Street, and the destruction of the LaGuardia Corner Gardens.
Masullo agreed. She said that co-location would be “horrendous” due to the additional noise and people a school would bring to the area. “As a senior citizen, that would be a real hardship,” she said.
The university said that it is waiting for the SCA’s decision. “We continue to work with the city and other officials on addressing the supermarket issue,” Beckman said.
The choice between either the Morton Williams or the public school is a “false dichotomy,” Allerton said, explaining that NYU has enough property that local residents should not have to give up an essential resource.
“They have the capacity to accommodate all these different needs,” said Allerton. “They’ve been talking with us but we haven’t seen that full commitment yet. They’re the missing piece here in sort of figuring this all out.”