Off-Third is WSN’s satire column.
Last week, NYU took down the nearly five-year-old scaffolding along Broadway — which served as a shelter from the elements, a safe place to wait for the consistently late NYU shuttle and the spot where many Tisch friendships started over a shared cigarette. “Thank you for being the pillars that hold up my roof, everything I stand for is in you,” Tisch alumna Lady Gaga wrote in a heartfelt Facebook post to her fans, in a message many students are holding with them with this tragic loss.
The building, or rather the four combined buildings of Tisch School of the Arts and Gallatin School of Individualized Study, is home to hundreds of students on their road to personal discovery. Generation Z is known to be highly emotional. Why would NYU, as a university that is conscious of this, risk students’ mental health by removing their emotional support scaffolding? A study from the University of San Diego found that scaffolding “improves the likelihood that students will retain new information.” NYU should encourage this growth in its students’ success, not remove the element of the building that allows it to happen.
In discussions during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s visit to the White House, President Donald Trump, father of Stern sophomore Barron Trump, told reporters to “bring it back.” We can only assume this was regarding the scaffolding projects, as Trump’s proclivity for continuously rebuilding iconic buildings of course extends to his son’s university, as seen with the Stern fortress.
Scaffolding is a historical landmark in New York, with millions traveling across the globe to see the steel-covered buildings — some of which are more noticeable than others, like the Louis Vuitton store with an iconic trunk facade that garnered massive attention. NYU, a tourist attraction in its own right, is going to lose significant attention with the demolition of its New York scaffolding. Now, the university is like an imposter, and no better than your average tourist with their city pants on.
TikTokers Copper and Peytona explained their outrage and distraught over the lost scaffolding, claiming how “it would protect us from the weather” and urging university administration to “put it back up right now.” They posted another video that summoned a swarm of outraged commenters like Snurp, who wrote, “What if a big bird swoops down and gets you? You’re so exposed now!” and Liv, who reminisced how they had “literally entered and graduated with that scaffolding still there.”
Time spent under the scaffolding is an integral element of gaining a Tisch degree, as there are no other aspects of a 4-year studio degree that are remotely different than that of a regular CAS or Stern degree. Tisch students require this protection for their outfits, their projects and their sanity.
The issue goes beyond the loss of shelter, as many students report not being able to find their way into the Tisch building anymore. TikTok user Gabby wrote in a comment how she “genuinely can’t recognize the street,” while another user, $G, said that when they went to go wait for the NYU shuttle, it felt like they had “entered some parallel alternate dimension it was genuinely so disorienting.”
Reports on the facade explain how “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” With this in mind, how could NYU President Linda Mills choose to take away the iconic additional feature of the building? Who wants to have another NYU flag waving in the wind, signifying that we are just students, when we could have real scaffolding that allows us to pretend we’re going to work in a midtown Manhattan highrise? This Gallatin student, for one, urges the administration to find a new project that can take another decade or so on the facade of the block to bring back our societal safety blanket that is the beloved scaffolding along Broadway.
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Annika Wilewicz at [email protected].