Planning For Growth, A School Tries To Help Plan A Village

"New York University and Greenwich Village seem woven into each other. The geographic location has been a powerful lure for students and faculty, the school a steady source of youth, commerce and intellectual vitality for the neighborhood.

But some who live there year in and year out have complained that the university's expansion was helter-skelter and its buildings ugly and enormous, and that both were ruining the Village.

Now the university, more popular than ever among the nation's high school seniors, says it will need about 6 million more square feet over the next 25 years, at least some of it in the Greenwich Village area.

So last week it held an open house, though not for prospective students. For five hours, about 300 people, mostly local residents, sipped punch and sparkling wine, examined poster boards describing N.Y.U. and its needs, and chatted with university officials and their architects about where the university was headed.

The reception was part of a planning process that the university says would shape its growth more deliberately, give the community more say - and, it hopes, make the expansion more palatable."