City College Students Navigate a Vertical Nightmare

Earlier this month, after a metal concert in November, Cesar Mendez, an 18-year-old freshman at City College, slipped on the stairs leading down to the train station. He severely sprained his left foot. Now that he must wear a foot brace and crutch to walk, navigating CCNY buildings has become a nightmare. The North Academic Center (NAC) at City College is seven floors high, with nine elevators and escalators available. The problem: many of them are out of service. “If I have problems with a foot that I can barely walk, I don’t want to see somebody that can’t even use their foot for anything [have to navigate difficulty],” says Mendez. “[Getting to class] was complicated because the mechanical escalators were broken.”

Broken elevators and escalators have long been a problem for students, particularly for students, faculty and staff experiencing mobility issues. It’s such a long-time concern that “The Campus,” a news magazine based at City College, complained of similar problems in a story ten years ago. “They’ve never been fully operational since I’ve been here,” Andi Codra, a 23-year-old, undecided sophomore says about the elevators and escalators. “And this is my third semester.” 

The college tried to get ahead of the issues eight days after the start of Fall 2024 semester when all of the City College community received an email explaining the lack of service of the escalators and elevators within the North Academic Center (NAC) and Marshak buildings. According to the email sent by the facilities, “in the coming weeks you will see many of them back in service.” The CCNY website provides further context for the upgrades to the elevators, which aim to replace the nine dated elevators with “state-of-the-art technology that will improve vertical transportation movements throughout the building.” 

The email dated September 6, 2024, notes that the NAC elevator refurbishment capital project should be completed by January 2025 but offers no end date for the escalator repair. “In the meantime,” the note reads, “we appreciate your patience and understanding.” 

This email was one of a series of follow ups to one sent out a year and a half earlier. The Office of Facilities Management addressed the CCNY community on February 10th, 2023, stating that “the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (DASNY) has awarded contract for the upgrading the nine (9) NAC elevators” that was set to begin between March and April 2023. There were monthly postings that followed, detailing the project’s phase progressions up until June 2024. The last update stated that “renovation on the remaining elevators is expected to finish around the beginning of the Fall Semester 2024.” 

Many students have stopped believing in the updates – and pay little attention to the emails. “I haven’t been at City where both elevators are in service,” Heiley Hernandez, a 21-year-old education transfer student, refuted. 

As with many concerns at the college, cost generally keep improvements in limbo. According to DASNY, a government organization that is tasked with regulating the contracts that are distributed to design and construction firms, “the estimated cost of the project is between $6.5 million and $6.8 million.” The contract for this renovation was allotted to the Knightsbridge Construction Corp with their bid of $8.31 million. 

The 2024 Five-Year Capital Plan Request (FY2024) details that more than 52 percent of CUNY buildings are 50 years or older. This has created a deferred maintenance backlog, an accumulation of maintenance work that has been postponed despite needing to be completed to further avoid asset breakdown. This is estimated to be valued at about $4.3 billion. In his testimony regarding FY2024, the CUNY Chancellor, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, requested almost $642.7 million toward the 300 buildings across the CUNY senior and community college campuses. “Much-needed critical maintenance funding of $384.2 million, and $100 million in expansion and improvements funding at the senior colleges,” he wrote. “The Governor’s matched $119.7 million for critical maintenance projects at the community colleges already received funding from the City, this represents an increase of $75 million compared to last year.”

Despite the amount of allocated funds for improvements across, many students still face difficulty when navigating the CCNY campus due to the poor execution of these maintenance projects. Jezabelle Sepulveda, a 20-year-old junior in English, who sprained her toe earlier this semester fell victim to these delays. “I couldn’t walk comfortably and wasn’t able to take the escalators because they were broken,” she explains. “I couldn’t take the elevators because then I would be late for my class, so I had to walk up like six flights of stairs with a sprained [toe].”