The CITY partners with Open Campus on coverage of the City University of New York.
The City University of New York Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved $35 million towards heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) upgrades at Hunter College’s dilapidated Thomas Hunter Hall.
The funding is part of a multi-phase plan to fix the dilapidation at the Upper East Side institution’s oldest building, which is connected by skywalks to another four Hunter facilities. That plan, in turn, is part of a broader push by CUNY to repair decaying buildings across its 25 campuses. Spearheaded by Armand Construction Corporation, the renovations at Thomas Hunter Hall are scheduled to begin next month and be completed by next March.
“The HVAC redesign, including the installation of central cooling, heating, and ventilation, and access to year-round HVAC, reflects Phase One of Hunter’s six-phase Master Plan for Thomas Hunter Hall,” Hunter College spokesperson Vince DiMiceli told THE CITY in a written statement. “Along with HVAC upgrades, Hunter will replace one of the two existing elevators and renovate the seventh, sixth, and parts of the fifth floors at Thomas Hunter.”
Built in 1913, the Tudor-style Thomas Hunter Hall is one of CUNY’s oldest buildings, with a litany of infrastructure issues including crumbling ceilings, peeling paint and broken windows and drywall.
DiMiceli said that the repairs the other five phases would cover are “dependent on funding availability.” He added that in the first phase “students can expect to see new restrooms, improvements to the seventh-floor Dance Studio, refreshed dressing rooms and study space on the sixth floor, and a new Dance Department Office suite on the fifth floor. Thomas Hunter Hall will be more efficient, more comfortable places to practice, study and work — and much greener, too.”
A CUNY facilities condition assessment in 2023 found that the university’s 300 buildings, more than half of them over 50 years old, needed about $7 billion in capital funds to cover “both the current deferred maintenance backlog and anticipated future renewal requirements necessary to maintain safe, functional buildings.”
Just 25% of those 300 buildings are currently in a state of good repair, according to CUNY’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget request, which put the deferred maintenance bill alone for its 29 million square feet of space at $6.9 billion.
In its budget request for the previous year, CUNY had reported that just 8% of its buildings were in a state of good repair. The university, which is aiming to have 55% of its buildings in a state of good repair by 2030, did not immediately respond to a question about the dramatic improvement.
In its “largest Capital Plan submission to date,” CUNY is asking the city and state for $2.3 billion in capital funding — $1 billion more than it got last year. The university notes that the bulk of that increase comes from infrastructure needs including $600 million more to address building repairs and $170 million more for sustainability projects.
In a report published last year, the Center for an Urban Future think tank argued that city and state investment in reducing CUNY’s carbon footprint would help “upgrade its aging building stock” while helping New York hit its own climate goals.
‘This Is a Huge Deal’
From holes in the ceiling to sporadic temperatures in classrooms and offices, students and faculty outlined several issues with the infrastructure at Hunter College.
“This is a huge deal. We’re so happy to see this allocation,” Jennifer Gaboury, a women and gender studies professor at Hunter, told THE CITY on Thursday in a phone interview. “Fundamentally, the buildings at Hunter can be too hot or too cold.”
Gaboury, who’s also chair of the Hunter chapter of the Professional Staff Congress union representing 30,000 workers across CUNY, noted that students, faculty and staff sometimes have to keep windows open during the winter because classrooms and offices get unbearably hot, which even invited pigeons to fly in and take roost in crumbling ceilings. In other instances, she continued, rooms get so cold that “people are without heat or working with their coat on.”
As to the $35 million in upgrades starting now, Gaboury said that “overall this is a drop in the bucket. I know they’re doing it piece by piece and that is, of course, welcome.”
Outside of the campus buildings on Lexington Avenue and 68th Street, the few students who were present during the spring break recess talked about “good days and bad days” inside of Hunter buildings.
“With the rain from — I think it was last year — there was a hole in the ceiling because it was raining for like a week straight,” said one student, who preferred not to disclose their name because they work for the college, about a classroom in the Hunter College West Building.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post CUNY Approves $35 Million For Hunter College Building Upgrades appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
