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New parks! New restaurants! The future of Manhattanville organizing! Bwogger-about-town Lydia DePillis reports (with apologies for the sub-par cell phone photos).

It's taken 20 years and $20 million, and the Harlem Piers waterfront park still isn't quite open. But a troupe of students got a surprise sneak peek today, as part of a tour featuring expansion from a north-of-125th-St. perspective.

Those who skidded through the rain to the shore near Fairway got through the chain-link fence with the help of Savona Bailey-McClain, chair of Community Board 9's Waterfront Economic Development committee, who fielded questions about what exactly people will be able to do there.

"This is really not a park. It's a wharf," she said, explaining the absence of typical park features, like stages and athletic fields. "It will feel like a park, it will look like a park, but it's not."

It was 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, and a band of flannel-clad SCEGers was on a singular mission: to personally deliver their demands for accountable expansion to the overlords ensconced in Low. While rain threatened, a group of about 20 students congregated at the sundial and unfurled their paper protest signs, joined together, and prepared to march through the tchotcke shanty-town currently colonizing the plaza. They would be heard, they said, even in the face of imminent and eminent opposition.

But before they could nail their list of 10 CB9 theses to PrezBo's door, they were summarily halted by bureaucrats Walter Rodriguez and SDA head Kevin Shollenberger, both formally dressed and wearing brass pins bearing their names. Rodriguez explained to the protesters that they could enter Low (he said this in an excited, patronizing tone, to the mildly confused stares of the SCEGers who reasonably expected no less) but that only three or four of them could enter the president's office. Shollenberger looked around apathetically.

And so the demanders set out on their quixotic journey, clutching signs and chanting anti-expansion slogans. They were almost distracted by one pony-tailed vendor who came out from behind his poster stand to say, "This is how the SDS was started! Stop the monster!" as they passed. As the band reached the door of Low, a stern security guard stepped aside to let them pass, and they filed in past the bust of Athena and along the corridor to the president's office.

There, a handful (four, maybe five) students entered the sacred room to speak with what looked like a secretary; Rodriguez and Shollenberger, who had been flanking the band, closed the door behind them. No more than a minute later the young Luthers emerged. Laughing nervously, the group turned around, resumed a chant ("Columbia's renewal is West Harlem's removal") and made their way back down Low Steps. The bureaucrats, inexplicably, shook hands with security outside of the presidential office and commented on how well they had completely gutted the spirit and neutered the intentions of the protest (my words, not theirs). And so SCEG convened, kvetched, and dissipated. Read more for the full list of their demands.

-KER

If you've been oblivious to the many attention-grabbing efforts on campus (the chalked stairs in Hamilton are a nice touch), you may not have heard about the SCEG/Postcrypt gallery show going on right now, "Expanding Perspectives: West Harlem," which opened Friday in the basement of St. Paul's and features art by both Columbia students and members of the greater community. Together with the lavish Robert Moses show in Wallach (more on that later), the exhibition forms one half of a complementary duo of timely campus happenings that expound on unique angles regarding Manhattanville expansion-- the human and the historical-- with extraordinary effects.

Bwog stopped by the gallery during Friday night's opening, which was abuzz with organizers, friends, artists, and critics (we noticed an august gentleman perambulating with an electronic critique notebook). The event, of course, wasn't just about the pieces, many of which are stunning, but rather the things people were saying about them. On one work, entitled, "Semiotics, Smoked Fish, and Scotch Tape," gallery-goers were actually encouraged to write personal messages in black Sharpie, resulting in notes like, "A place of beauty, strive, and strength. I love Harlem, it's in my blood and veins," mingled with personal tags and other comments.

After observing three female dancers performing a dirge-like routine with an orange electrical cord, we managed to get some photos before our camera battery blinkered out. Then, cool kids that we are, we chatted briefly with Sophie, who's been doing some of the wheatpaste art you see around campus, about her work. "It's just a character that I draw," she said, about her forlorn, blight-affected owls. "When I started, I didn't know what I was doing. I found a wheatpaste recipe online... It's just newsprint and Sharpie markers." And famous, mind you.

The awkwardly named 20th Annual Anti-Gentrification Community Awareness Festival, a protest-cum-block party organized by the anti-expansion Coalition to Preserve Community (check out their impressive new site), went down this afternoon down the hill at Tiemann Place. Articles and pictures from the CPC's past exploits festooned a central table, staffed by its ever-present leader Tom DeMott and Columbia kids from the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification. Bwog was intrigued by the difference between this shindig and the street fairs that occasionally block off Broadway by the main campus, as well as a bookseller's choice of not one, but two copies of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations--boosting awareness of Columbia's invisible hand, perhaps? Politics aside, Bwog rocked out to the excellent Creamsicles, while avoiding flying tennis balls from a game taking place in the middle of the street. Heads!