Columbia's Cotton Clubbing

In yesterday's NY Post, the paper focused on another business that is in the path of the Columbia University expansion-and doesn't want to be evicted by eminent domain. This time it's the Cotton Club on 125th Street, whose owner Johm Beatty told the Post: "The Cotton Club is not for sale,...I'm not going to negotiate a deal with Columbia because I don't want to leave...I have children and grandchildren who want to continue this history."

So now we add another complication to the CU mix, an African-American business that doesn't want to be moved by the gentrifying, diversity hypocrites of Morningside Heights. As Beatty emphasized: "They don't want black people to have any reason to be on their campus...This country tells you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps," said Beatty, who worked as a brick layer in South Carolina at the age of 10. He said his club, which offers blues and jazz on Fridays and Sunday gospel brunches to mostly European tourists hungry for some soul, is "a landmark institution."

Calling Al Sharpton. The university's real estate impulse is the underlying rationale for the Columbia Corporation, a rationale that is camouflaged by all of the cloaking liberal rhetoric that floats like a noxious miasma all over the college's campus.