student council passed a resolution asking the University to reconsider the gym plans, and two months later, bills to ban its construction were introduced in the State Senate and Assembly. That October, Columbia announced it would suspend groundbreaking for the gym until the following year, and by May 1967, university officials were considering changing the plans. Unsatisfied, protesters picketed outside Kirk's home that July, while Harlem officials decried a proposed compromise to build a community swimming pool instead. Undeterred, the Board of Estimate voted to approve the plans in October 1967, and despite further protests that November, construction began in February 1968. At the time, The New York Times architecture writer Ada Louise Huxtable said, "the real tragedy of the whole Columbia gym affair is that this dubious and even harmful project has been carried out in good faith." Columbia students and faculty amplified their opposition to the gym project in mid-1968, resulting in major student protests. That April, the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation called on Kirk and the trustees to reconsider the gym. Student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Afro-American Society held "sit-ins", and Mayor John Lindsay requested that work be suspended while the protests were ongoing. Students occupied administration and classroom buildings and shut down the university for several weeks. The Columbia faculty formed a committee to intervene after a large 2,500-person protest on April 30, which involved a New York City Police Department raid at several buildings. Meanwhile, parks commissioner August Heckscher II said that if Columbia was to drop its plans, he would have a community recreation center built at the site. The same month, $500,000 was allocated for restorations to the park, and the new Morningside Park Preservation Committee filed a lawsuit alleging the misuse of parkland. Kirk resigned in August 1968 because of the protests and was replaced as Columbia president by Andrew W. Cordier. Under his leadership, Columbia's trustees studied possible new sites for the gym before voting in March 1969 to cancel the project altogether. Elementary school At the same time as the Columbia controversy, another dispute arose after the New York State Legislature designated the northwestern corner of Morningside Park as the site of a public elementary school in 1963. Both Mayor Wagner and borough president Edward R. Dudley supported this initiative; Dudley said the site was "rubbish-strewn