It’s a freezing Thursday in February, the kind of day that feels like it’s in the single digits, and Tina Ruyter just wants to go to the farmers’ market. I meet the 67-year-old at her apartment on Morningside Drive and 116th, and we start walking her usual route: west on 116th Street until we hit the gates of Columbia University, at which point we walk south on Amsterdam to 114th, then back up Broadway to 116th again. It’s been nearly a year since Columbia closed the portion of 116th that cuts through its campus, forcing everyone without a school ID to do this kind of circuitous rerouting. “I’m lucky because I’m healthy, but it’s a huge inconvenience,” says Ruyter, who had hip surgery in January and currently walks with a cane. “More important is the principle of the thing.”

The principle of the thing, as Ruyter sees it, rests on the fact that the walkway has been open to pedestrians for as long as Manhattan’s street grid has existed. Which is also why she sued, joining a class-action lawsuit led by Toby Golick, a lawyer and friend who lives in her building. The case rests on a deal that Columbia made in 1953, when the city closed the stretch of 116th between Broadway and Amsterdam to cars and ceded it to Columbia University for a “token payment of $1,000.” In exchange, the university agreed to grant the city access and an “easement over the proposed pedestrian walk” that would be built by the school. For the next 70 years, the walk through campus was a particularly nice way to get to the 1 or go grocery shopping. Ruyter has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years and used it regularly. Everyone did.

Then Columbia started closing the walkway intermittently in response to students protesting the atrocities in Gaza and the school’s investments in Israel. In April the university

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