Christiane Collins, Scholar Who Fought a Columbia Gym, Dies at 92

Christiane Crasemann Collins, a historian of urban planning who helped make a moment in history herself by defying a bulldozer bent on converting a West Harlem park site into a Columbia University gymnasium, died on Friday at her home in West Falmouth, Mass. She was 92.

The cause was a stroke, her son Nicolas said.

In 1968, Mrs. Collins figured prominently in a turf war that evolved into a humble but symbolic civil rights struggle: a campaign by a coalition of black community groups and mostly white students and faculty to keep neighboring Columbia from impinging on two of Morningside Park’s mostly craggy 30 acres.