By Barry Benepe In the September 2015 issue of WestView, I described “the building that wasn’t there,” 35XV, designed by FXFOWLE. Eight years ago, the same firm embarked on another outstanding building that seeks to deny its existence in the “soft touch,” the architect’s description of its presence: 155 West 11th Street, built by Rudin Management
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Building Torn Down on West 11th
As a long time Village resident I know you will recognize the little house in the photo attached. I lifted the photo from Google Earth, fortunately before it was too late. If you walk by the building has been completely torn down. I took a guess that its number was 258 West 11th. Is this
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Real Estate Assault on 11 Jane. Neighbors Knocked for a Loop.
By Robert Widmann When the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation website published the plans and renderings for the luxury condo building being proposed for 11 Jane Street (directly next to my building at 9 Jane), it was as if I had been struck a physical blow. I felt dizzy. The building being proposed was
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Radical West Village Development Put on Hold
By Alexander Tobias Seeing a Landmarks Preservation Commission public hearing for the first time is an eye-opening experience. The first surprise comes from seeing the reading of decisions that were clearly written before presentations were made and public testimony given. Unanimous, rave approval of a new contemporary glass building in Tribeca puzzled many observers. While
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PIER 40: More Park (Like)?
By Barry Benepe Addressing a public meeting held by Community Board 2 on June 6, Madelyn Wils, CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust stated, “We need to make Pier 40 more park-like.” These were indeed welcome words. Pier 40 is not a park by any stretch of the imagination. It is a four level
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Garage to Wall of Glass Gives Jane Streeters Pause
By Alexander Tobias Redevelopment plans for 11-19 Jane Street—presently a two-story parking garage that’s been serving the community for nearly a century—were unveiled at Community Board 2’s Landmarks and Public Aesthetics Committee Hearing on May 16th. On May 20th, the full Community Board unanimously rejected the proposal. Since the Board’s ruling is non-binding, the project
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Today’s Contemporary, Tomorrow’s Historic
By Barry Benepe The pair of former stable/garage buildings formerly housing Pro Piano at 85-89 Jane Street are slated to be demolished and replaced with a one family house belonging to Jon Stryker, an architect specializing in the rehabilitation of historic buildings. He is also a philanthropist with a net worth estimated at $2.1
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Prison Ends Slumlord’s Smile
By George Capsis For months, since we did an article on her restaurant, Lima’s Taste on Christopher and Bedford, I had been hearing about Nelly Godfrey’s ten-year-long saga with what now appears to be the worst landlord in recent New York City history, Steven Croman. Nelly was invited, along with three other Croman victims,
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City Sells 50% Interest in Federal Supported Housing
By George Capsis While I was interviewing a 77-year-old senior on how he survived on a social security check of $800 dollars he offered he had a West Village rent stabilized apartment and Section 8. I had heard the term before, but I really did not know what it meant. Then WNYC offered a
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Diller Island Clears Hurdles
By Brian J. Pape, AIA The last regulatory agency approvals have been granted this week to a planned recreational pier in the Hudson River Park. Heavily promoted and widely criticized, Pier 55 was publicly announced in 2014 to a shocked set of interested parties, including members of the Friends of Hudson River Park, government
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Where to Park?
Barry Benepe’s article about 11 Jane Street—across the street from where I live—got the assessment of demand for off-street parking all wrong. Do you really think that workers waving flags to encourage drivers to park is a sign of too many indoor spaces? Over the last 25 years, as it has morphed into a hot
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The Dictatorship of Ugly
By George Capsis Oh, wow, there on the six o’clock news were the rounded features of Barry Diller modestly purring in unctuous LA diction his pleasure at being approved to go ahead with Pier 55—an undulating concrete is-land held up by enormous mushroom-shaped piles, some more than 60 feet above the river. The Times offered
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A Presidential Penthouse for NYU
By Brian J. Pape, AIA When George Capsis got a firsthand look at the new residence for NYU’s president Andrew Hamilton, he experienced the 4,200 square foot penthouse floor area, plus large terraces facing east and south, ideally located, fully functional, and freshly remodeled. It has been owned by NYU for many years in the
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New York is at a Crossroads
By Lynn Ellsworth New York is at a crossroads. Big Real Estate wants to remake our city in the style of Dubai. Their goal: Drown us under glass towers and replace our historic, low, and mid-rise city with a vision of urbanity straight out of Disney’s “Tomorrow-land.” But we don’t have to go down that
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Mayor’s Rezoning Plans Won’t Improve Quality or Affordability
By Andrew Berman Thousands of New Yorkers have expressed their opposition to the Mayor’s twin citywide rezoning plans, ‘Zoning for Quality and Affordability’ (ZQA) and ‘Mandatory Inclusionary Housing’ (MIH). ZQA would gut hard-won neighborhood zoning protections by lifting height limits for allowable new construction with little or no public benefit in return. MIH would be
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The St. John’s Terminal/Pier 40 Project: How an Assemblymember Should Lead
By Arthur Z. Schwartz Can a Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive activist lawyer also champion a billion dollar development project? The answer is yes. As WestView readers know, I am running for the Assembly seat that includes the West Village, Soho, and Tribeca. And I have made it clear that I am a supporter of the St.
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A Hospital or Condos?
Stop the Press! Just hours after I wrote the plea below to build a hospital first then condos on the St. John’s Terminal site, I got a call from Barbara Chacour that the Times had run a piece by Joyce Wadler—a West Village resident and a veteran Times writer—who discovered the hard way that the
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The Contempt of the One Percent
By George Capsis It is hard to believe but for six years there has been a forty-foot-long construction fence covering two buildings under renovation on the North side of West 4th Street between 10th and Charles Street. The building belongs to the daughter of billionaire George Soros whose main dwelling of, we assume, considerable size
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Building on Vacant NYCHA Land
By Brian J. Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Nathan Rich of the Peterson Rich Office of Architects also contributed to this article. Mayor de Blasio issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for three NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) vacant land sites last year for the private development of affordable housing. It is called “Next Generation NYCHA” and it
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Max and I Have Lost Our City
By George Capsis Max Frankel, like me, is very angry at these 1000-foot asparagus towers with $100 million apartments that are springing up along 57th Street with Central Park as a green lawn before them. Indeed, with land at $1500 per square foot, they are popping up all over the place—and they are Avatar strange.
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Affordable Housing Becomes a Museum Exhibit
By George Capsis To replace the semblance of a human presence after 55 years of marriage, I keep WNYC on all day—and my ears pricked up during lunch when I heard the familiar nasal voice of Leonard Lopate saying “with skyrocketing rents placing affordable housing outside the reach of thousands if not millions of
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Hundreds Turn Out To Oppose Gansevoort Plan at Landmarks
By Andrew Berman On November 10, an overflow crowd of hundreds filled the Landmarks Preservation Commission for a public hearing on a developer’s proposal for the massive transformation of the south side of Gansevoort Street. The proposal would involve demolishing a one and two story building, replacing the former with a 122 ft. tall
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The Man Who Owns Gansevoort Street
By George Capsis When Molly Bender—the sister and heir to Bill Gottlieb’s extensive collection of shabby but valuable buildings in and around the West Village—died, her daughter upon discovering she was not in the will sued her brother Neil Bender claiming he was not fit to manage the Gottfried holdings “by reason of substance
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We’re Preserving What?
By Alec Pruchnicki The Present Situation When the proposal for new buildings on Gansevoort Street to replace several old two-story structures was made public, the community opposition was vocal, unanimous… and wrong. Although Andrew Berman, the Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (of which I am a member and usually
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A Prescription For Fraud
As a Times editorial reports, at a Community Board meeting in Harlem, city retained consultants tried to sell the plan to get profit motivated developers to build higher denser apartment buildings and have those who can pay exploding market rate apartments share with those who less and less can afford even “affordable” rents. But the
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Revealing a Housing Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
By Thomas Mellins When, in early 2014, I started to curate an exhibition for the Museum of the City of New York on affordable housing, the subject was already a “hot” topic. It was widely acknowledged by government officials, developers, and the public alike, that attaining decent, affordable housing in a city identified worldwide
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The Good Death
By George Capsis Euthanasia is a Greek word from “eu” meaning “good” and “thanatos,” which is “death”, and in ancient Greece there was an acceptance that if a child was born deformed or crippled that it was best to put it to death. We Americans don’t believe in euthanasia, so we have a growing
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Decisions by Default
By George Capsis On Wednesday October 20, The New York Times ran an article outlining a plan to save the corroding, 15-acre Pier 40 by accepting $100 million from two real estate investment firms for the Pier’s air rights, allowing them to build 1,586 apartments, a hotel, and retail stores in five buildings facing Pier
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We Need to Make the Pier 40 Deal Our Deal
By Arthur Z. Schwartz On October 22, we all opened The New York Times and found out what only a select few knew up to that point. Two possible scenarios are on the table for the St John’s building, the massive, hulking structure sitting across the street from Pier 40 (which, if you don’t know,
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Landmarking Memories
By George Capsis “Come, they are going to have a meeting at PS 3 on the redevelopment of Gansevoort Street” offered Nelly Godfrey and sweetened the plea with fried calamari at her restaurant, Lima’s Taste, right around the corner on Christopher and Barrow. I don’t go to meetings like this anymore but rely on the
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Briefly Noted: Developments Related To My Arrest
On October 15, the District Attorney appeared with me and my lawyer, James Roth, in Supreme Court, a date set for the grand larceny charges against me to go to a grand jury. A supervisory attorney made an appearance and made a motion to the Judge that the charges be reduced to Petit Larceny (which
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Development Plan Would Obliterate, Not ‘Change’ Landmarked Gansevoort Street
By Andrew Berman More than 100 people attended an October 15 Community Board public hearing on an application to the Landmarks Preservation Commission for some pretty dramatic changes to the south side of Gansevoort Street in the Gansevoort Market Historic District. Located on the block between Washington and Greenwich Streets, the proposal seeks to demolish
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No to Gansevoort Market Development
By Arthur Z. Schwartz Hundreds of Northwest Village residents came out to PS3on October 15 to express opposition to a proposal to build condos on Gansevoort Street, between Greenwich Street and Washington Street. The condo, disguised to look like Meat Market buildings with awnings, will be one more step in the direction of eliminating the
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West Village Needs a Hospital
CONDOS TO SHADOW VILLAGE: In a deal struck by the City, two real estate investment firms will build five buildings facing Pier 40 starting at West Houston Street ranging in height from 240 to 430 feet containing 1,586 apartments. In a deal pushed by Councilman Corey Johnson, 476 units will be permanently affordable. The architects
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The Greatest Tragedy in City Development
By George Capsis Wikipedia recounts the facts that add up to the greatest tragedy in city development. “What is now Hudson River Park emerged from the failed 1970s and 1980s redevelopment of the dilapidated West Side Higway known as the Westway, which would have upgraded it to Interstate Highway standards as part of an extended
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Deal Allows 70% Increase At $1,363 a Foot, $100 Million Purchase Price a Token
By Andrew Berman It’s extremely concerning that the troubling and problematic process of selling air rights from the Hudson River Park to massively increase development inland is moving ahead, while alternatives for funding the park endorsed by community groups, and long-standing neighborhood requests for expanded landmark and zoning protections, are still being ignored by
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Is Croman Reading WestView?
Dear Editor: Please don’t worry—however, a few days after the newspaper hit the stands, Croman’s (landlord) “management” came by early in the morning on the 20th and stole our planters again! Suffice to say, we were upset, but it gives us more cannon fodder. We’ve submitted police report(s). You should be proud to know that
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City Finds It Cheaper to Keep Tenants in Rent Stabilized Apartments
On Monday, September 28th Mayor De Blasio announced he was allocating $12.3 million to hire lawyers to fight off landlord evictions and avoid an increase in homelessness. A landlord association quickly responded that the money should be used to pay back rent, which they feel is the principal cause for eviction. City assigned lawyers may
