The sale of Pier 40 air rights could serve both
Dick Gottfried was the youngest person ever to be elected to the New York State Assembly. He was only 23 and still attending Columbia Law School. Perhaps that is why he grew a Van Dyke and looks like a college professor.
When I asked Ed Koch at his birthday party, “How do we save St. Vincent’s?” he quickly said, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask Dick,” nodding in his direction. I did and he replied “We have to wait for the results of the study,” and when I asked, “Why?” he became irritated and offered, “OK, so what are we going to do just bang a drum?” (We should have banged.)
If you read his official bio as Chairman of the Health Committee, he introduced and passed some progress laws such as Parental Care Assistance for low-income women and other laws to assist the poor in receiving medical help.
Today, he made the Times, not on health law but because he was one of the authors of the “Act” along with Senator Franz Licht that created the Hudson River Park Trust. He had faithfully echoed all the demands of the then very vocal constituents that insisted the park be truly a park and free of commercial use – no apartments and no gambling ship conveniently moored for a run to the three mile limit; they really had that in there.
However, it was the recent effort to put apartments on Pier 40 by the private school sports dads whose kids play on the decaying 15 acre complex that sent Dick for a second time to Albany. They need $100 million to prevent the pier from going plop into the river; where would the kids play then?
On his first attempt, he accepted the sports dads’ expensively produced and mounted presentation putting slick glass apartment buildings on the pier. It was Assembly Member Deborah Glick that stood up and said no to apartments on or near Pier 40 (it would block the view of the river) which forced Dick back to Albany. However this time, with Deborah’s approval to sell the air rights, it has been passed and is in the bank.
According to a February Times article, selling air rights is a big and growing business. It allows a developer to buy the number of stories a building owner of say a five story tenement is allowed to build but hasn’t. They can then add those to his near or somewhat distant plot to build higher than the zoning normally allows.
Trump quietly bought seven air right packages and gave the finger to the Upper East Side cityscape with a 72 story black tower at United Nation’s Plaza.
The market for air rights is hot – hot hot hot. It is hard to know what the 15.5 acres of Pier 40 will net, but we do know a phalanx of glass condo towers is making its way down the five mile Park’s length and developers will want to build these as high as they can and a little higher; we are talking hundreds of millions.
Now what does the Hudson River Park need this money for? Well, the original deal was and still is that the city and state would actually pay to build the park. HRPT merely had to use the few piers so designated for limited commercial use like Pier 40 to raise money for maintenance.
In Central Park, the big maintenance item is cutting the grass. Yet when you have a pier sitting on hundreds of corroding steel piles and a 50 year old roof of reinforced concrete slabs leaking at the joints and a tidal surge once and in a while your maintenance bill exceeds grass cutting.
However, Dick is Chairman of the Health Committee of the State Assembly and hence probably knows better than all of us that we need to return a hospital to the West Side.
So, I am asking that the bill he has introduced be amended to designate $100 million of the air rights sales be set aside for the return of the new West Village Hospital.
