Who will follow in Amanda Burden's (very stylish) footsteps?

With the New York City mayor's race not even past the Democratic primary, it's a bit early to be handicapping the city's next chief city planner, but where's the fun in being coy?

Crain's has taken a look at who might fill the post, which it calls "perhaps more important than any deputy mayor position at City Hall," arriving at a short list that includes names ranging from Vishaan Chakrabarti, a consummate real estate industry insider and former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning, to the more community-minded Anna Levin, a member of the City Planning Commission and the chair of Manhattan Community Board 4's Land Use Commission during most of the 2000s.

But when we spoke to Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's Andrew Berman about who might be the city's next chief city planner, he threw cold water on the speculation.

"I think that the choice of who the chair will be, while it certainly tells you something, who the mayor is tells you more," Mr. Berman said.

He cited the evolution of Amanda Burden, widely heralded as driving the relatively radical rezonings—radical, at least, for the staid post-war planning years; there hasn't been a major revision to the city's code since the 1961 overhaul—of the Bloomberg years. Under Burden, development rules for a third of the city's land were changed in one way or another.

"Amanda was a very, very different member of the City Planning Commission when she was Mark Green's commissioner"—Mr. Green appointed Ms. Burden to the commission as the city's first public advocate—"than when she was Mike Bloomberg's."

"Some would argue," Mr. Berman continued, "that the Amanda Burden who served on the City Planning Commission [under Mark Green] wouldn't even recognize [today's] Amanda Burden."

Back before she became the face of Michael Bloomberg's Big Real Estate-friendly rezonings, Ms. Burden was not so well received by the industry. “I think there’s a concern about the prejudices she may bring to the position,” one developer told The Observer back in 2002. “I don’t think she was at the top of [our] list. But I think we feel that we can work with her, since we have no choice.”

Dapper though Mr. Chakrabarti may be, don't expect New York City's next chief planner to make the cover of Women's Wear Daily.

Of the candidates identified by Crain's, Mr. Chakrabarti and Ms. Levin sit on opposite sides of the pro- and anti-development spectrum.

"Folks from the real estate industry feel that they are entitled to more or less choose who the next chair is," Mr. Berman told The Observer. He wouldn't single out any candidate, but we can't help but think he was referring to Mr. Chakrabarti, who has been an unfailing advocate for density around New York's many transit hubs.

"Mr. Chakrabarti's group at Columbia University," wrote Crain's, "is expected to release a report soon showing that the city does not have the zoning capacity for the 1 million new New Yorkers expected by 2030 and is short about 300,000 residential units. As commissioner, Mr. Chakrabarti would likely support the upzoning of neighborhoods like Long Island City and the South Bronx that are one or two subway stops away from midtown."

Mr. Levin, on the other hand, has shown herself to be much more interested in affordable housing, and less interested in increasing the size of the city's overall housing stock, often expressing that distinctly West Side antipathy towards density.

She was, for example, the lone vote against Extell's Riverside Center project, saying the project was "too big."

And Ms. Levin and Mr. Chakrabarti stood on opposite sides of an early debate over the future of Hudson Yards back in 2003.

"We feel that the amount of growth planned for the area is essential to the long-term growth needs of the City of New York," Mr. Chakrabarti, then with the Department of City Planning, told The Observer.

Ms. Levin felt differently. "The city wants to create five World Trade Centers’ worth of new development. We feel that this is just too much," she said at the time, arguing that "the city must proceed without crushing the existing neighborhood."

A tweaked north side for Durst/Fetner's 625 West 57th Street. (Durst/Fetner)

Big, pointy apartments. (Durst/Fetner)

When Douglas Durst began deciding, yet again, what to do with the almost block-long property he owns at 57th Street and the Hudson River, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden urged the developer to think big. A high-tech data center, a school and a hotel had all fallen through, so Mr. Durst had fallen back on that most reliable form of New York City development: housing.

Ms. Burden wanted something iconic, especially for a project on such a prominent street at such a prominent location right on the waterfront. With Hudson River Park right there, it ought to be iconic. Mr. Durst delivered something BIG indeed, hiring the Danish wunderkinds at Bjarke Ingles Group to design his project.

Yesterday, Ms. Burden got to put her official stamp on the project, when she and the rest of the City Planning Commission approved Durst/Fetner’s BIG pyramid. It was the second-to-last step in the arduous months-long public review process, in many ways made all the easier by a dynamic design that has made this arguably the most unusual apartment building in the city.

"Our approval will facilitate development of a significant new building with a distinctive pyramid-like shaped design and thoughtful site plan that integrates the full block site into the evolving residential, institutional, and commercial neighborhood surrounding it," Ms. Burden said before voting in favor of the project.

Contained within the striking design are 753 apartments in a building that tapers from CKCKthree stories along the river up to a pinnacle of CKCK38 stories. It has an unusual sloping aspect (technically a tetrahedron, not a pyramid) with a massive courtyard cut into the middle that is almost the site of a football field. The cutout also affords every apartment with an outdoor terrace, a feature that was especially important to Mr. Ingels.

The commission required a few modifications to the project, dealing primarily with how it is experienced from the street. There is a limit on the amount of signage and obstructions that can go in the windows of the retail lining 57th Street and the West Side Highway, to ensure transparency and a sense of activity that does not obscure what is going on inside. The fear is a blank wall would deaden the street life, as has happened ion places like Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.

The developer has made similar gestures on 58th Street to ensure vibrancy on what is otherwise a block-long stretch of almost blank building. Retail wraps the corners of the building, but otherwise, there is a lobby and a loading dock and little else.

Part of the reason for this is the building is located in the 100-year-flood plane, so the Con Ed substation cannot go in the basement but instead by located above-grade. The utility needs access to the facilities at all times, so they have to be on the street, and cannot go higher up in the building. The developer also argued that there is barely any retail on 58th Street as is, so forcing it into the northern side of the building would be impractical and difficult to lease.

The solution was to establish a retail space within the lobby located in that section of the building, and to also install glass vitrines along the blank parts of the façade that could feature plants or sculptures on a rotating basis, creating a more engaging streetscape.

"It's an important approval, and we're pleased with her support and input," Mr. Durst said in an interview.

Previously, the developer agreed to additional modifications when the project received approvals two months ago from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. That included widening the sidewalks and narrowing the driveway between 57th and 58th streets located in the middle of the block at the main entrance to the building. Durst/Fetner will also provide seating and landscaping in the space. The developer also agreed to improve a connection to Hudson River Park at 59th Street, a block north of the development. The connection currently passes under an overpass of West Side Highway, and the developers will work with the city and state departments of transportation to spruce up the space.

"In all, this is an exciting project on a pivotal site that will benefit its occupants, the neighborhood and the city as a whole," Ms. Burden said.

One aspect of the project that has yet to be addressed is how long the affordable units in the building will remain affordable. The development is being built through the city's 80/20 program, which means 20 percent of apartments will be reserved for low- and moderate-income families, while the remaining number will be market rate.

Currently, those units will only be eligible for less well-off families for 35 years. The community board desperately wants permanent affordability, but Durst/Fetner insists it cannot agree to such an arrangement because they do not own the land. The developers themselves are leasing it from a family that has owned the land for more than a century, and is now comprised of some 100 trustees Durst/Fetner must negotiate with about extending the affordability window.

But local Councilwoman Gail Brewer has insisted the developers had better get negotiating, because she is willing to torpedo the project at the City Council—the final step in the public review process, where Ms. Brewer will have almost total say over the project—if her constituents do not get what they want.

The West Harlem rezoning is an especially historic occasion since it is the culmination of more than five years of planning by the community as a direct response to Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus. Following the university’s rezoning of the 17 acres between 125th Street and 133rd Street on which its new campus is already rising, the City Planning Commission promised to do a rezoning of the 90 blocks to the north, offering protection from potential overdevelopment that could be ushered in by the new school buildings.

"West Harlem is a vibrant, diverse community, and this rezoning will preserve the scale of its beautiful Beaux Arts, Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival brownstones and apartment houses built in the first decades of the 20th century," commission chair Amanda Burden said. "The rezoning also will reinvigorate an existing light manufacturing area just north of 125th Street by allowing commercial, community facility and residential uses in existing and new buildings to promote economic development and job creation."

In addition to this special district, the new rezoning restricts development on the side streets to roughly four stories, while on the avenues it rises between eight and 12 stories, where an exclusionary housing bonus can allow developers to add additional development in exchange for setting aside 20 percent of their projects as affordable. While local activists liked the rezoning overall, they felt that the upzoning along 145th Street, the area’s major commercial corridor, was too high. Historic preservation is also an issue, bound up in part with the overdevelopment issues.

"The Boys and Girls Club owns P.S. 186, one of the historic schools built by Charles Snider; he built hundreds of them at the turn of the century," said Catherine Abate, a local resident who has been active in the planning process. "Now, they could well develop it and do a 14-story residential structure, and with all that development, it's hard to think they wouldn't. I think the real concern for us [is] there are some important tenements, too, that with those kind of incentives, developers will have no choice but to demolish historic buildings and build bigger."

Borough President Scott Stringer, who persuaded the Bloomberg administration to undertake the rezoning five years ago and helped plan it through his office in the subsequent period, applauded the commission’s support for the plan. "The plan reflects the input of thousands of stakeholders in West Harlem and is a model for how we can craft a community-based planning process that finds common ground and safeguards a neighborhood," Mr. Stringer said. "It is a promise kept to the residents of West Harlem—and a proud moment for all who were involved."

The Bedford-Stuyvesant North rezoning covers 140 blocks across much of the neighborhood from Flushing Avenue (north) to Quincy Avenue (south), Classon and Franklin avenues (west) to Broadway (east). As with West Harlem, contextualism is key, again with downzonings on down-scale streets and offsetting upzonings on the wider north-south corridors, which also provides space for new affordable housing.

"Bedford-Stuyvesant is a vibrant community experiencing new growth and investment," Ms. Burden said. "This rezoning will ensure that new development complements the neighborhood while preserving the community’s historic brownstones, rowhouses and small apartment buildings. The proposed rezoning would protect neighborhood character, create new opportunities for permanently affordable housing and strengthen established commercial corridors, such as Broadway, Bedford and Myrtle Avenues."

Do the setback! (Studios Architecture)

The earlier 10th Avenue addition, sans setback. (Studios Architecture)

Much of the debate around the expansion of the Chelsea Market has centered around not the former Nasbisco factory turned popular shopping center (and subsequent tourist attraction), but the old railroad trestle next to it.

Part of the justification for expanding the market by 25 percent was that, in addition to providing construction jobs and new office space for the city's booming tech sector, the developer of the project, Jamestown Properties, would pay about $19 million to the High Line, to help fund ongoing maintenance. But there was also great community outcry over the fact that much of the new addition would be built on the 10th Avenue side of Chelsea Market, directly overhanging the High Line.

Earlier today, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project's expansion, and addressed a few of these concerns. The 10th Avenue addition will now be set back from the High Line, stepping back like a wedding cake as it rises, providing more air and light over the elevated park.

But the agreement was not a total victory for the Friends of the High Line, who are desperate for funds to keep the expensive park in shape. As a salve to community concerns about affordable housing, roughly one-third of the $19 million Jamestown had promised to the park will go instead into an affordable housing fund, which can be spent on projects in the neighborhood.

"We are gratified by the City Planning Commission's thoughtful and balanced approach in consideration and approval of Jamestown's application to expand the Chelsea Market," Michael Phillips, Jamestown's COO and project manager on the expansion, said in a statement. "With the leadership of Commission Chair Amanda Burden, the commission has modified the application to allow for some of the funds generated through a zoning bonus to be used for affordable housing, an approach that follows the road map set forth by the community board."

The board tentatively approved the project earlier this summer, raising questions about its size and a lack of affordable housing. They also fought against the possible inclusion of a hotel in an expansion planned over Budakkan on the Ninth Avenue side of the project, a concern echoed by Borough President Scott Stringer when he voted against the Chelsea Market expansion in July. He also lobbied for the project to be moved away from the High Line, though he preferred moving all of it to Ninth Avenue.

The Ninth Avenue addition, which had once been taller and included a hotel. (Studios Architecture)

As part of the agreement to win approval from the commission, Jamestown agreed to remove a hotel from its plans. It also reduced the height of the Ninth Avenue addition. That piece will now rise to 135 feet, even with the neighboring roofline of the market, rather than to a height of 160 feet.

As for the setbacks on 10th Avenue, they begin at the top of the market where the new addition is pushed back 15 feet, followed by another 10 feet when the new section reaches 185 feet, with a few more setbacks from there up to a final height of 230 feet. That is shorter than the neighboring Caledonia condo building though still taller than a number of the neighboring industrial buildings.

Altogether, the modifications reduce the expansion's overall size from 325,000 new square feet to roughly 285,000 square feet. The market currently contains about 1.2 million square feet of office and retail space.

"With these modifications, I believe this will be a great addition to the West Chelsea neighborhood," Commissioner Burden said before the commission voted unanimously to approve the project. "The additional office space will serve what has become a destination for creative and technology industries, and this new development will provide critical amenities to the High Line."

Despite the funding cut, Friends of the High Line also applauded the project's approval. "The City Planning Commission made a number of thoughtful changes to various aspects of the plan," Friends co-founder Robert Hammond said in an email. "We are pleased with the way the plan is moving forward, and we will continue to work with the community."

While polling has found general support for the expansion in the city, some locals still oppose the addition. "It's fiddling with the margins," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. "When you look at how much West Chelsea has been upzoned in the past 10 years, more than any other community, when you add to that an upzoning of one of New York City's most beloved landmarks, it just adds insult to injury."

He said the affordable housing contributions are "a sham" because, like a kitty set aside from the 2005 rezoning of the neighborhood, into which these new funds will also be deposited, none of the money has so far been spent. Though that is more a problem for the city than Jamestown.

He vowed to continue fighting the expansion at the City Council, where it will be taken up in the next two months ahead of its likely approval. The project lies in Council Speaker Christine Quinn's district, who has found herself stuck between addressing the concerns of her neighborhood base in Chelsea and the demands of the real estate industry, who appear to favor her as their candidate in next year's mayoral elections. How she threads the needle on this project will be interesting to see.

Too big, too fast? (DCP)

Easy does it. That is the message from Councilman Dan Garodnick, echoing concerns of two Midtown community boards, that the Bloomberg administration is moving too fast in its plans to rezone Midtown East to allow for taller skyscrapers.

The Councilman, who represents the eastern flank of Manhattan, applauded the plan in a letter [PDF] to Planning Commish Amanda Burden last week shared with The Observer, but he worries to plan is so complex, it needs more time to be considered. The Department of City Planning argues there is enough time to get the job done before the Bloomberg administration is out in a year and a half.

"It's certainly important to ensure that our Midtown core remains competitive with cities around the world," Mr. Garodnick told The Observer. "At the same time, we need to approach this rezoning proposal deliberately. I understand that the mayor's term has less than 500 days remaining, but that should not be the prime factor in driving the time frame for such an important proposal."

Primarily, Mr. Garodnick wants the scoping session, when the framework is solidified, pushed back six months to March. In the letter, he also criticized plans to release an initial framework in the coming weeks, "before Labor Day—when many New Yorkers are totally disengaged from the political process." The plan was to have the massive rezoning—both in space and scope—enter public review by the first quarter of next year, but pushing back scoping would likely push that into the summer or fall. The rezoning would almost certainly be approved by the next administration as a result.

There is some concern this could scuttle the plan, but Mr. Garodnick sees it as a way to foster a stronger one. "Indeed, there is no harm in having this proposal be initiated by the Bloomberg administration and finalized by the next mayor, whoever it may be, and for it be a shared legacy," Mr. Garodnick wrote. He argues that because the plan will be implemented until 2017, there is no need to rush the rezoning.

In a July 20 letter to the department, Community Board 5 mounted a similar case:

Given the enormous complexity and high stakes for this rezoning, we ask that the Department slow down its timetable so that the community can fully consider and respond to your plans and so that the Department can take the community's concerns and wishes into account, allowing time for town hall meetings, public hearings, and other forums. As a point of comparison, by its own account, the Department spent about five years to develop the plan for Hudson Yards, and just recently, the same amount of time to rezone a stretch of the Upper West Side. Closer to East Midtown, DOT and the Grand Central Partnership have spent nearly three years thus far to develop the plan for the Pershing Square pedestrian plaza. Certainly a project with the magnitude of East Midtown at least merits similar timetables.

There are those who believe the city is dragging its feet, however, namely Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo. He took to the tab's editorial pages today to slam the Midtown East plan from the other side. He said the city should not wait until 2017 to let developers build bigger. But his main issue is with a neighborhood improvement fund developers would finance by buying air rights: "The city wants the dough to remedy such horrible 'pedestrian realm challenges' as 'narrow sidewalks and bottlenecks in subway stations.' Hello, slush fund?"

The city will try and build a building for micro-apartments on a lot along First Avenue and East 27th Street. (Bing Maps)

Dream house? A model of a 300-square-foot apartment. (Matt Chaban)

It has long been a cliche that New York City apartments were no bigger than shoeboxes, even as sprawling units and reconstituted townhouses quietly replace them in this booming, bourgeoisie town. Still, every so often a YouTube video goes viral showing someone making due in 150 square feet or less. As the city continues to grapple with a shortage of apartments, the Bloomberg administration has embraced the less-is-more approach. They're trading Gracie Mansion for Malibu Stacy's Dream House.

The mayor wants to adAPT the city's housing stock to the 21st Century, as a new pilot program announced today is known, by allowing developers to create smaller apartments than regulations currently allow.

For much of New York's history, landlords and developers were building small, often substandard apartments to serve the city's soaring population—a fact anyone who has ever lived in a Lower East Side tenement can attest to. Zoning and building regulations rose up to combat these unfit dwellings, but now there is a demand for more apartments than the city, either through publicly financed housing projects or privately built developments, can afford to build.

The new adAPT program takes a plot of land in Kips Bay and a few zoning modifications to try and solve these problems.

Currently, construction codes only allow a certain number of apartment units per building, a ratio having to do with its size, and none of those units can be smaller than 400 square feet. (For those thinking they have lived in smaller, that is quite possible, though those were units built under old codes and grandfathered under the new ones.) With adAPT, the city will increase the density ratio for a building and reduce the size of those units, which the administration is calling micro-apartments, to somewhere in the range of 275 to 300 square feet.

This regulatory sleight of hand can only occur on city owned property at the moment, so the administration has taken a plot at 335 East 27th Street to use as a testing ground. A request for proposals will be released for the site on First Avenue, seeking a developer to construct a rental building where at least 75 percent of the units are comprised of these micro-apartments.

Were the building to be built entirely out of micro-apartments, it would accommodate up to 88 units, while a traditional layout would allow around half as many. The idea is to create more affordable apartments while allowing developers to still see a profit because in the aggregate, these small apartments would add up to a larger return than a traditional building.

"This is about creating housing that meets the needs of today's New Yorkers," Mayor Bloomberg said. "We want people to come here to start their careers here, to start out here, to start their families here. If they can't afford to live here, then that's a problem."

Similar programs have been attempted in perennial rivals London and Boston, and The Times just last week reported on some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to create "tech dorms" of a mere 150 square feet to offset the exorbitantly expensive quarters in the Bay Area.

The Kips Bay pilot site invites developers to propose other zoning changes that could make micro-apartments work better, with potential applications citywide, such as the possibility of moving some amenities to common spaces or toying with standardized dimensions—while still maintaining the light and air associated with quality housing. Housing Development and Preservation Commissioner Matthew Wambua described it as "a total let's see what happens, let's see what we come up with situation."

Design is also an important part of the pilot. The RFP will be judged not only on the financials but also the innovation developers bring to their compact apartment layouts and the appearance of the entire building. "This is an opportunity to use design to provide more housing options for New Yorkers," Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden said. "The statistics show we don't have enough housing for the people who want to live in this city, and designers can help us figure out the best ways to address these problems."

But the program is not simply meant to address a shortage in affordable smaller units but also problematic situations that have arisen from them. The city is concerned about people who subdivide larger units that they could not otherwise afford—who does not have a cousin or niece, freshly graduated from a Midwestern college, living in a walled off living room Uptown somewhere?—and otherwise cram people into apartments.

Commissioner Wambua pointed out that four single New Yorkers could afford a three-bedroom apartment priced at $2800 a month far more easily than a family of four, two working parents and two kids. It also so happens that it is illegal to live in a living room, or for four unrelated adults to occupy the same apartment, issues the city would like to put an end to. (Consider yourself on notice, Bushwick.)

Should the pilot work out, the administration hopes it has broad implications for a wide swath of residents, from the recently arrived Harvard grad to the single mother to the vet returning from war. "It's also good for divorcées," one city official remarked.

The biggest challenge may be getting developers to come along. In recent years, in the city's plushest districts, the mantra has been bigger is better, a fact that is generally true across New York City real estate: 1+1=2.5. With space at such a premium, people are willing to pay extra for more of it. That is partly the reason the city needs to go to extra measures to counteract these forces. "We've gotten a lot of interest from developers," Mr. Wambua said. "They are just as interested as us in creating housing where there is a clear demand for it."

Update: At today's announcement, city officials had said the current minimum size on apartments was 450 square feet, though it is in fact 400 square feet. The story has been edited to reflect this change.

Midtown, 2025? (Photo composite: Ed Johnson/NYO; Photos: Getty)

It was but one line in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City address in January, but it could prove to be one of the biggest of his dozen years in office.

“In the area around Grand Central, we’ll work with the City Council on a package of regulatory changes and incentives that will attract new investment, new companies and new jobs,” the mayor said from the stage inside Morris High School in the Bronx.

Hizzoner spent more time talking about Cornell’s Roosevelt Island tech campus, keeping the Hunt’s Point Produce Market from moving across the Hudson to Jersey and efforts to further expand the blue-collar workforce on the waterfront. Even the redevelopment of nearby East Fordham Road and Webster Avenue got equal billing with these vague pronouncements about “the area around Grand Central.”

Despite the scant mention, it turns out that for an administration that has never shied away from big plans, this may be one of the biggest projects yet.

In what is likely to be the latest, greatest and last of the grand Bloomberg rezonings, City Hall has turned its focus to Midtown East. Under the direction of City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, the administration has undertaken 115 rezonings in almost every corner of the city, remaking nearly a quarter of its landmass.

Now, it is time to remake the middle of Manhattan, to redevelop one of the most developed swathes of land in the world.

Midtown, 2000. (Getty)

It was not the first time Robert Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, had considered the plight of Midtown East, but he recalled it as the moment everything came into focus. Around this time last year, the former Goldman exec and Wachovia chief was standing on the roof of the Hearst Tower two blocks south of Columbus Circle, gazing out at the city surrounding him.

The Hearst building itself is an apt metaphor for the plans the city is currently contemplating. Originally built by William Randolph Hearst in 1928, the Art Deco dandy rose to six stories, with plans for a tower to rise above. Those were waylaid, for nearly eight decades, courtesy the Great Depression. But it would take another great boom to see the project through, and in 2006, the new Hearst Tower opened, with its faceted obsidian exterior, a gem of modern office life.

It was created by the high-tech practitioner and Pritzker Prize-winner Sir Norman Foster and received a LEED Gold rating for sustainability, the first office tower in the city to do so. The base of the tower remains, a nod to history, but it was gutted to make way for a soaring lobby, complete with a waterfall that recycles rainwater, helping to cool the space and cut down on A/C costs.

This is precisely the sort of building that Mr. Steel wants to see more of in Midtown, still the heart of the city’s commercial core.

“Think about what Midtown was historically, the Pantheon for corporate America,” he said during a recent phone interview. “It was lots of jobs, but also a symbol for all the Fortune 500 companies.”

But it was not so much the Hearst Tower as the ones surrounding it that got Mr. Steel concerned. A few blocks south, Mort Zuckerman was getting underway on 250 West 55th Street. In the distance stood the new Times headquarters, and across the street the still mostly-empty 11 Times Square. To the north was the Time Warner Center, and most telling of all, 3 Columbus Circle--another 1920s beauty built for General Motors, shoddily reclad in glass during the last boom by Joe Moinian, an effort to modernize the building.

Were Mr. Steel standing on the other side of Midtown, say atop the Bloomberg Building, he could point to almost no new development whatsoever besides the tower his boss and Vornado’s Steve Ross had built in 2004. And even then, the top half of that building, like the Time Warner Center, is filled with apartments for the likes of Jay-Z (Time Warner) and his wife Beyonce (Bloomberg). What new development there might be is much closer to 3 Columbus, buildings that have been “refreshed,” than anything built new, from the ground up.

The city wishes this were not the case, but given the vagaries of Manhattan development, from the challenges of clearing out tenants to the cost of construction, the status quo is often the easiest choice for a landlord to make. Developers argue that they need incentives, namely air rights, to do anything more. The number of new buildings could be counted on one hand.

“While new windows and HVAC systems can be installed, the fundamentals of ceiling heights and column configurations are fixed,” Mr. Zucckerman, chairman of Boston Properties and owner of a number of buildings in the area, including the iconic Citicorp Tower, said in an email. “To incentivize owners to empty leased office buildings and replace them simply requires that a much higher density be allowed.”

When the city began to look at solutions, the administration was struck by just how severe the situation in Midtown east had gotten. “We did an audit, and we found that 80 percent of buildings were more than 50 years old,” Mr. Steel said of Midtown East, roughly 39th Street to 57th Street, east of Fifth Avenue. “Basically it feels like the 1940s in a lot of places. We just think this should be a showcase place for the city, especially around Grand Central.”

But the city is focusing on much more than just Grand Central, based on a preliminary presentation it gave to community boards earlier this month, with the potential upzoning of the entire area. Still, there is a special focus on the blocks around the train station, as well as along Park Avenue, seen as especially valuable as well as especially outdated.

The entire rezoning might not cover the largest footprint of any the administration has undertaken, but it could well have the largest impact. Stretching to Second Avenue in the 40s and Third Avenue in the 50s, the current study area measures 85 square blocks, roughly 250 acres of the most densely developed property on earth. It is equivalent to about 10 Hudson Yards.

Yet compared to a place like Hong Kong or Singapore, the densities are piddling. “On a macro level, we have to remain competitive on a global basis in terms of creating modern office space,” real estate scion and Association of Better New York chairman Bill Rudin told The Observer. “Back in the ’80s, they shifted the zoning from the East Side to the West Side, and it kept going out to Hudson Yards. But Park Avenue is still very desirous.”

Steven Spinola, executive director of the Real Estate Board of New York, put it in even more stark terms. “Right now, our buildings top out around 50 stories,” he said. “Why shouldn’t they top out around 80 stories? They do in a lot of other great cities.” According to one much-discussed proposal, they could, with air rights jumping as much as 50 percent in certain areas.

An initial proposal is to be released on July 11, and the city hopes to begin the arduous public review process by the first quarter of next year—just before the notorious countdown clock at City Hall blinks off.

It all starts with Grand Central. (Getty)

There are those who fear that the city is putting the cart before the conductor. One of the big arguments for rezoning Midtown East is the arrival of East Side Access, which will usher the Long Island Railroad into Grand Central by the end of the decade (assuming no further delays). The Second Avenue subway might someday reach the area as well. But at the same time, the city has made massive infrastructure investments in areas like Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center site, where the Related Companies and Silverstein Properties struggle to find tenants. These expenditures, for expanding the 7 train and rebuilding ground zero, were partly based on the argument that Midtown had seen its day.

The case for reviving it is good, but not at the cost of these other areas, the thinking goes.

“The public is spending billions of dollars at Hudson Yards and ground zero, and for good reason,” Raju Mann, a former city planner and member of Community Board 5, said a recent meeting of the board. “We haven’t even seen what these projects have produced yet, so how can we be sure what’s appropriate for Midtown East?”

And yet developers outside of Midtown East areas are not worried, pointing out that the city’s proposal could take years, if not decades, to come to fruition.

“My first reaction was to be concerned about it, but the more I thought about it, it’s a really long-term proposition,” Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, told The Observer. He said the proposal could even be self-defeating. “It will also make these buildings more valuable, just perceptually, which will drive up the building cost,” he said. “That means they cost more to trade and assemble the sites, and by the time you’ve done all that, you may not be able to afford to replace the buildings.

Larry Silverstein shared this sentiment at the topping out of 4 World Trade Center on Monday, his shiny new office building that remains half empty. “My hunch is, we’re going to do fine,” he said, pointing to the drift of New Yorkers to both live and work in Downtown and Brooklyn.

There are other demographic shifts afoot, as well, though, that could undermine the success of the city’s plan. If one area has flourished during the past few years it is not Midtown East or Hudson Yards but Midtown South. As financial firms, with their love of shiny buildings and vast trading floors, have retrenched, the city’s tech sector has flourished, and it largely prefers old buildings to new. Even those firms moving to Midtown, like Facebook and Twitter, are setting up shop on Madison Avenue, filling spaces that are more Mad Men than Blade Runner. “We don’t know what the office of the future will look like yet,” Mr. Mann said.

Mr. Rudin pointed out that the two do not have to be mutually exclusive. “We need office space of all types for all types of tenants,” he said. “The important thing is that we plan for the future.”

The past is an issue, as well, as some preservationists worry about taking a full accounting of Midtown’s historic fabric before we begin bulldozing it. “I’ll be the first to admit that just because a building is X years old doesn’t mean it’s worth saving and reusing,” said Peg Breen, president of the Landmarks Conservancy. “But we can’t just plow it all under and build Midtown anew. Why bulldoze the place without seeing what’s there first.”

Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of Columbia University's real estate development program and former head of the Department of City Planning's Manhattan office, warned against knee-jerk preservation in the heart of Midtown. "This is the engine for the entire city," he said. "We cannot freeze it in amber. If we do, we'll end up like Paris, a museum and nothing else." Pro-development types love invoking Paris. It is the bête noire of businessmen the world over, apparently.

Still, the city argues that it is not obsessing over Midtown but instead finally giving it the attention it was used to in the past after a fair amount of neglect. “Really, this is a response to the five borough economic plan, which has focused outside of Midtown more than any administration ever has, I think,” Mr. Steel said.

This could be the case in more ways than one, as some traditional Midtown heavyweights, like SL Green, have felt neglected amidst the city’s westward expansion. Earlier this month, The Journal revealed that the city’s largest commercial landlord had teamed up with Hines, another player who has mostly developed along Third and Lex, to replace a clutch of turn-of-the-century buildings immediately west of Grand Central, on 42^nd Street between Madison and Vanderbuilt avenues. The city freely admits that it is working with local stakeholders to craft its plan but denies that they are the ones sketching it out.

"We will listen to what our partners in the private sector have to say, as well as the community, but this is definitely the mayor and his team's plan," Mr. Steel said. One City Hall source even called it "Bob Steel's baby," the marquee project of the deputy mayor since he joined the administration two years ago.

425 Park, in its prime. (Eral Soto)

One need look no further than 425 Park Avenue for proof of the problems with Midtown’s current zoning. One of those bland mid-century grandees, all flat glass planes, it was completed in 1958 and spans an entire block on Park. David Levinson, a partner at L&L Holdings, would tear down the 32-story behemoth if he could and replace it with something better. He is in the rare position of owning a building that will be empty of tenants coming 2015—normally a bad thing, were L&L not set on ridding itself of the low ceilings and column-choked spaces that fill the space.

“It’s an entire block-front on Park Avenue, and that opportunity hasn’t existed in my lifetime,” Mr. Levinson said with relish.

But he is confronted with the challenge of the zoning having changed three years after his tower was built, and were he to replace it, he would be left with a much smaller building. It is a problem faced by landlords all across Midtown East.

His clever real estate attorneys have determined that he could demolish all but the bottom quarter of the building and build up from there, getting as close to a new building as one could hope for. He has convened a private competition between 10 of the world’s top architects to solve this vexing problem.

Naturally, his fingers are also crossed that the city might solve this problem for him. “The zoning does not make this easy, but that’s the way it is, and we’re going to comply with that,” Mr Levinson said, “unless something changes.”

It might, and it might not. According to city planning sources, the proposal could get downsized to include only the immediate blocks surrounding Grand Central. There are almost 2 million square feet in development rights that once belonged to the Penn Central Railroad, currently owned by a little-known firm called Argent Ventures.

The city would add to that pot by a few million square feet, selling off the extra air rights, which would go to fund improvements to the surrounding streets and the spaces within Grand Central, particularly the local, and long-neglected, subway stations. This would benefit but a few developers owning surrounding properties. City Hall denied it has shrunk its scheme, but also admitted that it has yet to finalize the boundaries.

The administration is stuck between what it wants to build and what it has time to build. With thousands of constituents in Midtown, many with money to make and lose, it would be difficult to realize a sweeping plan within the next 18 months—public review alone takes seven. “I’m not even sure if there is unanimity at City Hall on what to do,” as one top land-use attorney put it. “I hope they can move quickly and not settle for the lowest common denominator.”

Even those critical or wary of the plan want to see it succeed, they just want to see it done right. The Municipal Art Society has long been a champion of Grand Central Terminal, helping to save it decades ago with Jacklyn Kennedy Onassis, and they have taken a keen interest in this project as well. Vin Cipolla, the group's president, hopes the mayor will take time in coming up with a plan, while realizing that if the administration puts it off, the next one might not take it up, either.

"Any plan for this area needs to be carefully balanced and worthy of Grand Central, the Chrysler Building and the Seagrams building," Mr. Cipolla said. "It’s a part of the city where the bar has to be very high."

And so do the buildings.

BluePRint pulls back the curtain on development. (Getty)

One of the more onerous aspect's of developing in New York City is the public review process, known as ULURP, a seven-month gauntlet of meetings and votes and editorializing about one's baby. But just as troublesome can be the act of getting to ULURP, a pre-certification process at the Department of City Planning that can take months, and sometimes even years, as city officials and planners get a project into the shape they want it and running environmental and economic analysis on the project.

The city just popped an aspirin on this development headache, or rather an Aleve, for a new program known as BluePRint, the Business Process Reform. It is meant to streamline the pre-certification process, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel announced at an ABNY breakfast this morning.

"These improvements will save applicants up to $100 million per year in soft costs and carrying costs," Mr. Steel said. "More development means more jobs for New Yorkers, and BluePRint simplifies the way applications are reviewed so those jobs can be created as soon as possible."

Since pre-certification takes place largely behind doors, with many moving parts, there is no set timeline for it, unlike ULURP, which has a seven-month clock for all the parties to act. This has much to do with the size of the projects and how much attention they need, the complexity of a site (over transit or a brownfield and so forth), and other factors.

Still, the Department of City Planning predicts certification will happen up to 50 percent faster for projects and provide a level of certainty for developers by codifying the steps in the process. “The pre-ULURP process has been the most problematic aspect of the public review process for real estate development," Real Estate Board president Mary Anne Tighe said in a statement. "It has been time-consuming, costly and unpredictable."

No longer. An entirely new per-certification review process has been created, which will launch in July. It has fewer steps with published templates and materials meant to help developers and their associates put together their applications. There will also be a new electronic system to increase coordination within the Department of City Planning as well as with outside agencies, a system that will also help developers track their projects.

The program will also aid the city in executing public projects, as well.

Many planners and developers believe that the ULURP process itself needs an overhaul, either because the community group has too little or too much power, but this first step should have developers in a better mood to proceed on these projects. They might even accede to some community demands if so.

Really. Really? (kerry!/Flickr)

Much as we want to be, The Observer is no real fan of the transformation of the Fourth Avenue from grotty auto shops to shoddy "luxury" apartment buildings. As usual, The Journal's Robbie Whelan delivers another brilliant diagnosis for the city's architectural woes, and this time he focuses in on "Brooklyn's Burden."

Sadly, the damage already is done. Fourth Avenue, anchored at the north end by the sublime Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, could have one day become one of New York's grand avenues, a broad street full of life, mixed uses and appealing architecture.

But the Planning Department lacked such foresight in 2003 when it rezoned the noisy avenue to take advantage of the demand for apartments spilling over Park Slope to the east and Boerum Hill and Gowanus to the west. Focused primarily on residential development, it didn't require developers to incorporate ground-level commercial businesses into their plans, and allowed them to cut sidewalks along Fourth Avenue for entrances to ground-level garages.

Developers got the message. With the re-zoning coinciding with the real-estate boom, they put up more than a dozen apartment towers, many of them cheap looking and with no retail at the street level, effectively killing off the avenue's vibrancy for blocks at a time.

The city finally got wise and passed another zoning change last year, correcting some of these mistakes. But it was too late. Walking along parts of Fourth Avenue today is like walking in the suburbs, bereft of the interaction between pedestrian and building, except for occasionally having to dodge a car darting out of a garage.

It closes with one of the strongest damnations of City Planning boss Amanda Burden, who has been honored by most every planning agency and civic group on the planet: "After Mayor Bloomberg leaves office at the end of 2013, Ms. Burden may be replaced as head of the Planning Department as well as chairwoman of the Planning Commission. Let's hope her replacement makes his or her mistakes before taking power."

This was clearly an awful oversight, but how much is Ms. Burden to blame, and how much is this the fault of the system with which she is trapped?

This is precisely why there is a war on landmarks, because so many New Yorkers are clamoring for more historic districts precisely because it is the only means of quality control in the city's "built environment." Just a block up the hill is Fifth Avenue, and the start of the Park Slope Historic District, one of the nicest and most expensive stretches in New York.

The historic district was just expanded for the third time, an outcome that makes developers red and blue. But can you blame the neighbors? When left to their own devices, some of these guys can do no right.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Mr. Whelan's name as "Robby," not "Robbie." The Observer regrets the error.

Reflecting on an AIDS memorial. (AIDS Memorial Coalition)

Happy hour had just ended at the Stonewall Inn on Monday night (2-for-1 well, beer and wine). Rob (dirty martini) and Steve (Budweiser) were sitting at a table discussing the merits of Tom Brady and Eli Manning.

“Brady is better in the pocket, he’s better by the numbers, but Eli just always pulls it out for you,” Scott said. “No pun intended,” he quickly added.

“I think Brady’s better. He’s just past his prime,” allowed Rob.

So they were in agreement, a rarity, they said.

Among the things they disagreed on—Thai food (Rob prefers pad thai, Scott pad see ew), books (Rob thrillers, Scott histories)—was a recent proposal for an AIDS memorial on a triangle of land across from the shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“I think it’s a lovely idea,” Scott said. “It had a huge impact on the gay community, on the neighborhood, on the entire city, and it has never been properly commemorated. This would be the perfect place to remember those who were lost.”

“It’s a big community,” Rob said. “Bigger than just us. We need a space that feels welcoming to everyone. Besides, I don’t like the design. All those mirrors, it looks like something Frank Gehry would do.”

This fight has more color than a rainbow flag.

The AIDS Memorial Park was conceived by Christopher Tepper and Paul Kelterborn, friends with a flair for city planning—Mr. Tepper works at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, Mr. Kelterborn at the Municipal Art Society. They are no strangers to the power of a nice public space. Their inspiration came from a 2010 article in New York magazine, about the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital and the unusual role it played in serving the AIDS community in New York.

“The building standing there being vacant had become a sort of de facto monument to the epidemic,“ Mr. Kelterborn told The Observer.

When Rudin Management, the august real estate family that had been working to turn the hospital into condos for years, revived its plan last spring, the young bucks saw an opportunity and launched the AIDS Memorial Park Coalition to create a proper memorial in New York, something a city long associated with the illness lacks.

But there are those in the Village who have been less than taken with the idea. (This is the Village after all, so everyone has an opinion on what goes on in their backyard.)

The Rudins are rooting for a regular park. (Rudin Management)

“We are a park-starved community,” said Marilyn Dorato, head of the Greenwich Village Block Association. “We need more space for people to just sit out and relax. There is a section of the approved plan that has an AIDS memorial. There is opposition to giving this whole space over to a use like this.”

According to Ms. Dorato—who says she has been called homophobic for her opposition—she lost a number of close friends to AIDS and a memorial would be too painful. “I don’t really need to be overwhelmed with memories all the time,” she said. “That period was really, really dreadful.”

There are those in the gay community who oppose the plan, as well. “I’d rather have a park,” said Scott Colton, head of the 305 West 13th Street Tenants Association. “I don’t think we need to memorialize AIDS.” Ms. Colton felt that many within the AIDS community have been cast aside by what might be called the AIDS Establishment run by gay men.

“What are we memorializing, a disease?” she said. “That was controllable!  What, bad behavior of people who went out and had sex knowing full well that was how it was transmitted with total disregard for the consequences?”

Even some of the old guard oppose the plan, feeling that the memorial is the work of arrivistes. “The AIDS garden was a plan by a group of 20-something men in the gay community,” said Tim Lunceford, an activist opposed to both the memorial and the Rudin plan.

The Rudins are against the memorial for practical reasons: there is concern that altering the plan could reopen the public review process, delaying construction of those condos. The plan is currently under review at the City Council, having won support from the City Planning Commission in January. (It was staunchly opposed in the fall by Community Board 2 while Borough President Scott Stringer conditionally approved of it.) The Council will vote by April.

The developer is sticking to his own park proposal, already approved by the planning commission, though he points out it will have AIDS memorial aspects. “We’ve always been very consistent in the design that we’ve put forth in working with the community, that we have placeholders for commemorative elements reflecting HIV and also the rich history of St. Vincent’s,” Mr. Rudin told The Observer after the commission voted for his plan on Jan. 23.

Among the powerful people backing the memorial is the same planning commission that approved Mr. Rudin’s plans. “Given the past efforts of the applicant on this proposal, I am confident they will continue to work with the community in the future, including those interested in creating the AIDS memorial,” influential chair Amanda Burden said.

Messrs. Tepper and Kelterborn have lined up some influential backers as well, including Whoopi Goldberg, Kenneth Cole and Robert Hammond of the Friends of the High Line, who are on the jury for the memorial design competition, launched in November. Michael Arad, designer of the 9/11 memorial, chaired the jury and has become a de facto spokesman for the project.

An official design was announced on Jan. 30. Called Infinite Forest, it was designed by Brooklyn firm studio a+i and features a stand of birch trees bounded by a triangle of mirrored walls. A nice place for reflection, but not necessarily somewhere to take the kids frolicking on a play date.

The ultimate decision on the fate of the memorial stands with Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who must decide between one of the city’s most powerful real estate barons and the pillar of her political base, the Village’s gay community, not to mention her constituents opposed to the memorial. The community has been demanding numerous concessions from the Rudins for affordable housing, a smaller condo tower and other issues, which could be costly to the developer, and it is possible he and the speaker could come to an agreement on an AIDS memorial that would be far less costly than any of those proposals. A mirrored olive branch.

Then again, city planning officials said that it would be almost impossible to approve the coalition’s design within the current land-use review, setting the development back as much as a year—one promise in the Rudin deal is that the condos cannot open before a new emergency care center or the park space is completed, which is tentatively scheduled for 2014.

This could just be a politically savvy move by two upstarts trying to get a big AIDS memorial built somewhere, anywhere. Get on board with one of the most contentious development fights of a generation and see where it takes you. You win, you win. You lose, you have built up a huge base of support. For her part, the speaker is already hard at work on the issue. A Quinn spokesperson reported diplomatically, “We look forward to working with all parties to ensure the appropriate location and design for an AIDS memorial.”

mchaban@observer.com

eknutsen@observer.com