Yesterday, super-scribe Steve Cuozzo had a really smart explainer of the Midtown East rezoning (it was almost as smart as ours). There was one point he made, and picked up elsewhere, that was not entirely true. Read More
It’s the moment developers, planning geeks, and perhaps the entire city without knowing it, has been waiting for all year: the unveiling of the city’s plans, first hinted at in the mayor’s State of the City address, to remake the face of Midtown Manhattan.
It is big. No, really big. Bigger than almost anything the city has ever seen. Empire State Building big. While that will not be the case for every tower that is eventually built through the program, it could be for at least a few. Read More
The knives are already drawn for a proposal that might not even happen, a proposed closure of Vanderbilt Avenue to cars. The mayor supports it anyway, and when the City Planning Commission unveils the outlines for its Midtown East rezoning tonight, New Yorkers may have a better idea of what is in store. Or not. Time and again, it has been stated that this maybe-plan is far from certain.
So now is the time to attack it.
The Post has with relish, as should be expected, and so has The Times in its way, tapping its target demographic, the Yale Club, which faces onto Vanderbilt Avenue. Read More
Back in 2007, in order to win his vote for Columbia’s contentious Manhattanville rezoning, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer got the city to agree to rezone the blocks north of the new 17-acre campus as well, a stanch against over development. Today, the borough president gets to vote on the rezoning he requested for West Harlem, and he is touting it as a triumph of community planning.
“This rezoning reflects the input of thousands of stakeholders in West Harlem and five years of work toward crafting a community-based planning consensus that could be a model for the rest of our City,” Mr. Stringer said in an email. “It is a promise kept to the residents of West Harlem—and a proud moment for all who are involved.”
Like many parts of the city, the zoning has not been updated since 1961. The Department of City Planning has created, through a multi-year consultation with the community, a contextual zoning package that will largely maintain the same density of development in the neighborhood while imposing new height limits and street wall requirements to ensure that sliver buildings and other uncharacteristic buildings cannot be built. Read More
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. Read More
What perfect timing our good friend Christopher Gray has. No sooner has the city begun debating in earnest the merits of whether or not Midtown East should be upzoned to allow for ever bigger skyscrapers than The Times’ Streetscapist reminds us that such debates, always fervent, are as old as the skyscrapers themselves, stretching back a century and a half. Read More
How many New Yorkers, after a long day of work, are headed home, a little beaten down, look up and think to themselves, “You know what Midtown needs? Bigger buildings.”
Probably not very many. But this is a question the Department of City Planning and the Bloomberg administration are very seriously considering as they work on rezoning a huge swath of Midtown East, the vaguest details of which were revealed to the land use committees of Community Boards 5 and 6 last night.
The goals of the plan, first revealed, also vaguely, in the mayor’s State of the City address, are quite reasonable. Like it has with so much of the city, from the Far West Side to the Brooklyn waterfront to downtown Jamaica, Queens, the administration wants to revise a set of zoning principals first laid out in 1961, and changed little since.
Meanwhile the world has, as has the city, and in order to stay competitive with places like London, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, Midtown, where 80 percent of buildings are 50 years old or older, must modernize. “We need to think of the global context,” said Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the department’s Manhattan office. Read More
There’s a reason why public transportation exists: so that people don’t have to use cars. Downtown Brooklyn residents have long accepted this reality of urban living and it appears that the Department of City Planning has too.
At Monday’s City Planning Commission meeting, DCP unveiled their latest proposal: a plan to reform Downtown Brooklyn’s off-street parking requirements. The oh-so-creatively titled Downtown Brooklyn Off-Street Parking plan would reduce the current zoning requirements for parking in new developments from availability for 40 percent of residential units to 20 percent. Read More
Can you legislate a storefront? That is what the Upper West Side is hoping. For more than a year, the Department of City Planning worked at a plan to rezone a swath of the once tawdry, now tony neighborhood, to protect the retail character on its main shopping strips. The plan, which has been opposed by local landlords, just won the conditional support of Borough President Scott Stringer. Read More
It turns out a one-liner in Mayor Bloomberg’s State of the City may indeed be one of the biggest development proposals of the waning days of his administration. Last Thursday, the mayor declared, “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.”
At the time, this could have meant any number of things, from tax incentives to a rezoning. The latter would be the most ambitious, but also the most complex, given it would require the demolition of some of the most built-up real estate in the world. According to a spokesperson for the Department of City Planning, the city is studying exactly what the best approach would be for the area, and expects to have the results by the spring, but according to The Journal, a major rezoning, stretching as far north as Central Park, may well be in the works. Read More
