Gene Kaufman's latest hotel: surprisingly not awful!

Gene Kaufman is not a beloved New York City architect. Though his buildings, and especially his hotels, are becoming ubiquitous across Midtown Manhattan, the very mention of his name is enough to inspire rage across the blogosphere. (Curbed's commenters, in particular, are not too fond of Mr. Kaufman, calling him, among other things, a "prick," "hack," "negligent human being," "pathetic excuse for an architect" and, of course, "terrorist.")

So it is with great relief that, as The Observer strolled past his latest construction site on 54th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, we noticed something unusual: 237 West 54th Street ain't half bad!

The building's skin has not reached the top, but it has risen high enough that we know what it will look like when it's finished. And for New Yorkers accustomed to his narrow, high-rise hotels with façades punctured by PTAC units and bargain-basement postmodern or historicist designs, Mr. Kaufman's staid gray brick and distinctly air conditioning grille-free Hilton Hotel comes as a welcome surprise.

"By Kaufman standards," wrote one forum-goer at Skyscraper Page, "this is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Maybe one of the interns designed it." Another noted that the design is "kind of snoozeville, but I like that it breaks up the glass monotony that the two towers on either side have created"—the two neighboring towers being Boston Properties' office tower at 250 West 55th Street, and Granite Broadway's 1717 Broadway, which will house two Marriott hotels.

Kaufman's not-awful hotel still exposes the naked lot line wall of 1717 Broadway, its newly built neighbor.

The building isn't perfect, though, as it still sits back a few yards on the lot, leaving an awkward gap between the building's face and the sidewalk, and exposing the unadorned lot line walls of the neighboring structures. This front set-back, as The Observer previously reported, is due to a combination of zoning rules that prevent buildings from rising straight up from the sidewalk, and the financial pressure to maintain uniform floor plate depths in order to keep design costs low for the bargain chain hotel builders (Joseph Moinian and Starwood Capital are developing the project).

Still, for an architect as maligned as Gene Kaufman, a building as inoffensive as 237 West 54th Street is a huge step in the right direction. Given the hotel boom Manhattan is going through, we'll likely be seeing a lot more of Mr. Kaufman's designs, so hopefully this newfound grace is not a fluke. Maybe he could even share his newfound design secrets with fellow cheap New York City hotel builders Peter Poon and Sam Chang?

The architects of the neighboring pre-wars probably didn't imagine their lot line walls would still be exposed 100 years later (TripAdvisor)

Standing on Sixth Avenue and peering west down 26th Street, one is greeted with a familiar Manhattan sight: a sheer wall of buildings, flanking the street on both sides. But look a little closer, and a gap emerges in the street wall at 125 West 26th Street, with the blank brick walls and sparsely-placed, unadorned lot line windows of the neighboring pre-wars peeking out from the sides.

This wouldn't be unusual if it was an empty lot—something a developer was sitting on until the time was right to build—but approaching the gap, it becomes clear that there is already a building there, and a tall one at that—a Holiday Inn. It just doesn't meet the sidewalk.

Tall, narrow, strangely setback hotels have been sprouting like weeds across the lower half of Manhattan these last few years, their builders rushing to fill the city's seemingly insatiable demand for hotels of all kinds. In 2011, developers added 4,404 new hotel rooms to the city’s existing 74,025 rooms, according to The New York Times. At 5.9 percent, it was the highest annual increase on record.

Which explains the hotels, but why are they all set back from the street wall, sticking out like sore thumbs and violating a central tenet of good urban design?

According to Robert Cook, a land use attorney at Anderson Kill & Olick, the decision by developers to build these odd-looking towers is driven, like all things real estate, by two considerations: economics and zoning.

"From the owner and developer's perspective, it's much less expensive to build and maintain a building that goes straight up," Mr. Cook told The Observer, "and this is particularly important for hotels, because they can get a cookie-cutter layout on each floor. This way, they don't have to work around the issues of where the core is going to go," as they would if the building has a setback above a certain height.

When combined with New York City's notoriously fickle zoning code, the financial pressure to build uniform floor plans can yield some awkward results.

If a building meets the sidewalk, it must step back to respect the sky exposure plane (Dept. of City Planning)

The crux of the zoning issue is the Department of City Planning's rules about what is known as the "sky exposure plane." When a building rises straight up from the sidewalk, the architect must often set the building back on floors higher than 85 feet, or about eight stories—something that hotel builders worried about costs are loathe to do, as it would require different floor plans above the setback.

To get around this restriction, builders can use what's known as "tower regulations." Builders are allowed to violate the sky exposure plane, Mr. Cook explained, so long as the structure doesn't occupy more than about half the lot and the base of the building is pushed back at least fifteen feet from the sidewalk (or ten feet on wide streets). In other words, developers can build straight up as tall as they'd like, without having to vary the size of the building's floor plates.

Buildings using tower rules (or another called the "alternate front setback" rule, which mandates a similar gap between the sidewalk and the structure) can also sometimes qualify for the "plaza bonus," which allows structures to have more floorspace if they include a public plaza in front of their buildings. These plazas have largely fallen out of style among urban designers, but the incentives to build them remain in effect in New York City's 1961 zoning code—a code which has been tweaked in the intervening years, but never fully overhauled and replaced.

The 85-foot upper setback rule is meant to allow light and air to reach the street, but the idea that buildings should narrow above this height is a modern one, and not one that pre-war builders followed. The Four Points by Sheraton at 158 West 25th Street, for example, is surrounded by 12-story pre-war buildings with no setbacks, something that would be illegal today. A Hampton Inn at 116 West 31st Street sits directly across the street from a 16-story loft building dating to 1912. Shooting straight up from the sidewalk for its full height, it is about twice as tall as a building without setbacks is allowed to rise today.

The Fruit Roll-Up on on West 37th (New York YIMBY)

Gene Kaufman and Peter Poon are the architects of choice for Manhattan's set-back hotel builders. Their designs are often pilloried on the city's real estate blogs, earning comparisons to lunchbox treats.

"Besides the lack of windows, the front of the building is bifurcated by what appears to be an enormous Fruit Roll-Up," New York YIMBY's Nikolai Fedak wrote of Mr. Poon's Courtyard by Marriott at 307 West 37th Street. The design deficiencies of Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Poon's hotels are only magnified by their awkward size and placement on the lot.

Nor is criticism limited to the nether-reaches of the blogosphere.

"I think those dinky hotels are something of a blight," Vanity Fair architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in an email after being contacted by The Observer. Mr. Goldberger dubbed them "this decade's version of the 'sliver' apartment buildings that went up a generation ago, when developers were sneaking mini-high rises into townhouse-sized parcels."

Should the Department of City Planning decide to do something about these "sliver hotels," it has two options: do away with the required setbacks above 85 feet (or at least raise the height at which these setbacks are necessary, for example in areas where pre-war buildings are already violating the rule), or stop allowing developers to take advantage of the alternate front setback rule and tower form.

In recent years New York City planners have begun to address the issue, but only across relatively small areas and in response to private rezoning applications. For example, in a district encompassing the mid-block portion just south of Penn Station, for example, the code requires builders to meet the sidewalk and set back above a certain height. The Department of City Planning's summary page highlights one of these sliver hotels as something the new zone would prevent, though the featured building is not actually within the rezoning area.

The Hudson Square rezoning, initiated in response to a request by Trinity Church, a large landowner in the neighborhood, will also forbid such hotels set back from the lot line.

But for the Manhattan landowners who don't have the clout to get their own personal rezonings, the old rules stay in effect, and the set-back sliver hotels will continue to rise.

The next Boom Boom Room? (Real Deal)

Gene Kaufman, the swankest architect in town, went before the Landmarks Preservation Commission yesterday to try and win support for an addition atop the Hotel Chelsea, which Mr. Kaufman is redecorating for mysterious developer Joseph Chetrit. Tenants, who have lodged numerous complaints about the renovations, are especially concerned about a rooftop addition that they fear will become an all-night party spot. It turns out they have some powerful neighbors who agree.

Every local elected official thinks the rooftop addition is a bad idea, and they submitted testimony to the commission saying so. Signed by Congressman Jerry Nadler, Borough President Scott Stringer, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, State Senator Tom Duane and Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, the letter (attached in full below) condemns the addition as a bacchanalia waiting to happen.

While we realize the effects of the proposed rooftop addition might have on existing tenants is not entirely within LPC’s purview, the tenants will nevertheless lose the use of the rooftop space and have a wall covering the windows of some apartments. This will result in a tremendous loss of light and air to the existing occupied rooftop apartments. If the proposed rooftop addition becomes an eating or drinking establishment, which seems likely, the noise levels will also have a negative impact on the existing tenants as well as residents in the adjacent buildings.

They don't find the structure very attractive, either.

The proposed materials of stucco, aluminum, and glass are not contextual with the original façade, the rooftop’s brick masonry, and the slate cladding, all of which will be obstructed or obliterated by this addition. Moreover, the roof’s historic William A. Underhill brick pavers, which are embedded with bronze plaques, would be trampled by this addition. This incongruous structure is an affront to the building’s overall appearance and will be visible from West 24th Street and the east side of Seventh Avenue. There is a clear case that this modification would detract from the historic character and qualities of the building which make it such a prominent landmark.

An affront! Well, lucky for them, the commissioners agreed, according to Curbed. While they found some elements of the renovations to be appropriate and tasteful, even, the cabana up top gave them particular pause. The project has been sent away for more exploration, and likely alterations. It will be curious to see if anything al fresco is approved.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Chelsea Hotel Group Testimony Final

"We will fall," sang the Stooges. (The Real Deal)

When Joseph Chetrit bought the Chelsea Hotel, there was widespread fear of what would become to the grand old dame. Would she lose her quirks and charm, the characteristics that made this The Chelsea? The Real Deal got a look around the redbrick behemoth on 23rd Street recently, and it looks like the answer is a definite yes.

In the past few days, the demolition has begun in earnest. Workers have gutted the east wing of the building's seventh floor, an area once inhabited by novelist William S. Burroughs and actor Ethan Hawke, residents said. A visit by The Real Deal yesterday revealed that walls, doors and fixtures have been removed, leaving piles of wood and debris in their place.

The problem of missing art at the Chelsea has been a longstanding one, something the hotel's house blog, Living with Legends, has been cataloging for some time, including these photos of a denuded lobby. Given that architect Gene Kaufman had called the project a "subtle" renovation, it's good to know he can be so soft with a sledgehammer.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

As you can see in these new renderings provided by the building's architect, Gene Kaufman, it has light up balconies that will shimmer at night, bringing a bit of that dance-club flare back to the cleaned up thoroughfare. This is not the first time Kaufman has designed a hotel that twinkles in the night, either.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo