Rezoned!

This afternoon, the City Council voted to approve the Hudson Square rezoning. The rezoning—a plan five years in the making that allows for the creation of a denser, mixed-use district with significantly more residential and retail development—is now in effect. Bordered by Tribeca and Soho, there's little doubt what the rezoning will mean for Hudson Square's future. Behold New York's next hot neighborhood.

Full Council approval was largely a formality after the Council's land use and zoning and franchise committees voted to approve the plan last week, but it was significant: the last step in a lengthy approval process that will transform a neighborhood currently characterized by old printing plants and quiet sidewalks.

The rezoning process—initiated by Trinity Real Estate and the largest privately-initiated rezoning in the city—was largely uncontroversial. Nonetheless, Trinity had more to gain from the rezoning than any other developer, given that the church owns roughly 40 percent of the neighborhood, an area that is bounded by Houston and Canal streets to the north and south, Sixth Avenue and Washington Street to east and west.

But even the proposal's detractors admitted that the existing zoning was problematic and needed to be overhauled—it barred residential development but not hotel/condo towers (like the much-maligned Trump Soho). Moreover, the neighborhood has, in recent years, drawn a number of tech and media companies to its loft-like commercial spaces, increasing demand for dining and nightlife options.

Nonetheless, the Trinity plan was altered considerably since it was first proposed. As a condition of City Council approval, the land use committee negotiated changes to increase affordable housing (the rezoning is expected to bring between 2,000 and 3,000 new apartment units to the area) and open space funding. The Council also garnered an agreement with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to vote on the northern section of the South Village Historic District by the end of the year—an area that many (including the city's own impact report) say will be adversely affected by spillover development from a newly-rezoned Hudson Square.

The City Planning Commission and Borough President Scott Stringer also made additional changes to the original plan—adding a 444-seat elementary school, reducing the height of the buildings down from 320 feet to 290 feet and requiring special permits for any hotels with more than 100 rooms.

Last week, Community Board 2 chair David Gruber told The Observer that the modified plan was “a win all around." He singled out the landmarking of part of the South Village Historic District, the $5.6 million in open space funds that will go to fix the roof at Pier 40 and more affordable housing as changes that the community was particularly pleased with.

Meanwhile, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has been a rare critic of the plan because of its potential impact on the South Village, faulted the council for not securing landmark hearings for the entire district and for allowing buildings to rise as high as they did.

“The commitment to vote upon landmarking part of the South Village before the end of the year reduces substantially but by no means eliminates the negative impact this rezoning, as approved, will have,” executive director Andrew Berman wrote in a statement.

Still, the rezoning plan that passed today was rare in its widespread popularity. It was also, to no one's surprise, very popular with Trinity.

"The rezoning has benefitted from the ideas and close participation of the community board, the oversight of the City Planning Commission and the contributions of the Borough President, " Trinity Real Estate president Jason Pizer wrote in a statement. "The result is a winning combination for the neighborhood and the city. Trinity has a long history in Hudson Square and, especially recently, has seen it evolve and grow as a home for many creative companies so important to the city's economy."

Mr. Pizer added that Trinity felt that the rezoning would, as had been intended, "strengthen this vital and dynamic area while preserving its special character."

kvelsey@observer.com

505 Greenwich Street: Not a bad place to retreat to after a humiliating Oprah interview.

All the shame that James Frey endured when his non-fiction memoir on addiction was revealed to be largely manufactured may have hurt his byline, but his bottom line is doing just fine: he and wife Maya have unloaded their third-floor combination condo at 505 Greenwich Street for $3.9 million according to city records (a trustworthy source).

The couple picked up the two units in 2005 and 2008 for a combined total of a bit more than $3.5 million, combining them into one enormous 2,800-square foot four-bedroom.

The condo contains an obscenely large 40-foot by 23-foot living room, more than big enough to gather your closest friends and family and break the news to them that your memoir was mostly fabricated. But then, they probably already knew that.

We're not sure where Mr. and Mrs. Frey are headed—they haven't picked up any new homes in New York City lately, at least under their own names, and we weren't able to reach Mr. Frey for comment. Not that we could believe what he would have told us anyway.

But given Mr. Frey's recent rebound (he's written a couple of novels—marketed as novels—since the Million Little Pieces fiasco), we're guessing it's somewhere nice. Maybe Los Angeles? Back in 2010 Mr. Frey told the New York Post that he was working on an hour-long drama with Mark Wahlberg for HBO about the pornography industry.

"We're going to tell the type of stories no one else has told before, and go places no one has gone before," he said. "Very private places, we imagine." (Perhaps the master bedroom at 505 Greenwich, overlooking the building's zen garden?) Or maybe he'll stay a few nights at Chateau Marmont, but tell everyone he's actually moving in for the next three months?

The buyers, Kenneth Rapp and wife Michelle, should be familiar to those who follow New York real estate: Mr. Rapp is a vice chairman at commercial real estate brokerage CBRE, where he's been since 1988. He was unavailable for comment. But we wish him luck with his new home—may he only be brought to Oprah's couch for good things, as the ancient Chinese proverb goes.

What will it mean for development in the South Village? (Trinity Real Estate)

There is no doubt that the Hudson Square rezoning, if and when it is approved, will reshape what is arguably the last remaining swath of downtown Manhattan's formerly industrial landscape. Preservationists, however, are not concerned with the fate of the neighborhood's old printing plants, but rather, that of the quaint district that borders Hudson Square to the northeast.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation claims that development and demolition plans in the as-yet unlandmarked South Village—a chunk of Soho bounded by West 4th to the north, Sixth Avenue to the west, West Broadway to the east and Watts Street to the South—have been speeding up as the rezoning moves through the approval process.

Now they want the city council to withhold approval for the rezoning until the South Village is declared a historic district—a move that would effectively halt Trinity's plans for Hudson Square as the application wends its way through the Landmarks Preservation Commission, where it has formally been under consideration since 2006. A public hearing and vote are still required for Landmarks approval.

"One of these things can be delayed without harm and the other cannot," said GVSHP executive director Andrew Berman.

Mr. Berman cited the creation of the West Chelsea historic district during the West Chelsea rezoning as an example of the city council wielding similar power.

"Speaker [Christine] Quinn has considerable leverage. The question is, 'does she want to use it?' In the past, she's demanded concessions that cost the city millions of dollars," said Mr. Berman, pointing to public schools and funding for affordable housing. The implication being that a vote on a landmarks proposal shouldn’t be hard by comparison

But it's unclear if Ms. Quinn, who has advocated for the South Village Historic District and others in the past would, or even could, mandate the creation of a historic district as a condition of the rezoning.

In response to a question of whether such a step was conceivable, city council spokesman Justin Goodman said that Ms. Quinn did not wish to comment on an under-review application, but that “as with all ULURP applications that come before the Council, Speaker Quinn looks forward to reviewing the proposal and to working to ensure that an open dialogue with all interested parties is maintained."

We couldn't help but wonder, even if Ms. Quinn could stop the rezoning, would a mayoral candidate eager to be seen favorably by the real estate community take steps to stall a popular, largely uncontroversial rezoning because of a landmarking delay in an adjacent neighborhood?

Regardless of the city council's ability, or desire to, mandate landmarking, Hudson Square's spillover development remains a presents a real problem for vulnerable South Village. If the Hudson Square rezoning hasn't already spurred development in the adjoining neighborhoods, it no doubt will. Development in Manhattan is less a delicate dance than a domino effect, a question not of if, but when.

Moreover, the South Village is already wedged between two historic districts (the Soho Cast Iron and the Greenwich Village), which is making it an increasingly popular place for developers to plunk the residential high-rises and hotels that are forbidden on the low-rise streets nearby. While Hudson Square would't have the same restrictions as the Cast Iron district or Greenwich Village, its redevelopment into a happening neighborhood will make South Village that much more attractive.

The GVSHP has amassed a list of non-contextual developments in the proposed historic district which have, like the Hudson Square rezoning, been in the works for some time. Among them is the Children's Aid Society at 209 Sullivan Street—a three-story building that will be demolished and replaced with a 7-story building but could, GVSHP warns, be replaced with a 16-story building under current zoning regulations if the developer so desired (he doesn't). The empty lot at 180 Sixth Avenue, where owners filed plans with the DOB to a build a 14-story residential high-rise this fall, is another area of concern.

Mr. Berman pointed out that he wasn't the only one who believed Hudson Square would spur high-rise development in the South Village: the city's own environmental impact study said that the proposed historic district would suffer a "significant adverse impact from the rezoning."

Whether Hudson Square is already influencing South Village development, or if both the push to rezone Hudson Square and South Village projects are the result of larger economic trends is debatable. But the question of whether it will in the future is significantly less ambiguous.

kvelsey@observer.com

Towers will be slightly smaller than initially proposed following an agreement between the borough president and Trinity. (Trinity Real Estate)

The new towers in Hudson Square are going to look more, well, square.

That is after Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wrangled a deal with Trinity Church to reduce the size of new towers as part of a rezoning the rectors are undertaking in the formerly industrial neighborhood just north of the Holland Tunnel. This was among the concessions extracted by Mr. Stringer before giving the project his conditional approval, which he signed yesterday as part of the rezoning's public review process.

The buildings will be a bit wider, though, so as not to lose their density, but they can only rise to 290 feet, rather than 320 feet. Stocky towers instead of slender spires, basically. But that is in many ways fitting with the areas already stolid building stock of former printing plants, which typified the neighborhood for a century before it became a popular haven for Soho expats and minor celebrities (hello James Gandolfini and Lou Reed!). 

Hoping to capitalize on the newfound popularity of the neighborhood, Trinity's rezoning seeks to add housing stock to what was primarily an warren of offices and light industry—albeit a still very popular one, with the likes of Viacom, Edelman, Saatchi, New York magazine and the Daily News among the media and tech firms calling the area home. The rezoning calls for creating between 2,000 and 3,200 new apartments spread across some 20 possible development sites.

To help sop up all those new residents, or at least their kids, the borough president has also redoubled the call for a new school, which Trinity has tentatively committed to. He also wants more opportunities for open space in the district to accommodate the new residents, which should be undertaken with consultation from the community, Mr. Stringer said.

“I am proud today to announce my recommendation for conditional approval of the Hudson Square Special District, which will address many long standing community concerns,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement. “I believe the modifications agreed to today will bring this proposal further in line with sound planning and community preferences.”

Another big piece of the agreement is the elimination of an area known as Subdistrict B, that would have restricted building heights near to the Holland Tunnel. Some landlords within the area, most notably Edison Properties, had complained about Trinity telling them what to do with their properties. Now those developers could seek taller towers, such as one Edison has proposed for a lot it owns near the Holland Tunnel.

Trinity has also agreed to the Borough President's request that any hotels with more than 100 units require a special permit, a provision meant to limit hotel development (while also giving the hotel worker's union sway through the City Council over any new towers).

“The proposed modifications will help to align the proposed rezoning with community concerns,” Mr. Stringer said. "I am pleased that Trinity Church was willing to not only provide a new public school prior to ULURP commencing, but agreed to work to address outstanding issues."

For its part, Trinity is satisfied with the changes.  "I wish to thank you for your thoughtful suggestions for modifying the proposed Special Hudson Square District and your recommendation that the proposed Special District be approved," Trinity Real Estate president Justin Pizer wrote Mr. Stringer on Monday in a letter the company shared with The Observer. "Your recommendation is a vote for the balanced growth of Hudson Square as an active mixed-use community."

Next, the rezoning will have to be approved by the City Planning Commission, followed by the City Council, which has the final say. Previously, the local community board gave a conditional disapproval to the project with many of the same open-space and height concerns that Mr. Stringer reached an agreement on. Their anxieties may well have helped him strike this deal.

Now if only anyone could do something about all the honking from the tunnel traffic.

Correction: Edison Properties' site is not within Subdistrict B. Rather, this was a carve out meant to protect a row of historic rowhouses in the area that might actually now be susceptible to demolition and redevelopment. The reason for this exception was not immediately clear (The Observer has put in a request to the Borough President's office for clarification). Meanwhile, a rep for Edison explains that the firm is still dissatisfied with the rezoning and will be testifying about the firm's reservations tomorrow.

Going up? (Trinity Real Estate)

Hudson Square today. (Skyscraper City)

We know that the reason there are no skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan has nothing to do with bedrock and everything to do with development patterns. And it is development that will alter that skyline once again. Trinity Real Estate recently unveiled their plans to rezone Hudson Square, the last undeveloped corner of Manhattan just west of Soho, north of Tribeca, south of the Village. As those neighborhoods would suggest, it is a place ripe for development. Just beware of over-development.

That is the message Trinity delivered when it went to the Community Board last week to present its plan as part of the city's months-long public review process. Our buildings may seem big, but they could be bigger, as a presentation reported Curbed reveals (there will also be gourmet chocolate!). Trinity furnished The Observer with their key slide making this case, which shows towers pushing 500-600 feet in the neighborhood. Compare that to the roughly 200-foot skyline now, the Trump Soho not withstanding.

It is true, current zoning has no height limits, meaning clever developers could build even higher. At the same time, residential development is currently barred, so there would be limited reason to build bigger (a big office tower, or more likely, hotel is  possible regardless of the rezoning—see: Trump Soho).

All the same, even with a 320-foot height limit, these towers will top their hulking industrial neighbors. Another striking revelation from these renderings is just how many development sites there are in the district. As we previously reported, the city is looking at at least a dozen new buildings, but it's always hard to conceive of just how many that is until you see a visual like this.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. In fact, it is quite exciting. Manhattan is a place of skyscrapers, and we will need more to house everyone moving here, especially given an affordable housing within the rezoning.

It kind of helps fill out the science fiction future where Manhattan is just one giant skyscraper district.

Lofty goals. (Trinity Real Estate)

Last Friday night on far west Spring Street, the Ear Inn was crowded as usual. A mix of neighborhood regulars and happy-hour-indulging co-workers from the nearby loft buildings—architects, ad execs, programmers, writers—were crammed around the mahogany bar imbibing. Others were gathered outside around benches on the uncrowned sidewalk two blocks from the West Side Highway.

The bar has been there for 195 years, but forget asking for some sort of mixological cocktail that could be found at hundreds of establishments citywide pretending at this sort of authenticity. Above the bar, beyond the shelves of dusty liquor bottles, are glass carboys, ruddy green and brown glass, the size of harbor buoys. They held wine more than a century ago and disappeared into the bowels of the basement, only to be excavated in the 1970s when the bar was made over by a band of eccentric artists. One of their rank tended bar until five years ago. He has since moved upstate. Things change, then they don't.

“We’ve gotten the holy trinity of Pret a Manger, Starbucks and Hale & Hearty soups, but otherwise the neighborhood looks the way you imagine it did 100 years ago,” said James Parvin, a segment producer at NBC who lives in a loft he converted himself on nearby Charlton Street.

With the exception of those at the Ear Inn and down the block eating at 508 Restaurant & Bar, by 7 o’clock the surrounding streets had largely emptied out. The only real activity was the wall of cars creeping, honking, into the Holland Tunnel. Empty is how the streets would largely remain until 7 o’clock Monday morning, when the workers would begin filing back into their postindustrial warrens along Hudson and Varick Streets.

This is how vast swaths of downtown Manhattan used to look, dead in all but daylight, from Soho to Chelsea to the Financial District. Hudson Square, as developers began calling the area bounded by Houston Street, Sixth Avenue, Canal Street and the river in the 1980s, is all that is left. Or all that was.

Nothing but blue skies that I see. (gsz/Flickr)

On Monday Afternoon, the City Planning Commission certified a carefully crafted rezoning scheme furnished by Trinity Real Estate, the property management arm of the city’s oldest church, and once its largest landowner. Trinity’s holdings have been winnowed down over the years, confined largely to the plots it owns in Hudson Square.

For the past five years, Trinity has been devising a plan to turn a number of sites it controls in the area into housing, that most lucrative of New York City real estate ventures. Along the way, it has created the largest private rezoning in city history, twice the size of the massive 26-acre Hudson Yards development 40 blocks to the north, three times the size of Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus.

“Mixed-use communities, such as the Flatiron District and Union Square, which are attracting new businesses and residents, contribute significantly to the dynamic appeal and economic vitality of the city,” Jason Pizer, president of Trinity Real Estate, said in statement Monday. “The proposed rezoning would reinforce Hudson Square as a vital hub for the jobs which are so integral to the city’s future.” Trinity declined to publicly discuss the project until it goes before the local community board next month.

Will this effort really be able to transform the last untouched corner of Manhattan, to make it look, feel and behave like the rest? An earlier rezoning along Renwick Street a decade ago saw a spate of new condo projects that would portend much of the development that swept the city in the ensuing years. Philip Johnson’s last building is here, the Urban Glass House, completed after his death. His modern lofts were, until a few months ago, uniformly selling for less than the bankers and lawyers and foreigners had been paying when they first moved in a few years prior.

One of the most quietly beautiful couples in the entire city, Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, traded Park Slope—Park Slope!—for Hudson Square. Now they are reportedly leaving, their West Street penthouse on the market for $8.5 million. Their neighbors include John Slattery, James Gandolfini and that other fabulous couple Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. All have said they were drawn here because of the quiet of this unassuming neighborhood, so hard to find anywhere else these days.

“We’ve gotten pretty used to construction over the past decade,” Gary Lawlor, an Ear Inn bartender for twice as long, said. “That hasn’t changed anything, so I don’t think some more new buildings will, either.”

The question has become: How much say should any one entity have over an entire neighborhood?

Arguably (even inarguably) Mayor Bloomberg and his planning commissioner Amanda Burden have exercised the power to reshape the entire city during the past decade, but they were elected and appointed to the job. Carl Weisbrod has Hudson Square almost to himself.

A City Hall hand going back to the Koch administration, Mr. Weisbrod arrived at Trinity in 2005 to run the real estate division. He spent a good part of that time very astutely filling the former printing plants, but his big task was going beyond business. He was focused on the streets, not the C suites. Mr. Weisbrod, who left Trinity last year to become a partner at planning shop HR&A, certainly had the experience. He spent 20 odd years cleaning up Times Square followed by a decade in Lower Manhattan as founding director of the Downtown Alliance. Half that time was spent helping to rebuild after 9/11. Reshaping a neighborhood like Hudson Square would be nothing.

Always a school, always. Here, part of a marquee development on Canal Street. (SHoP Architects)

It is the same thing Trinity has been doing for downtown for more than three centuries. The church was established in 1697 by the grace of King William III. The third church still stands at the top of Wall Street, its 281-foot steeple, completed in 1846, was the highest point in the land until the New York World building surpassed it 54 years later. Real estate has always been at the heart of the church.

Queen Anne made Trinity what it is to this day through the generous land grant of 215 acres, much of it farmland (the annual rent was one peppercorn). Over time, much of that land was given away, granted to churches, schools and other charities, most notably Kings College, today Columbia University. What remains of the church’s holdings is concentrated in Hudson Square.

The area has largely risen and fallen with the tides of the city. After the cows and crops moved on, it became dockland when Manhattan was ringed with piers. When wheels began to replace rudders, Hudson Square became a hub of printing, starting in the 1920s, primarily for Wall Street—contracts, prospectuses, research—though everything from books to greeting cards was common. They were perhaps the very first victims of the digital age.

By the mid-1980s, half of Trinity’s 6 million square feet of industrial space in the neighborhood was bankrupt. The church rectors decided something had to be done. In 1987, Tishman Speyer, building on Trinity’s land, completed 375 Hudson Street. Saatchi & Saatchi, which took nearly half of the 900,000-square-foot building, was the anchor tenant. One by one, the old printing lofts were remade, and many stalwarts of the creative class—MTV, New York magazine, Edelman, Rafael Viñoly architects—followed. Vacancies stand at 5 percent, the lowest rate in the entire city.

It would seem Trinity should be building more office space, but the church is going in a different direction. To attract the kind of vibrant retail that will truly make their tenants’ lives (and their rents) top-notch, some lovely loft apartments would surely help the street life. Many storefronts are perennial losers, especially the restaurants.

Trinity wants to transform some five undeveloped sites it owns, along with up to a dozen it does not, into grand new apartment buildings in the style of the neighborhood’s existing industrial buildings. A number of complex zoning regulations have been proposed. These are meant to maintain the bulky historical look of the area while limiting the slender hotel towers, most notably one bearing the name Trump, that have sprouted in the neighborhood over the past decade. Still, along the avenues, buildings up to 30 stories will be allowed.

In total, the rezoning is expected to create more than 3,000 new apartments in the area, spread across those dozen sites, with the possibility of additional smaller projects. Roughly one in five apartments will be affordable, through development bonuses offered in the zoning. Special measures have been put in place to discourage the demolition of the existing loft buildings or their conversation into apartments. Basically, any office space that is eliminated must be replaced in a one-to-one basis somewhere within the district. Special approvals are also required for new hotel construction.

It is largely the same playbook the Department of City Planning has been honing throughout the Bloomberg years to encourage development, preserve neighborhood character and foster affordable housing. And yet the plan does not sit well with many in the neighborhood, precisely because it is being undertaken by Trinity and not the department itself.

Occupy Hudson Square. (Getty)

Hudson Square has been through a lot in the past few years.

Before the rezoning, there was the hullaboo about the outsized Trump Soho, where 391 “condos” were for sale in the 46-story “hotel.” Residences are illegal in construction zones, so an eventual compromise was reached to restrict owners to 120 days a year at a stretch of no more than 30 days. It was this sort of out-of-context, out-of-bounds development that helped spur on the rezoning.

Then came Mayor Bloomberg with plans for a sanitation garage. The garbage trucks have to park somewhere after all, and the mayor had rightly vowed to stop dumping them all in the outer boroughs, especially the South Bronx. Each borough would have to take its fair share. Messrs. Gandolfini, Slattery and Reed were far from O.K. with this—think of the property values!—and they hosted rallies and benefits, replete with red carpet, even commissioned a local architect to offer an alternative. Mr. Gandolfini was among the plaintiffs of a lawsuit attacking the city for the plan. It passed anyway, and steel currently rises to five stories at the corner of Spring Street and the West Side Highway. Trinity seems to have embraced the building as a mark of the neighborhood’s mixed character.

Then there was the Occupation. One of Trinity’s main reasons for developing all this real estate is to fund the church’s charitable work. In addition to fighting to end apartheid by funding Reverend Desmond Tutu and providing brown bag lunches every Wednesday on the steps of the old church, Trinity gave greatly of money and resources to Occupy Wall Street, including office space in Hudson Square. When the eviction finally came from Zuccotti Park last December, the Occupiers briefly moved into Duarte Park, the future site of that marquee tower. After vandalism and other strains of lawlessness ensued, they were evicted from the space.

Now it is Trinity’s turn to stir things up a little.

At Monday’s planning meeting, some commissioners questioned why it was a private developer, and not the city itself, that was undertaking such a monumental planning effort. “This is a private application that very much looks and smells and feels like a neighborhood rezoning,” Commissioner Anna Levin said. “I’m curious about the degree of interchange between staff and the applicant in taking this up and shaping it. Also, the extent to which other stakeholders and other property owners have been consulted.”

Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the department’s Manhattan office, responded, “Certainly this is a neighborhood rezoning, one put forward by a private applicant. As we have many applications, certainly, with this amount of coverage, there have been discussions with the department. But again, this is a private application, as we want to make clear.”

There are the usual complaints from the neighbors, of course, about schools and affordable housing. The preservationists are worried not only about the integrity of the old loft buildings but also some Federalist-style townhouses sprinkled throughout the district. But the biggest bellows actually come from a number of prominent developers who own land in the area but do not bear the cross.

“The urban design regulations are too generic, they don’t apply well to Hudson Square’s unique grid, and they don’t accommodate the type of development the plan aims to produce.” Anthony Borelli, vice president of planning and development at Edison Properties, told The Observer. His firm owns a parking lot just above the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, a fact that makes its redevelopment difficult, as half the site is unbuildable—dig down for a foundation and you hit the dead space below. But the historical covenants in place make a setback tower impossible.

“On one hand, Trinity’s plan sets a goal for creating approximately 6,000 residential units, including affordable housing, to make the area a vibrant 24-hour neighborhood,” Mr. Borelli said. “But then on the other hand, its urban design regulations make it virtually impossible to achieve that many units or to fully use the city’s inclusionary housing program.”

Gary Barnett, head of Extell Development, placed much of the blame on City Planning. “I’m not sure Trinity really cares,” he said.

"This is a private application that very much looks and smells and feels like a neighborhood rezoning," Commissioner Anna Levin said. "I'm curious about the degree of interchange between staff and the applicant in taking this up and shaping it. Also, the extent to which other stakeholders and other property owners have been consulted."

Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the department's Manhattan office, responded, "Certainly this is a neighborhood rezoning, one put forward by a private applicant. As we have many applications, certainly, with this amount of coverage, there have been discussions with the department. But again, this is a private application, as we want to make clear."

So while the department may get the transformation it wants—the City Planning Commission will vote on whether or not they like the plan in a couple of months—they do not need to expand the resources in crafting it. After all, it has taken Trinity five years to reach this point.

The presentation—provided by the Department of City Planning, which was not responsible for but heavily involved in the rezoning—also gave the first glimpse on exactly what Trinity hopes to achieve. Contextualism is the catch word of the day, with buildings of comparable size to those that already exist in the neighborhood.

Typically, such contextual zonings have involved low-rise neighborhoods, like Park Slope and large parts of Queens. Here, it means massive loft buildings. Along the avenues, projects will be allowed to reach as high as 320 feet while side streets will be limited to 185 feet. But the big twist is new provisions for height and setback requirements, meaning all of these buildings will create uniform facades along the sidewalk in the range of 125 to 150 feet.

This eliminates a spate of new towers, particularly hotels, which have drawn back from the streets leaving empty space around them. Hotels of more than 100 rooms will also be required to get a special permit from the City Planning Commission, a provision meant to encourage residential development.

Planning documents predict between 2,000 and 3,200 new residential units will be created in the neighborhood, most notably at a special site on the corner of Canal and Sixth Avenue. This building will rise to 430 feet, where it is meant to serve as a gateway to the new neighborhood as well as providing a school for the thousands of residents new and old. SHoP architects worked up a teaser rendering for the base of the building, but the real show stopped was a massing diagram that showed a tower with a profile not unlike the Williamsburgh Saving Bank Building in Downtown Brooklyn.

Affordable housing is a major component, and while it will not be included with the marquee tower, it will be included in the rest of the residential development sites through the inclusionary housing program, which grants a development bonus for making 20 percent of apartments affordable. Hundreds of affordable housing units are slated to be created, one of the rezoning's chief selling points.

Soon the Trump Soho will not be the only thing dominating this otherwise low-slung section of Manhattan.

The neighborhood New York forgot. (Hudson Square Connection)

Trinity Church has controlled vast swaths of Lower Manhattan real estate for more than three centuries, since the Queen of England deeded 215-acres to the church in 1705. Much of that property has been given away or sold off, but the church still controls one pocket of land at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, known affectionately these days thanks to developers and brokers, as Hudson Square.

Over the years, the neighborhood has been remade repeatedly, from farmland to factories to the heart of the city’s printing district. More recently, it has become a hub of media and tech firms—Saatchi and Saatchi, New York magazine, MTV, the New York Genome Center—but the church wants to take things a step further and create a 24/7 live-work neighborhood, like neighboring Soho and Tribeca.

For the past five years, Trinity has been working on a rezoning of 50 acres spread over some 20 off-the-grid blocks—the area often feels remote cut off from the rest of the city as it is by the Holland Tunnel. On Monday, it officially begins the public review process, as the City Planning Commission is expected to certify Trinity's in-hourse rezoning proposal.

The area is generally bounded by Sixth Avenue on the East, the Hudson River on the West, Houston Street to the north and Canal Street to the south. The rezoning will be slightly smaller than that, but at twice the size of the Hudson Yards development 40 blocks north, and three times as big as Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus further north from there, it is by far the largest private rezoning the Department of City Planning has ever underwritten.

It is also one of the most complex, with contextual zoning elements meant to preserve the neighborhood character; open space provisions meant to foster more plazas and parks in an area that has almost none; plus schools, affordable housing, even plans for dealing with night clubs, of which there are already a few in the area. The idea is to create opportunities for housing without stymieing the businesses that have already taken root.

A spokesman for Trinity declined to discuss the project until it is officially certified.

Some locals have already complained that height limits for new buildings are already too high while developers outside of Trinity express concerns about their ability to build. The area is home to celebrities, among them James Gandolfini, Jennifer Garner and Lou Reed, as well as ignominy in the form of a coming garbage truck garage all those stars hate. Meanwhile, one of the primest development sites, Duarte Square along Canal Street and Sixth Avenue, has already made headlines.

It is the empty lot, once a temporary art park, that was taken over by Occupy Wall Street following their eviction from Zucotti Park. Initially, Trinity was happy to have the guests until they showed hostility toward their hosts, at which point the NYPD forced them out, and the park has remained locked up ever since.

Hopefully the rezoning will prove to be less contentious.

Correction:A previous version of this post misstated the year the Queen deeded the land to the church. It was 1705, not 1773. The Observer regrets the error.

Looks nicer than your place.

The Post had discovered an ingenious way to live in the heart of Manhattan for a little as $92 a month—just move into Manhattan Mini Storage in West Soho.

On the building’s eighth floor The Post spotted a man sleeping on the ground in front of an open storage unit. The cramped 5-foot by 5-foot unit —which rents from $106 to $213 a month —was filled with dirty clothes and water jugs. By contrast, the average rent for a non-doorman SoHo studio is $2,500.

It's not exactly the Ritz, but it'll work.

At about 2 a.m., a man in a dirty black T-shirt, sweat pants and grubby sneakers with hot-pink trim was spotted taking a two-hour nap inside a rented unit on the sixth floor before leaving and coming back and falling asleep again.

This probably helps explain why a number of local developers are desperate to have Hudson Square rezoned, paving the way for more residential development. Just look at the demand. Not that anyone spending a night at 161 Varick Street could afford to live in any of these new buildings either.

Nor does that make them criminals, though the Post seems to think otherwise.

Legitimate patrons, however, are worried sick that their property is just a smashed lock away from disappearing.

“It’s like walking into a slum,” said Josip Matijevic, 32, a DJ who keeps about $40,000 worth of equipment at the facility. “There are a lot of bad vibes here. I see people without key cards walking in all the time. This is my career in here. I can’t afford to lose any of it.
[...]

"This is where I keep my valuables,” said Shauna Williams, 26, of Canarsie. “You don’t want homeless people to be around your belongings like that.”

Madeline Ames, 28, of Brooklyn keeps $50,000 worth of camera equipment in the facility. “Security is practically nonexistent,” she said.

Since when is being homeless or frugal a crime?

Frenkel & Co., an independent insurance company, has signed a seven-year lease renewal for 39,000 square feet on the fourth floor of 350 Hudson Street for its corporate headquarters, The Commercial Observer has learned.

350 Hudson Street. (Courtesy Property Shark)

Frenkel was represented by Eric Deutsch of CBRE. Trinity Real Estate was represented in-house by assistant vice president of real estate leasing Tom Lynch.

Asking rents at 350 Hudson Street were $49 per square foot. Frenkel’s current lease wasn’t up until 2015. But the firm was interested in making renovations to its current office space and decided to re-up for a new lease, which is now slated to end in 2022.

“They want to improve the space, because they saw themselves being there longer than three years,” Mr. Lynch told The Commercial Observer.

Frenkel initially came to 350 Hudson Street as a subtenant in 2007, and became a direct tenant once that sublease came up in 2010.

Frenkel will be paying a slightly higher rent than what it normally paid, according to brokers familiar with the negotiations.

The deal was finalized earlier this month.

Frenkel was founded in 1878 by German immigrant Emil Frenkel.

The company previously had offices in Tower Two of the World Trade Center when it was forced to evacuate following the September 11 attacks in 2001. Frenkel moved its headquarters to 1740 Broadway while opening a client service facility in Jersey City, New Jersey. It signed a five-year lease for 350 Hudson Street in 2010.

Drosen@Observer.com