By Kim Velsey 3/01 5:15pm

Rezoning

Grand Central Station: an example of balancing progress and preservation well. (TravelJapanBlog)

The Station that Started It All: How Grand Central Embodies the Battle Over Midtown East

When the plan to rezone Midtown East was revealed last year, there was much excitement and much grumbling, but the outlines of the battle to come lacked definition. In retrospect, it seems so inevitable: how could the conflict over the heart and soul of the city’s central business district take any shape but that of progress versus preservation?

It is a conflict that haunts, if not defines, every land use debate in the city, and a particularly fitting one for Midtown. The district developed around, and largely because of, Grand Central station—a building that not only epitomizes the conflict, but helped to define it. Read More

By The Editors 10/09/12 7:33pm

Editorials

Midtown, Reimagined

Mayor Bloomberg’s push to transform the area around Grand Central Terminal may or may not be the sort of legacy project that chief executives embrace on their way out the door.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the mayor’s motivations are. What matters is that it’s a visionary proposal to bring the eastern portion of Midtown into the 21st century.

If the City Council approves the mayor’s rezoning plan, an area bounded by 39th Street and 57th Street east of Fifth Avenue will be transformed over the coming years. The neighborhood’s aging buildings will be replaced by towers that will soar higher than some of the East Side’s iconic landmarks, including, perhaps, the Chrysler Building. The rezoning plan would rewrite current rules that have limited the height of buildings in the areas.

Potential construction projects could add enough office space to house 16,000 additional workers and would bring a 21st century look and feel to a district that threatens to become tired and outdated in the coming decades. The mayor would like to have the plan in place by the time he leaves office at the end of next year, but that would require City Council approval by next October.

There’s no guarantee that Mr. Bloomberg will get his way on this, but the council’s rejection of the plan would be unfortunate. Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/07/12 10:49am

In the Rezone

11 Photos

Keeping It Contextual

Keeping It Contextual: City Planning Commission Approves Rezonings in West Harlem, Bed-Stuy

It was a busy day at the City Planning Commission Wednesday. Not only did the commissioners debate the upzoning of the Chelsea Market, which they unanimously approved, but they also approved the downzoning of two historic neighborhoods, West Harlem and Bed-Stuy. The contextual rezonings seek to limit development on side streets, which tend to be chock-full of 100-year-old brownstones, while directing new development—with affordable housing!—to the broad avenues running through the neighborhoods. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/23/12 5:12pm

Best Laid Plans

They want more to look at. (Getty)

City Planning Says It Is Not Rushing Midtown Rezoning, Though It Has Good Reason to Act Fast

Earlier this week, Councilman Dan Garodnick called on the Department of City Planning to slow down the planning for the new Midtown East rezoning that would add possible a dozen new skyscrapers to the Manhattan skyline. The argument was that with such an important rezoning—the city’s fate as a competitive marketplace hangs in the balance!—more time was needed to consult all the parties and get the plan right.

For essentially the same reasons, the department is now arguing that it cannot wait. Time is of the essence to get these new projects underway. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/22/12 9:30am

Best Laid Plans

Lofty goals. (Trinity Real Estate)

Circling Hudson Square: Everybody Wants a Piece of the Last Untouched Neighborhood—Except for Those Who Just Want To Be Left Alone

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. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/20/12 6:12pm

Best Laid Plans

5 Photos

Hudson Squared Off

Hudson Square Hallejujah: City Planning Certifies Trinity’s Transformation of Sleepy Neighborhood

Time to pray to the zoning gods. As expected, Trinity Real Estate brought its big plans to the City Planning Commission today—it is the largest private rezoning ever undertaken. The plan to bring residential development to the quiet blocks just west of Soho was met with quiet approval from the commission, though a few members of the zoning board expressed concern over whether or not a private applicant, and not the city, should be undertaking such a project. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/16/12 8:20pm

Best Laid Plans

The neighborhood New York forgot. (Hudson Square Connection)

Hudson Square Rising: Last Corner of Undeveloped Manhattan Starts Rezoning Process Monday

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. Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/25/12 8:30am

It Takes a Village

Not in our back quad! (GVSHP)

Ivory Sours: Late to Class, NYU Professors Fail at Blocking So-Called Sexton Plan, Hope for Extra Credit

Last Thursday, as has happened every day for going on a century, a couple middle-aged intellectuals gathered around a table in Greenwich Village to discuss the news of the day, which, as has happened every day for going on a century, did not suit them.

“They act like it’s a no-brainer,” Mark Crispin Miller explained of the acquaintances he had made in recent months in his quest to stand up to his employer and landlord, New York University. Just two days prior, a committee of the City Council, part of the monolithic “they” Mr. Crispin Miller was railing against, approved the university’s 2 million-square-foot expansion plan, which would plant four sizable buildings just across the street.

“‘Of course it’s going through,’ they tell you,” he said with disgust. “‘She’s running for mayor, she needs the support of the real estate industry, you moron.’” She would be Christine Quinn, Speaker of the City Council, without whose blessing almost nothing happens there. Her district also happens to be just around the corner, giving her added incentive to take an interest in, and credit for, the project.

“This is a no-bullshit city,” Patrick Deer interjected with his British crack. “Even if we see something’s off from across the street, we’ll barge in and do something about it. There’s an innate sense of justice. Or so I thought. I know there was when I got here.” Mr. Deer has been at NYU since 2002, teaching English. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/27/12 2:37pm

In the Rezone

Right-sized on Broadway. (DCP)

West Harlem Shuffle: Scott Stringer Approves Low-Rise Rezoning He Called for Five Years Ago

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

By Matt Chaban 6/07/12 9:00pm

Best Laid Plans

Needs work. (Globe Images)

Is Midtown Too Small? City Planning Outlines Ideas for Adding (Much) Taller Towers

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