Grand Central: progress vs. preservation. (TravelJapanBlog)

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.

Grand Central Terminal lauded for setting the legal precedent that went on to save landmarks across the city, was actually built over the demolished ruins of another landmark—Grand Central Depot. The Depot, despite its relatively recent vintage (it was completed in 1871) and its popularity (it was second as a tourist attraction only to the Capitol in Washington, according to Sam Roberts's book on the terminal) was destroyed without sentiment in the early 1900s, making way for the Gilded Age beauty that now stands on 42nd Street.

The old Grand Central, demolished to make way for change.

But what of the fact that the mansard-roofed station boasted a "magical" 652-foot-long arch-ribbed-vault train shed, had the largest interior space on the North American continent and provided the backdrop wherein we first set eyes on Lily Bart in the House of Mirth? Pretty details all, but progress called. The electrification of the rails was the way of the future and the depot had to go.

To finance its construction, Grand Central Station pioneered the sale of air rights, a practice that transformed the surrounding neighborhood, which was something of a backwater when Grand Central Station was constructed. Its resultant character—which preservationists are so eager to see maintained—was formed by the forces of development, forces that could care less about the past, or the semi-pastoral quality of the land they so eagerly converted into a business district. Nor did its developers seem to have any illusions that the architects' vision of the final station would be sealed in amber. Engineering provisions were made for the construction of a (never-built) tower over the terminal.

The sale of air rights went on to spur development in neighborhoods around the city. So much so that 100 years later, air rights are the centerpiece of the Midtown East rezoning proposal—the powerhouse that is to drive the neighborhood's next transformation.

It is, of course, no surprise that a new and somewhat radical station would be bedfellows with other new and radical things. Nor is it particularly surprising that some years down the road, when Grand Central was no longer so new or so radical, it would nearly fall victim to those same pro-development forces, who saw it as an impediment to change (and profits).

And so, the symbol of brave progress and growth became a beleaguered old beauty that needed to be protected from greed-induced destruction. For most people, it is this, more recent vision, that springs to mind most readily when one thinks of Grand Central. Jackie O. front and center, that arbiter of taste, defending New York's grand monument. It was, moreover, a historic battle: Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City went all the way to the Supreme Court (the first historic preservation case to do so) and established that the city could use its landmarks law to protect a property from being torn down (that the act was not an unjust taking, but within the land-use regulatory power of government).

In the decades since, landmarking has been used to preserve not only buildings, but an increasing number of pockets within the city. And, after three terms of Mayor Bloomberg's strongly pro-development policies, it has increasingly come to seem like the only real tool that community groups and neighborhoods have to stop (rather than simply modify) unwanted changes. As such, the dialogue between the pro-preservation and pro-development forces has become ever shriller, the two camps now diametrically opposed, in our rapidly changing city.

There are many issues with the Midtown East rezoning besides the preservation of unlandmarked buildings. It is, as a growing chorus of critics have complained, hurtling along very (quite possibly too) quickly. The speed leaves little time to examine its impact or whether the city is selling air rights for too little—giving a generous gift to developers that it can ill afford, particularly considering the costs of transportation and pedestrian upgrades that greater density will require.

But the battle lines have been drawn and now we're all stuck squabbling over the historic significance of buildings in Midtown East. Perhaps this is the only way to hash out a plan that's agreeable to both parties, but if the opposing camps' recent publications are any indication, they seem to be moving farther apart rather than closer together.

This past week, both the Municipal Art Society and Midtown 21C, a pro-development group backed by REBNY, released reports each purporting to be the best visions for the future of Midtown East. MAS's report, entitled "A Bold Vision for the Future" lists 17 buildings that it claims would be prime candidates for landmarking. Midtown 21C's report, entitled "Icons, Placeholders and Leftovers" argues that every building worth landmarking has already been landmarked (hence the focus on placeholders and leftovers).

MAS claims that the vibrancy of the central business district owes much to its current character. Midtown 21C argues that the central business district will cease to have any vibrancy if we stand in the way of its "continuous transformation." MAS sees a district with lots of architecturally and historically significant buildings. Midtown 21C sees a district with lots of dowdy and dated office buildings.

Both groups are right; successful cities are successful precisely because they are a blend of the old and the new, tradition and change, historic buildings and fresh development. We should save truly noteworthy buildings and allow developers to tear down the unexceptional and the outmoded. In the months to come, the city must decide what to keep and what to discard, how to preserve the elements that make Midtown what it is, while clearing away the detritus that's stopping it from becoming what it needs to be. We would do well to consider Grand Central, a model of how development can create beloved buildings and how preservation can save them.

kvelsey@observer.com

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. Critics are concerned about myriad issues, ranging from subway capacity to sanitation. That’s fine—no project of this scale should be without critics and skeptics. The problem is when critics become obstacles simply because they prefer the status quo and when skeptics become cynics who see political agendas lurking behind even the simplest construction project.

Neighborhood residents, building owners and other interested parties should have every opportunity to weigh in on the zoning overhaul. And it surely is important to make sure that infrastructure, including subway capacity, keeps up with the mayor’s ambitions for the neighborhood.

But still, it is important to remember that one of Michael Bloomberg’s enduring legacies is not, in fact, this project or any one project. It is the sense that the city really is moving ahead after decades of crisis management, retrenchment and stabilization. Projects like the East Side rezoning and the Hudson Yards redevelopment project were beyond the city’s ambitions as recently as a decade ago. Under Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure, the city has gotten back to the idea of big dreams and visionary planning. That’s no small achievement.

Other cities around the world are embracing the changes needed to compete and prosper in a century that will be defined by technological change and sustainable development. Mr. Bloomberg has insisted that New York can not remain locked into a 20th century mind-set, whether the issue is outdated zoning regulations or archaic work rules.

The transformation of the East Side would be yet another sign that New York is prepared for today’s challenges—and tomorrow’s.

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."

They want more to look at. (Getty)

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.

In an email statement (in full below, with highlights by us), the department argues that developers need time to to assemble their sites and start building when the restriction preventing new projects before 2017 lapses. Previously, the department had argued that it was not as though all these new buildings would be built overnight, but rather this was a long-term plan that would take decades to fully develop. This raises the question of whether waiting six more months to debate the plan, as Councilman Garodnick and the local community boards are asking for, would really hurt the plan.

"We want to make sure that there is certainty, and we also want to make sure this is done right," Councilman Garodnick said in a statement. "The proposal has merit, and allowing a few more months to what will be a decades-long process would help ensure that all issues are vetted and considered."

The department remains eager to finish this before the end of the Bloomberg administration, though it must also be careful not to anger the Council, which after all has final say on all rezonings.

The purpose of the East Midtown rezoning proposal is to secure the area’s future as a premier business district by encouraging the development of a small number of new, state-of-the art Class A office buildings over the next two decades. Recognizing the fundamental importance of East Midtown to the City’s economic future, the Mayor has made this rezoning a priority for the Administration.

Under the proposed timeline for this project, the first new buildings are not likely to come online until later this decade or next, but this can only happen if we set in place zoning mechanisms now. Adopting a predictable zoning framework in 2013 is a necessary prerequisite for the development of new high-end commercial buildings over the long term. In the near term, property owners need certainty and predictability to make significant financial commitments that will ultimately lead to these new developments. It takes many years to assemble sites, and yet more time to decant, demolish, and prep the site for development. Having the new zoning in place within 2013 will provide the certainty and predictability necessary.

With these new developments will come much needed improvements to both the on‐street and below ground pedestrian networks. We are proposing that major new office towers be required to contribute to a fund for specific and targeted transit and pedestrian improvements in and around Grand Central Terminal that will reduce subway congestion points, increase capacity on platforms and transform Vanderbilt Avenue into a signature pedestrian gateway

As with all of our projects, we have been carefully analyzing the area and meeting with area stakeholders, including the community boards, to discuss the issues and proposed policy solutions so that an appropriate long‐term zoning framework for East Midtown can be created. There is ample time to complete all the necessary review and analyses for this project, and we are committed to continue working closely with the community and other stakeholders as the process moves forward.

Some have compared East Midtown to Hudson Yards, saying that the Hudson Yards rezoning took years before it entered the public review process. East Midtown is a vastly different proposal than the Hudson Yards rezoning, which contemplated a complete transformation of the area equivalent to adding half of downtown Boston’s office space floor area. This was in addition to new streets, parks and open space, more than 14,000 apartments, an expanded Javits Center, a Sports and Convention Center and the extension of the #7 subway. In East Midtown, our proposal is much more targeted—it builds on the existing character of the area and is designed to facilitate a substantially smaller amount of new development.

Any delay of this proposal means uncertainty for East Midtown. Given the importance of East Midtown to the City—for its jobs, tax base, and its critical transportation role—we must put into place a new regulatory framework that strengthens, not stymies, East Midtown’s continued competitiveness on the global stage.

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.

Not in our back quad! (GVSHP)

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.

“It’s amoral, like Mitt Romney,” added Bo Ricobono, an adjunct education professor and Soho lifer active on the community board, which unanimously opposed the expansion.

“You mean immoral,” Mr. Crispin Miller said.

“Not immoral, amoral,” Mr. Ricobono continued. “He has to do what he has to do. In that context, in finance, that’s fine. Well, it’s not fine, but it makes sense, you know what I mean? But in this context, in a public project and a public process, it’s just wrong.”

“You purport to act morally,” Mr. Crispin Miller said, looking up from his empty water glass, toward the ceiling. “That’s what Machiavelli said.”

They were sitting inside the Silver Spurs at the corner of Houston Street and LaGuardia Place, having finished a meal of burgers, the restaurant’s greasy specialty. They had hoped to go to Bruno Bakery for some lighter fare, but it had been overtaken by Spanish tourists—yet another affront.

“I love this university. This was my dream job, and we’re just trying to save the university from itself,” Mr. Deer said.

But really, the argument was academic. Like a student blithely ignoring the class syllabus, the NYU faculty opposed to the plan had left their all work for the very last minute. It had been a convincing argument, the kind that might have swayed the public had it been delivered earlier. But politicians and city planners do not grade on a bell curve. At best, the faculty had gotten a C-, a few concessions and little else.

For the past five years, NYU has been working on its first real master plan. Entitled NYU 2031, it is meant to chart the school’s growth over the next two decades as it expands in the Village and beyond—well beyond. Campuses are already up and running in Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and the biggest yet is planned for Shanghai. It is largely the vision of the university’s current president, John Sexton, the long-time dean of the Law School and former chairman of the New York Fed.

Were his vision for a “global network” lacking projects in New York—which also include the takeover of New York Polytechnic in Brooklyn to form NYU Poly, as well as an expansion of the medical school along First Avenue and a possible campus on Governors Island—his critics would probably be delighted, rather than despondent. As it is, they feel ignored, unloved, suffocated. At least that’s been the case the past few months.

It wasn’t until February that any discernible opposition movement began to form within the university. “NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan,” they dubbed themselves.

“We call it the Sexton Plan because it’s his plan, not ours,” Mr. Crispin Miller said. “The university is its professors, not the administration.” He is the opposition’s unofficial ringleader. A professor of media studies, he has round glasses and a buzz cut more befitting a monk than a marine. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of Television, The Bush Dyslexicon and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy.

The opposition group has galvanized a good portion of the faculty—about 40 percent of whom live on the superblocks NYU wishes to redevelop—against the plan. So far, 37 schools or divisions have passed resolutions opposing the plan, including 27 of 32 in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s oldest and most influential body.

These include programs that arguably know a thing or two about the university’s current undertaking, namely the Stern Business School, which voted 52-3 against, and the economics department, whose 30 professors were unanimous in their disapproval. “What does it tell you that these guys think this plan is a farce?” Mr. Crispin Miller said. Many of the humanities departments, from Anthropology to Museum Studies to Social and Cultural Analysis, are also opposed. Ditto Chemistry, Mathematics and the Center for Neural Science, among others. “And there are more by the week,” Mr. Crispin Miller said.

If one were to build the perfect coalition to beat back such a plan, this would be the place to do it. Economists, planners, scientists, investigative journalists—Nobel laureates! “I voted against it without reservation,” economics professor Thomas Sargent, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his study of “cause and effect in the macroeconomy,” said in an email. “The vote reflected widespread distrust among faculty members that has been fostered by the central administration’s embarking on various ill-conceived and expensive endeavors without consulting the faculty members for their advice and opinions.”

What more could community activists ask for?

Perhaps a little activity. While the outcry since February has been impressive, and is only growing louder, that was a month after NYU certified its plans with the City Planning Commission, at which point they were basically cast in stone. The proposal was ultimately shorn by the City Council committee last week and goes before the full council Wednesday (basically a rubber-stamp vote), but it remains only 20 percent smaller than originally proposed. Two of the four towers have been reduced in size but otherwise remain. In size, it is a development comparable to two Chrysler Buildings.

Meanwhile, the opposition group did not launch its website until late March, and it came up with its own counter-proposal only last week, the same day the council committee voted through the modified plan—well beyond the moment at which it could have changed anything.

In a similar fight two years ago, Extell Development’s plans for the last parcel of Riverside Center were confronted with four separate alternatives offered up by the community board that ultimately helped alter the shape of that proposal, though none of them overhauled it, either.

Quite a few community board members have complained privately that they wish the faculty had been more publicly involved in the fight. “They make a strong case against this plan, one that could really sway public opinion,” one board member said. “I just wish they had made it a year or two ago.”

The NYU administration deserves a good deal of credit for pacifying the faculty, though reportedly not in good faith. “They would hold these little open houses and say, ‘Oh, this is years away,’” Mr. Crispin Miller said. “When we would confront other faculty about it, they said the same thing. ‘I don’t have to worry about that.’ One of the smartest things NYU ever did was spruce up the gardens and buy a new jungle gym, after years of neglect, as if to say, ‘Look, why would we buy this new jungle gym if we were going to tear it down tomorrow?’”

Barbara Weinstein, one of the university’s distinguished Silver Professors, argues it is wrong to pass judgment on the faculty for its timing. “As with most issues, large numbers of people only got mobilized when specific decisions were looming in the near future,” she said. “How much are you doing to prevent global warming, which threatens life as we know it? I’m guessing not a whole helluva lot, even though the threat is massively greater than that of NYU 2031.”

As with any radical debate taking place, there is far from unanimity of opinion. “I am not opposed to it, nor do I view it as my job to defend it,” one Stern finance professor said, lauding the school’s “careful thought about how to achieve it within the constraints of our urban environment.”

Mitchell Moss, the outspoken urban planning professor and a supporter of the expansion, believes the fight is purely political. “You have a number of faculty who relish getting into political fights,” he said. “For them, this is just an extension of their time in graduate school, in Berkeley or Cambridge. For a lot of faculty members, it’s a necessary distraction from the burden of writing and teaching.”

And there is some truth to that. Animosity against President Sexton has been stirring since his appointment—some faculty wanted an outsider—and has only intensified as he has expanded the student body and the university’s footprint. A number of professors said they foresee a no-confidence vote in the future, and Mr. Crispin Miller made similar overtures toward Ms. Quinn and City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, in whose district the project falls. “There is real talk in the community of a recall,” he warned.

The faculty already has Gibson Dunn on retainer and is preparing a lawsuit challenging the expansion once it is approved. (It cannot be challenged in court until that time, but such efforts have a track record of failure.)

Ms. Chin said the failure of the professors had as much to do with intractability as anything. “They had a very strong position pretty much opposing this, they didn’t want any compromise,” she said. “They just wanted a no, and it was hard to explain to them how we had to work things out with NYU.

“They did not seem to understand the process.”

The views from the ivory tower are pretty good, until some wants to build something bigger next door.

Right-sized on Broadway. (DCP)

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.

The rezoning covers 90 blocks stretching from 126th Street up to 155th Street, running west from Edgecombe, Bradhurt, Amsterdam and St. Nicholas avenues to the river. Excluded from this area is the the campuses of City College and Columbia's Manhattanville project, which is south of 133rd Street.

West of Broadway, the buildings are the biggest, rising to 105 feet on the side streets and 120 feet on the avenues, but buildings have a required setback between 60 and 85 feet. They must now be built up to the sidewalk, as is the case in most of Manhattan, thus presenting developers from stepping back to build taller towers. East of Broadway, the same street wall requirements exist, though the buildings are lower, ranging from height limits of 70 to 80 feet, with setbacks between 40 and 60 feet. This is meant to reflect the rowhouse and walk-up scale of the area.

"This historic undertaking will protect the distinctive residential character of this neighborhood for decades to come," Mr. Stringer said.

Special districts have been carved out for 145th Street, the area's main commercial thoroughfare, and a pocket of manufacturing around 126th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Along 145th Street, a few select sites have been upzoned, to provide for new development, which will be part of the city's inclusionary housing program, which means that in exchange for a bonus to build bigger, developers must make 20 percent of their units affordable. These sites could rise as high as 170 feet with the inclusion of the affordable housing.

The 126th Street area had been traditionally used for manufacturing, but the plan calls for a new mixed use district that would allow housing, commercial and light manufacturing uses to coexist. This is not unlike the mix of uses just across the street in Columbia's new campus.

"We feel very comfortable that this plan will protect the neighborhood from some of the development we've seen elsewhere in the city," Reverend Georgiette Morgan-Thomas, chair of the local community board, told The Observer. She pointed to two projects in particular, Aerial East and Aerial West, hulking towers developed around 100th Street by Extell Development as the kind of egregious development the community wanted to avoid.

The board spent three years developing a model for the rezoning with the help of the Department of City Planning and the borough president. "Scott and City Planning have done an extraordinary job working with the community to craft this plan," Ms. Morgan-Thomas said.

"It's always a great place to be to know you've done something for the community, something that will truly protect it," she added. "When we're all gone, the zoning will still be in place, along with the buildings as they've always been."

Needs work. (Globe Images)

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.

This idea gave a number of community board members pause, though. While there was modest concern that Midtown is indeed dense enough as it is, many agreed that improvements could also be made. The big question was whether giving developers a huge development bonus, as appears to be the main thrust of the rezoning, would achieve the goals the city hopes to achieve.

Details were scant, but the area the department is looking at was outlined, an 85-block swath running from 40th Street to 57th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue, except for a section of Second Avenue in the East 40s. This brackets a section of the neighborhood the department is especially interested in, roughly 20 blocks surrounding Grand Central Terminal. The one other detail to emerge was an interest in improving Park Avenue, ensuring its place as the city's premier business address.

To put things in perspective, this roughly 250 acre rezoning would be almost 10 times as large as Hudson Yards, and according to one city planning source could increase development rights in the area by as much as 50 percent, depending on what set of recommendations the department embraces. As Real Estate Board president Steven Spinola explained a few weeks ago during a different discussion on the future of Midtown, "right now, our buildings top out around 50 stories. Why shouldn't they top out around 80 stories? They do in a lot of other great cities."

Including in Hudson Yards, and even exceed that height at the slowly redeveloping World Trade Center. And this was perhaps the greatest concern for community board members. "The public is spending billions of dollars at Hudson Yards and ground zero, and for good reason," said Raju Mann, a member of Community Board 5. "We haven't even seen what these projects have produced yet, so how can we be sure what's appropriate for Midtown East?"

He also argued that the whole rationale for investing in these areas was because the administration had argued that Midtown was outmoded. Now to reinvest in that neighborhood, worthy as it is, could undercut the others before they have a chance to take root. The department counters that because Midtown is indeed built up, it will not develop over night and be a direct competitor to these areas, but instead this is a rezoning that will play out over two or three decades. Ms. Hsu-Chen made special note of a marked lack of office development in Midtown in the past decade to drive home the point that current zoning does not work.

Such ambitions also had community board members worried, as they felt the plan is moving too quickly given its size and scope. The department plans on releasing a more concrete vision in July, which it will study and modify throughout the fall before submitting it for public review in the first quarter of 2013. "For something so big, and so important, that seems awfully fast," said Kate McDonough, chair of board 5's Land Use Committee. The implication was that this was one last land grab by developers before the Bloomberg administration leaves office at the end of next year.