Still standing: the Alice Austen house on Staten Island (the Historic House Trust).

Their floors may creak, their plaster may crumble and their halls may be filled with daunting drafts, but New York's old houses have proved their mettle through many a storm. Hurricane Sandy was no exception. The city's historic mansions appear to have come through the hurricane basically unscathed, preservationists told The Observer, although at least one Lower Manhattan Landmark remains unaccounted for.

"We've been very lucky, none of our 23 houses sustained damage," said Frank Vagnone, the executive director of the Historic House Trust. "And many of them were right in the path of the storm. The Alice Austen House, in particular. It's right on the Verrazano Narrows."

The Alice Austen house did narrowly escape damage from a fallen tree, whose branches scraped the home's exterior, but neither it, nor the artifacts and collections in any of the Trust's homes were damaged.

"These buildings can sustain a lot of battering," he said. "The Conference House in Tottenville [Staten Island] is a stone building with thick wooden shutters. It's been there since before the Revolution."

It was one of many historic waterfront properties that withstood the storm surge: Gracie Mansion is unharmed and ready to house the next mayor if he or she is so inclined. The Bartow-Pell Mansion did not succumb to the waters of Pelham Bay and on Tuesday morning Trinity Church took to its website to assure parishioners and preservationists that there were "no reports of significant damage to Trinity Church, St. Paul's Chapel, Hudson Square properties, St. Margaret's House, Trinity Preschool, or Charlotte's Place." Meanwhile, the basement of the Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Seton in Lower Manhattan was flooded with at least three feet of water, but the structure's first floor does not appear to be breached. (The Shrine also had one of its doors torn off).

The South Street Seaport museum was flooded, with water rising five feet high on the building's first floor, the Museum of the City of New York reported, but all museum artifacts and docked ships weathered the storm's wrath. These included a car float, a barge, the Pioneer's dock and historic vessels the Ambrose, the Wavertree, the W.O. Decker and the Peking, which starred in the film Around Cape Horn documenting her 1929 passage around the southern tip of South America in hurricane conditions.

Arlene Simon, the President of Landmark West, the preservation organization that watches over the stretch of Manhattan between 59th Street to 110th Streets, the River to the Park, said that there was no real damage but tree damage, and even that wasn't bad.

"Much of the architecture on the Upper West Side is incredibly sound architecture from the 1800s. I live in a building that was built in 1903 and if you didn't listen to the radio or read the paper, you wouldn't have even known about the hurricane," said Ms. Simon.

Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council said that he had yet to hear of any flooded interiors, waterlogged museum collections or otherwise compromised structures. He added that it was encouraging to hear news trickle in that many of the city's lower-lying, waterfront landmarks like the Eldridge Street Synagogue and the Alice Austin House were unharmed.

"Old buildings were built pretty sturdy," he said, noting that he had yet to hear the fate of the Battery Maritime Building or the bungalows in Far Rockaway that Historic Districts has been trying to save.

"I do expect the bungalows got bashed pretty good," he said, adding "no news doesn't necessarily mean good news when there is limited phone service and power outages."

The West Village, while waterlogged, without power and missing its Halloween parade, does not appear to have lost any of its historic charm, Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation reported as he walked through Village this afternoon, scouring the neighborhood structures for signs of damage."

"Although it's the emptiest and the quietest I've ever seen it," he added.

The Merchant House Museum on East 4th Street appeared to be intact as well, although the 19th Century home, rumored to be haunted, did cancel its candlelight ghost tours. It would appear that on this Halloween, the only ones roaming the house's pristinely preserved halls will be the ghosts.

kvelsey@observer.com

"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.

Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church

Two weeks ago, three Occupy Wall Street members began a hunger strike in front of Duarte Square. They were protesting Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church for not allowing them to use the empty lot owned by the church's real estate arm, Hudson Square Properties. The demonstrators were arrested...twice...for trespassing on the church's land.

It seemed like an odd battle to pick for Occupy Wall Street; especially since Trinity Church had provided the OWS with space to hold meetings, use WiFi and public facilities, and even join in discussions with religious leaders. But since Nov. 17th's Day of Action saw members get arrested for trying to make a temporary camp in the empty lot, the Occupiers have focused their energy on guilting the church into just giving them the land.

Except, as we noted at the time, this was never going to happen. Trinity Church owns a substantial chunk of New York real estate, bequeathed to them by the Queen Ann of England in 1705.  The money goes back a long way, and now so do the vestry. So when the OWS posted a blog "Trinity Wall Street Vestry’s 1% Connections," noting all the big-name real estate developers and very rich people associated with the church, the feeling is sort of like...well, yes, of course this is the case. Obviously.

An analysis of Trinity’s vestry (the governing board that manages the parish’s affairs) lends some significant weight to these concerns. Marked as up-to-date as of May 6, 2011, the vestry list reads as a who’s-who of the rich and powerful in New York, including Wall Street bankers, media and real estate executives, and in the most telling case, a former executive vice president of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns Zuccotti Park and pressured the city to evict the occupiers in the first place. (See the full list below).

This isn't exactly new information. And again, turning Trinity into the bad enemy is not in the Occupiers' best interests. The church--1% alliances and all--were letting OWS use its Charlotte's Place area as a place to regroup and use the Internet and bathroom. No matter who "owns" Duarte Square (and it is most certainly Trinity), OWS has no right to demand the space and condemn the people who own just because they aren't getting what they want. It makes those members of the movement look spoiled, ungrateful, and worse: naive. We find ourselves agreeing with what Trinity's Rector Dr. James H. Cooper, who recently wrote about the situation:

Calling this an issue of "political sanctuary" is manipulative and blind to reality. Equating the desire to seize this property with uprisings against tyranny is misguided, at best. Hyperbolic distortion drives up petition signatures, but doesn't make it right. Those arrested were not seeking sanctuary; they were seeking to be arrested. Trinity will continue our responsible outreach and pastoral services for all. We appreciate the many expressions of support we have received from so many in the community.

Way to make a very rich, very powerful church look like the nice guys here, OWS.

Hudson Square, just west of SoHo, is dominated by the unlikely real estate giant Trinity Church, which owns six million square feet in the area, making it by far the most dominant landlord. Just in the past year or so, the neighborhood has seen the number of media-related firms flourish, attracting the likes of WNYC, New York magazine, Viacom, and CBS radio.

“It’s a neighborhood that’s earlier in its evolution than other more established areas, but it’s catching up fast,” the lead broker on the most recent deal, Daniel Horowitz, of brokerage Studley, said.

The Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners deal, also brokered by Peter Capuciati, David Providenti and Jon Rosenblatt of Studley, brings the marketing firm’s total space in Hudson Square to 68,000 square feet. Office rents in the area are around $50 a square foot.