Sep. 12, 2006 - more not-staying-the-same, East Village edition / will a developer develop?

maybe they are diversifying down?
Gothamist is calling the new nabe Extell-land, referring to the East Village area bounded by 10^th and 14^th Sts, 2d Av and Av B, since the Extell Development Corporation bought 17 buildings in that grid. The NY Post has the detail that the buildings were bought for (only?) $72.6mm from a single landlord, and consist of 253 rent-regulated apartments in the four and five story tenements.

 (per Gothamist.com)

let’s just say that Extell did not make its name collecting controlled rent
Extell was the developer recruited by Ratner’s Atlantic Yards opponents who bid a basketful of money (pun intended!) for the right to develop the Atlantic Yards, and lost to ForestCity’s smaller basket. Extell is building the twin “Ariel”s on the Upper West Side, where most apartments are going from the high $1s to the low $4s (that’s millions, of course). Then there is the condo conversion of the Stanhope Hotel across from the Met, where the “smaller units” (everything is relative) run more than 4,000 sq ft and go for $10mm+.

Sep. 7, 2006 - the scale is immense / 5 year NYC population changes

Sep. 5, 2006 - nothing stays the same / Stuyvesant Town before and (soon to be) after

Aug. 1, 2006 - The other side of the illegal loft story / conflicts with industrial policy

Jul. 18, 2006 - The strange case of the rent-free loft / the dicey math of illegal lofts

Jul. 7, 2006 - dynamic city / time runs out on a stripped Tiffany’s

Here is the second of two posts inspired by Sunday’s NY Times that got me thinking about how dynamic New York City is.

From champagne to jewels

Sunday’s Real Estate section carried a piece about an ugly building on Union Square West, six blocks due west along 15^th Street from the new Moet HQ.

Who knew that this spare white building began life in 1870 as the flagship of Tiffany & Company, jewelers and was a “monster [cast] iron building”?

The Times [in 1870] called the new building a "palace of jewels," with black-walnut counters and ebony cases holding watches, fans, opera glasses and other articles in wood, leather, silver, cloisonné, enamel, bronze and rosewood. The Times observed that one ornamental statue, " 'Zingerilla,' by the Spanish sculptor Klessinger, appears almost ready to speak to her admirers."

Tiffany’s stayed for only 35 years before moving uptown (to 37^th Street and Fifth Avenue) and the building became a home for garment companies. By 1925 the building was owned by Amalgamated Bank, which had been formed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, one of many trade unions located (coincidentally?) around Union Square (the square was named for the federal union – The United States).

An accident and a careful architect

How did this “elaborate” cast-iron building turn into the “blocky white blob of a building” it has been?

It was an accident, literally.

A piece of iron fell from the façade in 1952, leading to the death of the unfortunate pedestrian it landed on. The Amalgamated Bank hired a thorough architect to “make sure” that such an accident never recurred. Which this careful architect did by stripping away every projecting piece of iron from the façade and encasing the shell in white brick.

Since then, the bank has been just one part of the polyglot assortment of Union Square's architecture, which mixes Romanesque, Queen Anne, Federal, postmodern and other styles

This polyglot of styles persisted through the decline of the Union Square area as the City’s fortunes waned across the Board in the 1970s, and the square was a place to avoid at night (and sometimes during the day). The coming of the greenmarket and restaurateur Danny Meyer in the 1980s began the upswing in fortunes. I believe Meyer deserves much of the credit for marshalling property owners around the square to pressure the City for better police and sanitation services. His Union Square Café became a big social and gustatory hit, which increased the attention paid to the area, and resulted in the last few years in major improvements to the square. (A personal note: I vividly recall the street reconstruction projects being well under way on September 11, 2001, as I walked through the square just before 9 AM that Tuesday, just after the first plane had flown low and loud over my head, heading south.)

(Bless Meyer also for similar work he did on marshalling corporate neighbors in cleaning up Madison Square a few years ago, where his 11 Madison and Tabla sit.)

But I digress….

A predictable but dynamic change

The next act for the boring white brick bank building that used to be an elaborate cast-iron jewelry firm is clear, at least for this structure. Given the zoning and the general market, when the bank sells the building (as it has begun to do) it is likely to be torn down to be replaced by a condominium tower.

From luxury jewelry to ladies underwear to a union bank to the inevitable condo, in four acts spanning about 140 years. Maybe that is not so dynamic a series of changes, after all....

Jul. 7, 2006 - dynamic city / champagne in a cookie building

Two pieces in Sunday’s NY Times got me thinking about how dynamic New York City is. I suppose that other cities are similarly dynamic, but the relative age, breadth and range of the City, and its sharp geographic boundaries, probably make NYC – and especially Manhattan – more dynamic.

Here’s the first one.

The business section ran an article about the new HQ of Moet Hennessy, on the second floor of a 1914 building that used to house the National Biscuit Company (better known as Nabisco) between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues (address is 85 Tenth Av, from 15th to 16^th Streets). Anyone who has driven down West Street in this area has probably noticed the “National Biscuit Company” sign on the west side of the building. I don’t know the history, but given the proximity to the Hudson River piers and access to that Holland and Lincoln Tunnels to New Jersey, it was probably a warehouse or distribution facility.

Like many such buildings in this far west corridor, it has almost certainly been significantly under-utilized of late. Back when the elevated Westside Highway ran above West Street (before it was closed in the 1970s because it was literally falling apart) this area was dark, noisy, dirty and dangerous. Back when the docks were in full commercial flower (until the early 1950s), this area was probably also filled with the ancillary businesses that catered to maritime commerce and sailors, including bars, flophouses and whore houses.

But the container cargo ships moved the commercial shipping hub across the river to New Jersey (the mob-controlled longshoreman and stevedoring unions didn’t help) in the 1950s and 1960s and the general decline of the city in the 1960s and 1970s left this far west side of Manhattan a bleak stretch between the genteel West Village and Chelsea.

Then the neighborhood just to the south, across 14^th Street, went from being a neighborhood of wholesale meat and provisioning companies in the early 1990s to “The Meatpacking District” (in which very little grocery meat is packed, but boutiques and condos thrive) at the turn of the century.

Which made it easier for creeping change to creep across 14^th Street, first to create the climate in which the Chelsea Market thrived, then to engulf the old National Biscuit Company building.

The Times article describes this building as “at the edge” of the Meatpacking District (though I would quibble that this District does not cross 14th Street; this should be part of Chelsea) and describes the nearby neighbors as including: Del Posto, CraftSteak and Morimoto restaurants; the Gansevoort Hotel; Soho House, a private club; and the Food Network (nearly all of which are above 14^th Street). For Moet Hennessy, this location is ideal because it allows the sales and marketing people for their champagne, spirits and cognac brands to walk to clients.

But it is the unidentified near neighbors that make this area dynamic: mid-block small-scale apartment buildings just to the east on up to 22nd Street, the venerable General Theological Seminary (whose bell tower charms passersby both visibly and aurally) between Ninth and Tenth at 20^th and 21^st Streets, the Maritime Hotel (in a building that housed Covenant House, a social services agency, most recently but whose porthole windows hint at its history as a longshoreman’s union headquarters) and the buildings managed by the NYC Housing Authority.

The fragile mix of low and moderate income housing in the corridor above 14^th Street west of Ninth Avenue now sits cheek by jowl to the creeping deluxe living represented by the Maritime Hotel and the new restaurants. Increasingly, bodegas, grocers and similar retail establishments struggle to afford the higher rents that the increasingly fashionable neighborhood can command.

The ongoing attempt by the Seminary to renovate and to raise money by building a tower have focused attention on the scale of this neighborhood, and its mix of low-income residents, "middle-class" (or its Manhattan equivalents) and high-end gentrifiers. According to The Villager, the Seminary and its business partners have scaled back to a 13 story condominium tower, which is still too tall to many residents: That fight in this dynamic neighborhood continues.

The Villager has run a series of articles about the Seminary plans, as well as this one “Chelsea 2025”, a brainstorming session about changes in Chelsea and its future.