Ready or Not, a Neighborhood Gets a Makeover
An artist's rendering of the new high-rise and stores coming to Park West Village.
Last Monday, a half-dozen neighbors met in a sunny apartment at Park West Village, a U-shaped complex of seven buildings in the upper West 90's. They were indulging in a neighborhood pastime: remembrance of stores past.
At the C-Town supermarket, "their meats were always fresh," said Lois Hoffmann, 72, who has close-cropped white hair and was wearing bright red lipstick.
Neighbors often met at the Central Park Cafe, formerly at 97th Street and Columbus Avenue. "My 96-year-old neighbor could walk to that corner, and that's as far as she could walk," said Paul Bunten, a thin, fast-talking man with swept-back gray hair. "That was her senior nutrition program."
Someone else mentioned the cafe's floor-to-ceiling windows. "To heck with that!" said Dean Heitner, a wiry man with a thick mustache. "I miss the Hungarian waitresses."
They won't be back; nor will two dozen other stores that ringed the complex. PWV Acquisitions, the company that owns Park West Village's rental apartments, began emptying the retail spaces last fall. This summer, two years of new construction and remodeling is scheduled to begin; PWV plans to add about 90,000 square feet of underground retail space and replace the old neighborhood stores with new chain stores.
What worries residents most is not the changing commercial landscape but a development known locally as the Spike. PWV plans a 29-story wafer of glass and steel at 808 Columbus Avenue, in the middle of Park West Village. The building, to be completed in 2008, will be 13 stories taller than its immediate neighbors and will cut off the bottom of Park West Village's "U," filling some open space and funneling residents bound for Columbus Avenue through two covered walkways.
"It's like the Berlin Wall," Mr. Bunten said.
But the hundreds of people who attended a rally June 1 opposing the tower seemed to be protesting a certain kind of gentrification as much as the loss of shortcuts or cherished sight lines.
"The sort of tenants attracted to luxury rental buildings are a transient population who have a fortress mentality," Mr. Bunten said. "They tend to consume the resources of the neighborhood, but they don't give back to the community. They come here for a couple of years out of college, and they get a high-paying job on Wall Street. Then they leave."
Martin McLaughlin, a spokesman for PWV, said the company would add green space to the complex by moving the current parking lots underground and putting grass on the reclaimed space. The new building will not block many views, he added, and he said the new stores would be better and more numerous than the old ones.
"Change is change," he said. Referring to the tenants of the complex, he added: "Obviously they don't think it's for the better. I think the retail is much better, and they may appreciate it at some point." ALEX MINDLIN
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