Our Response to the NY Times

The City

Summer of Protest on the West Side

Published: June 18, 2006

To the Editor:

Developers' plans to overcrowd Park West Village ("Ready or Not, a Neighborhood Gets a Makeover," June 11), to divide our diverse community into separate and unequal parts, have sparked a Boston Tea Party on the Upper West Side. Renters and condo owners from Central Park West to Riverside Drive are gearing up for a summer of protests against accelerated overdevelopment. Middle-class and working families must be able to establish and keep their homes in Manhattan.

We call on the mayor to grant Park West Village the designation of a Special Planned Community Preservation District. Built on land obtained with taxpayers' money for the common good, Park West Village has been a de facto special planned community for decades. Failure to preserve, protect and defend our neighborhood would be a betrayal of the public trust.

Cathy Unsino
Upper West Side

What ''The Spike'' Will Look Like

What we know (not in the Cityrealty article): Gluck and Chetrit plan to build a solid mall of national chain stores running from 97th to 100th Streets on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. "The Spike" of 29 or 30 stories is planned for the middle of the block, completely cutting off normal access to the 3 buildings with Columbus Avenue addresses 784, 788, and 792, setting up a virtual Berlin Wall between the rentals west of Columbus and the condo buildings east of that avenue. Those trying to walk to the 3 rental buildings will have to make their way through ground-level tunnels beneath "The Spike". To permit fire access and deliveries, the developers propose a two-way road to replace the current parking lots and playgrounds -- bringing in the very traffic that the original Park West Village planners excluded by closing off 98th and 99th Streets.

"The Spike" itself will have access to trees and a swimming pool placed above the wall of stores -- but those facilities will not be available to the community whose 40-year-old trees and playgrounds will be supplanted by a road.

What the article says:

www.Cityrealty.com's "New and Noteworthy" column

A 29-story residential tower and a low-rise base with 220,000 square feet of retail space is planned at 808 Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side by PWV Acquisitions, the owners of the large Park West Village rental complex between 97th and 100th Streets, Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, that surrounds the site.

Several stores on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue have recently been closed in and around Park West Village, which was bought by Joseph Chetrit of the Chetrit Group and Laurence Gluck of Stellar Management, from Helmsley-Spear Inc., in 2000 for about $122 million.

Martin J. McLaughlin, a spokesman for The Chetrit Group, has told CityRealty.Com that no change contemplated for the residential buildings in the complex.

Park West Village, a large “towers-in-a-park” development, was erected in 1961 along Central Park West between 97th and 100th Streets and designed by S. J. Kessler & Sons. It has 7, red-brick, balconied, slab towers and four of them are condominiums and three are rentals.

The proposed retail space at 808 Columbus Avenue will have 60,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, a 80,000-square feet basement and a 80,000-square foot second story, according to an article by Elisabeth Butler in the May 17, 2006 edition of Crains.

According to an article by Alex Mindlin in the June 11, 2006 edition of The New York Times, the apartment tower, which is on the west side of Columbus Avenue, is expected to be completed in 2008 and it 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.”

Costas Kondylis & Partners are the architects for the planned tower and retail complex.

Extell Development is erecting two high-rise apartment towers across from one another on Broadway between 99th and 100th Streets and as a result a taskforce of Community Board 7 has recommended rezoning parts of the Upper West Side above 96th Street to limit building heights.

The proposed rezoning reflects concerns in the community about a number of “soft” sites, that is, sites current built to less than half the permissible bulk, on Broadway north of 106th Street and elsewhere in the community.

Comm. Bd. 7 Recommends Rezoning to Keep Construction Low

From Community Board 7, www.cb7.org

Steering Committee

Sheldon J. Fine, Chairman

1. Re: Rezoning of West 97^th -110^th Streets - Riverside Drive to Central Park West.

With the invaluable assistance of the staff of the Department of City Planning, unprecedented expressions of concern and interest in the affected community, and close collaboration (if not unanimity) among members of a Task Force appointed by Community Board 7, to review zoning between West 97^th Street and 110^th Street, Riverside Drive to Central Park West; and

Recognizing the need for prompt action to avoid further construction of inappropriate and non-contextual buildings in the area; and

Having due regard for not only the need of the city to accommodate growth sensibly and in such a manner as to preserve the essential character of the neighborhoods, including the need to maintain and promote the diversity of ethnic and racial groups, incomes and populations; and

Seeking urgently to avoid further loss of low- and moderate-income housing and to promote as much mixed- and affordable-housing as possible in any new construction; and

Endeavoring to preserve the architectural and historic heritage and to promote design excellence in future development on the Upper West Side; and

Recognizing the need to prevent the continuing loss of small neighborhood commercial and retail services and the need to encourage the provision of such commercial and retail uses in any future new construction;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT Community Board 7/Manhattan adopts the recommendations of the West 97^th -110^th Streets Task Force, and recommends that the Zoning Resolution be amended to incorporate the changes in zoning designation set forth on the schedule attached to this resolution; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT all parties involved in the amendment process act as expeditiously as possible to enact the proposed changes.

Committee: 14-0-1-0. Board Members: 2-0-0-0.

Learn more about the neighborhood we want to save

The Exhibit was Co-sponsored by:

Park West Neighborhood History Group - 400 Central Park West, Apt. 5P, New
York, N.Y. 10025

West 98th and 99th Street Old Community - Jim Torain, Coordinator, 840 Grand
Concourse, Apt. 3B, Bronx, N. Y. 10451, tel: 718-292-9521

Columbus/Amsterdam BID- Peter Arndtsen, District Manager, 991 Amsterdam
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10025.

____________________________________________________________

The 37 acres of land, buildings, businesses, and people cleared by
Robert Moses in the 1950's were viewed as slum clearance by those not living
there and urban renewal by those who came after. Park West Village and Douglass
Houses replaced the Old Community, and have since built their own character
and history.

The past and present communities have gotten together to bring you
this exhibit. Maps, photos and books show 97th-100th Street and environs as a
"blooming dale", "a special place" for the better part of two centuries.
Changes are again in the offing, and we want to build on what we value from the past
and present as we plan for the future. Please come help us do that.

How can I help?

Join us. Make your voice heard.

• Call Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff (212- 788-3000) to urge that the open spaces and publically-committed land remain open.
  

• Volunteer for

• letter-writing
• flyer distribution
• making photocopies
• direct action
• phone calling
• enlisting community groups to join us.
  

• If you have organizational or other useful experience and would like to come to our meetings as we plan, contact Preservewpn@yahoo.com.

• If you live or work in the community, please donate money: renting school auditoriums and printing flyers cost money. Make your check payable to the "Park West Village Ten. Assoc." and be sure to earmark it in the check's "message" section with the words "Preserve West Park North." (It is not tax deductible.) Thanks!

New York Times' City Section?!

New York Times, Sunday, June 11, 2006, City Section

Upper West Side

Ready or Not, a Neighborhood Gets a Makeover

Costas Kondylis & Partners

An artist's rendering of the new high-rise and stores coming to Park West Village.

By ALEX MINDLIN

Published: June 11, 2006

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

AM New York Article on June 1 Town Meeting

PWV Acquisition LLC intends to develop a strip of high-end retail stores on Columbus Avenue, in front of the three Park West Village buildings it owns. It also plans to build a 29-story tower with market-rate rentals at the same spot. The high rise would occupy space now set aside for trees, benches and parking.

"The people who moved to Park West Village came because it was an oasis of trees and open spaces," said Lois Hoffmann, president of the Park West Village Tenants Association, who was one of the organizers of a town hall meeting last night to discuss the development. She added that tenants have been left in the dark about the development plans.

In a statement, PWV Acquisition LLC said it is meeting with elected officials, tenants and the community about the development.

"We look forward to a continuing dialogue about this new, mixed-use development," the statement said. "We expect to bring much needed new retail to serve this community."

Kathleen Cudahy, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said the high rise would be centered in the middle of the block, to maximize the amount of sunlight the three buildings would receive. She also said the luxury tower and the nearest building would be 200 feet apart, allowing for open space.

Tenants said the future development has already wreaked havoc on the community. The site of the planned commercial space was formerly occupied by local merchants who were given notice to vacate last fall.

In early May, tenants protested the loss of neighborhood stores when the last of the shopowners, a C-Town grocery mart, shut down.