Hell's Kitchen Online 7/16/99

[kitchen]

Hell's Kitchen Online                               7/16/99
http://hellskitchen.net "All the News the Times Won't Print"
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Because New York is worth saving: http://www.RetireRudy.com
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IN THIS ISSUE...

  1. Air Rights Decision Overturned (Backstage)

  2. Losing Altitude (Variety)

  3. Clinton Beats Giuliani (Tenant/Inquilino)

  4. Robert Moses Lives (West Side Rail Yards, NY Mag)

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Air Rights Decision Overturned 
Backstage, July 8, 1999
By Robert Windeler

A judge of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan has annulled an 11-month-old New York
City zoning rule allowing owners of 25 Broadway theatres to sell their unused air rights to
developers of properties up to several blocks away.

Judge William P. McCooe, in overturning the rule, cited the city's failure to provide an
environmental impact study (EIS) before implementing the theatre district zoning change in August
1998. He castigated the city for its contention that the sweeping rezoning would not have a
significant effect on the environment of the district in question, 40th to 57th streets between
Eighth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

"It strains credibility, especially in light of other determinations that an EIS had been required
for much smaller projects," McCooe wrote in his decision.

An EIS by city planners, under New York City's and New York State's broad-based environmental
laws, would have examined not only the effects of increased development on pedestrian, subway, and
vehicular traffic, and noise and air pollution, but also on the impact on the quality of life of
the existing community.

McCooe's decision came in response to a suit filed in January by the Clinton Special District
Coalition, representing residents of older, mostly rent-stabilized, apartment buildings and owners
of largely low-rise business buildings along and off Eighth Avenue, in the area known as Clinton
or Hell's Kitchen. Hundreds of theatre artists live in the district, which is ethnically mixed and
booming. Clinton has enjoyed special district status since 1973.

Because of its concentration of low-rise buildings, Eighth Avenue was expected to be the rezoning
rule's major beneficiary or victim, depending on the point of view. As many as 23 new skyscrapers
might have been built using transferred air rights, mostly along the east side of Eighth Avenue.
(In an earlier compromise between the opposing factions, the west side of Eighth Avenue had been
excluded from the rezoning.)

Antonia L. Bryson, the attorney for CSDC, told Back Stage, "We're celebrating a big victory; we've
stopped this catalyst for severe gentrification, up to this point. The city's rule would have
stimulated a Midtown-like growth, such as that along Sixth Avenue or Third Avenue, with their
giant office towers and upper-income apartment buildings-with residents making six times as much
as our current residents. The judge agreed with us that this rule would have destroyed a
neighborhood that is already bursting at the seams."

Air rights, also known as development rights, refer to the difference between the actual size of a
building and the maximum size allowed on its land by existing local zoning regulations. Because
traditional theatres are almost always low-rise buildings, they tend to have significant unused
air rights. Usually, air rights can only be sold or transferred to sites next door, across the
street, cater-cornered from, or under the same ownership as the building ceding the rights.

With the new rule, owners of the 25 landmarked theatres (out of 37 considered "Broadway" houses)
could have sold and transferred 2.4 million sq. ft. of unused space above their buildings to sites
anywhere else within the theatre district. At an estimated $50 per square foot, sales of all
potential air rights would have earned an estimated $120 million. The 2.4 million square footage
approximates that of the Empire State Building.

Proponents of the rezoning rule included not only theatre owners such as the Shuberts and the
Nederlanders, but also The Broadway Initiative Working Group, whose president is Tony-winning
composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and which encompasses a sometimes reluctant Actors' Equity and
other theatrical unions, and the Theatre Development Fund. These supporters argued that passage of
the development rights rule was essential for the survival of Broadway theatre. Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani and City Council President Peter Vallone supported the measure, but Manhattan Borough
President C. Virginia Fields was a vocal opponent, along with most Clinton area politicians and
the majority of Manhattan members of the City Council.

The Shubert Organization owns 12 of the 25 theatres, or 1.1 million sq. ft. of unused air rights.
The Nederlander Organization owns five theatres, and Jujamcyn Theatres, three.

Theatre owners who sold air rights would have had to agree to keep their buildings in use as
theatres for 25 years, according to the plan. And they would have had to contribute $10 per square
foot of air rights sold to The Broadway Initiative, a not-for-profit coalition that planned to use
the proceeds to underwrite new plays and small musicals and develop new audiences for the theatre.

No air rights have been sold in the district since the City Council passed the rule in August
1998.

The city has 30 days after the service of McCooe's decision to file a notice of appeal the state
Supreme Court's Appellate Division, First Department. (A second level of challenge, in the state's
Court of Appeals, could prolong a final decision for as much as a year.) Gabriel Taussig, chief of
the Administrative Division of the New York City Law Department, told Back Stage that, to his
knowledge, his department had not been officially informed of the decision and had not yet decided
what the city's response would be.

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Noises Off 
Losing Altitude 
by Charles Isherwood 
Variety, July 12, 1999

NEW YORK -- The plan allowing Broadway theater owners to sell potentially lucrative "air rights"
to developers was dealt a setback on June 29, when a judge invalidated the zoning amendment passed
by the City Council that would allow it to proceed.

The plan had been opposed by the Clinton Special District Coalition, an activist group from the
neighborhood targeted by the rezoning plan. The CSDC had filed a lawsuit to block the plan,, and
the judge sided with the CSDC basing his decision on the city's determination not to commission an
environmental impact study assessing the effects the plan would have on the area.

The Mayor's office originally proposed the plan and won approval from the City Council last
August. It will appeal the decision. City Planning Spokeswomen Jennifer Chiat said the city
expects the plan will ultimately be approved, and added that an environmental impact study had in
fact been conducted. She said the ruling contained "egregious errors."

The major Broadway Theater owners -- the Shuberts, Nederlanders and Jujamcyn organizations --
potentially stand to gain millions if the plan eventually goes through. The plan would allow them
to sell the rights to develop unused space above certain theaters to developments in an area
between Sixth and Eighth avenues and between 42nd and 57th streets. Presently, they are allowed to
sell such rights to developments directly adjacent to the theaters only.

part of the plan mandates that for every square foot of air rights , $10 would eventually go to
the Broadway Initiative, a nonprofit organization created to help promote the production of
straight plays and small musicals on Broadway.

But critics charge that the Broadway Initiative is merely a smokescreen used to make palatable a
plan that will enrich the theater owners and developers while bringing minimal benefits to the
industry as a whole. John Fisher, a spokesman for the CSDC, calls the plan a "scam," noting that
most of the Initiative's budget was supposed to come from union and corporate donations that have
yet to materialize.

Maria Somma, prexy of the Assn' of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, one of the guilds
expected to give financial support, said ATPAM had agreed to offer only "expertise." "We can't
commit to giving financial support until we see a business plan on paper. We haven't seen one
yet."

Joey Parnes, coordinator of the Broadway Initiative, declined to comment.

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Clinton Beats Giuliani
Met Council Tenant/Inquilino
July/August 1999

Clinton community activists won a victory June 29, when a Manhattan judge
invalidated a city zoning plan that would have cleared the way for massive
redevelopment in the neighborhood west of Eighth Avenue.

State Supreme Court Justice William P. McCooe ruled that the city could not
allow theatre owners to sell “air rights”—the right to build taller
structures than normally allowed by zoning codes, by using space not taken
up by low-rise buildings—above their theatres without doing an
environmental-impact statement on the plan’s effect first. 

Last year, the City Council changed the city’s zoning codes to allow
theatre owners to sell air rights to their buildings anywhere within a
45-block area of Midtown, between Sixth and Eighth avenues and 42nd and
57th streets. Fearing that the change would spawn massive overdevelopment
and displace longtime residents, many in the Clinton neighborhood strongly
opposed it.

“Clinton beats Giuliani,” exulted John Fisher of the Clinton Special
District Coalition, a plaintiff in the suit. The Giuliani administration
may appeal the decision.

City officials argued that an environmental-impact statement was not needed
for the zoning changes. They claimed that the plan would not significantly
impair traffic, air quality, or neighborhood character in the area
affected, because most of the over 2 million square feet of additional
space it would allow built would not be developed.

Judge McCooe disagreed, saying that with Midtown booming, it “strains
credibility” to predict that the zoning change would not spur intensive new
construction. “In light of the immense scope of the project, which covers
17 blocks and two avenues, and considering the vast potential amount of
total capacity to be added,” he wrote, “the court determines that an EIS
should have been prepared.”

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CITYSCAPE
Robert Moses Lives
New York Magazine, July 12, 1999

A cunning plan to cover the West Side rail yards with a vast park and commercial ventures -- with
a stadium in the Hudson on the side -- has a master builder's grandiosity.

BY KARRIE JACOBS

Peter Eisenman, his white hair closely cropped, his red bow tie as bright as a carnation, is
staring at his fingers. The architect is sitting next to me at the award dinner for an
urban-planning competition sponsored by Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, and he
doesn't appear to be paying a bit of attention to the speaker, the CCA's founding director,
Phyllis Lambert. She is about to announce the winner of the $100,000 prize for a new vision of
Manhattan's far West Side, a neighborhood rising above the MTA's rail yards. Eisenman, one of the
finalists, is concentrating on his cuticles.

As it turns out, he doesn't need to listen. He knows. Someone had called him late the previous
night, after the all-star cast of jurors -- including architects Frank Gehry, Elizabeth Diller,
Arata Isozaki, Philip Johnson, and José Rafael Moneo -- had voted his plan the winner. (Eisenman
is on a roll; the previous week, his Holocaust memorial, to be built on land adjacent to the
Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, was approved by the Bundestag.)

I was pretty sure I knew as well when, earlier that day, I examined the plans by finalists Ben van
Berkel and Caroline Bos of Amsterdam; Morphosis of Santa Monica; Cedric Price Architects of
London; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto of New York; and Eisenman, also of New York. I noticed
that his isn't just an architectural plan; it's a political one. His is the scheme anchored by a
sports stadium, presumably an unabashed nod to one of the other jurors, Joseph B. Rose, chairman
of the City Planning Commission.

Conspiracy theorists in the architectural community also thought they knew. When the five
finalists, culled from a field of 110, were announced in February, rumors began circulating that
the competition was a sham, a vehicle for Eisenman. Lambert (née Bronfman -- as a young woman she
was instrumental in hiring Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build her family's Seagram Building) is
close to Eisenman, the story went, and had recently spent $1 million buying his architectural
drawings. To which Lambert responds: "That's so crazy, I can't bear it." She points out that the
CCA, which, after all, is an architecture museum, has been buying Eisenman's work for years. But
she's also purchased the drawings of countless others. And she didn't select the finalists, the
jury did. Elizabeth Diller, an experimental architect who was the sole woman on the jury, insists
the selection process was both unpredictable and fair: "I would be the first to blow the whistle
if something bad was going on."

"This is the first time I felt myself to the right of everyone else," Eisenman says in his
acceptance speech. "I've always played the bad boy, the lefty." Yet during dinner he tells me that
many of his best patrons have been Republicans. For example, there's Leslie Wexner, chairman of
the Limited and namesake of Eisenman's award-winning Wexner Center, in Columbus, Ohio. And, for a
time in 1997, it appeared that Staten Island's Republican borough president, Guy Molinari, was
actually going to build Eisenman's exotic, high-tech conch-shell addition to the Saint George
Ferry Terminal. (A more conventional firm has since been selected for the project.)

Not that there's anything overtly Republican about Eisenman's architecture, which is, in stylistic
terms, fairly radical. He tends to design buildings that are painstakingly engineered to look as
though they're on the brink of collapse. But there is something about Eisenman's go-go attitude,
his practiced salesmanship, that people in positions of power -- whatever their party affiliation
-- find enthralling.

The West Side design is a case in point, the perfect merger of outlandish and practical. Between a
stadium, conventional but for the fact that it's partially submerged in the Hudson River, and a
more-or-less-rectilinear office tower on the present site of Madison Square Garden stretches a
bizarre man-made terrain, a building four avenue blocks long and five street blocks wide. The idea
is that a verdant rooftop park, resembling a geologic model of restless tectonic plates, sits atop
a variety of moneymaking concerns, including a new Madison Square Garden, television studios,
hotel rooms, and lots of parking spaces. Better still, the developers of the tower at the east end
of the complex buy up the air rights from the blocks above the train yards, subsidizing the
other-worldly rooftop. And then there's the stadium.

Like a pitchman on late-night TV, Eisenman keeps offering more. His proposal includes an extension
of the No. 7 subway line -- something the city has been pushing as part of Mayor Giuliani's
stadium crusade -- down Eighth Avenue, along 33rd Street, connecting to another line linking it
with the Meadowlands sports complex -- "from Shea Stadium to Secaucus," the designer boasts.

And here's the twisted genius of Eisenman's plan: Embedded in it is the presumption that New York
will host the 2012 Olympics. Not only is this a romantic conceit designed to appeal to boosters on
both sides of the Hudson, but the Olympics, Eisenman claims, provides a loophole in environmental
laws that would otherwise prevent the construction of a stadium in the Hudson River.

Well, maybe Eisenman has moved to the right of center.

He didn't come up with this all by himself. He brought in high-powered collaborators, notably
Marilyn Taylor and David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects of the proposed
new Penn Station. But this project has a monolithic, master-builder quality reminiscent of the bad
old days of urban renewal. The design may be breathtakingly au courant, full of complex and
irregular forms inspired and facilitated by the computer, but the plan itself is retrograde,
promising to impose a unified vision on 100 acres of New York City. "Megalomaniacal," asserts a
juror who says he preferred the Morphosis plan, which clearly invited the participation of many
architects, as did some of the other proposals.

Eisenman's scheme is a lesson in why urban renewal was once so seductive for policy-makers. It's a
security blanket, with the architect providing all the answers for a slice of Manhattan that is,
at the moment, nothing but questions: Can the Javits Center expand? Does Madison Square Garden
stay where it is or move yet again? And how do we get to this part of town, anyway?

Eisenman leaves nothing to chance; at least that's the impression given by his presentation. In
actuality, the urban topology of his models, disorienting and thrilling, diverts attention from
annoying little details like how this thing will actually work. It's hard to figure out, looking
at the computer-generated renderings, just how a Madison Square Garden would fit between the rail
yards below and the warped terrain of the rooftop park above. Nor is it clear how this horizontal
super-duper block would appear to a street-level pedestrian standing on the corner of 34th and
Ninth. Would it be a shining example of twenty-first century urbanity, a bigger, better version of
San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens, or a nightmarish adventure in gigantism? Maybe it's unfair to
ask those questions of something so raw, so new. But, as pie-in-the-sky as the project appears to
be, the architect is completely in earnest. "We have a real scheme," Eisenman insists.

Like many architectural competitions, the CCA's was staged primarily as a catalyst for public
discussion. The finalists' submissions will be on display in Grand Central's Vanderbilt Hall in
October, and there will be a daylong symposium at the Cooper Union on October 8. But the CCA's
competition also holds out the tantalizing promise that the participating architects will
influence what is eventually built. Why else would Lambert have included both Rose and Empire
State Development Corporation chairman Charles Gargano as jury members? And why else would she
select a parcel of land over which the city, the state, and every private developer are
salivating?

Gargano, incidentally, did not make it to the daylong judging of the projects. Nor was he in
attendance at the dinner. While he was, according to competition organizers, very involved, his
failure to show up for the actual judging adds to the perception that Manhattan's West Side, no
matter what the CCA's visionary architects propose, will continue to be a battlefield for the
political war between city and state governments. Regardless of what, if anything, is eventually
built there, Eisenman has done something that will likely attract more powerful clients. He has
given an otherwise dim-witted scheme -- Giuliani's West Side stadium plan -- a veneer of
intellectual credibility and an avant-garde sheen.