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November 21, 2008
Plan to Redevelop Seaport Is Spurned for the Mass, Scale and Height of Its Buildings
The New York Times
by David W. Dunlap and Sewell Chan
What's good for the South Street Seaport is apparently not good for Prospect Heights, at least where the Landmarks Preservation Commission is concerned.
An ambitious and much-debated plan to redevelop the low-rise South Street Seaport with a 42-story apartment and hotel was rebuffed in its current form on Tuesday by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Eventually, the plummeting economy might have reshaped the redevelopment proposal by General Growth Properties of Chicago, which itself faces an uncertain future. But the landmarks commission got to it first.
A majority of the commissioners made it clear that they did not find the proposed massing, scale and height of the buildings appropriate to the 19th-century historic district, said a spokeswoman for the commission, Elisabeth de Bourbon.
...The redevelopment plan — a mix of stores, hotel rooms, apartments and open space — is strongly favored by the Bloomberg administration. SHoP Architects has designed a 495-foot tower, clad in a terra-cotta exoskeleton, rising on new pilings in the East River. A 1980s mall on Pier 17 would be replaced with two-story retail buildings, a four- and six-story hotel, walkways, a plaza, and the refurbished and relocated Tin Building.
NoLandGrab: While the LPC is now considering a Prospect Height Historic District that carefully avoids the proposed footprint of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, it refused to consider protecting noteworthy buildings in the path of Ratner's wrecking ball, like the old Spalding Factory and the now-demolished Ward Bakery — which was, ironically, perhaps the finest example of a terra-cotta-clad building in New York.
For the record, the Atlantic Yards plan includes several towers of a similar "mass, scale and height" as the building proposed at the Seaport, all of which would loom over low-rise, 19th-century Prospect Heights and Fort Greene.
Posted by eric at November 21, 2008 10:41 AM