New York: Projects & Construction

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/ny...l?ref=nyregion
An Obscure City Street, Often Forgotten and Perhaps Soon for Sale

By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: September 28, 2008


Michael Falco for The New York Times

In the East Village, Extra Place has drawn interest from a developer, but some local residents would like it to remain a city street.


The New York Times

Extra Place is about 30 feet wide and about 120 feet long.

New York City has thousands of avenues, boulevards, streets and other byways, some famous, others merely utilitarian. But even many veteran taxi drivers and longtime local residents find it difficult to give the location of Extra Place, mostly because they have never heard of it.

The tiny street is in the East Village and runs north from First Street — without making it to Second Street — between the Bowery and Second Avenue. About 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, it resembles a dusty alleyway more than an active thoroughfare. There are no street signs. It is virtually impossible to see on a standard atlas.

The street does, however, have admirers. For instance, there is Avalon Bay, the developer of recently constructed luxury buildings on First Street. It wants to repave Extra Place and create a cleaner passageway to the shops and boutiques that are expected to open in the new buildings.

Other admirers include longtime neighbors who said they were charmed by the truncated lane simply because it was one of the last remnants of the block’s pregentrified past. But the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which has control of the street, has no interest in holding on to it.

At a meeting of the neighborhood community board’s land use committee this month, representatives of the city agency and Avalon Bay outlined a proposal for the developer to buy the street.

But the committee prefers that the street remain in the city’s hands, and it asked for a new plan to be submitted next month, said Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3.

“There’s very little city-owned space left, and we would like the city to continue to own Extra Place,” she said. “There could be proposals to fix it up and manage it, which could be done by Avalon, but we also want to guarantee public access.”

Avalon Bay announced several months ago that it wanted to repave the little street and install seats, including some to be used by a cafe to which the developer expects to lease space. The idea that Avalon Bay might buy the street was first made public at this month’s meeting. Michele de Milly, a spokeswoman for Avalon Bay, said that though the company wanted to use the street, it did not necessarily want to own it. “Avalon Bay’s principal concern is refurbishing this derelict alleyway and turning it into a public amenity,” she said, adding that the city had suggested the sale.

Seth Donlin, a spokesman for Housing Preservation, said it was indeed the city’s desire to sell the street and noted that the agency’s mission was to develop property rather than manage it.

Compared with its more colorful neighbor, the Bowery, Extra Place has left a light historical footprint. Some believe it got its name in 1802, when a large farm owned by Philip Minthorne was split up among several of his children and the narrow strip of land was unclaimed.

The back door of CBGB, the punk rock monument that closed in 2006, opened onto Extra Place, and the street is perhaps best known as the setting for the cover photograph of the Ramones’ album “Rocket to Russia.”

“The ground was magnificent,” said Danny Fields, the manager of the Ramones, who took the photograph in November 1976. “It was filled with junk, shreds of clothes and pieces of barrels, posters, leaves, ropes.”

Some residents, including bloggers who write about the gentrification of the East Village, have opposed the idea of selling Extra Place, arguing that the piece of public property, modest as it is, should remain public. Others have lauded Extra Place as a rarity — a virtually unchanged sliver of the city that ought to be left alone.

Jeremiah Moss, who runs a blog called Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York (subtitled, “The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct”), posted part of a Talk of the Town story about Extra Place that appeared in The New Yorker in 1952.

The author, Brendan Gill, wrote: “Extra Place is a narrow little dead-end street, dark even by day and marked off by rusty iron warehouse doors and shuttered windows, with week-old newspapers blowing along the gutters.”

With a few exceptions, the street looked much the same on a recent evening. A rat skittered across the back of the street near a door that used to lead into CBGB, which is now the site of an upscale clothing store. Graffiti was on walls and an empty 22-ounce beer bottle lay near a fresh batch of discarded newspapers.

A few passersby said that they rarely thought about Extra Place but suggested that it could use some sprucing up.

Mr. Fields, for his part, said he thought that some people were underestimating the appeal of the street in its current state.

“The best years of my life,” he said, “were in places that were dark, damp and disgusting.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/ny...ml?ref=thecity
At a Flashy New Hotel, a Pair of Eloises

By DAVID KAUFMAN
Published: September 26, 2008


Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“I won’t order from room service,” says Hettie Jones, top left with Katy Abel, whose tenement building, above and above left, has been incorporated in the new Cooper Square Hotel. “But it will be nice to finally have a doorman.”

FROM jazz cats to beatniks, hippies to punks, Hettie Jones has seen them all from the fourth-floor walk-up at 27 Cooper Square, where she has lived since 1962.

“We didn’t call it the East Village when we visited in those days,” said Ms. Jones, a slight yet spry 74-year-old with a graying pixie cut. “We simply said we were ‘going east.’ ”

Ms. Jones first started going east in the 1950s to hear jazz greats like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis play at the Five Spot, a club where the free jazz movement first flourished. Back then, Ms. Jones was a future poet still known as Hettie Cohen — a middle-class Jewish girl from the West Village via Queens — and Cooper Square was a warren of Jewish old-timers and Ukrainian and Puerto Rican newcomers.

“There were hookers patrolling their spots down on Fourth Street,” recalled Ms. Jones, the former wife of Everett LeRoi Jones, the poet subsequently known as Amiri Baraka. “And then, in the ’80s, the transvestites began to arrive.”

The cross-dressers — and the punks that followed — have long been priced out of Cooper Square, but Ms. Jones still lives in the apartment where she raised two daughters, Kellie and Lisa, and entertained Beat Generation artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara. As a single parent of biracial children, Ms. Jones has long faced both personal and political struggles. The latest one was the battle to save her home.

It’s a battle that Ms. Jones, along with her neighbor of 30 years, Katy Abel, improbably won against the Cooper Square Hotel, a 21-story luxury tower with 145 rooms that has risen past her roof garden and will begin accepting guests within a few weeks.

“I grew the most fantastic tomatoes and peppers up there, veggies that need lots of light,” lamented Ms. Jones. “We used to have views from every angle, but now they only exist from the hotel’s penthouse.”

The two women agree that the impact of the Cooper Square Hotel, at 25 Cooper Square, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, could have been more significant. In 2005, the initial owners of the site, Lionheart Development, intended to demolish three red-brick tenements, including the building in which the two women lived, a former rooming house dating to 1845. Having secured what is known as artists’ loft status for their apartments during an eviction scare in the ’80s, the two women were not legally required to move.

By the time Matt Moss, a subsequent co-owner of the property, acquired it a year later, the two women had long since stopped being interested in negotiating the fate of their 163-year-old home. From then on, the developers say, the project progressed with Ms. Jones, Ms. Abel and the tenement in place.

The hotel’s owners went back to the drawing board and had the architect, Carlos Zapata, redesign the Cooper Square Hotel so that it incorporated the tenement.

“It was a bit like surgery,” Mr. Zapata said of the 26 months of construction, which fused the women’s old building with the sleek new tower next door. “We had to build the hotel from above and support the tenement from below.”

Mr. Zapata said that retaining the tenement added six months to the construction project, but the blending of the two structures has yielded an unusual amalgam. The ground floor of the tenement houses the hotel’s library and concierge desk; administrative offices are on the second floor. The third- and fourth-floor apartments occupied by Ms. Jones and Ms. Abel have been upgraded and are ready for occupancy.

“WE had to move for 10 days while they replaced the roof,” said Ms. Jones, who was relocated at Mr. Moss’s expense to the Hotel on Rivington in the spring, while Ms. Abel took shelter at the Bowery Hotel.

“I won’t order from room service,” Ms. Jones said of her unexpected turn as a late-in-life Eloise. “But it will be nice to finally have a doorman.”

As for the hotel’s guests — the ones paying upward of $425 per night or indulging in its 15-seat private screening room — “these are people with lots of money and we never really had any money around here,” Ms. Jones added.

Pointing to the cluster of new luxury towers rising in the square, Ms. Jones added with a sigh: “This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it.”

Despite the attachment to her home, which lacked heating, hot water and even a sink when she first rented it for $100 month, Ms. Jones acknowledged that she might have moved if huge amounts of money had been offered.

“People tried to make us into stalwarts and revolutionaries, but we probably would have agreed to the right offer,” said Ms. Jones, who still writes poetry and teaches a course on children’s book writing at the New School. “The city is about change. And even I never really expected to be avant-garde forever.”

WTC: TOWERING PROBLEMS - New York Post
WTC: TOWERING PROBLEMS


Posted: 3:38 am
October 1, 2008

LARRY Silverstein wants to keep building his three World Trade Center towers no matter what the current market conditions, one of his executives says - and the real-estate industry is right behind him.

But the credit crisis and the consolidation on Wall Street could become additional obstacles in Silverstein's road to completing all three towers by 2012.

"We need first-class office space," said a major broker who represents large financial-services firms. "He should build them no matter what detractors say."

The 77-year-old Silverstein has worked through many cycles and knows that having new office space on tap when the real estate market is ready for them would be a big plus for the downtown economy.

"We're not building for today's market, but for three to five years from now," insisted Janno Lieber, president of World Trade Center Properties, a Silverstein Properties unit.

"It is absolutely essential that New York get on with the business of building the next generation of innovative and green office towers," Lieber said. "We need this space to keep pace with our international competitors and keep high-wage jobs in New York City."

Kent Swig, president of Swig Burris Equities, another major downtown office owner and developer, concurred.

"I'd rather build in a bad market delivering into a good market," he said. "The logic [of waiting until there is a good market to build] is completely flawed."

The owners of the site, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, must also first talk with the developer about new timetables, after Port Authority Executive Director Christopher Ward releases a progress update report tomorrow.

"We need to sit down with him about the market and [financing]," said an official who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity.

Of course, if officials suggest delaying any of the three towers, Silverstein would likely suggest getting a break on the $88 million in rent that he forks over every year to the Port Authority on the essentially vacant land.

Work has not yet begun on Tower 2 - the largest of the three buildings, which will have a quad-diamond diagonal top and will be located next to the Freedom Tower. The land is still being excavated by the Port Authority, and would therefore be the most logical tower to delay.

In a January speech, Silverstein said Towers 3 and 4 would be topping out by mid-2010, and Tower 2 by mid-2011 - a timeline that may now change based on when the Port Author ity can deliver a vehicle-screen ing center, utili ties and roads.

The screening center - which is crucial for bringing in and out construction materials both for tenants and to dismantle the cranes used to build the towers - is being held up while the Deutsche Bank building awaits demolition.

As part of its new schedule, the official confided, the Port Authority will immediately start building the vehicle-screening center on land next door.

Utilities are also needed for work on the towers while Greenwich Street is extended as part of the plan for the towers to open up onto the newly created road.

Work, meanwhile, forges ahead on Towers 3 and 4, but at some undisclosed point in the future Silverstein will also need to put his hand out to bankers for further construction funds.

Silverstein has "a strong head start" on paying for the towers through insurance proceeds and the availability of tax-exempt debt financing known as Liberty Bonds.

But what is needed right now, the developer believes, is the market's confidence that government can build the infrastructure necessary to support the office towers - that is, the transit hub, the vehicle-security center and the roads and utilities.

"To the extent a more reliable and more transparent timeline is achieved, the better off we all are," said Lieber. "Hopefully the impact will be minimal, but it's hard to say right now. Our hope is that the Port's process will lead to a reasonable yet aggressive timetable and that we can move swiftly from there."

Swig said private owners like him have already relied on the Port Authority's previously announced opening dates for the buildings and the PATH terminal to bring and retain tenants at certain rents, and to schedule hotel construction to accommodate the flood of expected visitors.

The Port Authority official said the agreement by architect Santiago Calatrava to add columns to the underground PATH station design and changes to the way the soaring above-ground "spines" are anchored underground will make it faster and easier to build. It will also save more than $250 million, even as the overall cost balloons to over $3 billion, and visually the structure has gone from birdlike to resembling a lumbering stegosaurus.

Since 27 million square feet of offices was removed from downtown's inventory after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and through the renovation of offices into residential space, Swig said, "New York ultimately needs the office space, and they have to get [the towers] finished. And they can find a thousand excuses not to build, but they have to build it."

lois.weiss@nypost.com