For many years, Village Preservation has energetically and successfully advocated to protect our treasured neighborhoods and structures. Now they hope to save the crumbling Dapolito Recreation Center at the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Clarkston Street. They also hope to stop the creation of a new recreation center at 388 Hudson Street.
The Mamdani administration appears poised to move ahead with a 400-foot tall tower on public land at 388 Hudson Street (at Clarkson Street) originally planned by the Adams administration. The proposed project is riddled with serious problems — including design, demolition, and choice of developer. If not changed now, it will become a permanent reality in our neighborhood.
It can be confusing trying to understand whether a new development will serve the best interests of its community. After all, there are fundamental differences in strategy amongst New York City politicians to deal with the affordability crisis.
The lack of affordable housing is a complex problem. And every complex problem, as the saying goes, has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
You might think in this great city of millions of people and billions of building square footage, that the city leaders would be very thorough with their construction codes, having instituted one of the first codes in 1867. To their credit, city leaders made regular updates to the city’s building codes since, but have been paying a lot of attention to our current building codes in the last few years.
Apparently there used to be a time in New York when apartments weren’t run through private equity. Back in the 1960s, community activists in Harlem and across the city had to take control of their building’s utilities as landlords mass-abandoned apartments that were no longer seeing returns.
The city that never sleeps is asleep while residents lose agency over what happens to their neighborhood. With changes in building requirements from The City Of Yes (TCOY), which does not promote affordability, it is clear that administrative actions do not improve quality of life.
Blame Donald Trump. If your favorite major media outlet isn’t reporting New York City historic preservation news as often as you’d like, one reason might be the constantly breaking national news stories that “bigfoot” local coverage off the page.
We received a letter in response to the Village View’s November article The Transformation of Sixth Avenue at 14th Street, and our question about Macy’s origins.
According to Village Preservation, “The city is planning to develop the site of the Gansevoort Meat Market north of the Whitney Museum … It will include a 60-story, 600-ft. tall, 600-unit apartment tower of mostly ultra-expensive super-luxury units.”
