Battle for Space, Light : High-Rises Cast Shadow Over N.Y.
When Laura Benson moved into her ninth-floor apartment on West 57th Street, it was a light and airy retreat from the pressures of teeming Manhattan.
Fifteen years later, her building is a dwarf in the shadows of the steel-and-glass towers that surround it, and Benson’s once-pleasant home seems more and more like a cave. She can’t even read during the daytime without turning on her lights.
“It’s not fun to be in the apartment,” Benson complained. “I go crazy.”
If Los Angeles’ struggles with growth are defined by its clogged freeways and choking smog, Manhattan’s are most evident in its dwindling patches of sunshine and open space.
Explosive Growth
New York’s strong recovery from its fiscal crisis of the 1970s, combined with the explosive growth of the financial services industry, has sent Manhattan into one of its most prolonged building booms ever. Demand has driven land prices to astronomical levels. Developers have nowhere to go but up: There are more than 60 buildings of taller than 15 stories under construction in Manhattan.
Air and light are scarcer than ever, and these days, a host of sophisticated and well-organized neighborhood groups are fighting to save what remains. Such luminaries as actor Paul Newman, violinist Itzhak Perlman and former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis have lent their names to the efforts to stop or slow various projects.
“Maybe 20 years ago, New Yorkers would say, the bigger, the better, because that’s what distinguishes us,” said state Sen. Franz S. Leichter. “Now, there’s concern for quality of life, and a realization that bigness isn’t necessarily goodness. . . . Throughout the city, you are finding a revolt against developments that do not harmonize with the community.”
‘Beginning of Tragedy’
Not everyone sees it that way. George Sternlieb, head of Rutgers University’s Center for Urban Policy Research, described the growing influence of development opponents as “the beginning of a tragedy. . . . It is a desperate rear-guard action against the city of the 21st Century.”
“Nobody can remember the bad times, when New York and New Jersey were competing to see which would have the highest unemployment rate,” Sternlieb said. “When we were scared, anybody who wanted to do anything short of a toxic waste disposal site was welcome.”
Now, he said, “there are literally a thousand groups that have the power to naysay.”
Recently, such organizations have won two important skirmishes in their escalating war with developers.
In late March, Albert and Laurence Ginsberg were ordered to decapitate more than one-third of their new 31-story Upper East Side apartment building after a neighborhood group, Civitas, discovered they had built it taller than the law allows. It was the first time such a dramatic penalty had been levied by the city, and will mean the loss of 24 apartments that would have sold for about $450,000 each, or a total of $11 million. Demolition and related expenses are expected to cost $2.5 million.
The Ginsbergs are appealing the Board of Standards and Appeals ruling in court. Meanwhile, the nearly complete building sits empty, as it has since early 1987.
Two weeks ago, Mortimer B. Zuckerman finally reached an agreement with neighborhood groups over the skyscraper he plans to build on Columbus Circle. During his four-year battle, he was forced to scale down his plans twice in the face of public outcry. At one point, thousands gathered in Central Park with umbrellas to demonstrate how much sunlight the building would block.
Fight Over Trump City
Those fights could pale in comparison to what may await Donald Trump, who expects to apply within the next few months for city permission to build his colossal Trump City on the Hudson River between 59th and 72nd streets. The site of an old Conrail yard, it is Manhattan’s largest remaining undeveloped tract.
The showpiece of Trump’s 18-million-square-foot development would be the world’s tallest building--a 152-story tower of offices, hotel rooms and apartments rising a third of a mile from the Hudson’s bank. Alongside it would be a row of 60-story buildings and the city’s largest shopping mall. Its daily population of workers, residents and visitors would be around 80,000.
Trump insists that the development would not be another concrete wasteland. It would include 19 acres of parks and public recreational facilities.
“We intend to build a project there that is suitable for the site--suitably grand,” said Anthony Gliedman, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “We’re committed to doing a really great project there.”
Westpride, a 3-year-old community group, does not share Trump’s enthusiasm or his taste. Trump is “the Liberace of development,” said Roberta Brandes Gratz, one of Westpride’s founders.
“It’s bizarre. It is the size of a whole new city grafted onto what is already one of the densest neighborhoods of New York. It’s just idiocy,” said Gratz, who is the author of a recently published book, “The Living City.”
“The future of the West Side is being cemented into place for generations, and it is a future that has an appalling lack of concern for human scale, human values, for a sense of community,” added author Robert A. Caro, a West Side resident who chronicled the development of modern New York in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of legendary city planner Robert Moses.
Westpride has estimated that Trump’s tallest building would cast a shadow a quarter of a mile into New Jersey in the early morning and almost all the way across Manhattan on some spring afternoons.
“New York is a city of tall buildings. Clearly, there’s nothing particularly damaged by (Trump City),” Gliedman replied. “Who would know if it cast a shadow to New Jersey? Who would care?” He insisted that the spire would be less intrusive to the air and light than the bulky developments of earlier eras, such as Rockefeller Center.
Of course, tall buildings are nothing new to Manhattan. As far back as 1930, folk singer Woody Guthrie described it as a place where “the buildings are so high the sun don’t come out until 1:30 in the afternoon, and then it’s visible for seven minutes between the Empire State Building and the shoeshine over there.”
Backlash Growing
But today’s projects, said Sen. Leichter, “are not just big. They’re grandiose. It’s like a game of, ‘I Can Top You.’ . . . There’s a real backlash growing.”
Developers claim that in this confrontational climate, it has become harder to win approval for a project than it is to actually build it.
Bruce Eichner, whose 72-story Cityspire on West 55th Street has been one of the more controversial towers to pierce the Manhattan sky in the last few years, describes the trend as “the Tokyoization of Manhattan.”
Few cities in the world restrict development so tightly as land-scarce Tokyo, where “sunshine right” is protected as a vested interest in the building code and even one dissenting vote in a neighborhood can tie up construction for months.
Verges on Mystical
On the other hand, Eichner’s opponents argue that New York’s old zoning strictures have crumbled in the era of super-scale developers. Today’s giant skyscrapers materialize through a process that verges on the mystical.
Eichner’s Cityspire is a good example. He was able to build it almost twice as big as zoning would otherwise permit by:
- Literally buying air from his neighbor at $32.50 per square foot.
- Taking advantage of a controversial city bonus plan.
- And, finally, striking a bargain with city officials when he discovered he had accidentally built Cityspire too tall.
His first step was to buy his neighbor’s “air rights”--the vacant space over a nearby building. Its owners literally subdivided the air and transferred the right to develop it to Eichner.
Stacking such columns of air, a concept that has been used to a lesser extent in Los Angeles, is the chief means by which developers have gotten permission to build the spires that have elevated the Manhattan skyline in recent years.
Makes for Variety
Supporters of the concept note that transferring air rights makes for variety, far more attractive than developing areas into monotonous and forbidding blocks of buildings that are all the same size. Once they’ve sold their air rights, the buildings around a skyscraper are forced to remain small.
But community groups often complain that such dealing can destroy the character of a neighborhood.
Another controversial policy has been the city’s practice of relaxing its zoning code in exchange for builders’ providing services and amenities.
Even after he acquired his neighbor’s air rights, Eichner could not construct Cityspire as big as he wanted it. So he took advantage of a city bonus plan, under which he could add 20% to the size of the building, if he gave the city something it wanted in return.
In some cases, developers have received bonuses for adding atriums or plazas; in others, for providing middle- or low-income housing. Sometimes bonuses are used to channel construction from densely developed areas to those where growth is considered desirable.
Eichner won his bonus by renovating the rundown City Center Theater near the building.
But his story did not end there. As Cityspire was nearing completion, Eichner discovered he had inadvertently built it 11 feet too tall. So he went back into protracted negotiations with the city, and agreed earlier this year to donate rehearsal space for nonprofit dance companies in return for the right to keep the extra height.
Eichner said the whole process has been a nightmare.
“The difference between the building being 800 feet and 811 feet is of no consequence to anyone,” he complained. “I cannot for the life of me understand what public good was served by this fiasco.”
However, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that the Cityspire saga symbolized a disturbing trend.
Such dealings, he wrote, “turn the natural order of things upside down, and suggest that private developers can make their own rules, or at least negotiate with the city to revise the rules if they are not happy with them. . . . What is to prevent another developer from adding 22 feet to his building and offering to build two dance studios?”
Indeed, the Ginsbergs, who are facing the prospect of having to demolish the top 12 floors of their apartment building on East 96th Street, tried to make a similar deal.
Arguing that they broke the law through no fault of their own--they said they relied on a faulty city zoning map--the developers offered to refurbish nearby tenements if they could keep the additional stories.
Originally, Mayor Edward I. Koch supported their proposal, but he has since reversed his position and supports the Board of Standards and Appeals decision.
To Civitas, the group that alerted the city to the violation in July, 1986, the board’s ruling is an important precedent. Too long, said Civitas president Genie Rice, the message to developers has been that if “you break the law, you pay your way out. That is part of doing business in the city.”
Mayoral candidate and City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin agreed: “The city should stop selling municipal indulgences.”
Con Howe, executive director of the City Planning Commission, rejected the contention that the city has been cutting too many deals with developers.
Howe said that the city has removed many of the bonuses it used to offer--such as allowing bigger buildings in exchange for theater renovations, atriums and arcades. In recent years, he said, it has added only one new type of bonus--for developers who include low- and moderate-income housing in their construction.
“If anything, we’ve moved to ‘as-of-right’ development. That’s the term we use where there’s no special permission requested or granted,” Howe said.
He noted that between 1978 and 1982, only 39% of the buildings in mid-town were built without special approval, bonuses or variances. In the next five years, the most recent for which figures are available, 80% of mid-town construction has “followed the letter of the zoning laws.”
But in the eyes of its critics, the city has been too eager a partner with developers, sacrificing rational urban planning for the sake of expanding its tax base and stretching its revenues.
Said Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University urban planning professor: “The only thing Mayor Koch had left to sell was the light and the air of Manhattan, so he began selling it with a vengeance.”
Times researcher Charles Hirshberg contributed to this story.
