Water always reaches its own level, which is how the less charitable among you would characterize the hulking and banal presence of NYU in Greenwich Village and it’s virus-like spread eastward. Even if you wouldn’t, dorms and near-dorms are the latest battle line in the war of what I guess should be called institutional gentrification (or maybe Gentrification Plus!(tm)).
Three projects have made the news recently, all of them because they are big, big, big. There might be an undercurrent of the pejorative ‘filled with NYU students’, but that isn’t such a controversial statement to anyone living downtown (no, I kid, NYU students are such a joy; I can’t want to go to Dojo and see some). To their limited credit, not all the dorms in question were inextricably associated with NYU.
The latest skirmish, though by any measure just about over, involves another featureless behemoth closer to the campus proper, on 12th Street off Fourth Avenue. NYU has secured air rights, preservation exceptions and all manner of clever zoning geegaws to insert a 26-story dorm behind the façade of an almost National Registered church (St. Ann’s). Of course, you can still vent this evening before the project is rubber stamped, but don’t get too excited.
The scourge that is NYU development is so pervasive, they can probably get away with arguing that mediocre, over-scaled projects that hardly relate to the street life of the surrounding neighborhoods are actually contextual, a nifty trick, since they are responsible for most of them. How bad is it? Well, when the Kimmel Center was announced, it was touted as a sea change in the development process, a building of superior design quality and closer in character and scale to the immediate environs. Yeah, it’s that bad.
Dorms aren’t inevitably bad. In fact NYU squeezed out two not so bad ones just a block away on Third Avenue (both not far from two other very modest and serviceable efforts from the Cooper Union and New School — perhaps the aura of institutional bland peters our just east of the Alamo?). But that seems to be a long time ago. The most recent example, on the corner of Fourth Street and the Bowery, is nothing short of horrendous. You can see the control joints where the prefab brick panels come together from my apartment, and I have to walk a good ways just to get to Avenue A.
But NYU almost always is. The area that best defines the campus (roughly from Bleecker to 9th Street, west from Broadway to Washington Square Park West) is a mixture of interesting to average older stock, with any street level services thoroughly scrubbed of interesting events and heavily privatized, and the addition of a series of boxy, awkward examples of the worst of educational architecture: haphazard, multivalent programs, repetitive spaces, the occasional pander to style that attempts to subvert the nearly spec office space model that dictates the thinking behind most of them.
Quickly approaching preeminent status (if not there already) as largest private landowner in Manhattan (if you’re curious, the main competitors are Columbia University and Trinity Church), it seems hard to fathom a way to stop them, especially as there seems to be an endless supply of affluent parents who operate under the delusion that NYU produces something other than self-important and talent-less scenesters who aspire to nothing more than someday coming up with something as cool as Misshapes.
As if that weren’t insulting enough, people who aren’t even attached to NYU are using it as an excuse to build their own awful residential projects. Way out in the wilds of the East Village, one manage to slip under the radar, while the other has come up hard against the people that wrote the EV Gentrification Handbook: the residents of Christadora House.
Both attempt to end run FAR (the calculation that determines maximum buildable envelope) limits by qualifying for a community use bonus, and option that includes dormitories (how itinerant residents help communities, well, let NYU explain that). One project, at 81 East Third, was built with a vague promise that it would cater to New York School of Law students (a very convenient commute to Worth Street, yes), but it turns out they didn’t even have leases in places (one of those legal details that just unnecessarily encumber developers). That one was so bad they even tightened up the rules after.
But the man who likely will force a wholesale redrafting of community use bonuses is the man everyone in the East Village has found a reason to hate. Buying PS 64 (best known as CHARAS/El Bohio for the past decade) from Giuliani in the late nineties (in an auction that seemed designed to be a monstrous fuck you to his least favorite nabe), Gregg Singer has trotted out every school except DeVry to justify a 22-story tower. Stonewalled a number of times, he’s taken to grumbling at local papers, and has petulantly put his property back on the market. You have to feel for him; if it sells, at a reported 20 or so times his purchase price seven years ago (that’s about a 300% return a year, right? and you thought your co-op was appreciating fast), he’ll barely have enough left over after licking his wounds and paying his lawyers to, I dunno, buy bothRupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s properties.
The EV types seem pretty well organized, and funded, and have plenty of Community Board support in their collective distaste. But back in the land of purple banners and empty trolley buses, it looks like they could use a little more help. Make your voice heard in a couple hours at 333 Bowery.
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We Don’t Need No Education(al Facilities).
Water always reaches its own level, which is how the less charitable among you would characterize the hulking and banal presence of NYU in Greenwich Village and it’s virus-like spread eastward. Even if you wouldn’t, dorms and near-dorms are the latest battle line in the war of what I guess should be called institutional gentrification (or maybe Gentrification Plus!(tm)).
Three projects have made the news recently, all of them because they are big, big, big. There might be an undercurrent of the pejorative ‘filled with NYU students’, but that isn’t such a controversial statement to anyone living downtown (no, I kid, NYU students are such a joy; I can’t want to go to Dojo and see some). To their limited credit, not all the dorms in question were inextricably associated with NYU. The latest skirmish, though by any measure just about over, involves another featureless behemoth closer to the campus proper, on 12th Street off Fourth Avenue. NYU has secured air rights, preservation exceptions and all manner of clever zoning geegaws to insert a 26-story dorm behind the façade of an almost National Registered church (St. Ann’s). Of course, you can still vent this evening before the project is rubber stamped, but don’t get too excited. The scourge that is NYU development is so pervasive, they can probably get away with arguing that mediocre, over-scaled projects that hardly relate to the street life of the surrounding neighborhoods are actually contextual, a nifty trick, since they are responsible for most of them. How bad is it? Well, when the Kimmel Center was announced, it was touted as a sea change in the development process, a building of superior design quality and closer in character and scale to the immediate environs. Yeah, it’s that bad. Dorms aren’t inevitably bad. In fact NYU squeezed out two not so bad ones just a block away on Third Avenue (both not far from two other very modest and serviceable efforts from the Cooper Union and New School — perhaps the aura of institutional bland peters our just east of the Alamo?). But that seems to be a long time ago. The most recent example, on the corner of Fourth Street and the Bowery, is nothing short of horrendous. You can see the control joints where the prefab brick panels come together from my apartment, and I have to walk a good ways just to get to Avenue A. But NYU almost always is. The area that best defines the campus (roughly from Bleecker to 9th Street, west from Broadway to Washington Square Park West) is a mixture of interesting to average older stock, with any street level services thoroughly scrubbed of interesting events and heavily privatized, and the addition of a series of boxy, awkward examples of the worst of educational architecture: haphazard, multivalent programs, repetitive spaces, the occasional pander to style that attempts to subvert the nearly spec office space model that dictates the thinking behind most of them. Quickly approaching preeminent status (if not there already) as largest private landowner in Manhattan (if you’re curious, the main competitors are Columbia University and Trinity Church), it seems hard to fathom a way to stop them, especially as there seems to be an endless supply of affluent parents who operate under the delusion that NYU produces something other than self-important and talent-less scenesters who aspire to nothing more than someday coming up with something as cool as Misshapes. As if that weren’t insulting enough, people who aren’t even attached to NYU are using it as an excuse to build their own awful residential projects. Way out in the wilds of the East Village, one manage to slip under the radar, while the other has come up hard against the people that wrote the EV Gentrification Handbook: the residents of Christadora House. Both attempt to end run FAR (the calculation that determines maximum buildable envelope) limits by qualifying for a community use bonus, and option that includes dormitories (how itinerant residents help communities, well, let NYU explain that). One project, at 81 East Third, was built with a vague promise that it would cater to New York School of Law students (a very convenient commute to Worth Street, yes), but it turns out they didn’t even have leases in places (one of those legal details that just unnecessarily encumber developers). That one was so bad they even tightened up the rules after. But the man who likely will force a wholesale redrafting of community use bonuses is the man everyone in the East Village has found a reason to hate. Buying PS 64 (best known as CHARAS/El Bohio for the past decade) from Giuliani in the late nineties (in an auction that seemed designed to be a monstrous fuck you to his least favorite nabe), Gregg Singer has trotted out every school except DeVry to justify a 22-story tower. Stonewalled a number of times, he’s taken to grumbling at local papers, and has petulantly put his property back on the market. You have to feel for him; if it sells, at a reported 20 or so times his purchase price seven years ago (that’s about a 300% return a year, right? and you thought your co-op was appreciating fast), he’ll barely have enough left over after licking his wounds and paying his lawyers to, I dunno, buy both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s properties. The EV types seem pretty well organized, and funded, and have plenty of Community Board support in their collective distaste. But back in the land of purple banners and empty trolley buses, it looks like they could use a little more help. Make your voice heard in a couple hours at 333 Bowery.