Tribeca’s Citizen-Architect

 On May 16, more than 300 people gathered at St. Andrews Church in Lower Manhattan to remember John Petrarca, 51, who died on May 9 after a two-year battle with cancer. An architect and 22-year resident of Tribeca, Petrarca lived on Reade Street with his wife, Sarah Bartlett and their children, Emilia and Ian.

John Petrarca photographs the construction of his Reade Street

At the service, Petrarca was eulogized as a man who left a visible legacy on his neighborhood.

“He was a model citizen-architect,” said Rocco Damato. “He cared how Tribeca should evolve and he had a vision of how it should get there.”

Petrarca’s influence can be seen from his neighborhood’s rooftops to its main thoroughfare, Greenwich Street.

As a member of Community Board 1 from 1994 to 1999, Petrarca’s first major cause was the narrowing and landscaping of Greenwich Street, once 70-feet-wide and a veritable raceway for traffic barreling through the neighborhood. He joined forces with three other board members—Doug Sterner, Nancy Owens and Rocco Damato—to battle the city over funding for the project and answer critics who opposed the street’s narrowing.

“It’s hard to remember what Greenwich Street was like,” says Owens. “It was a wasteland and John had a vision of transforming the street. It took so many years of working on this project, with hundreds of meetings and telephone conversations. John understood that you needed a wider support beyond the city agencies, that you needed to educate people about the project.”

Petrarca’s tenure as chair of the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 1 came at a critical time. Developers were rushing to convert long-empty buildings into multi-million-dollar lofts and adding valuable, but often

poorly designed, extra living space on rooftops. The developers first had to come before Petrarca’s committee, which advised the Landmarks Preservation Commission. His disapprovals were often accompanied by erudite lectures on design. Penthouses, he insisted, must be architecturally interesting additions to Tribeca’s skyline, not overbearing or banal.

In an attempt to broaden support for his ideas, Petrarca brought together then Landmarks Commission chair Jennifer Raab with almost every developer, realtor, real estate lawyer, architect and anyone else interested in the lucrative practice of heaping precious floor area on top of Tribeca buildings.

During the meeting, Petrarca presented a slide show of the best and worst of penthouse design in the neighborhood. “If you live on the fifth floor, you should see something that has its own interest as a rooftop addition,” he told the gathering, “not something that looks like mechanical equipment and elevator bulkheads gone wild.”

Petrarca was also passionately opposed to the proliferation of illegal signage in Tribeca, arguing, along with others, that the area was treated differently from other residential neighborhoods. His committee managed to get violations on six billboards, three of which carried criminal-court summonses.

In one fight, he took on the New York Academy of Art on Franklin Street, which had rented space on the side of its building for a huge Jose Quervo ad. “The zoning regulations in New York City are written for the consideration for the residential environment,” he said in a debate with the Academy’s director, Bruce Ferguson. “You can’t come in and impose a big bottle of Jose Quervo on my living room.”

As chair of the Landmarks Committee, Petrarca tirelessly argued that new construction in Tribeca should evoke, but not imitate the old. He put his principles into practice when he designed and developed a trio of townhouses on Reade Street between Greenwich and Hudson streets.

Loft apartments would have been more lucrative, but Petrarca’s explanation for constructing single-family homes—the first in Manhattan in decades—was simple. “You can build higher, you can build bigger, you can build lofts like most people associate with Tribeca,” he said. “But I’m a house guy. For all the lofts I design, I love living in a house.”

Petrarca was fascinated by engineering and mechanical challenges. With his own black steel house on Reade Street, for example, he took the unorthodox step of prefabricating the entire 20-ton facade. As a crane gingerly lowered it onto the building’s frame, Petrarca watched with fascination. “It fits,” he said, as the facade finally slid into place. “If it had been a hotter day, it probably wouldn’t have!”

Eschewing conventional energy sources for his townhouses, Petrarca tapped geothermal energy deep in Manhattan’s bedrock by drilling holes—as deep as the Empire State Building is high—in front of each house. The buildings were among the first in Manhattan to rely almost exclusively on geothermal power.

“There are very few things you can do in construction in the city to conserve energy,” he observed at the time. “You can’t build windmills, and there are too many shadows for effective solar power.”

Those who knew Petrarca often marveled at the enthusiasm and energy that he brought to his work and the passion he showed towards his neighborhood.

“He had a very busy life with an office, a staff and a family, but John found the time to give back to the community,” said Nancy Owens. “He enjoyed the challenge and saw he could make a difference.”

(The family asks that donations in John Petrarca’s memory can be sent to Friends of Greenwich Street, 295 Greenwich St., Box 247, New York, NY 10013.)