Demolition Sparks Landmarking Effort

By Carl Glassman
MAY 3, 2006

Just five stories tall and a century-and-a-half old, the building at 16 Warren Street was taken down quickly and easily last month. As workers pried apart brick sidewalls and pulled up ceiling joists, Lisa Lim watched grimly from a rear window of her apartment at 80 Chambers Street.

"It's being demolished floor by floor," she said, looking down at the building, now two stories shorter. "When they take it apart it's heart-wrenching. It's a beautiful building."


Sixteen Warren Street will be replaced by a building nearly twice its size, and neighboring structures could share the same fate. A set of similar 19th-century buildings line Warren and Chambers Streets, between Broadway and West Broadway, a stone's throw from the city-protected Tribeca South Historic District.
 

Lim organized a group of her neighbors, the Conservancy Committee of the Tower 270 Condominium, to try to save those buildings from demolition and prevent the construction of large rooftop additions, which the group says are inappropriate. The residents identified 15 nearby buildings on the "historic corridor" of Chambers and Warren Streets that are similar in style, vintage and size to those in the landmark district and, they insist, deserve the same protections.

"I'm really afraid that one by one these buildings will be demolished," said Vincent Cangelosi, an architect and a member of the conservancy group. He and other preservation-minded residents warn of the possible acquisition—and destruction—of several buildings by one developer.

The group has joined forces with the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 1 to try to convince the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) that the Tribeca South Historic District should be expanded to include the blocks where these buildings stand.

"I was shocked when I saw it demolished," Marc Donnenfeld, a member of CB1's Landmarks Committee, said of 16 Warren Street. "Now, with people tearing buildings down, I see the urgency of the expansion of the district. Speed is of the essence."

Last month, CB1 hastily drew up a resolution that calls on the LPC to hold hearings on the expansion of the Tribeca South Historic District and the historic district in northern Tribeca, to include an area bounded by Canal, Hubert, West and Hudson Streets.

The board, which passed a similar resolution last July, noted that since then, 16 Warren Street was demolished and three other unprotected buildings on Warren Street have been altered.

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a preservation advocacy group, warned that the loss of 16 Warren Street could lead to a domino effect.

 

"Suddenly it will become obvious to other owners that maybe their building should be leveled," he said. "You could have a whole row of 10 buildings, crowding each other out."

Local preservationists who fought in the 1980s to save Tribeca's architectural fabric had wanted the LPC to protect a wider swath of the neighborhood than the agency eventually included when it created Tribeca's four historic districts in 1991 and 1992. The boundary of the Tribeca South Historic District went only as far south as the north side of Chambers Street.

In November 2002, the LPC expanded the southern district to include 28 more buildings on the south side of Chambers Street and on Murray and Warren Streets, but that was still far fewer than preservation advocates recommended. At that time several members of the LPC said they hoped to see additional areas of the neighborhood protected. Sherida Paulsen, then the chairwoman of the LPC, told the Trib that the commission's research department was "actively evaluating" proposals to further expand the district.

Last month—three-and-a-half years later—an LPC spokeswoman told the Trib that the most recent request for an extension of the district was "being evaluated." Robert Tierney, the LPC's chairman, and Mary Beth Betts, the commission's director of research, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Vibeke Lichten and Joel Assouline are a Philadelphia-based husband and wife team who are developing 16 Warren Street. They had intended to add six floors to the exisiting building but their first architect, Lichten said, made a "bad mistake" in his zoning analysis. "We based our purchase of the property on that faulty zoning," she said. "We were left without much choice but to build a new building." Lichten emphasized that the design will take its cues from successful new buildings in the historic district, such as 116 Hudson Street, between North Moore and Franklin Streets.

Sixteen Warren Street is the first building in the proposed expanded historic district to be demolished. But for preservation advocates, the alarm sounded seven years ago when a five-story mansion was built on the roof of 60 Warren Street, a five-story former champagne warehouse.

"We have philistines coming down from the hills who are out to destroy these historic buildings and make a profit," Carole De Saram, head of the Tribeca Community Association, warned at the time.

Since then, other so-called "lollipop" additions have freely sprung up in the area. Had they been proposed for buildings in the nearby historic district, the LPC almost certainly would not have allowed them.

While building owners often rail against restrictions placed on them by LPC oversight—whether for the size of a rooftop addition, the choice of a window replacement or the alteration of a storefront—preservationists argue that a building's landmark status or a neighborhood's designation as a historic district rewards landlords with higher property values. As an example, they point to the skyrocketing value of real estate in Tribeca's historic districts.

Without those protections, said Bankoff of the Historic District Council, "Pretty soon you've lost the feeling of Tribeca and it becomes an anyplace. Not the neighborhood that drew people to it in the first place."