Owner resists landmarking for her building

 by Ronald Drenger

Martha Schessel stood across the street from 67 Greenwich Street, the four-story building that her family has owned for more than 40 years, and pointed out the cracked facade, the peeling paint, the deteriorated fixtures.

Martha Schessel stands with her son Harry in front of 67 Greenwich Street, which her father bought after immigrating to New York. Photo by Carl Glassman

“What is beautiful about that?” she asked.

Preservationists see the nearly 200-year-old building, half a block north of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance, as an important and rare architectural link to the city’s early history. They want it restored and are campaigning to have it designated as a city landmark. (See story at left.)

But Martha Schessel, 70, and her son Harry, 39, see an unremarkable ruin, not worth the $5 million or more they say it would cost to fix up.

“Just because something is old doesn’t mean it should be preserved,” Martha Schessel said during a visit to the vacant building last month.

“The city is not here just for preservationists,” said Harry Schessel. “Ninety-nine percent of the people who walk past this building don’t see anything unique. Nobody says, ‘Wow, what a gorgeous building.’ It doesn’t have the architectural beauty that some other old buildings have. It might have been a really nice building in its time, but its time is passed. ”

The Schessels want to tear down 67 Greenwich Street, which stands a few blocks below the World Trade Center site, and put up a 22-story residential building. The project, they say, would allow them finally to turn a profit on the property and would help revitalize the neighborhood, as well. An architect has drawn up preliminary plans.

But earlier this year the Schessels learned that the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) had put a hold on the building—it cannot

be demolished until the commission conducts a review to determine if it should be landmarked. In 1966, the commission declined to give 67 Greenwich Street landmark status. Martha Schessel fought against it then, too.

“In the ’60s, when the building was in better condition, LPC said that it wasn’t historically significant, that it didn’t have sufficient architectural value,” said Harry Schessel. “Why do we have to go through this again?”

The Schessels argue that the building has little historic value because it has been altered over the years and now stands alone among newer structures. Its Federal era neighbors were demolished in the 1940s for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

In addition, the Schessels say, the building is in such bad shape, with crumbling ceilings, sloping floors and rotting wooden beams, that it would be too expensive to restore.

“It would be almost impossible to get an economic return on the building,” said Harry Schessel. “We’re not going to put a penny into it.”

Preservationists argue that the Schessels should never have let the building deteriorate so badly, but that it is salvageable. If the building is landmarked, they note, there is help for owners like the Schessels.

“There is whole array of subsidy programs, grants, low-interest loans and tax incentives to help defray some of the cost of restoring and reusing the building,” said Roger Lang, director of community programs and services at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Under landmarks law, he added, the Schessels could also sell unused development rights on the 67 Greenwich Street site to a developer who is building on another site nearby.

Martha Schessel said she let the building deteriorate because it generated too little revenue to keep up. The small apartments, with tubs in the kitchens and toilets in the hallways, had been rent-controlled, and the last residential tenant, who moved out in the early 1980s, was paying less than $40 a month, she said. The last commercial tenant, an ice and trucking company, left in 2001.

“It was costing more to keep the building operating than the income we were getting from rent,” she said. “There was never any money to work on it.”

The Schessels claim they stand to lose $10 million to $15 million profit if they’re denied the right to put up a new building. They hope to apply for tax-free Liberty Bond financing, created by the government after 9/11 to help rebuild Downtown. To be eligible for the bonds, they have to act quickly, but the Landmarks Commission’s hold on the building has put their plans into limbo, Harry Schessel said.

“The Liberty Bonds allow us for the first time to build on the site,” he said. “Let us put up a building that would really enhance the neighborhood.”

Sixty-seven Greenwich Street has been in the Schessel family for almost a half century. Martha Schessel and her family, who are Jewish, survived in Rumania through the Holocaust and came to New York in 1951 with little money, she said.

Her father, who had been a lawyer in Rumania, worked a series of menial jobs before buying, with his brother-in-law, first the restaurant in the rear of the ground floor of 67 Greenwich Street and then, in the late 1950’s, the whole building.

When her father died in 1979, Martha Schessel, whose husband is a plastic surgeon, inherited the building. She also owns two other residential buildings on the Upper West Side. Harry Schessel left a job at a security firm after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in order to develop the new building at 67 Greenwich Street.

“My grandfather and my family worked very hard to get this, and we put years into the building,” Martha Schessel said. “Why should we not be able to recognize the financial benefit?”