CB1 Committee Rejects Plan to Develop Two Tribeca Buildings as One
STUDIO JS2 VIA Tribeca triB CARL GLASSMAN / TRIBECA TRIB
Left: The Rendering for 52 and 54 Lispenard, shown to CB1. Right: The buildings today.
CB1 condemned plans that would combine the two buildings into one condominium development. Those plans call for covering the existing façade of the smaller, two-story 52 Lispenard with a scalloped terracotta, add three floors to match the height of the building next to it and put on a two-story addition that would span both of them. Committee members called the plan “insensitive” and “suburban.”
“It’s a very unusual piece of architecture, and what you’re putting in here is just this kind of bland infill that really doesn’t respect what is there at all,” Landmarks Committee member and architect Coren Sharples told the project’s architect, James Schelkle of Studio JS2. Schelkle is designing the project in collaboration with Suzana Bellettiere of Section F Design.
The committee voted unanimously to oppose the proposed located in the Tribeca East Historic District. Murat Bugdaycay, who is developing the building and would occupy the top three floors, told the Trib he will review the plans with his architects but expects to go before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission without the community board’s blessing.
“We are going to sit down and make sure we hear the community,” Bugdaycay said. “At the same time, it is a commercial project. It has to financially make sense.”
Both structures were completed in 1868 as five-story buildings. The top three floors of 52 Lispenard were torn down in the 1930s after a fire.
“We feel that the penthouse would speak to Tribeca’s language and what we are trying to accomplish is build new with the old,” Schelkle told the committee.
“These are really some of the loveliest examples of this sort of gothic facade that we have in the city,” Sharples said. “I just don’t understand the need to demolish the facade on the smaller building.”
Schelkle argued that the façade on the smaller building is beyond repair, and the Landmarks Commission discouraged the architects from trying to mimic it on the newer floors,
“They don’t really want us to attempt to recreate because that’s usually not successful,” he said.
The committee told Schelkle that it rarely approves rooftop additions that are more than one story high, but would seriously consider a two-story addition on these two buildings if they also benefited from a sensitive restoration.
“I would love to see these buildings restored, but I think they should be restored lovingly and to try to retain as much character as humanly possible, “ committee member Vera Sung said.
The proposal is expected to go before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in early February.
By Jessica Terrell
POSTED Jan. 17