Architect Peter Guthrie, of developers DDG Partners, presents his proposed design for 100 Franklin Street to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
The architect of a hotly contested glass-walled residential building, proposed for two oddly shaped lots in Tribeca’s historic district, will have to rethink their design.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission last month took a look at plans for the building at 100 Franklin St.—actually two connected triangular structures with a single glass front that would stand on what are now parking lots along Sixth Avenue, between White and Franklin streets. Largely echoing many of the nearly two dozen residents and others at the hearing who testified against the building, the commissioners said the design is a self-conscious and inappropriate addition to the neighborhood.
“There’s too much going on, making the building too frenetic, too show-offy,” Commissioner Frederick Bland said.
“The whole thing just needs to calm down,” he added, while also noting the “many laudable and interesting aspects” of the scheme.
“You’re trying too darn hard to be both cool and of the moment and also refer back,” Commissioner Michael Goldblum said of the two-story penthouse proposed for the northern, eight-story building. The roof structure is meant as a reference to the mansard roof of the 1868 loft building it would abut at 17 White Street.
The commission did not take a vote on the project, by DDG Partners. Its chairman, Robert Tierney, told the developers to “rework” the design.
Along with the roundly criticized penthouse, architect Peter Guthrie’s concept for the difficult site called for a solid glass facade in front of brick arches and the building’s structural support. Behind that would be the apartment windows.
The arches are meant to be visible through the glass and would begin on the second floor, above proposed storefronts. Guthrie said he sees the brick arches as a reference to the surrounding historic buildings.
Goldblum disagreed that the arches bring to mind neighborhood history. “Here you’re creating a fictive building, which never would have looked like this and it certainly wouldn't have started at the second floor,” he said.
Asked by a commissioner how the building fits into the Tribeca East Historic District, Guthrie called it a “celebration” of the typical 19th-century loft building, with its order of base, middle and top. “It also celebrates our time, where we as architects are working today,” he said. “Unabashedly,” he added, “we’re sticking our neck out as we haven’t before.”
"Glass is not an easy one to bring before you," he said. "But we feel it's absolutely appropriate in this case."
For nearly an hour, residents and others testified—as they have at three Community Board 1 meetings—that the building doesn’t match the character of the neighborhood. Prudence Carlson, a leader of the opposition and a resident of 17 White Street, called it “incoherent, menacingly ugly and out of size.”
To architect Walter Melvin, the penthouse looked like a “glass spaceship which has crashed on the roof.” Anne Luce, the 17 White Street co-op president, said in a statement read to the commission that the structure would be an “insult of a modern glass building with no context to our building.”
The Landmarks hearing marked the third time that CB1 had weighed in on the project. Back in October, with just a few neighbors of the site present, the board’s Landmarks Committee, chaired by Bruce Ehrmann, praised the overall design in a resolution while offering a scathing critique of the penthouse and the “bulbous” elevator bulkheads that would protrude from the roof. Some 20 residents, unhappy with what otherwise was an approval of the project, appeared at the full-board meeting later in the month, causing the board to delay a final vote on the building until this month.
Attending the meeting with the Landmarks Committee in early November, where Guthrie gave a second presentation, residents again lambasted the project.
This time the meeting was chaired by Roger Byrom (Ehrmann was out of town), who aggressively challenged the developers to delay their appearance before the Commission in order to resolve the community’s objections. Or, as he put it, “Maybe this is a project you should walk away from.”
The committee voted to reject the entire project.
The final CB1 committee resolution submitted to the Landmarks Commission, and later approved by the full board, included 21 “whereases” and appeared to be an attempt to include both the softer language of the first resolution and to recommend that the developer “find a proposal that is contextual, appropriate and has the community’s support.”
Carlson called the commission’s response to the project “reasoned.”
“I think that they want to do the right thing for the neighborhood,” she said.
“But there are so many question marks floating in space in terms of what will happen,” she added. “When they come back with something, will it really be more appropriate?”