It’s a Hotel After All and Residents Are Mad By Ronald Drenger It has been a year and a half since Tribeca last heard from the developer of the narrow lot at the corner of Church and Duane streets. Back then, after his designs for a hotel had repeatedly been opposed by neighbors and rejected by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, he told worried residents that he was planning to build a six-story residential loft building. But last month, when excavation work suddenly began on the site, Duane Street residents were dismayed to learn from construction workers that a hotel was going up after all. Now some residents, who say that the builder, Sam Chang, and the architect, Gene Kaufman, have refused to talk to them, are again worried that a hotel will create congestion and disrupt residential life on the street and that construction will compromise the structural integrity of an adjacent building. “They haven’t let us see the plans as they promised they would, so there’s a tremendous amount of skepticism and fear,” said Jean Grillo, who heads the Duane/Thomas Neighborhood Committee. “They started excavating without telling anyone in our building, and there’s nobody available to talk to us about what they’re planning,” said Linda Pollak, who lives and works at 132 Duane St., a five-story condominium next door to the site. Documents posted last month at the construction site only added to residents’ confusion and anger. There was a Buildings Department permit for a commercial building next to the Certificate of Appropriateness, issued by the Landmarks Commission in August 2001, for a six-story-plus-penthouse “apartment building with a commercial ground floor.” The Buildings Department has so far issued only a foundation permit, but not a permit for building construction. In April, it denied the developer a building permit, according to a department spokeswoman. “I can assure you, there is no cause for concern,” Neil Shah, director of development for Hersha Hospitality Management, the site’s owner, said in a phone interview last month. “The neighborhood will be pleasantly surprised.” Shah said that Hersha was planning a “small boutique hotel” with about 45 rooms and a ground floor café. He is scheduled to give details on Dec. 5 at a public meeting of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee (see Community Calendar). Hersha, which owns more than 20 chain hotels on the east coast, is developing three Hampton Inn hotels in Manhattan, one of them at 320 Pearl St. Shah said that Kaufman, the architect, had forwarded to him angry emails from residents. “I was really surprised by the level of interest, and, to a certain degree, controversy,” said Shah, who seemed unaware that residents had been raising concerns about the project for years and had spent many hours at community board meetings and Landmarks Commission hearings battling against earlier hotel plans. In addition to worrying about too much traffic, the loft owners at 132 Duane St. are concerned that construction work will damage their 19th-century building. They put up bracing last year to shore up a fragile cellar wall, and recently installed seismic monitors to measure vibrations from the work. “We have to make sure that things will be done correctly,” Olivier Scaramaucci, condominium president at 132 Duane, said. “We’re very suspicious because there has been, we feel, a pattern of deception with this project.”