Some ideas for the NYPD for securing City Hall

To the Editor:

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly seems nervous about security at City Hall. And when a brave guy like Ray Kelly is nervous, it makes me nervous, which leads me to thinking of big solutions.

So here’s a radical suggestion for Lower Manhattan, designed for this new era of being a constant terrorist target:

Build a new 21st-Century civic center for New York City with an up-to-date, wired-for-digital, secure City Hall; office buildings for the City Council and City agencies; and a public space for press conferences, civic celebrations and demonstrations. The new civic center is built at the WTC site, the West Side rail yards or even in Brooklyn or Queens.

The old civic center is restored as New York’s city commons...an historic site; with the Tweed building serving as a gateway Museum of the City of NY; the current City Hall, a ceremonial civic center and museum; the historic subway station that’s under the park, an outpost of the Transit Museum; and all the gates to City Hall Park open.

This is a huge idea but worth it. Rather than the petite municipal HQ we have now, the proposed new modern government center is one needed to run our metropolis into the future. And imagining this plan brings a breath of relief to those of us who live near City Hall. Maybe to Commissioner Kelly, too.

Skip Blumberg
The Friends of
City Hall Park

The truth about 60 Hudson Street not being told

To the Editor:

Sixty Hudson Street, the noxious, fuel-laden telecom hotel in our midst, has been given a mythical history. It was presented last June by Phyllis Arnold, the Buildings Department’s counsel, at a hearing before the Board of Standards and Appeals of an appeal brought by Neighbors Against N.O.I.S.E. to overturn a Buildings Department waiver permitting 60 Hudson to store illegal amounts of diesel fuel on upper floors.

According to Ms. Arnold, “In some ways this building is a relic. But it’s there.... It’s an as of right office building that is now functioning in a way that the law permits it to function.... The neighborhood has changed, in old common law parlance we would call it coming to the nuisance.”

Ms. Arnold’s account contains two major flaws. First, 60 Hudson Street is no longer an office building. It was built as one. Western Union chose the great Ralph Walker to design this architectural masterpiece as its national headquarters, with an executive suite at the top, offices, several floors for teletype machines, labs, a schoolroom for delivery boys, and a beautiful auditorium, now destroyed.

But today 60 Hudson is a high-hazard warehouse that was wrongly permitted to develop in a residential neighborhood. Its certificate of occupancy, which labels it an office building, should have been updated in the early nineties, when 60 Hudson opened its doors to a multitude of telecommunications companies, who loaded spaces once occupied by people with racks of electronic equipment along with back-up generators, air conditioning units, and tanks of diesel fuel. New York’s Building Code says an office building is occupied for transacting business, and performing other services “that may incidentally involve the storage of limited quantities of stocks of goods for office use or purposes.” That’s not 60 Hudson Street.

The second flaw in Miss Arnold’s statement is her remark that residents “came to the nuisance.” When 60 Hudson became a nuisance, in the mid 90’s, Tribeca had been residential for years. The two 10-story buildings directly across Hudson Street were converted to residential use by 1981. Of our five board members, one has lived on Thomas Street since 1979, one on Hudson since 1982, one on Worth since 1988. A block away, the 1332-unit Independence Plaza opened in 1975.

Some of my friends are furious at the suggestion that the nuisance predates them. John Willenbecher recalls what it was like in 1970, when he moved into a loft across from 60 Hudson: “We thought of 60 Hudson Street as our friendly neighborhood Western Union building with workers going in at 9 and out at 5, dark at night and no noise emanating from the windows.” Barbara Stanley Moss says “I moved into 75 Hudson on March 1, 1977. I ate lunch often at the Brown Derby coffee shop on the ground floor of 60 Hudson. I frequented 60 Hudson Street for several activities, including placing my outgoing mail in the brass mailbox, and using the payphones when my home phone was out of service. When my bathroom was being renovated around 1990, I routinely walked into the building and took the elevator to a random floor where I would easily locate a ladies’ room.”

If your readers want to help us explain to the Board of Standards and Appeals that 60 Hudson and the Buildings Department are misrepresenting history, come to our third hearing, on Sept. 13, at 10 AM, 40 Rector St., 6th Fl., Room E.

Deborah Allen
Neighbors Against N.O.I.S.E.

Too many tour busses in Battery Park City

To the Editor:

My husband and I are embarking on a mission to prevent double-decker, and other tour busses from illegally parking in our cul-de-sac at the end of South End Avenue in Battery Park City.

Recently, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of tour busses, from large vans to the monstrous, red, double-decker busses, travelling down to the end of South End Avenue and at best, making 20-point turns to head back up the street (as if they wound up there by mistake), at worst, parking in a “No Standing - Any Time” zone to let tourists off and waiting for their return, then having to make the necessary 20-point turn to exit the cul-de-sac. Residents who stand in these restricted areas, even to load or unload groceries, are immediately ticketed or towed.

While we are relaxed, peace-loving jamokes, who adore Downtown and relish the fact that many people visiting the city also enjoy our “backyard,” we are adamantly against these tour vehicles clogging our neighborhood. There are many sections of the city where tour busses are not allowed, much less park, and we believe that the same restrictions should be imposed on our small street. This neighborhood was not built, nor can it accommodate, the size and (what we foresee in the future as) long lines of busses driving, parking, turning, creating traffic congestion, noise, exhaust and unsafe conditions for pedestrians.

Becca and Peter Acken