Backing for Glass Top on Landmark

By Nick Pinto
POSTED FEBRUARY 1, 2008

After much indecisive back and forth and wrangling over an ambivalent resolution, members of Community Board 1 voted last month in favor of plans to build a four-story glass hotel atop one of the city’s grandest landmarks, the recently renovated 1906 Battery Maritime Building.

The board’s ambivalence about the project was reflected in the resolution prepared by its Landmarks Committee, which simultaneously recommended approval and registered “strong objection to the bulk and massing of the new addition.”

CB1 member Paul Hovitz pressed the committee’s chair, Roger Byrom, to explain the apparent disjunction.

“How can you be in strong opposition to it and still be approving it?” Hovitz asked. “You’re sidestepping the issue!”

Byrom’s effort to explain his committee’s resolution did little to clarify the confusion.

“We’re approving the project in terms of the bulk and the mass,” Byrom responded, “but we are raising a strong objection to the bulk and the mass.”

The Dermot Company, which is behind the proposed development, has argued that the addition’s size is driven by the need to make the building profitable. The team’s architects say that the current design—the third version so far made public—is scaled back as far as possible and no further reductions can be made.

But speaking before the full Community Board, architect Jonathan Marvel attempted to persuade members that the addition would also be critical to the historic renovation of the building.

Marvel argued that the glass hotel complements the cupolas that originally capped the building’s vertical elements and which the current design restores.

“The glass hotel is simply here to replace the sky,” Marvel said, invoking the low landscape behind the building before skyscrapers rose in Lower Manhattan. “The building needs the cupolas; the cupolas need the glass backdrop.”

Marc Ameruso, the only member to vote against the project in committee, explained his opposition to the full board. 

“Taking financial concerns into how a building is considered as a landmark is a slippery slope,” he said.

 Board member Joe Lerner agreed. “The city of New York paid millions of dollars to renovate this building. Now to add this bulk to it would be terrible.”

But others on the board had no objection to the design’s juxtaposition of modern and historic.

“I like the restoration,” said Allan Tannenbaum. “There’s a lot of that going on in the city these days, and I’ve gotten used to it.”

Even some of the members opposed to the design praised the changes made and noted that the glass top will be all but invisible from the landward side.

In addition to the hotel, the design includes a grand public hall that will be available in the evening as a private event space. It will be run by the Poulakakos family, operators of several Downtown restaurants including Harry’s of Hanover Square.

By the end of the discussion, only six members voted against the proposal. One of them, surprisingly, was Byrom.

 Final approval of the architectural designs rests with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Commission voiced concerns about the plans when they first reviewed them in October, but since the plan has the support of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, many on the Community Board believe it will be approved. The project has not yet been scheduled for a Commission hearing, but it is expected to be reviewed at one of their February meetings.

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