"Skinny Hotel" Still Source of Conflict

By Carl Glassman
POSTED FEBRUARY 1, 2008

As neighborhood conflicts go, this one, it seems, knows no end.

Last month the new 45-room Duane Street Hotel, a sliver of a building at Duane and Church Streets, was no sooner fluffing the pillows for its very first guests than it was embroiled in a local fight. At issue was the hotel’s application for a beer and wine license for ’beca its diminutive 40-seat restaurant, with five-seat bar.

With the full community board last month possibly poised to recommend that the State Liquor Authority reject the application, the owners temporarily withdrew it before a vote could be taken.

But even before construction began on the tiny corner lot at 130 Duane Street, neighborhood foes had taken on the planned establishment, first designed with 66 rooms.

“Neighbors in Fight Against Skinny Hotel” was the headline in the November 2000 issue of the Trib. Back then, nearby residents were warning that traffic and pedestrians would choke the area, that a “budget hotel” might lure unsavory strangers close to a nearby preschool, and that the hotel was too small for the number of rooms.

“It’s going to be this anthill of squashed people,” said one opponent  at a CB1 meeting in 2000.

Anger and suspicion grew after  hotel developer Sam Chang, who was constructing the building, told the Landmarks Preservation Commission that his plans had changed. It would be a residential building, he claimed. But when excavation for the foundation began, local residents were enraged to learn that a hotel was in the works after all. And repeated requests to view plans for the building, residents complained, were always denied.

“We don’t trust you, we don’t have a good relationship with you and you’ve told us things that are not true,” Jean Grillo, a Duane Street neighborhood activist, told a representative of the Pennsylvania-based operator, Hersha Hotels, in 2003, when he appeared before CB1 to answer its concerns.

Grillo, a district leader in the Downtown Independent Democrats and public member of CB1, is still at it. Backed by CB1, Councilman Alan Gerson and State Sen. Martin Connor, she helped lead resistance to the hotel’s liquor license at the SLA  last year, and won. Now Hersha is going for beer and wine and she is after them again.

Grillo cited the many nearby liquor licensed establishments, the presence of preschools in the area and what she called the hotelier’s record of “never caring what we thought” as  reasons to deny the license.

Tribeca Committee member Julie Nadel agreed. “There’s bad history here,”  she said.  “For me, alarm bells are going off.”

“Someone would have to do triple somersaults,” said committee member Bruce Ehrmann, citing developer Chang’s track record with this and other projects Downtown. “Sam Chang would have to appear and take questions for me to vote positively,” he said.

Hersha representatives argued that they are being punished for Chang’s actions. Foiz Ahmed, regional director of operations, told the committee Hersha had only just bought the hotel from Chang. Before that they were consultants on the long-overdue building. “We have absolutely nothing to do with Sam Chang,” he said.

Seated a few days later in the hotel’s restaurant, Jeff Stegman, the general manager, said ’beca’s success depends on serving alcohol. He said the “high-end traveler” at the hotel, where rates start around $300 a night, expects it. “We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner here. It’s very difficult to justify dinner without beer and wine.”

And if the the SLA turns him down again? “We don’t even want to get into that,” he replied.

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