Construction Woes Pit Angry Neighbors Against Luxury Tribeca Hotel

The Warren Street Hotel, 86 Warren Street, and its neighbor, 80 Warren Street. The co-op is seeking repairs to damage caused by construction of the hotel, which was completed last year with 69 guest rooms and 12 residential apartments. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Your hardship? What about our hardship? 

That’s what aggrieved neighbors are saying to the developers of a struggling new luxury hotel in Tribeca.

The Warren Street Hotel at 86 Warren St., where room rates start at $1,225 a night, opened last year without the fitness center and event space that the London-based operator, Firmdale Hotels, claims it needs to survive. 

Excavation for the $86 million hotel’s foundation turned up unanticipated soil conditions and caused structural damage to neighboring buildings. The owners say that has meant the loss of three cellar levels that would have housed the needed amenities. Now they are asking the city for a zoning variance to allow a 2,922-square-foot enlargement of the building’s 12th floor to accommodate those facilities.

But they won’t get it if neighbors living next door at 80 Warren Street have their way. At least not yet. Having endured flooding, cracked walls and ceilings and doors and windows that no longer closed, the co-op residents insist the developer’s efforts to fix the damage to their 110-year-old building were inadequate, and problems persist. 

The two sides came together this month at a meeting of Community Board 1’s Land Use, Zoning and Economic Development Committee, where the developer sought the board’s advisory approval for the right to build an addition that would exceed the structure’s allowed bulk. 

“Some of those repairs were done in a sloppy way and cracks reopened,” said 80 Warren resident Deborah Treisman. “The building continued to shift constantly. We are here one year post termination of the construction, almost one year, and there is extensive damage to our building, which has not been repaired.” The co-op said no repairs have been made since 2021.

“I can’t even believe the request,” said 80 Warren resident Paul Lieberman, who detailed damage to his apartment that included flooded walls and an estimated $300,000 in needed repairs to the building. “I don’t know how somebody can actually, in good faith, come to us and say, we want to build another thing. We don’t want to fix your thing.”

Efforts to discuss the problems “many times” with the hotel have been fruitless, the co-op told the community board in a written statement. Instead, they said, they were referred to an insurance broker. “When we contacted the insurance broker they said WE had to initiate legal action to get our building fixed,” the co-op wrote.

To win approval for the variance, the developer must convince the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals that, among other conditions, the problem was not self-created and the requested variance is the minimum change to the building that would solve the financial hardship to the business.

“The proposed addition raises the project only slightly above break-even,” Eric Palatnik, a lawyer for the developer, told the committee. 

Would denial of the variance bankrupt the project? a committee member asked.

“That is essentially correct,” Palatnik replied.

As originally planned, four sub-cellar levels would contain mechanical systems, back of house facilities, the fitness center and two meeting or “function” rooms. But soon after excavation began, Palatnik said, unexpected problems arose that would make construction at that depth impossible. It was discovered that 80 Warren had a “floating wall,” meaning that its foundation was disconnected to the rest of the building. This, combined with unexpected poor soil conditions, Palatnik said, caused the building to shift during pile driving. Once it was detected that 80 Warren’s movement “far exceeding what would be expected in a typical excavation,” $2.5 million-worth of pilings was abandoned. The contractor pivoted to a safer installation method, and one rather than four below-ground levels. (The previous use of secant piles had been chosen in part as a protective wall against groundwater.) 

Palatnik said the owners made a “good faith effort to construct the hotel without harming the neighboring buildings” and spent nearly $500,000 in repairs and protections to the three affected buildings. But the co-op asserts that, aside from the yet unfinished repairs, it is also owed some $300,000 in access fees that allowed the contractors to install scaffolding on their roof, which they say remained there for years.

“I don’t think our building is about to allow access to our roof, which is still damaged. So I’m not sure how they would do this [new] construction,” Treisman said. 

Palatnik did not respond to an email request for comment.

CB1 chair Tammy Meltzer asked the Firmdale Hotels representatives to return to the committee after they had made restitution and “figured out what the deal is with the neighbors.”

“That’s going to be the first question before we look at any plans or anything else,” she said. “To make whole the promises that you’ve already made to the neighbors.”

That meeting is expected to take place in March, it was later announced.