Stairs and Grand Restaurant: Focus of Planned Changes to Landmark Building

Rendering of the Clock Tower Building's restored Banking Hall as a restaurant, with landmark stairs moved inside the room and leading to a balcony. The stairs are now located just outside the room. Rendering: Beyer Blinder Belle and Civic Center Community Group Broadway LLC via Tribeca Trib 

Forget the stairs. They’ll take the elevator.

So say the owners of 346 Broadway (aka The Clock Tower Building) in Tribeca.

Last December, Peebles Corp. and the El Ad Group went before the Landmarks Commission to win approvals for numerous and complex alterations to the 1898 McKim, Mead & White landmark, part of their planned residential conversion and restoration of the building. The big news from those hearings was the commission’s controversial ruling—now the subject of a lawsuit—that the building’s rare, landmark-protected clock and tower could be owned and privatized as part of a buyer's triplex penthouse.

But the proposal also included the unusual request to move a landmarked marble staircase now located between the second and third floors. The original approved plans called for moving them to the building's Lafayette Street side, where they would lead up one flight to what is slated to become a grand restaurant in the double-height landmark space known as the “Banking Hall.”

Now, it turns out, unnamed restaurateurs interested in the more than 6,000-square-foot space believe their many customers will want to ride, not walk, up to this “significant destination,” architect John Beyer of Beyer Blinder Belle, told Community Board 1’s Landmarks Committee this month in his request to amend those approved plans.

“We have worked with our client and prospective restaurateurs and their consultants on this issue and they have determined that they really cannot function with one elevator,” Beyer said. “They felt that this is such a sizable restaurant and an important function of getting people up because you only have a small entry space,” he added.

The alternate plan, approved by the Landmarks Commission on March 22, calls for putting a second elevator where the stairs would have gone and moving the stairs 17 feet inside the restaurant space. The stairs would provide access to the balcony, where there also will be seating.

The committee recommended that the Landmarks Commission approve the change, but not without reiterating its previous opposition to the treatment of the clock, which has been off limits to its caretakers for a year. “Community Board 1,” the resolution states, “maintains that part of the landmark and development mandates should be to keep the historic clock working; the clock needs to be wound manually every two weeks…”

A coalition of preservationists, environmentalists and horologists have filed suit against the city and the developers, saying that privatizing the clock, and electrifying its works, is tantamount to de-designating it as a landmark. And it would be “equally calamitous,” they say, to make the tower permanently inaccessible. A hearing on the case was held last December and, pending a judge’s decision, an agreement is in place to suspend work on the clock and tower until April 15.

“This is such an issue in the preservationist community,” Landmarks Committee co-chair Bruce Ehrmann said.

In November, 2014, as developers were pursuing approvals for their residential conversion plans for 346 Broadway, the Trib visited with the city’s Clock Master, Marvin Schneider, and Forest Markowitz, who were continuing to wind the clock after electricity had been cut to the tower. Below is the video that came from that visit. Schneider had helped to restore the clock in 1980 and, in 1992, was joined by Markowitz in the winding and maintaining of the landmark clock. They have been denied access to the clock since March 2015.