Judge Scraps Landmarks Commission Approval for Planned Seaport Tower

Outside the 250 Water Street construction site on Jan. 12, City Councilman Christopher Marte speaks to opponents of the 324-foot-high residential tower that is planned to be built there. The judge's ruling in their favor shows "people power," Marte told them. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Opponents of a planned 324-foot residential tower in the South Street Seaport are celebrating a judge’s decision [1] on Jan. 12 to halt the project’s construction.

State Supreme Court Judge Arthur F. Engoron invalidated the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s approval of the controversial Howard Hughes Corp. project at 250 Water Street, agreeing with the lawsuit's petitioners [2], which include the Seaport Coalition [3] and several individuals. The agency, the judge said, had acted improperly when it approved [4] the tower.

Last October, Engoron ordered a temporary stop to construction, pending the January hearing.

“This decision demonstrates that how much money you have, it doesn’t matter. If you are a developer, you are not above the law,” said Grace Lee, the new Assemblywoman for the area. Lee’s political activism began as a co-founder of Children First, an organization of parents formed out of concerns about toxins on the site which, until recently, was a parking lot across the street from two elementary schools. 

Lee joined other opponents outside the 250 Water Street site to celebrate their victory and declare their resolve to battle on. 

“We’re going to keep fighting because we know that they’re not going anywhere,” said Emily Hellstrom, one of the petitioners. “Well, we aren’t either.”

In a statement, a Howard Hughes Corp. spokesman said, “We respectfully disagree with Judge Engoron’s decision and believe that the Appellate Division will overturn this decision in due course.” 

The city’s Law Department, which represented the commission, did not respond to a request for comment.

The $850 million project is planned to include 190 market-rate condos and 80 below-market apartments, with a 5-story base of office, retail and community uses. Work on the site so far has been largely confined to excavation and removal of soil contaminated by a thermometer factory that once occupied the property.

The Seaport Coalition, which includes Children First, Southbridge Towers and Save Our Seaport, argued—and Engoron agreed—that the Landmarks Commission “abused its discretion” when it allowed a building of the same scale as others it had rejected in the past. 

At the Thursday event, Paul Goldstein, who for many years beginning in the 1980s was Community Board 1’s district manager, recalled the previous owner’s multiple failed attempts to convince the Landmarks Commission to approve a project larger than allowable in the South Street Seaport Historic District. “The LPC turned down buildings as short as 12 stories, saying they were too tall for a district here,” Goldstein, a Southbridge Towers resident and CB1 member, said. “In these precious historic districts we should preserve what we have here. It’s a special part of New York. We don’t have to give that up on behalf of a greedy developer.”

The LPC, Engoron wrote in his decision, “fails to explain why a parking lot that was previously repeatedly found to be part of the Historic District could now appropriately be the site of a high-rise tower that would loom over the remainder of the protected neighborhood.”

Much of the support that the developer received for the project, including from former City Councilwoman Margaret Chin and former Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, was based on its promise to financially support the struggling South Street Seaport Museum. Opponents claim that the agency was swayed by sympathy for the museum. 

Engoron wrote: “In the final analysis, the Citizens of New York City are entitled to feel confident that a controversial, counter-intuitive decision to allow a skyscraper to be built in a low-rise historic district, after repeated decisions disallowing such a structure and without a coherent explanation, was made solely on the merits, and not because of a quid pro quo, even one with a laudable purpose of museum funding.”

The record, he added, “does not justify any such confidence.”