THE people at Community Board 5 want to land mark the Hotel Pennsyl vania. They’re joking, right? If only.
The hulk on Seventh Avenue at 31st Street isn’t architecturally distinguished or even meaningful – as anyone who suffers its oppressive presence can attest, it’s one of the gloomiest structures between the Battery and The Bronx.
But the site might house a new skyscraper home for Merrill Lynch – something the board plainly wants to prevent, even though its members are supposed to represent the community’s best interests, and the project would obviously benefit the area around it.
Last week, Board 5 voted 21-8 to recommend to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission that the hotel be saved from demolition. Why landmark it? Because, they say, Glenn Miller’s orchestra played there in the 1930s.
If the Pennsylvania is worthy of immortalizing for that reason, then so is the lovely apartment building I call home – because Sammy Davis Jr.’s mother once lived there.
The last-minute drive to save the hotel is flagrant anti-development obstructionism, under the thinnest possible mask of preservationism. It will likely go nowhere. A community board’s role is merely advisory, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission has (quite properly) shown no interest in “saving” the Pennsylvania.
Even the knee-jerk activists who ordinarily rally to preserve anything larger than a lamppost haven’t gone to bat for the hotel – a 22-story mausoleum that darkens the daily arrival of Penn Station commuters across the street.
Even so, the hotel’s owner, Vornado Realty Trust, is taking no chances. It has hired the powerful lobbying firm Patricia Lynch Associates to disarm any prospective political opposition to demolishing the hotel. Lynch has a close working relationship with both Gov. Spitzer and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (who represents Downtown and doesn’t want to see Merrill move north).
Vornado bought the beat-up and obsolescent Pennsylvania in the late 1990s as a strategic building block in its ambition to redevelop the lower West 30s, where it owns several other properties. It’s never been a secret that Vornado one day would replace it with a building more economically viable and worthy of today’s Manhattan.
Merrill has long been based downtown at the World Financial Center. But Vornado CEO Steven Roth recently came close to nailing down a deal to build the Wall Street firm a new headquarters at the hotel site in Midtown – until revelations of huge losses led to the ouster of Merrill CEO Stan O’Neal.
Now the decision to move or not will be up to newly named chief executive John Thain. Will a company reeling from losses and writedowns yet to be fully tabulated opt for a costly, unnecessary relocation uptown?
A Merrill departure might do little harm to Downtown, which is back on its feet and might no longer need to rely mainly on financial services companies to fill its office floors.
But a new Merrill Lynch headquarters uptown would be a boon to the whole district – an obvious fact, and one that makes CB 5’s position incomprehensible.
It’s not just the hotel that’s a charmless, unsightly mess – so is the entire zone around it. Most buildings are antiquated, and many addresses are significantly underbuilt – capable of supporting much larger structures even without zoning changes or air-rights transfers.
In a city starved for first-class new office space, what has kept this miserable Midtown South precinct from enjoying the modernization and investment that have transformed so much of Manhattan?
Many things, including once-restrictive zoning, the miserable state of Penn Station and the Garden – and the depressing shadow of the Hotel Pennsylvania.
Vornado and Related Cos. are partners in a proposal for a new Penn Station/Madison Square Garden complex nearby. But whether or not that goes ahead, the district urgently needs new investment.
And the best hope for that would be to land a major commercial anchor – such as a Merrill Lynch tower. Yet, Board 5 prefers a blighted old hotel to a headquarters for one of the world’s great financial institutions.
Vornado and Merrill would need certain public approvals for air-rights transfers and zoning alterations. But such allowances are made for many other projects. And no eminent domain (forced relocation) is involved: No residents or businesses would need to be evicted, except for a handful of retail tenants who’d have several years to move.
Manhattan community boards in recent years have largely shed their past reputation for mindless, anti-development activism. They’ve helped facilitate worthy projects needing public approvals and constructively persuaded developers to make their new buildings better, both for their occupants and their neighbors.
But landmark the Hotel Pennsylvania? They’ve gotta be kidding. Let’s hope CB 5’s campaign doesn’t augur a return to the bad old days. scuozzo@nypost.com