In a single craven stroke, lame-duck Speaker Christine Quinn and weak-willed City Councilman Dan Garodnick have likely consigned the once dominant Grand Central area to a permanent future as a back-office district.
The two just torpedoed East Midtown rezoning, holding out for more, unspecified “infrastructure” and transit improvements, though the Bloomberg team already threw in the kitchen sink to meet their demands.
Their announcement that there “is no good reason to rush the proposal through” leaves its fate to the mercy of “progressive” but progress-averse Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and a council more antagonistic to development than the current one.
Quinn and Garodnick say they get the need to modernize, but want it done “properly” — meaning to require more “open space,” better subway access and untold streetscape changes on their terms before any new buildings can go up.
They surely know, though, that the entrenched political and ideological opposition to rezoning will likely ensure that “properly” means never. And that the main argument against it — that it would spawn an overnight forest of giant, sun-blocking skyscrapers — is a fraud, given the time-consuming difficulty of getting even one large new Manhattan office tower out of the ground.
Once Manhattan’s pride, the Park Avenue corridor is swiftly turning obsolescent with office buildings an average 70 years old. Even with easy access to Grand Central Terminal and unparalleled shopping and dining options, companies don’t want them anymore. Yet, archaic 1961 zoning rules make it impossible to replace them even with new structures of the same size.
It’s why in the past few years Microsoft, Bank of America, Conde Nast, Coach, Ernst & Young, Time Warner and Kaye Scholer, among many others, set up shop elsewhere in Manhattan, never even considering East Midtown for a modern new base of operations.
Some of those firms at least weren’t abandoning East Midtown, just leaving other neighborhoods. Now, though, firms are starting to flee the district itself: The Post reported this week that law firm Jones Day is leaving East 41st Street for 330,000 square feet at Brookfield Center downtown.
Rezoning is easy in the outer boroughs, where Bloomberg did much to open up the waterfront and revive dormant areas. It’s another story in central Manhattan, where unyielding labor unions, preservationists and others resistant to change “just because” have prevented the city from fully rezoning even the Garment District.
That time-warped backwater — much, much smaller than East Midtown’s 73 blocks — is bound by 1980s rules requiring landlords to maintain low-priced space for apparel factories that no longer exist.
Bloomberg never put rezoning there to a council vote because he knew it would fail, thanks to the iron grip the apparel and hotel unions had on Quinn (whose one-time top aide Maura Keaney had previously been a top official of garment union Unite Here).
If pro-development Bloomberg couldn’t sway the council on a few grimy old blocks in the West 30s and 40s, how likely are development-wary de Blasio and an even farther-left City Council to bless the more ambitious plan for vastly larger East Midtown?
But Garodnick, who represents the district, must placate the council’s restive left wing to pursue his dream of succeeding Quinn as speaker. Lame-duck Quinn lacked the gumption to challenge him.
Unless a miracle happens, those 70-year-old buildings will be 80 years old before wiser heads prevail — if it isn’t too late.