If City Hall hopes to get the Grand Central area rezoned before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office, it needs to get its game together fast.
The proposal is long overdue, but also vulnerable: With the clock ticking down on Bloomberg’s mayoralty, all opponents need do is delay.
The local media hand an open mic to reactionaries who’d preserve the obsolescent Park Avenue corridor in aspic. Yet City Hall’s public response consists mainly of letters to the editor from Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden.
The whiners accuse the city of trying to “rush” through the measure, which would allow larger office buildings to rise than are now permitted in East Midtown.
“Rush”? Baloney. Yes, Bloomberg makes no secret of wanting to put the changes before the City Council next year. But they wouldn’t take effect until 2017.
And they’re so complex, it might be years beyond that before any larger new buildings actually go up. Until then, East Midtown’s aging office stock will continue to rot even more.
Foes of the plan are rallying around the usual NIMBY causes of alleged pollution, congestion and transit horrors. They spin images of a Midtown skyscraper jungle where pedestrians will be crushed like ants in sunless crevices between 1,000-foot tall towers.
In fact, the city estimates that the handful of larger buildings likely to go up would add just 16,000 daily employees to the area’s 230,000 now — a negligible increase in a 78-block area.
Rezoning would merely ease archaic 1961 rules which limit the size of new office towers to even smaller than the ones which stood at the time — and which are now mostly obsolete. (Three-quarters of the area’s buildings are at least 50 years old.)
To Manhattan-based design gurus and pedestrian “advocates,” however, the precious blocks around Grand Central have a more immediate and emotional pull than, say, Coney Island. That is: It’s in their backyards.
The president of the influential Municipal Art Society says “the public experience,” and “not the size of buildings,” must come first. Community Board 5 sounds outright hostile. If the negativist chorus cows City Hall in the least, bringing the area into the 21st Century might be a lost cause.
Left to any of Bloomberg’s wannabe successors, there likely would be no Midtown East rezoning at all. As reported by CaptitalNewYork.com, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson warned before the MAS last week against a “rush to get this done in the next 14 months.” He called the proposal “a recipe in the long run for disaster.”
Correction: The potential disaster lies in the way Bloomberg and Burden weighted down the measure with strings that will deter all but the richest, most ruthless developers.
These strings require any would-be project in the district to pour tens of millions of dollars into city coffers. To build larger, you must buy into a city-controlled “District Improvement Bonus” to pay for pedestrian and transit amenities.
Hello, chaos-producing, over-budget follies like the World Trade Center “Transit Hub” and the Fulton Transit Center.
A terrifying peek at what could be in store appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week — a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill brainstorm to redesign the Grand Central district’s public spaces.
They include bizarre, elevated walkways between buildings and even a circular “skyway” hundreds of feet above the sidewalk — as well, of course, as pedestrian plazas so beloved of “urban planners.”
Such pipe dreams are anything but urban. Taking people off sidewalks in the interest of “uncrowding” sucks the life out of a town; just look at the deserted streets of White Plains and scores of lesser cities.
Yet, for all its flaws, the rezoning must be approved. But it won’t be unless Bloomberg is willing to fight for it — in public, and with conviction.