Good morning. It’s Monday and we’ll look at a controversy over plans to build some very tall towers in Manhattan, where they would dwarf neighboring buildings.
When is a building too tall?
In a city where expensive supertalls have punched through the skyline, that question is being raised by Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation, a group that focuses on architecture in Greenwich Village, the East Village and NoHo. His target is a 30-story condominium tower planned for West 13th Street.
He says the tower would overwhelm an area of mostly rowhouses and buildings that aren’t nearly as tall — 538 feet tall, he says. That would put the tower’s top floor more than 200 feet above the tallest existing building in the Village.
The height question has also come up on the Upper West Side, where there are already concerns about replacing a two-story library with a taller building that would include roughly 850 apartments, a mental-health facility and a new library. That project is not even officially on the drawing board yet. Another larger project — whose centerpiece would be far taller — has begun demolition of the stretch of West 66th Street where ABC had television studios and offices for generations.
Berman’s group is questioning whether zoning rules under the “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” the sweeping plan pushed by Mayor Eric Adams last year to allow more citywide development, apply to the Greenwich Village project. The City Council narrowly approved “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” which includes zoning changes and affordability targets, after the mayor’s office committed an additional $5 billion to affordable housing and infrastructure projects.
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