In the Manhattan neighborhood of NoHo, high-end boutiques, theaters and art galleries intermingle with Greek Revival-style buildings more than 150 years old. The mix of culture and old-school charm is so special that New York City has designated much of the area “historic” in nature, granting it strict protections against careless development.
For decades, though, a peculiar sight has rested plumb in the middle: a parking lot, with cars stacked one on top of the other in structures that resemble big, ugly shoe racks.
Now, a developer wants to replace the lot with two apartment buildings as tall as 19 stories, and which would include about 200 units. Around 50 would be “affordable,” renting for somewhere around $2,200 for a two-bedroom apartment, in a neighborhood where roomy, ground floor lofts can go for $20,000 or more per month. Many residents, likening the project to dropping a gigantic “cruise ship” or “spaceship” into their community, are relying on the city’s historic preservation rules to stop it.
“This is our common heritage,” said Dino Buturovic, 66, who said that he has lived around the corner for 26 years. “You have to be careful with it.”
The lot, at the corner of Great Jones and Lafayette Streets, is in the NoHo Historic District Extension, meaning that any development must be approved by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is holding a hearing on the plan on Tuesday. The commission may then sign off on the project, reject it altogether or force developers to change it to better fit the area.
Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group that is a leading voice of the opposition, said his group’s position has been distorted. He said he fully expects that something will be built on the lot, but it shouldn’t be as big and out of character as the proposed apartment buildings.
“It’s a false dichotomy to say that the choices are the proposal as-is, or preserving a parking lot,” he said.
New York City, and Manhattan in particular, is well known for acrimonious neighborhood battles over housing.
A short distance from the NoHo parking lot, a fight over whether to build housing on a public garden, the Elizabeth Street Garden, has dragged on for more than a decade. On the Upper West Side, a plan to transform an aging church, West Park Presbyterian, into housing met with fierce resistance from celebrities who live in the area. The commission is also expected to revisit that plan on Tuesday.
Still, most people agree that the city is suffering a severe housing shortage and needs to build more homes, especially affordable ones. That was the reason behind a contentious 2021 push to rezone parts of NoHo, and neighboring SoHo.
But unlike a similar rezoning effort in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which has prompted a flurry of construction, relatively little has happened in NoHo and SoHo, in part because much of the area is still considered historically vital and under the purview of the commission.
“Zoning is ultimately an incentive system,” said Valerie De La Rosa, the chair of Manhattan’s Community Board 2, which opposed the 2021 rezoning and opposes the parking lot development. “If increasing allowable density doesn’t translate into more housing supply, then we should ask whether the incentives embedded in the policy are actually producing the outcomes the city intended.”
But Joseph Meng, an executive vice president with Edward J. Minskoff Equities, who is part of the development team, said the push to build on the parking lot was “exactly” what the rezoning was designed to deliver. It can be difficult to find space to build more homes, he said, which is why a parking lot in a high-demand neighborhood can be an attractive opportunity.
“We look forward to working with stakeholders and local leaders to get it right for the neighborhood,” he said.
It may be a tough sell.
In a number of community meetings over the past week, local residents have raised their concerns, saying that the project is too big, and clashes with the neighborhood’s aesthetic identity.
Most people, like Mr. Buturovic, say they expect and even want there to be affordable housing on the site (though at least one resident testified at a community board hearing that she liked watching the cars as they are hoisted up and down).
“People have very progressive values here,” Mr. Buturovic said. “It’s definitely not an issue here.”
Even if the lot remains, it will still have some fans.
On a recent Wednesday, Doran Adrian, 30, and his father, Steven Adrian, were walking along Great Jones Street, admiring the NoHo neighborhood. The pair were visiting from Saskatchewan, Canada, where Steven Adrian lives on a farm, miles from the next home.
They had visited Central Park and the Empire State Building. But when they arrived at the parking lot car stacker, they stopped and felt compelled to ask the attendants how the contraption worked.
“It is quite something,” the older Mr. Adrian said. Should it be turned into housing, though? “Not our place to say,” he said.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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