The Changing Face of a Neighborhood

Otto Leuschel, the bespectacled and casually dressed representative for Whole Foods Market, was sweating under the harsh florescent lights of the cafeteria at P.S. 163 on Amsterdam Avenue and 97th Street one evening early this summer.

Even as he energetically pitched the company’s “core values,” “animal compassion foundation,” and its “culture of empowerment and moving up,” it was clear that the couple hundred Upper West Siders assembled before him were not enthused.

True, many in Leuschel’s audience of skeptics were eagerly nibbling the Whole Foods-catered asparagus rolled in pancetta and other free organic snacks, but convincing the crowd of neighborhood residents that 57,500 square feet of retail space in the middle of their housing complex was to their benefit was going to be a hard sell.

Dozens of local residents lined up at the microphone to confront Leuschel and the other Whole Foods reps with their complaints. The store is planned for a corner that would court East Side traffic coming across Central Park. The store’s loading dock would be too close to where children enter P.S. 163. The store’s prices would be too high for neighborhood people, especially those living at the nearby Douglass Houses, to afford.

Leuschel answered each speaker, explaining that the company was committed to working with the local Community Board 7 to minimize disruption to the neighborhood, prices wouldn’t be as high as people expected, and solutions to traffic and trash around children could be worked out without moving the store or the loading dock.

Area residents promised that they were willing to protest, boycott, and do everything else in their power to make development happen on their terms. Growing exasperated, Leuschel replied, “I’m sorry the neighborhood is changing.”

Overseeing a Neighborhood Transition

With that statement, Leuschel revealed an uncomfortable truth.
The housing development known as Park West Village—which extends from 97th to 100th Street, from just east of Amsterdam Avenue to Central Park West—is undergoing its biggest change since it was built as a middle-income housing complex with subsidies from the federal government in the late 1950s.

Long-time residents, most of them still living in rent-stabilized apartments, say they moved to Park West Village because of its location on the Upper West Side, its comparatively cheap rent, its diversity, and its leafy open spaces.

“It’s a community unlike many places in New York where you don’t know your neighbors,” said Dean Heitner, who moved to the neighborhood in 1973. “We all know one another, and know a little about each others’ lives and meet frequently just outside on the benches.”

Today, walking down Columbus Avenue, passersby will see construction workers digging huge pits for the foundations of a glassy three-block-long retail corridor anchored by Whole Foods, and four residential towers with heights of 29 stories, 15 stories, 14 stories, and 13 stories, right in the middle of Park West Village.

The project is an “infill” development, meaning the new towers will be constructed between the buildings already on the site, replacing what was a strip of arguably shabby low-scale stores and a few tennis courts along Columbus Avenue.

Jeff Winick, CEO of the Winick Realty Group, confirmed that leases had been signed for 85 percent of the new strip’s storefronts. He would not give names, but did say there will be a bank, a sporting goods store, and a home furnishing store in addition to “a lot of smaller retailers from the community.”

Like Columbia’s proposed expansion into Manhattanville, plans for Columbus Village will radically change the population density and character of the neighborhood.

But unlike with Columbia’s expansion, there is no formal governmental process that gives local residents and neighbors a say in how development happens. Because the developers claim not to need a zoning change—building “as of right”—they do not have to go through the city’s extensive oversight procedure that gives communities a vote, albeit a non-binding one.

“When you don’t go through a ULURP [the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure], that means you haven’t presented an environmental impact statement for scrutiny by the community and elected officials,” said Maria Watson, a long-time tenant at Park West Village. “They’re imposing on an aged infrastructure.”

But Peter Rosenberg, project manager for the developers Stellar Management and The Chetrit Group, said because of all of Park West Village’s open space, it is one of the least-densely developed areas in the city, and will remain so even after Columbus Village is completed.

“This is a responsible place for us to develop,” he said. “Almost every location in New York is infill at this point and, while we certainly regret the inconvenience that the residents have suffered, we’re going to try to do everything we can to make it as small an impact as we can for them.”

Among the area’s stakeholders—the tenants and condo owners of Park West Village, local schools, churches, business owners, Community Board 7, and elected officials—there are many diverse opinions. Some say developers are dropping something akin to a shopping mall right in the middle of their neighborhood and hate the idea of change no matter what form it takes. Some want upgraded stores, and welcome the organic grocery franchise. Most have taken a complicated stance in the middle.

As groups against the new development deal with disagreement among their own ranks, they, the community board, and elected officials have also tried to carve out a set of guidelines to follow as they bring the developers to the negotiating table. The developers are just as unclear about the objectives of their interactions with area residents.

“Residents, elected officials, the community board... we’re all trying to figure out ways that residents can get their voices heard in the absence of an official process,” said Jessica Silver, a community liaison in the office of borough president Scott Stringer.

Building “as of right”

Though the project is conspicuous to Park West Villagers today, it initially came as a surprise.

The site’s owners and developers waited at least six years after buying the property in 2000 to build on the site, as the city’s contract with the slum-clearance project’s first developer dictated the exact percentage of profits the complex’s owner was allowed to make for four decades, locking the buildings’ configuration in place.

The expiration of this 40-year clause snuck up on residents of Park West Village in late 2005, catching them off-guard and disorganized.

Initially, the developers would not meet with tenants to explain their plans, but they finally caved in to pressure applied by elected officials, according to Heitner, who is also the chair of the legal committee of the Park West Village Tenants Association.

“People were living in a complex, it didn’t look like anything was going to happen to it, and all of a sudden our landlord started excavating,” Heitner said. “We actually had to force them to let us know what was happening.”

The Tenants Association took on the primary organizing role, though, as many involved in the organization are quick to point out, the group does not represent the interests of the condominium owners in the buildings east of Columbus Avenue and includes few of the growing population of the complex’s market-rate renters.

The Tenants’ Association, divided as it was, followed a few different courses of action.
A hard-fought campaign to legally restrict building heights in Manhattan Valley from 97th to 110th Street was passed in late September, but Park West Village was left out of the new rezoning plans.

Park West Villagers and supporters vied for its inclusion but the City Planning
Commission was reluctant to grant height restrictions of any kind on the Upper West Side, according to Cynthia Doty of West Siders for Responsible Development and the Coalition to Save West Park North, who was involved in zoning negotiations.

“We were presented with the idea that if we didn’t come up with the compromise, that City Planning would pull the entire plan and we would wind up with nothing. Meanwhile, developers were lurking,” Doty said. “We didn’t wind up working on a plan for Park West Village and so tried to support other options.”

These other options included helping tenants apply to get the area land-marked for its historic rather than architectural value—Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Tito Puente, and Elaine Stritch all called Park West Village home—or applying for city protections under a Special Preservation District program. The City Planning Commission was “not interested” in granting tenants status in the special district program, according to Doty. The Landmarks Preservation Commission also never brought the site up for a vote.

Meanwhile, tenants created a task-force of in-house architects and city-planners to brainstorm alternative designs to the one proposed by Gluck and Chetrit, and looked to convince Whole Foods to move to 100th Street, where traffic conditions would support the site better.

Heitner said he thought the developers never planned on taking their suggestions seriously, but Winnifred Armstrong, former president of the Tenants Association and a long-time resident of Park West Village, said: “We never really put it to the developer in any way that made it possible to consider it. There was no incentive for them to do that, it was late in the game.”

With these efforts taking up time and energy, the Tenants Association tried another tactic: a court case against the developers arguing that a technicality in the city’s contract with the initial developer allowed them to stall work for a few months. Park West Villagers lost the case, and in the summer of 2006, the commercial structures were razed and work began.

A Multitude of Meetings

The Tenants Association, their elected officials, and CB7, working with limited resources and time, tried as many strategies as they could think of to air their grievances with the developers about the “as of right” project.

There are still pending inquiries into whether or not the project is even “as of right.”
Borough president Scott Stringer expects the Department of Buildings to respond soon to a letter he wrote challenging aspects of the project which he claims may not be legal under zoning law—including types of stores that can rent at the site. The zoning law requires stores to be “neighborhood stores,” and Stringer said their size makes them “destination stores.”

Winick, the CEO of the development’s realtor, declined to comment on that issue.
But, in the meantime, tenants have aired their concerns at two monthly meetings—one to oversee construction, one for broader concerns—convened by CB7 since May, which bring them face to face with developers regularly.

Park West Villagers complain about the dust, noise, and disruption that comes with living next to a major construction site, and many consider the construction committee meetings helpful, especially in the wake of the collapse of a retaining wall at the site of the future Whole Foods this summer that brought every outraged West Side politician to the rescue of Park West Villagers for a few weeks. Representatives from city agencies attend these meetings to ensure developers are within the law as they build.

The objectives of the monthly coordinating committee are less defined, but Silver of the Borough President’s office said they are useful because they aim to ensure the efforts of various community groups aren’t duplicated.

At these meetings, tenants and developers said some issues are advanced but divisive issues like the general scale of the project and the location of Whole Foods’ future loading dock are discussed without progress.

Rosenberg, the project manager, points to major concessions—giving residents nearly full control of landscaping, retooling the heating and cooling systems so as to not blow on current tenants’ windows, and revising how trash will be handled at the site—but many tenants don’t consider these key accomplishments.

“They sit and listen, and yes us to death, and do exactly what they choose to do,” Lois Hoffmann, president of the Tenants Association, said.

“We are listening,” Rosenberg countered. “We accommodate the residents and the tenants when and where we can.”

There is a sense on both sides that talks between the two parties go around in circles, and many say because it is considered an “as of right” project, they expected it.
As Armstrong said, “nobody—politicians, residents, developer—was ready for this dialogue.” But twice a month the dialogue happens anyway.

A New Story?

On Oct. 6, the gym at the Frederick Douglass Center was packed with people eating, laughing, and talking as the band churned out jazz standards.

Gathered for their annual reunion were members of “the Old Community,” individuals whose homes on 98th and 99th Streets were razed in the late 1950s to build what would become Park West Village.

Members of Park West Village’s history group attended, including former resident of “the Old Community” Jim Torain, who put the night’s event together as he has for years now.

Sabella Curry remembered what her neighborhood looked like when she grew up there in the late ’30s and ’40s before its mostly African-American residents were evicted.

“We played jacks, we rode bikes, our mothers was always in the windows watching over us—‘get away from there! Don’t you do that! Come upstairs here!’”
Wistfully, she added, “those two blocks were like a little city of its own.”

Sara Vogel can be reached at sara.vogel@columbiaspectator.com.