Seminary has a historic opportunity to get it right

An aerial view from the northwest of the General Theological Seminary's new Ninth Ave. tower proposal as rendered by Polshek Partnership Architects.

By Francis Morrone

The legislation for creating historic districts is premised on the belief that some streets or neighborhoods reach a stage of optimal habitability, and the law should seek to maintain this urban virtue in perpetuity. We all believe that the city is, as a whole, a dynamic, changing place. But when a neighborhood’s topsy-turvy history should at last yield what we all also know is its essentially right form, we feel we cannot chance to upset the delicate balance, and so we designate the historic district.

Otherwise, the delicate balance may be upset by architecturally and urbanistically inappropriate incursions — by buildings that aesthetically are radically different from those already there, or that are radically out of scale. The Chelsea Historic District comprises blocks of superb 19th-century row houses, and also the square-block campus of a distinguished historic institution, General Theological Seminary. The seminary is the dominant physical fact in the district, and any changes that it incurs or engenders will have a considerable spillover effect. Right now, controversy rages in Chelsea over a proposed 15-story tower the seminary wishes to build on Ninth Ave. between 20th and 21st Sts. The matter is little known outside of Chelsea. I found out about it after I devoted one of my weekly “Abroad in New York” columns in The New York Sun to an appreciation of the seminary’s historic campus, with its several buildings by Charles Coolidge Haight surrounding a very lovely garden in the interior of the block.

I concluded my article by praising Alfred Morton Githens’s 1931 Seabury Hall as the sort of contextual building architects once strove to create, and hoping that the seminary’s new building would be half as good. The new building, which will contain space for the seminary as well as apartments, is being developed by the Brodsky Organization, a major New York developer, and designed by the Polshek Partnership. The seminary and its partisans claim that the new tower will not adversely affect the historic district, since the tower is of the same height as the building directly across Ninth Ave. The seminary and its partisans further claim that the building’s scale is necessary to generate the revenues that are desperately needed by the seminary for the repair and maintenance of its severely deteriorated historic buildings.

My concern, speaking as a Chelsea outsider, is that this is another example of the sorts of projects underway all over the city, projects that may set horrendous precedents that could vastly diminish the urban quality of New York at the very moment when we’d made long strides in understanding and remediating the urban ills brought on by the architecturally dismal decades from the 1950s through the 1970s when we witnessed vast tracts of urban fabric ripped asunder by balefully conceived projects of overbuilding. The issue involving the seminary may seem small in comparison with, say, the proposed Atlantic Yards development in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, or any number of other megaprojects. But the seminary project may stand for the smaller-scale, insidious incursions that are taking place in the shadow of much vaster developments that are grabbing the headlines, and therefore merits a close look by all New Yorkers.

I do not know the state of the seminary’s finances, and will take them at their word when they say they are broke. Any observer can see that their physical plant is not in the best condition. And I also know that the seminary has in the past worked for the good of its Chelsea neighbors, as when during the bleak years of real-estate redlining, the seminary helped many Chelsea homeowners to obtain bank loans for property improvements. That was a stellar example of imaginative involvement with the community that cannot be praised too highly. Today, the seminary could work with its neighbors again, in an imaginative way that might form a precedent, whereby an influential institution seeks to meliorate its misfortunes without resorting to the readymade solution offered by big developers and approved by the present round of public officials.

That wrong solution involves, first, the ruthless exploitation of land values through cynical overdevelopment, and, second, the imposition of a chic but brutal glass architecture where it is least appropriate, and that is likely to look tasteless, tacky and badly weathered decades hence. The seminary’s claim, that the glass tower will “offer a quiet and restrained presence on Ninth Ave.,” is a willful misstatement about an architecture that is inherently violent and that bespeaks values of impermanency that should be anathema to such a distinguished institution.

This then is my dream: that General Theological Seminary be as imaginative and as forthcoming in fighting the urban ills of our day — among which we must count the cynical post-9/11 land grab that threatens to roll back all the progress New Yorkers have steadfastly achieved in the last 20 years in making this a more livable city — just as, once upon a dreary time ago, the seminary fought the equal corruption called redlining.

Morrone is an architectural historian and author of “Architectural Guide Book to New York City.”