The Buzz

WE DON’T HAVE YOUR KINDA LAWS BACK HOME IN PA.:
Just as last week’s issue was about to close, we heard from Maryann Marinac, the hold-out tenant of a residential building-turned-Marriot ExecuStay (i.e., an illegal hotel), who we featured in a Q&A in last week’s issue. She called to report on her most recent court date with Lasalle Investment Management, the newest owner of her building on West 24th Street, which is trying to secure Marinac’s eviction so they can hand over all the rooms to the Marriot Corporation. According to Marinac, who couldn’t stop laughing, LaSalle’s attorney David Pfeffer “tried to say that the New York court had no jurisdiction [over her case] because the building belongs to the state of Pennsylvania.” After the judge explained patiently that even if that were true, the management would still have to obey the laws of New York State, Pfeffer backed down, said Marinac. Still, we were a little astonished at the attempt, which made us think of John Edgar Wideman, the Lower East Side writer who once told us that his beloved Pennsylvania was “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and a whole lotta Mississippi in the middle.” Not that it matters now (thanks, judge!), but we’d like to be there the day that Pfeffer and Peter Riguardi, head of Lasalle’s New York City area operations, are busted for smoking in a bar, and claim that because you can still light up in Wilkes-Barre, they should be able to flout Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Department of Health. We also hope that Riguardi was thinking of Marinac when he told the Real Deal last year that the city was “tough, sophisticated and ruthless.”

PALE ORANGE ALERT:
When we first found out that 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue had been shut down Monday by a bomb scare, we slapped ourselves for not photographing the stilled street—and then called Ed Hamilton, our reporter and a resident of the Chelsea Hotel. When he got back to us yesterday, Ed’s shrug was audible over the phone. “It was some kind of suspicious package,” said Hamilton, who said that police had flooded the street and that he had had trouble getting in and out of the hotel, because “no one was allowed on the sidewalk.” Further complicating things, he said, was a businessman who had threatened to sue the city because, if he had known about the street closure, he would never have turned onto 23rd Street that day. “I guess he thought there should have been cops at the corner, warning him,” laughed Ed, who said he wasn’t planning to call the 13th Precinct, four blocks away, to request such a patrol anytime soon.

CALLING ALL CARPENTERS:
When the Department of Buildings announced its new Enforcement Initiative, most of the attention justly went to the DOB’s first revision of the building code in more than 50 years, and its intent to fix chronic problems and charge notorious landlords like Larry Tauber for them. We learned this week that the initiative is also a hiring spree: Next Wednesday, DOB is holding its third housing fair, hoping to attract engineers, architects and building inspectors as part of an effort to become more proactive, instead of just responding when people like Lee Compton, former Community Board 4 chairperson, call to tell DOB that many builders are still not playing by the rules. We learned about DOB’s new efforts from longtime Chelsea realtor Robin Brooks, now a DOB communications officer, when we asked about what looked to Compton like a shortage of qualified inspectors. More on this issue next week. But if you’ve always wanted to be the one who says to contractors, “Stop work now!” you might want to go to 280 Broadway on Wednesday with résumé in hand.

QUINN COMES BACK HOME:
As we go to press, word has it that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn will be rolling up her sleeves and getting back to her roots in her role as keynote speaker at Housing Conservation Coordinators’ free tenants’ conference on Saturday, Oct. 13. She’ll be followed by a day of workshops for tenants, including “How to find affordable housing,” “Your landlord can’t evict you for that—know your rights as a tenant” and “Building tenant power: The making of a movement.” The conference, which runs 10 a.m.– 4 p.m., is open to all in the neighborhood and includes free breakfast and lunch (sign us up!). To register, contact Ivette Nunez at 212-541-5996, x24 or inunez@hcc-nyc.org.

BUT THEIR HEART WAS PURE:
When Community Board 4 members gave the thumbs-down in April to Annabelle Selldorf’s “innovative” building at 200 Eleventh Avenue, where condo owners will be able to drive directly to their multimillion-dollar apartments via an elevator lift, they knew their refusal was mostly symbolic. As reported by Chelsea Now in our April 20 issue, then–board chairperson Lee Compton said: “The fact that the Department of City Planning and the Department of Buildings has already signed off on it is a pretty good indication that it’ll probably go through anyway.” This week we asked Anna Levin, one of Board 4’s most quotable experts on buildings issues, what she thought about the fact that construction is now well under way on Selldorf’s much-touted building, despite its flouting of zoning limitations on parking and the city’s longstanding commitment to the Clean Air Act. “I wish we’d known what they were going to tell City Planning,” Levin said ruefully, explaining that the builders had “shown DCP figures that indicated that very wealthy people tended to own more cars,” and thus the condo-garages qualified under the “special need” exemption in the zoning laws. All perfectly legal, said Levin, even if it qualifies as a sincere perversion of the phrase “special need”: How is that need,” she asked, “with three bus lines and two subway lines within walking distance?” When Chelsea Now pointed out that for too many drivers, those options don’t count, she said with a quiet chuckle, “I know, but it’s too bad. I don’t see why the suburbs see the need to come right into Manhattan.” At least the board is on record as having done the right thing, she said, echoing Compton’s word at the time: “We’ve got an obligation to recommend what’s best for the community.” Chelsea Now hopes that there are scorekeepers in Heaven, and that when the rivers swallow up those condos due to global warming, no one will blame the brave warriors on the Chelsea Preservation and Planning Committee.