The Buzz

The two-story penthouse addition under construction at 339 W. 29th St.

Community demands transparency in Hudson Yards process

By Chris Lombardi

This week, as developers rushed to meet the Oct.11 deadline to bid for the Hudson Rail Yards, local elected officials and advocates demanded that the city make the details of those bids public so that community boards and local residents are privy to all the proposals seeking to virtually remake the West Side of Manhattan.

The Hudson Yards Citizens Advisory Committee (HYCAC), which had opposed the city’s plan to give sole development rights to a single company, has asked the Hudson Yards Development Corporation (HDYC) to develop a “transparent process” rather than decide on a winner in secret. Last Wednesday, a similar request was issued by Community Board 4 in a resolution passed at its general meeting. In doing so, the board joined State Senator Tom Duane and Assemblymember Richard Gottfried in demanding that all bids be disclosed.

“The important thing here is openness,” said Gottfried in a phone interview on Tuesday. “These are decisions being made by a small group of people, in secret, and they can just say, ‘Take it or leave it.’ That isn’t acceptable.”

Deciding the fate of the 26-acre rail yard in secret isn’t the only thing that HYCAC, an advisory body created by the state, finds unacceptable. The committee charges that the Request for Proposals (RFP) issued by the city, to which the firms are responding, doesn’t provide adequate guarantees for affordable housing in its proposed 70-foot towers, or assurances that the proposed open space at the center will be a public park. And committee members worry that by requesting that developers provide two sets of bids—one with and one without an intact High Line—HDYC is endangering the only historic resource still on the site.

The Yards, owned by MTA and once known mostly as the proposed site of the failed Jets football stadium, is the last undeveloped parcel on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Much of the rest has been scooped up by developers since a 2005 rezoning: The Real Deal lists 34 projects, including the Yards, set to transform the blocks between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, from 30th to 43rd Streets. Chelsea and Clinton residents are familiar with many of them, such as Rockrose’s already-in-progress condo tower on West 37th Street and the Related Corporation’s proposed 53-story residence at 440 W. 42rd Street (nicknamed “Lake Related” by some members of CB 4).

The design guidelines for the Yards issued by HDYC would permit approximately 5.7 million square feet of residential and commercial development, as well as seven acres of open space and a loosely defined “cultural center”—a total of 12.4 million square feet. At press time, five developers were repeatedly named as possible suitors for the Yards, some of whom had teamed up to strengthen their bids: The Durst Organization, Vornado, Bloomfield Properties, Tishman/Speyer and Related. (See sidebar.)

To make those millions of square feet a reality, the chosen developer will most likely take advantage of some of the RFP’s built-in incentives for affordable housing, open space and green buildings. But given HYDC’s mandate to “maximize value and revenues” for MTA, HYCAC worries that the corporation may decline bids that might be lower because they include more affordable housing or costly public space. Thus, advocates told Chelsea Now this week, it is especially important for the public to see the “project profile” of each bid: in other words, what each developer plans to build, how they plan to finance it, how long it will take, and, specifically, how they plan to treat the High Line.

The Yards were long deemed “worthless” by city officials, according to advisory committee co-founder John Raskin, organizing director of Housing Conservation Coordinators (HCC), until Mayor Bloomberg proposed putting his Jets stadium there in 2004. Raskin, who spoke to Chelsea Now last Thursday, added that when the stadium was defeated in 2005, the city decided the formerly worthless Yards could become a new 26-acre neighborhood in Manhattan, and its third financial center. Doing so would first require the construction of platforms over the running trains of the Long Island Rail Road and a planned extension of the No. 7 subway line, at a current estimated cost of $1.5 billion: On those platform would rise the new city.

HYDC, helmed by former MTA executive Ann Weisbrod, was formed in 2006 after the MTA rejected Mayor Bloomberg’s 2005 offer to buy the western portion of the Yards for $500 million. (MTA’s own assessor had valued the formerly “worthless” Yards at $1.2 million.) The corporation’s board, headed by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, also includes representatives of Speaker Christine Quinn, Borough President Scott Stringer and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, as well as representatives of a mosaic of city and state agencies, and an appointed representative of Board 4.

“We fought for that [representation],” said Lee Compton, former CB 4 chairperson and signatory of the Hudson Yards Memorandum of Understanding. “We wanted to make sure that the concerns of the community would be reflected at every meeting.”

Compton and other members of CB 4 have also been active members of HYCAC, which also includes many of the same people that defeated the stadium: Housing Conservation Coordinators, Manhattan Plaza Tenants Association, Friends of the High Line, Friends of Hudson River Park, and local elected officials from Gottfried, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and State Senator Thomas Duane to Congressman Jerrold Nadler.

Together, said Compton, they helped nudge MTA toward recognizing the community’s concerns, from modifying their plans to mandate parking and incorporate affordable housing into its RFP to Weisbrod’s statement, at a forum in May, that she favored preservation of the High Line.

“I was blown away when she said that,” said Compton. “It means they’ve come a long way.”

Still, given the financial mandates of the site, HYCAC worries that the Yards could easily become a gated playground for the very wealthy, said Compton. And they were horrified when HDYC voted in the spring to choose a single developer for the entire 26 acres: That was in strong contrast to what the community had envisioned, according to HCYAC representatives interviewed by Chelsea Now.

“I think it would be sensible to develop the site by laying out something like the traditional Manhattan street grid, parcel it out slowly, and invite developers to participate,” said Gottfried, echoing both HCC’s Raskin and a number of op-ed commentaries from the Real Deal, which speculated that the city could actually gain more revenue that way in the long term.

“I don’t think you need to roll the dice like this, with one developer, and just hope you made the right decision. But City Hall tends to like grand gestures,” said Gottfried.

While experts fear that both the city and MTA are losing billions, to HCYAC members, the real loser may be the community. They charge that the affordable-housing commitments in the RFP are fairly soft, based entirely on the 80/20 program, offering developers a chance to build 20 stories as of right and add up to 50 more by using the HDYC’s built-in bonuses for inclusionary and affordable housing.

“I expect,” said Gottfried, “that there will be nowhere near as much affordable housing as people anticipate,” since the RFP doesn’t mandate that developers opt into the Inclusionary Housing Program, or even the 80/20 program.

And in the eastern portion of the Yards, said Raskin, the zoning plus all the bonuses allow for “un-buildable” towers of more than 80 stories, which would likely be traded for development rights somewhere else in the city.

HYCAC members also wondered about the planned “cultural center” in the RFP. “Developers are saying that they were told, ‘just leave a block of space right now,’ to be filled in later,” said Gottfried. “I don’t know if I want the MTA making decisions about arts programs, or some big developer for that matter.”

CB 4’s Compton added that the developers he has spoken to felt limited, and a little frustrated, by what they see as HDYC’s lack of vision. “They come to us and say they’ve been thinking about what makes smaller arts groups grow,” said Compton. Not top-down, like some opera house, but real, authentic small arts groups that bubble up from the bottom. But that kind of thinking isn’t in the RFP, and they fear that if they include it, they’ll be dropped from contention.”

Another sore point with HYCAC is the still-endangered northern section of the High Line that loops around the Western Rail Yards from 30th to 33rd Streets between 11th Avenue and the West Side Highway, which the city has yet to buy from CSX Transportation and which if left standing, according to developers and MTA, would increase construction costs significantly, thereby lowering the value of the incoming bids and cutting into MTA’s profit from the sale of the Yards.

Despite the hope frequently expressed by the Mayor and MTA that the park can be preserved, HDYC asked its development suitors to present one bid that would leave some or all of the elevated railway unscathed, and one in which the 150-year-old structure is demolished. To Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond, thinking about the latter is almost physically painful.

Hammond added that the whole Yards process gave him a case of déjà-vu: “We have to convince them all over again,” he said.

City officials, once skeptical of the “blighted” High Line, have come to see it as a city treasure, he said, a far cry from the planners who once proposed tearing it down and replacing it with a newer identical structure. “Christine Quinn jokingly called it the Faux Line,” laughed Hammond, who then added: “This new neighborhood at the rail yards—it’s going to be unlike any other in New York. Everything in it will be new. Why tear down the one historic resource?”

Meanwhile, HYCAC’s call for the bids to be made public is not without precedent. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation used a similar process in 2002. And in 1997, a similar was followed when Columbus Circle was up for redevelopment. After a July 1996 RFP for the latter, as CB 4’s letter pointed out, nine submissions were publicly displayed in the Coliseum lobby starting January 6, 1997, long before MTA made its selection in May. The result was a building whose “scale and design are a lot better than they would have been,” said Gottfried. He added on Tuesday that Hudson Yards dwarfs Columbus Circle in scale, and is comparable to that of Lower Manhattan, and thus demands as high a level of scrutiny or higher.

“You’re not just talking about one building, but a huge swath in a very important part of Manhattan,” said Gottfried. “While it’s certainly not identical to Lower Manhattan — it’s not as emotionally fraught —they do have in common the issue of the importance of public input.”

Sidebar:

In July 1863, just after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the first-ever military draft was started in New York City and the Draft Riots began, Abby Hopper Gibbons and her oldest daughter, Sarah (Sally), were at Point Lookout, Md., in a dangerous zone, nursing wounded Union soldiers and helping escaped slaves to survive and avoid recapture. At home at 19 Lamartine Place (now 339 W. 29th St.) were Abby’s husband, James Sloan Gibbons, and their two younger daughters, Julia and Lucy. Here are a few glimpses of what happened to their home on July 14.

From a July 17 letter from Lucy to her Aunt Anna:

As for Bridget, the [Irish servant] girl, it was impossible to alarm her. Her sole consideration was getting through with the washing....

.... In fact, at about 5 o’clock,...I proposed taking a bath [after she and Julia had moved some clothing, personal papers, and portraits to their aunt and uncle’s home next door]. Fifteen minutes later, the mob appeared.

.... Our neighbors behaved nobly. Judge Robinson entered with the mob and saved what he could--a portrait of Willie [their brother, who had died in a freak accident while a student at Harvard, a few years earlier], a drawer full of letters,...Mr. Horn stood in the parlor and threatened the mob with a pistol. He drove off the women (!!!) who were trying to set fire to the house with torches, but was finally obliged to retreat through the back window. Mr. Grey rescued a sheet full of wet clothes which were being carried off; and his wife had them re-washed and ironed. A lilttle boy from somewhere, only about twelve years old, helped like a little soldier, bringing buckets of water to put out the fire.

.... Our butcher [probably an Irishman] went into the midst of the mob, and declared he would not have that house touched, for which he was badly beaten, but will recover.

Father was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel making a last appeal for military to protect the premises.

.... Mr. [Joseph] Choate...[accompanied us] over the roofs to the end of the block, (by this time the mob was violent) out of a house there [owned by a Jewish man], procured a carriage which waited in 8th Ave., put us all into it, and brought us [to his family’s home on W. 21st St.].

Excerpted from “The Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons as Told Chiefly Through Her Correspondence,” By Sarah Gibbons Emerson (1896)