In this issue:
- Update on our lawsuit
- The Chair of the LPC Resigns!
- Tribeca Trust Shrinks Cape Advisor’s Overgrown Building on West Broadway
- Save the Dates for our “Secret Salon” Series for Tribeca Residents
- What is Going on About Conflicts of Interest on Community Board 1?
- How to Help
Update on Our Lawsuit
Which one of these Tribeca buildings is in a historic district and which is outside the boundaries?
Last fall we had our long-awaited date in court (covered in the press here.) Alas, all we got as justice was literally 14 minutes of the judge’s attention! The Judge turned down our request for formal transcription of the arguments. Instead, she called the lawyers to her bench, listened to them for about five minutes each. Then asked them a few questions. None of us could hear anything. Then, at the end of fourteen minutes, she told everyone to go away, that she would write her opinion up later. And indeed she did, a few weeks later, saying no to Tribeca Trust and ignoring all of our argumentation, addressing none of the issues that our attorney raised. Be careful of the machine-picked judges!
Needless to say, we have filed an appeal. It is not over yet.
The Chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission Resigns!
The Chair of the LPC, Meenakshi Srinivasan, resigned on April 20. There had been an extensive campaign (of which Tribeca Trust was a part) that asked the City Council to appoint a new Chair because Srinivasan is widely regarded as hostile to historic districts and a “fox guarding the henhouse” representative of the anti-regulatory agenda that is promoted by New York’s biggest lobby: the Real Estate Board of New York. Nobody knows if that influenced her resignation, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Depending on who is appointed to replace the Chair, it might be possible for Tribeca Trust’s extension requests for our historic districts to be pushed forward on a different route than our lawsuit.
Meanwhile, here is a link (with pictures) to the op-ed: We Got What We Wanted….Now What? by Lynn Ellsworth published in the Broadsheet Daily here.
Tribeca Trust Tames Cape Advisor’s Overgrown Building on West Broadway
Everyone mourns the five beautiful buildings that wrapped West Broadway’s east side between Murray and Warren Streets. Remember when Cape Advisors tore them all down? Well, turns out the building they started to construct is just way too big for the zoning. We hired zoning guru George Janes to investigate the matter and to file a zoning challenge on our behalf. And indeed, George found all kinds of tricks and runarounds that Cape Advisors used to build something larger than zoning allowed.
The upshot: with help of Gale Brewer’s new zoning staffer, we got the Department of Buildings to conduct a formal audit of Cape Advisors drawings. And guess what? Cape Advisors must now redesign the building and scale it back substantially. Here’s hoping it costs them their profit margin…..
That’s a win for Tribeca. Not as sweet as avoiding the demolitions in the first place, but still a win.
Save the Dates for our “Secret Salon Series”
Tribeca Trust is rebooting after our exhaustion from the lawsuit against the Landmarks Commission with a new series of talks in apartments and galleries scattered around the neighborhood. The talks are of civic interest to all Tribecans. They will be free and open to the public. Seating is limited, so RSVP is essential at this link on Eventbrite. Locations are kept secret until you reserve a spot.
Each salon will have wine and cheese. They will open with an illustrated talk by a knowledgeable person we recruit for the event. This will be followed by Q & A and some socializing over the wine.
See the dates and topics below the photo.
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The First Secret Salon on Monday, April 30, 6:00 p.m. – Taming Monster Buildings – a Talk with Zoning Guru George Janes
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The Second Secret Salon on Tuesday, May 15, 6:00 p.m: What Can We Do About Tribeca’s Neglected Public Spaces? A Talk with Tribeca Trust and Guests from the Project for Public Spaces
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The Third Secret Salon on Tuesday, June 5, 600 p.m.: Meet Your Downtown Political Clubs: A roundtable in which you can ask anything!
Register for one talk or all of them at the link above or this link .
What is Going On About Conflicts of Interest on Community Board 1?
The Tribeca Trust board has sent a letter to the Manhattan Borough President, Councilmember Margaret Chin, and the Conflicts of Interest Board. We ask: how can the Co-Chair of Community Board 1’s land-use committee (Mr. Reggie Thomas) be a full-time professional lobbyist and also serve on our Community Board (or anyone’s community board for that matter)? Here is a link to one of Mr. Thomas’s on-line biographies. Worse, how can the same lobbyist get a job as Vice President for Government Relations for REBNY, our city’s most infamous attack machine against historic districts and the landmark law (REBNY stands for the Real Estate Board of New York), and remain Co-Chair of the Land Use Committee? (Here is a link to a REBNY article about Mr. Thomas’s appointment).
You only have to google search to learn that our city’s community boards from Inwood to Crown Heights are ridden with troubling conflicts of interest, but ours at CB 1 surely wins the prize for overreach by the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY). REBNY has explicitly vowed to weaken the Landmarks Preservation Commission and has said in various published white papers that they want to stop landmarking and want to eliminate the height cap in the entire city. How can such a lobby be allowed to grab the land-use Chair of a Community Board? It is, to this writer, a problem that passes no sniff test I can think of. Democratic societies in the modern era need rules that prevent professional lobbyists from serving on community boards. That’s a really simple principle to follow. We wonder not just how Mr. Thomas got appointed in the first place, but how it happened that it was given the co-chairmanship of the Land-Use Committee?
We have asked the elected officials and the Conflicts of Interests Board to conduct an audit of what is going on at Community Board 1 and to consider as well imposing some kind of term limits on board members. There are members who have served going on 20 years. We will let you what we hear back. Meanwhile, feel free to call the Conflicts of Interest Board at 212-442-1400 to ask for an audit of conflicts of interest on CB 1 and to express your dismay. You can also fill out the Conflict of Interest Board’s online form here. We are paying for their salaries over there, so we may as well ask them to right this particular wrong.
The highest ethical standard when analyzing these situations calls for “avoiding even the appearance” of a conflict of interest. Of course, the law does not require our politicians to adhere to such a high standard when making appointments to community boards, but politicians should do it anyway, as a matter of principle, so as to retain public confidence in government institutions. And if they don’t, it’s our duty to ask them to.
How to Help
- Offer your living room for one of our secret salon series (we’ll take care of everything else).
- Good at graphic design? We always need help with that. Want to serve on the board and shake us up over our post-lawsuit daze? Write us at lynnellsworth@tribecatrust.org
- Want to donate? Click here.
As always, thank you for reading and pardon all typos.
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