Eliot Brown

The deal for billions of dollars worth of development over the West Side rail yards collapsed Thursday afternoon, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Tishman Speyer hitting an impasse in negotiations. The failure to reach a deal came more than five weeks after the M.T.A. announced Tishman Speyer as the winner of the development rights, after a months-long bidding contest between six of the city’s largest development firms.

According to a statement from the M.T.A., the failure to complete the deal came as Tishman Speyer refused to close on the agreement for the eastern half of the rail yards until the western half was rezoned, a process that could easily take until late 2009, if not 2010. The accord reached in late March held that Tishman would close on the eastern half; then, after the western half was rezoned, they would close the deal on that section, completing the deal. The total deal was estimated to bring the M.T.A. about $1 billion from Tishman.

The collapse in talks came one day after the M.T.A. passed a self-imposed seven-day deadline to finish negotiations and sign a conditional letter of designation, a document that was not signed when Tishman won the bidding. Officials said at the time of that announcement, in late March, that they were highly confident a final deal would be reached, characterizing the designation letter as something of a formality.  read more »

Renowned architect Richard Rogers has left the architectural team to renovate and expand the Javits Center, a move that comes four months after the state finalized a decision against any large scale expansion, an Empire State Development Corporation spokesman confirmed.

The Pritzker Prize-winning Mr. Rogers was brought on for the project by Pataki development chief Charles Gargano in part as a means to draw public support for the project. Mr. Rogers designed, among other projects, Paris’ Centre Pompidou museum with Renzo Piano.  read more »

Five weeks after Tishman Speyer was announced the winner of the West Side rail yards, negotiations are still unfinished between Tishman, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city, an M.T.A. spokesman confirmed.

The parties yesterday missed a seven-day deadline set by the M.T.A. at its board meeting last week, with the final details of a conditional letter of designation yet to be finalized.  read more »

Should Governor Paterson indeed move the Moynihan Station project under the control of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as he said he wants to do, at least two members of the State Assembly are poised to resist the action: Richard Gottfried, the district’s representative, and Richard Brodsky, the chairman of the committee that oversees public authorities.

“It’s a New York project; it ought to be run by a New York agency,” Mr. Brodsky said. “As a bi-state authority, they [the Port Authority] have been unresponsive, remote and immune to reform.”

Moving Moynihan from the state-controlled Empire State Development Corporation to the Port Authority would remove the Legislature from any direct control over the project, taking away its ability to pass laws about the plan or have approval power via the Public Authorities Control Board. (The PACB blocked the project from moving forward in a phased plan at the end of the Pataki administration.)  read more »

A judge further blocked construction of a restaurant at the pavilion in Union Square Park today, placing a partial injunction on the Department of Parks and Recreation project.

The city is barred from “installing fixtures for or operating a restaurant in the Pavilion” until a further ruling or order, the judge wrote, though the city is allowed to proceed on preliminary work, an expanded playground and a renovation of the northern end of the park.  read more »

On April 10, Christopher Ward was sitting in his midtown office when he got an unexpected phone call late in the afternoon. On the line was a mutual friend of Governor David Paterson’s top aide, Charles O’Byrne, calling with an unusual question.

“He just said, ‘Are you bored?’ And I said, ‘You’re not asking me as my psychiatrist—what are you asking me?’” Mr. Ward, 53, recounted.  read more »

The planned new medical facility of St. Vincent's in the West Village was dealt a setback today, as the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission sent the hospital back to the drawing boards. At issue were concerns about the demolition of numerous structures in the historic district to make way for a block of townhouses and a condo tower built by Rudin family.

While the commission did not vote on the plan, according to commission spokeswoman Elisabeth de Bourbon, commissioners said it required major revisions, with some suggesting the hospital rethink the proposal in full.  read more »

With construction safety serving as the favorite punching bag for legislators of late, the City Council is putting together a torrent of new proposed regulations of the construction industry, with a hearing scheduled tomorrow for 12 bills.

Numerous members of the City Council have called for new steps to ensure safety at construction sites amid the building boom, citing the rising number of construction-related fatalities (13 so far this year, compared with 12 in all of last year), as evidence of need of reforms.  read more »

In the search for a new commissioner for the Department of Buildings, the Bloomberg administration wants to drop a requirement that the position go to a certified architect or engineer, a move that is being resisted by the city’s architectural advocacy organization.

“We feel very, very strongly that it should be withdrawn, that it’s ill considered—that I would even go so far to say hypocritical,” said Fredric Bell, director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “It has to be a licensed design professional—not someone who just has good management skills … they really have to know buildings as their business.”

The City Council will hold a hearing on Wednesday on the new legislation, which was brought forward by the mayor’s office.  read more »

The Municipal Art Society has launched a Web site and campaign critical of the proposed phasing for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project, claiming the creation of parking lots in place of existing buildings will blight the area.

Because of the long time frame that will likely be needed to build the project—developer Forest City Ratner puts the slated completion date at 2018, though critics say that’s too optimistic—the footprint could be filled with parking lots (though Forest City denies that charge, claiming it will be public open space with trees).  read more »

Some changes don’t last long.

Reversing a structure that former Governor Eliot Spitzer put in place last year, Governor Paterson wants to reunite the state’s development agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, under one chairperson, ending a 17-month experiment with two chairmen on equal footing—one upstate, one downstate.

“We had come to the conclusion in our discussions that the bifurcated system—taking economic development and dividing it up between two people around the state—that it wasn’t working,” he told reporters yesterday. “I’m sure one person can be sensitive to the issues all around the state.”  read more »

Governor David Paterson said today that he will likely move Moynihan Station under the purview of the Port Authority, dropping the imbroglio on the plate of soon-to-be-announced executive director Christopher Ward.

From The Observer’s Em Whitney:

David Paterson was on the WFAN "Boomer and Carton" show this morning, expressing frustration over the city’s stalled major development projects.

“What I’m going to do," Paterson told the hosts, "is probably move construction of Moynihan [Station] to the Port Authority, which I think has a better chance of getting it done quickly and I hope that we can start construction quickly enough that we can reverse plans that exist.

 read more »

Governor David Paterson is planning to appoint Christopher Ward as executive director of the Port Authority, with an announcement to come as early as this afternoon, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Mr. Ward, the former commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection and a onetime Port Authority staffer, would take the slot left vacant by Anthony Shorris, who was asked to resign by Mr. Paterson last month to make way for a commissioner of his choosing.  read more »

The mayor’s executive budget released yesterday called for $389.7 million in city funding for the proposed Willets Point redevelopment, an amount that would be one of the largest direct city contributions for an economic development project during the Bloomberg administration.

[Summary of the executive budget here as a PDF].

The money would be used for acquisition and infrastructure work, according to a city summary of the mayor’s budget plan, with the capital budget calling for the money to be spread over a 12-year period, with the bulk of it at the start.  read more »

The Star-Ledger reports that Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the New Jersey Devils are trying to assemble investors to buy the Nets basketball team from development firm Forest City Ratner.

Should the Nets be sold—Forest City denied that the team is for sale—it would presumably kill the more than $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, developed by Forest City under the premise that a new Frank Gehry-designed arena would be created for the Nets.  read more »

Developers Vornado Realty Trust and the Related Companies are grasping for options to keep alive a multibillion dollar redo of Penn Station and related real estate development, as they have asked the city and state to back a loan to build a new Madison Square Garden in the Farley Post Office across Eight Avenue.

The proposal is intended to lure the Garden back to the table, as the company, led by Chairman James Dolan, pulled out of the larger plan in March. The state is considering the offer as one of many options for the project, a state official confirmed.

In this option, the state and city could be saddled with the cost of the arena—said to be in the range of $900 million to $1 billion—should the larger redo of Penn Station ultimately fall apart.  read more »

The Bloomberg administration is getting squeezed from all sides with its Coney Island plan, as its most recent proposal is taking fire from both advocates of the historic amusement hub and the area’s major landholder, Joseph Sitt.

Key advocates who once rallied behind the Bloomberg administration are now coming out strongly against the city’s proposal, expressing dismay that it would further shrink down the amusement district, putting retail and some hotels where city-owned land for amusements was once planned.

“The new plan sucks,” said Dick Zigun, the director of the nonprofit Coney Island USA who is often called the unofficial mayor of Coney Island. “They initially came together and came up with a plan that everybody got on board for … This is so watered down it is unacceptable.”  read more »

A month after the state declared Tishman Speyer winner of the bid to develop the West Side rail yards, the  read more »

The City Council is expected to pass a major rezoning of 125th Street this afternoon, opening up Harlem’s historic main thoroughfare to substantial levels of new development.

The move comes as the plan, pushed forward by the city and altered some by the Council, has met opposition from many in Harlem, who claim the rezoning will accelerate gentrification and displacement in the predominantly low-income African-American and Latino district.

Speaking to reporters, members of the Council sought to show the support they’ve received from the larger Harlem community for the plan, appearing with multiple religious leaders and community board chairs as they touted the plan.

Key to their support, the Council members said, was an agreement reached with the city to dedicate as below market-rate 48 percent of the new housing created by the rezoning, up from 20 percent presented in the city’s version of the plan.  read more »

Expanding parks is not supposed to be this difficult.

“This is the worst situation I’ve ever encountered in terms of [dealings with] the community,” said Carol Greitzer, a former councilwoman from the West Village who helped start a group called 250+ Friends of New York Parks. It opposes many of the Bloomberg administration’s park plans. “They come up with a plan. Maybe—maybe—if you’re lucky, you can tweak it slightly, but that’s about all you can do.”  read more »

Mayor Bloomberg and Joseph Sitt just can’t seem to get along.

Mr. Sitt, the major landowner in Coney Island, has been resisting the city’s quest to remake the Brooklyn enclave. He opposed the city’s earlier plan and now has reservations about a compromise that would allow him to develop much of his land just north of a nine-acre amusement zone.  read more »

The woes of the mega-project have been a hot topic lately, as Moynihan Station, Atlantic Yards and Willets Point, to name a few, are facing challenges amid a rough economy and shifting political landscape (at the state level especially).

Timely, then, is tomorrow morning’s forum at the New School, where Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber is slated to address this very issue, at least according to the title of the program: “Maintaining Momentum: Can New York’s Ambitious Development Agenda Survive an Economic Downturn?”

Also, speaking on a panel, according to a release from the New School: City Comptroller William Thompson, Terra Holdings economist Gregory Heym, Pratt Center director Brad Lander, Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation President Rafael Salaberrios; and Manhattan Institute fellow Julia Vitullo-Martin.  read more »

Amanda Burden, director of the city’s Department of City Planning and chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, has been given a top designation by the American Institute of Certified Planners, the country’s major planners' organization.

Ms. Burden was inducted last night into the organization’s College of Fellows, a designation held by only about 400 members.

Ms. Burden’s work in the Planning Department has been a critical element of the Bloomberg administration’s legacy on development in this city, as she has crafted more than 80 rezonings, allowing for thousands of units of new housing while limiting development in many low-rise neighborhoods.

Even if many of the high-profile mega-projects championed by the city ultimately fail to be realized, the rezonings carry long-term impact, particularly the 2005 Hudson Yards rezoning that opened the far West Side to dense development.  read more »

The notoriously press-shy Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner is due to appear on NY1 tonight at 8:30, going one-on-one with reporter Budd Mishkin.

The folks at NY1 have sent us over a brief teaser quote from Mr. Ratner:

We need jobs, we need shopping that's appropriate, and the right price and quality goods, supermarkets that provide food of quality and well priced, we need housing, and the architecture is important but it's not that important.

 read more »

Elected officials are pushing to halt work on Brooklyn’s $4 billion-plus Atlantic Yards development in order to re-examine the project, given the new governor and delays caused by the slow economy.

A rally is scheduled for Saturday.  read more »

A state appellate court has tossed out an appeal to block the planned Brooklyn Bridge Park, removing a potential obstacle for the 85-acre project slated to rise along the Brooklyn waterfront.

The decision, which came earlier this week, marks a defeat for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, which has vehemently opposed the creation of new housing on the parkland’s edge in order to finance the maintenance.

Many hurdles remain: the planned parkland, on the drawing boards for well over a decade, is substantially over budget given the increase in construction costs, and no sources have been identified to cover the shortfall. Further, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is resisting the concept of floating walkways that run through the park, as the agency is concerned about effects the structures could have on marine life.

The Defense Fund expects to appeal to the Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state.  read more »

As if there weren’t enough affordable housing fights around the city, it’s probably time to add another to the list. In Long Island City, at the confluence of Newtown Creek and the East River, the city is at the start of the public review process for a major planned housing complex of mostly middle-income residents called Hunter’s Point South (a.k.a. Queens West).

Tonight, the fun kicks off at a Community Board 2 hearing in Queens, where, among other issues, we’re willing to bet that people want more affordable housing than is presented in the plan.  read more »

An alternative studied in the Willets Point environmental review suggests a possible compromise strategy for the Bloomberg administration in its contested effort to redevelop the 61-acre industrial area by Shea Stadium.

The proposed redevelopment has turned into a big political quagmire, with elected officials on the City Council jumping at the chance to bash the city about its proposal. While a group of current and former elected officials met at City Hall today to hail the plan, the project clearly will take some convincing in the Council.

The alternative plan, studied in the draft environmental impact statement, calls for acquiring the land and building the project, in two phases. The plan includes acquiring the land on the western portions of the site first, where most of the smaller automotive-related businesses are based, while the owner-occupied businesses on the eastern portion would have more time before they sell their land. The plan would be the same in size, though the first half would be done by 2013, according to the plan studied, while the second half would be done by 2017.  read more »

The Brooklyn container shipping port operator that was once in the city’s crosshairs saw its lease approved by the Port Authority’s governing board today, finalizing a victory in a long-fought battle with the Bloomberg administration.

Led by former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, the city wanted to replace the port operator, American Stevedoring Inc., with a bustling complex of marine-related industry, a conference center, a hotel, a beer garden, housing and an expanded cruise terminal.

The city argued that the container shipping site, on Piers 7 – 12 in Red Hook, was inefficient in that location—better suited for a place such as Sunset Park.

But as the city prepared to move ahead, American Stevedoring proved a tenacious opponent, lining up elected officials behind their cause and ultimately forcing the city to back down.  read more »

A bunch of elected officials held a pro-Willets Point redevelopment rally at City Hall this morning in a likely attempt to counter efforts in the City Council to oppose the multi-billion dollar, 61-acre project, at least as currently presented.  read more »

The folks at the city's Economic Development Corporation sent over the above rendering of the West Side trade show facility we wrote about yesterday. A Vornado Realty Trust subsidiary submitted a winning bid to expand the existing facility, located at Pier 94.

The city will conduct an “intensive, in-depth assessment” of high-risk construction in the city, the Department of Buildings announced Wednesday, one day after commissioner Patricia Lancaster resigned.

"This year, we have seen an increase in accidents and injuries related to high-risk construction activities," acting commissioner Robert LiMandri said in a statement, "and we must make sure that as construction activity in the City continues to increase, the Department’s ability to hold the construction industry to higher safety standards keeps pace."

The department will spend $4 million to bring in outside engineers and others to oversee the review.

Full release after the jump.  read more »

Almost every time I’ve called Assemblyman Richard Brodsky about a story in the past few months, he interrupts me in my first question.

“You wanna know the story you should be doing?” he states, then goes into a diatribe on how the billions in initiatives on the far West Side are an unstable set of dominoes, all liable to topple.

My response—while the projects seem on shaky ground, there’s not enough hard figures or examples to show that things indeed are going to hell—may soon become invalid.

Now Mr. Brodsky, the chairman of the Assembly committee that oversees state authorities and corporations, is taking legislative action to provide more transparency with these projects.  read more »

Vornado Realty Trust, led by CEO Steve Roth, has been selected to develop an expanded trade show facility on the far West Side, expanding a modest convention center on Pier 94 into Pier 92.

For Mr. Roth, who recently was inched out by Jerry Speyer in a bid to develop the West Side rail yards, the project is a moderately-sized fish (the project will cost about $100 million, according to the city’s Economic Development Corp.), as opposed to the “elephant” that he’s been looking for (in his letter to investors [PDF] a few weeks back, he wrote that Vornado was “always elephant hunting and this year we missed a few.”)  read more »

Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Lee Sander seems a bit uncertain about the $100 million that developer Forest City Ratner owes the agency for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project. He had this to say earlier this month in a capital program “webinar” (no, we don’t quite know what that word is either), responding to a question about the MTA’s current capital plan:

There is $100 million associated with the sale of Atlantic Yards, and many of you have read in the newspapers some of the difficulty Forest City is having with that development, so hopefully that will proceed, but we want to make sure that that happens—but we’re concerned about that.

 read more »

The debate over the future of Coney Island has become enmeshed in politics; standing at center stage is Councilman Domenic Recchia.

“I tell you one thing, we’re going to get a new boardwalk,” the Brooklyn Democrat said, stomping his foot last week on the decaying wooden planks of Coney Island’s signature walkway.  read more »

The city’s commissioner of the Department of Buildings, Patricia Lancaster, today resigned from her post, more than five weeks after a major Upper East Side crane collapse killed seven people.

Ms. Lancaster, credited with overhauling and cleaning up a department noted for corruption, led numerous efforts to modernize the regulatory agency and increase penalties for developers as the amount of construction in the city soared.

But in the end, the building boom proved to be her undoing, as a number of high-profile deaths at construction sites in recent months brought on piles of public attention and numerous calls by lawmakers for her resignation.

Garnering the most attention was the crane collapse on East 51st Street, and last week, Ms. Lancaster acknowledged that the building of that size should never have been approved in the first place for that site.  read more »

The Bloomberg administration is facing stiff opposition to its Willets Point redevelopment plan.

The city commenced a seven-month rezoning process today for the 61-acre site by Shea Stadium, prompting 29 members of the City Council to declare their disappointment with the plan. (More details on the Council’s concerns here).

The letter seems to spell trouble for the Bloomberg administration on this project, which imagines a complete redevelopment of the manufacturing and car repair-intensive district.  read more »

The Bloomberg administration is plowing forward on its plan to redevelop the industrial area next to Shea Stadium, as it intends to start the rezoning process on Monday despite objections from the City Council.

“We have asked them not to certify Monday,” said Melinda Katz, chairwoman of the City Council’s land use committee. “My feeling is that there are a lot of outstanding issues.”

The plan for the 61-acre site, Willets Point, calls for a large mixed-used community with up to 5,500 units of housing, up to 1.7 million square feet of retail, up to 700 hotel rooms, a public school, and possibly a modest convention center. The decision to jump into the seven-month approval process without the blessing of the Council suggests a rising anxiety among members of the Bloomberg administration, which has 18 months left in office and a slew of large development projects left to implement.  read more »

An addendum to our article earlier this week on the never-ending Moynihan Station saga: The concept of converting the Farley Post Office into a rail station is widely viewed as belonging to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, its most persistent advocate from the early 1990s until his death in 2003. But the history goes back a bit further, and started as a partnership between the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrak, both of which stood to gain from a redevelopment of Farley.

Two of the major forces behind the plan's genesis: Donald Pross, who served as Amtrak’s director of real estate and development until 1995, and Dennis Wamsley, who ran the Postal Service’s asset management division.

Amtrak, eager to have a more presentable flagship station, was looking at options of how to improve Penn Station in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Mr. Pross.

Around the same time, a postal service executive was heading up a program known as asset management for the agency, finding ways to take existing properties, add other uses, and bring in some new money.  read more »

Yesterday morning we took a little jaunt downtown to check out the progress of the Freedom Tower. Accompanied by some folks from the Port Authority, which is developing the tower, we took a few shots from the construction site. Work is slated to rise above street level later this year.

For now, the sub-grade work seems to have a whole lot of workers installing a whole lot of cement and rebar. The site was mostly empty and the vast majority of the work has come within the last year. The Port Authority said they still are on schedule for completion in 2012.  read more »

Governor Paterson seems to be striving to put his signature on development projects around the state, as his decision to jettison the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Anthony Shorris, suggests.

Taken with the top job at the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s top two posts responsible for economic development are now both free, awaiting appointments of Mr. Paterson’s choosing. Other than those two positions, the governor, now more than a month into his job, has freed up relatively few other top jobs thus far, accepting the resignations of the commissioner of the Division of Human Rights, and the acting state police superintendent.

The forced departure of Mr. Shorris, who oversaw billions of dollars in construction projects including the World Trade Center redevelopment, comes a week after Mr. Paterson declared he would “revisit the issue at Ground Zero” at a breakfast, referencing the potential for delays at the site. It was unclear exactly what he meant at the time, though now the remark seems to make more sense.

Many in and out of government described Mr. Shorris as an intelligent administrator, giving him high marks in his job at the Port Authority. Still, he was said to not have tremendous political acumen, occasionally leaving politicians and officials feeling rebuffed.  read more »

The city found safety violations on six tower cranes (large cranes attached to buildings), after searching all 29 tower cranes in use citywide, the Department of Buildings announced today. The six cranes, with another two registering administrative violations, were temporarily shut down until the errors were corrected.

Following last month’s fatal crane accident on East 51st Street, DOB did a sweep of all the tower cranes in the city, and is now looking at mobile cranes, of which there are 220.  read more »

With all the pretty new parks rising (or at least planned to rise) along the city’s waterfront, one might think that shipping uses were simply a thing of the past.

Not exactly, says a city-commissioned study of “maritime support services,” which claims the port of New York has a major shortage of dry docks and tie-up facilities for ships, so much so that it recommends nearly tripling the capacity of drydocks by 2016.  read more »

Assemblyman Richard Gottfried has come out against Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel’s tower planned to rise next to the Museum of Modern Art, joining neighbors and State Senator Liz Krueger in their opposition to the project.  read more »

A team led by the Hudson Companies will give rise to a mixed-income village along the banks of the once-toxic Gowanus Canal