Superior Plan

The Board of Standards and Appeals approved Related Companies' plan to build a 190-foot, 160,000-square-foot residential tower at the site of the Superior Ink factory at Bethune and West streets in Greenwich Village earlier today. This is a partial victory for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has been lobbying the B.S.A. to quash, or at least scale down, Related's project. It was originally designed to be 270 feet tall. This should be one of the last new towers to go up in the neighborhood; last year the Department of City Planning down-zoned the whole area after a push by preservation activists and locals who were concerned about all the new, large-scale developments, such as the Meier towers on Perry and Charles streets, going up. In a press release, GVSHP executive director Andrew Berman vowed to keep pressuring the Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark the Superior Ink factory: "This historic neighborhood deserves nothing less." -Matthew Grace