ALERT: Miami comes to the Meat Market
From GVSHP:
Plans for Huge Miami-Beach style Hotel in Meatpacking District: GVSHP has reached out to hotel developer Andre Balazs with our very serious concerns about his plans to build a 250-ft. tall, 330 room hotel at 848 Washington Street (btw. 13th and Little West 12th Streets) over the High Line in the Meatpacking District. We have seen Balazs’ plans for a gigantic wedge-shaped hotel on the site, the design for which is clearly inspired by Morris Lapidus’ hotels of the 1950’s and 60’s (see www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=115534 and www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=114151 for examples). GVSHP has tried to convince Mr. Balazs to re-think or even adjust his project, but he has thus far refused.
While GVSHP has succeeded in stopping or changing other inappropriate development plans in the Meatpacking District (such as a planned 500-ft. tall tower on this site – see www.gvshp.org/848DOBruling.htm), this case is different. Unfortunately, Balazs’s proposed hotel is allowable under the existing zoning (unlike prior plans – see www.gvshp.org/ganshi-risepress.htm), and the site is just outside of the Gansevoort Market Historic District (see www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/maps/gansevoort.pdf). GVSHP has called upon the City to extend landmark protections to this block and others along the western edge of the Meatpacking District which were removed from the Gansevoort Market Historic District we fought for and secured in 2003; we have also called upon the City to consider eliminating hotel development from allowable zoning categories in the area. With this most recent threat, we have reiterated that call, and asked the City to help (see www.gvshp.org/documents/Balazsletter_001.pdf). For further information, see the article in yesterday’s NY Sun at www.nysun.com/article/32949 (excerpts at bottom of e-mail).
Excerpts from The New York Sun www.nysun.com/article/32949
May 18, 2006 Thursday
REAL ESTATE; Pg. 18
541 words
Balazs’s Plans for Hotel on the High Line Draws Fire From Neighborhood
By DAVID LOMBINO, Staff Reporter of the Sun
Preservationists and neighbors who have seen designs for hotelier Andre Balazs’s boutique hotel that will straddle the High Line in the meatpacking district have likened the 25-story glass and white brick tower to something one would find in Miami Beach or Las Vegas.
They are asking Mr. Balazs to scale back the designs – which have been shielded from the public thus far – but the hotelier is saying that it is too late to make changes.
The director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, and the local restaurant owner Florent Morellet, met with Mr. Balazs last week.
“It basically looks like a Las Vegas casino or an Atlantic City hotel dropped into the meatpacking district,” Mr. Berman said. “The design is about as far from contextual as you could imagine.”
Mr. Balazs said “We can’t alter the design. It’s in the ground. It is what it is,” “There are no surprises in the design,” he said. “What we do is contextual projects.”
“The Standard, New York” is a 330-room hotel set to open by 2008, according to Mr. Balazs. The hotelier, a regular on Page Six, owns the Mercer Hotel and recently developed a luxury condominium project in the SoHo historical district called 40 Mercer Street. His boutique hotels in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles are popular celebrity hangouts.
The building site near Washington Street and West 13th Street has long served as a battleground between developers and neighborhood groups.
In 2002, developer Stephen Touhey proposed building a 45-story condominium on the site, designed by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel. After outrage by neighborhood activists, including Mr. Berman and Mr. Morellet, Mr. Touhey refashioned his plans into a hotel. After more pressure, he sold out to Mr. Balazs in 2004 for $24 million.
In 2003, the city’s Landmarks and Preservation Commission designated a large swath of the low-rise, cobblestoned streets as the Gansevoort historic district. Even though that designation would have prevented Mr. Balazs’s current design, the site was excluded from the boundaries.
Mr. Balazs is under no obligation to change the designs because the planned building fits within existing city regulations. Despite the city’s historic designation, Mr. Berman says that the meatpacking district is still facing a “host of issues” stemming from a rapid transition, skyrocketing rents, and the city’s most crowded nightlife scene.
“There are efforts to bring the neighborhood back to a balance, an even keel, to keep it from becoming this B &T nightlife Disneyland,” Mr. Berman said. “We fear this hotel will only add to this problem.”