Legal Challenge to MoMA/Hines Skyscraper Begins
NEW YORK — (March 8, 2010) – On February 25, 2010, the West 54-55 Street Block Association and the Coalition for Responsible Midtown Development filed a petition for judgment in New York State Court to stop the construction of a towering skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. To be located at 53 West 53rd street “Tower Verre” is being developed by the Hines Organization of Houston and Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Street Fund and will house the latest expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. MoMA, The University Club, St. Thomas Church and the Folk Art Museum are all selling air rights to the project causing it to be three times larger than the as-of-right size permitted on the site.
Citing numerous failures to comply with statutory and procedural requirements in obtaining the necessary permissions to greenlight the project, the Petitioners seek judgment declaring the project illegal. The City of New York, The New York City Council and the City Planning Commission are all named as Co-Defendants and the petition further seeks to annul the City’s approval of the project due to the City’s failure to comply with applicable provisions of the City Zoning Resolution, the Special Midtown Preservation Subdistrict, the City Charter, and the State Zoning Enabling legislation. Further, the complaint/petition alleges that the approvals of the project are a violation of the State Environmental Quality Act.
Nouvel’s tower, a behemoth over 1000 feet tall, is planned for an undersized side street in a lot adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art (“MoMA”). The tax-exempt MoMA demolished the historic City Athletic Club and turned a nearly $100 million profit on its flip of the building site to Hines. MoMA stands to make still more on air rights sales and Hines must build 4-5 new floors of galleries for the museum in the deal. Hines originally was approved for a 25-story building and shortly after asked special permits for a building as high as the Empire State Building (1250 feet) If built Tower Verre would be one of the tallest buildings in Manhattan on a lot barely the size of a McDonald’s franchise. Having recently skirted foreclosure on three properties in greater San Francisco, it is questionable whether Hines can even carry out this mega-project. There is a good chance that midtown would be stuck living with years of project cutbacks and construction delays. The neighborhood has already suffered six years of MoMA construction in the last decade and nearly an equal amount of construction in front of the CBS building for a subway project.
Bloomberg News Architecture critic James Russell chimed in when the procedural run around first came to light: “The real art in this deal is the zoning… which could cast some of Midtown’s most prized and densely built blocks into darkness. Someday such abuse may become illegal.”
Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Critic of the Wall Street Journal had this to say in a recent New York Times interview: “The Museum of Modern Art has become a real estate operation. I admit a certain amount of nostalgia: I remember a street that was once one of the best streets in New York, 53rd Street. Watching it change over the years, I can’t help but view their new Nouvel tower as the last destructive nail.”
Lawyers for Hines told the Landmarks Preservation Commission not to worry about the impacts of the Tower since they are ‘getting out of Dodge,’ meaning they are moving the air rights 500 feet toward Sixth Avenue. Hines and MoMA are shoe-horning a sliver of a tower on less than half of an acre on a side-street and justifying it in the name of preservation and having the work of a Pritzker prize winner (Nouvel). This is disgraceful coming from a museum that considers itself an arbiter of good planning and architecture. The CBS building and other landmarks on the block will be dwarfed let alone the residents.
To read more about the efforts of The West 54-55 Street Block Association and the Coalition for Responsible Midtown Development in combating this project, please visit http://www.no2moma.com/ .