Pols to rally against giant Nike store at Aurora’s 529 Broadway

A local community board is planning a rally against a new 55,000-square-foot Nike store set to open at Aurora Capital Associates’ 529 Broadway.

Community Board 2 argues that the Department of Buildings shouldn’t have allowed Nike to build out a store that large in Soho, where zoning restricts retail space in new developments to 10,000 square feet. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council member Margaret Chin and CB2 chair Tobi Bergman will lead the rally outside the DOB headquarters at 280 Broadway.

Aurora [TRDataCustom] would have had to win a special permit for such a large store, which it avoided by simply filing an alteration permit. The firm is building the six-story building from the ground up. But it argued a neighboring building’s wall actually a “party wall” belonging to 529 Broadway, meaning it never fully demolished the old structure and was merely doing an alteration.

“DOB is very compliant to that kind of thing. It happens all the time,” Bergman said at a July 2015 board meeting.

Helping build 529 Broadway is Harco Construction under conditions the DOB found “immediately hazardous” at one point.  In June, Harco was convicted of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide over the death of a construction worker on a separate site in the Meatpacking District. [DNAinfo] — Konrad Putzier