Midtown’s Community Board 5 approved an air rights transfer that will allow a Moinian Group affiliate’s new West Side hotel to rise higher than expected, DNAinfo reported.

The Moinian Group, run by Joseph Moinian, conveyed its interests in the land at 237 West 54th Street, a Midtown lot for which Moinian has filed plans for a hotel, to a new anonymous joint venture last month. The new, controlling members of the venture have provided financing.

The board voted in favor of allowing the joint venture to purchase 24,000 square feet of development rights from the Booth Theater on West 45th Street, making way for a 34-story, 400-room hotel on the site, DNAinfo said. [more]

The Department of Education’s decision to eliminate about 150 seats in a forthcoming Union Square school was made to push forward construction for the contested school and avoid delays posed by angry residents of a neighboring co-op, according to DNAinfo.
The DOE has been working to build a middle school and high school with 868 seats at 10 East 15th Street, but residents of the neighboring Victoria co-op, at 7 East 14th Street, complained about the noise and crowds the school would bring to their block. Rather than face litigation from the residents, the DOE and School Construction Authority chose to compromise in order to move quickly on the school, which it said is necessary to alleviate crowding in the district’s other schools. [more]

Midtown-based SL Green Realty wants to petition the
city to move the Grand Central shuttle bus station of Airporter, which offers trips to LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports, because the disembarking passengers are
interfering too much with the foot traffic in the area that is close to a building it owns, DNAinfo
reported. Retailers on Park Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets have
been complaining about the crowds on the block, Elizabeth Majkowski,
senior vicepresident of operations at SL Green, which owns 125 Park
Avenue, said. [more]

From left: the Eventi Hotel and the Ace Hotel (credit: PropertyShark)

The small, up-and-coming businesses that once thrived along the stretch between Madison Square Park and Herald Square, are becoming endangered by residential development, according to the New York Times.

Two decades ago the area was filled with vacant lots and rundown buildings. That old building stock offered start-ups, dentists, architects and other small tenants cheap rents.

But with rampant development in the area, which includes glassy condominiums, trendy hotels and razed lots readied for future construction, those small tenants fear their office space may no longer be so cheap. [more]

Members of a Chelsea community board have unanimously voted in favor of a plan to re-zone the blocks surrounding the Fashion Institute of Technology at Seventh Avenue and West 27th Street, according to DNAinfo, despite concerns that new zoning conditions might mark an end for existing commercial and office spaces in the area.

The new designation, to span West 28th, 29th and 30th streets between Seventh and Eighth avenues, would loosen regulations for new residential units. Developers would be allowed to turn any building smaller than 50,000 square feet into residential space. [more]

The Landmarks Committee of Midtown Manhattan’s Community Board 5 voted to recommend landmark status Tuesday night for three new buildings being targeted by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, according to DNAinfo. Among those on the agenda at the LPC’s Oct. 26 public hearing will be the 12-story Hotel Wolcott, on West 31st Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, which was designed by Grant’s Tomb architect John Duncan, and 500 Fifth Avenue, often called the mini-Empire State Building because it was also designed by Shreve Lamb and Harmon and built at the same time. The 59-story tower has a similarly small footprint and set-backs in its structure, created to comply with zoning requirements. The third building up for landmark designation is the Neo-Renaissance Mills Hotel No. 3, a 16-story structure at 485 Seventh Avenue that was originally built to house 1,000 single men and was one of the first “light-court tenements” in the U.S., according to notes from the LPC. The vote by the community board serves as an advisory. [DNAinfo]

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City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Vornado Realty Trust through a loophole in campaign finance regulations, despite publicly praising a three-year-old law that was supposed to limit the amount that individuals doing business with the city are allowed to contribute, to $400 each. According to Crain’s, Quinn received $19,900 from Vornado executives, nearly $15,000 of which is being held in an account saved for her expected 2013 mayoral campaign. The donations began coming in around the same time the city began building a database of companies doing business with the city as part of the new campaign finance law, which passed in 2007. Last week, the City Council approved Vornado’s proposed skyscraper at 15 Penn Plaza with Quinn’s support, despite resistance from Community Board 5. Since the Vornado project is listed under 401 Hotel Reit LLC, Vornado and its executives aren’t considered to be “doing business with the city” themselves — only the LLC is — making it easy for them to skirt the $400 limit. Earlier this week, Quinn said she supported efforts to close that loophole by adding new disclosure requirements for companies with ownership interests in LLCs. Still, she doesn’t plan to return Vornado’s donations. [Crain's] 

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The Eventi hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Sixth Avenue during the day. Click the images for more.

The West 29th Street tower dubbed Eventi made a neon splash onto Sixth Avenue when its nightly LED lighting display kicked off on the hotel’s second, third and fourth floors last week.

The 54-story Eventi, which opens May 14 under the Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants brand, will light the base of the building every night “the same way the Empire State or Rock Center does,” according to a spokesperson for the hotel, who would not reveal the price tag for the building’s new glow.

A construction worker at the scene said the system has the capacity for a rotating lights show that will be projected onto Sixth Avenue.

That was news to Community Board 5 District Manager Wally Rubin, who declined to comment on the display.

Most of the scaffolding on J.D. Carlisle Development’s 835 Sixth Avenue façade has come down, revealing the Eventi’s lobby. The Real Deal snapped some pictures of the entrance earlier today (photos of the nighttime display are not yet available). Once it’s up and running, the hotel is slated to have 292 guest rooms and 302 luxury rental apartments. [more]

The site of a former Chelsea nightclub, Limelight, which had been a 19th-century Episcopal church, may soon become a permanent retail mall. On Oct. 20, the Landmarks Preservation Commission will weigh a proposal by the operators of 656 Sixth Avenue, who want to bring dozens of boutiques and restaurants to a site that has historically been a source of rowdiness and neighborhood complaints. More than 40 leasing deals are in negotiation, and signed tenants include a candy shop called It’s Sugar, Hunter Boots, a rainboots store, and Caswell Massey, which specializes in soaps. Though community board approval is not necessary for the project to move forward (a Landmarks Commission vote will ultimately decide its fate), the board expressed skepticism about the project in a September hearing. [Crain's] [more]

Jean Nouvel and renderings of 53 West 53rd Street

Developers of a Jean Nouvel-designed skyscraper adjacent to the Museum
of Modern Art have applied to build a tower seven stories taller than
the proposal they originally unveiled two years ago. The willowy design for the tower at 53 West 53rd Street the developer announced in the fall of 2007
was 75 stories tall, but the one included in a recent filing with the Department of City Planning and described on the developer’s Web
site is 82 stories high. The building has been controversial, with Community Board 5 criticizing
its height and bulk in a resolution in March 2008, calling it an
“eccentric, asymmetrical tower.” The mixed-use project from Houston-based international developer Hines
Interests will have 100 hotel rooms and 120 condominium units on the
upper floors, and also include a 60,000-square-foot expansion of MoMa’s
galleries on the second to the fifth floors, the Hines Web site says.
The number of hotel and condo rooms has not changed since 2007, but the
amount of space for the museum has grown from 50,000 in 2007 to 60,000, according to
the latest description on the Web site. A museum spokesperson put the figure at 70,000 square feet. Hines did not immediately respond to requests for comment. [more]