Alphabet City, the East Village enclave literally defined by the lettered streets that run north-south through it, is the city’s latest battleground for zoning fights.
As it shakes off a heritage once marked by poverty and open-air drug dealing in the 1980s and early 1990s, some developers want to build bigger, while others say new construction should be consistent with the five- and six-story tenement houses that characterize most of the neighborhood.
The issue is far from settled, but in the end, the debate may be moot: Current and new developments are having no trouble both drawing buyers and staying the same size as older surrounding buildings.
The nonprofit East Village Community Coalition this year commissioned a survey to study contextual development in Alphabet City, where zoning hasn’t changed since the early 1960s. The survey concluded that residential buildings similar in scope to the current walkups were fine; anything too much taller was not.
Existing buildings and ones under construction would not be affected by any downzoning, which would be confined to an area generally bounded by Third Avenue to the west, Avenue D to the east, 13th Street to the north, and Houston Street to the south.
Community Board 3, which includes Alphabet City, threw its full support behind the coalition’s survey in September, with its chairman, David McWater, telling The Real Deal that the unanimous vote was essentially a legislative bulwark against the inevitable gentrification getting too out of hand.
“It’s aimed at keeping development contextual,” said McWater, an East Village bar owner. “It was a vote of support for that.”
The City Council would have to approve any downzoning, and even advocates say Alphabet City’s is probably two to three years off. Still, the debate over future development can’t start soon enough for some as the rapid metamorphosis of Alphabet City from drug haven to hip East Village annex continues.
Take, for instance, the mini-debate over a high-rise dorm. Area residents started the East Village Community Coalition to get landmark status for P.S. 64 between Avenues B and C on 9th and 10th streets. Developer Gregg Singer had planned to build on the site of P.S. 64, which he and his partners bought for $3.1 million at public auction in 1998, a 19-story dormitory not associated with any university. The coalition and others in the area fought the plan, and, after much wrangling, the city ultimately denied Singer’s plan. McWater cited that dorm as an example of the sort of out-of-context development Alphabet City wants to avoid.
Avoiding that may not be hard to do. Residential real estate currently has little trouble drawing prospective buyers. Plus, Alphabet City, a relative latecomer to gentrification, has an added financial bonus.
“It’s a little bit more affordable than other areas,” said Jaime Breitman, a broker with Bellmarc Realty, who’s been showing a two-bedroom triplex co-op on East 4th Street near Avenue C. The asking price in the 20-unit, prewar building that was once a rectory is $925,000.
Condo developments this year in Alphabet City have remained contextually similar to the much older surrounding buildings. The developments, like the 11-unit Green Diamond on Avenue A and the 17-unit 241 East 7th Street, are decidedly smaller in scale than Singer’s almost-dorm.
One Avenue B, for instance, will be eight stories of studio, one- and two-bedroom condos when it opens in early 2007.
And the neighborhood surrounding the new development will only help in selling it, said Matthew Van Damm, a project manager for Citi Habitats Marketing Group, which is marketing One Avenue B. That may not always have been the case.
“I think the Lower East Side, Alphabet City, the East Village the neighborhoods have kind of merged boundaries,” Van Damm said, “as opposed to a few years ago, [when] people wouldn’t touch Alphabet City and they would live in the East Village.”