As told to Lauren Elkies
Richard Born, principal, BD Hotels
I think those two buildings [the Richard Meier-designed 173 and 176 Perry Street] are a work of art and it was a true pleasure to see those towers completed.
Being able to deliver an architecturally significant project, having projected numbers that nobody really thought were realistic, having completed a project that added to the skyline of the city and making a profit doing so was a great feeling.
Those buildings were really the first buildings that one truly calls a design concept — a designed residential building. If you look around at high-rise residential construction in New York City you’ll see a lot of brick buildings that have been built. I don’t think there was ever a glass building built as a residential tower in New York before that. All of a sudden after that you saw a plethora of design buildings being built.
If you go back in the history of the development of New York, every new structure was a contemporary structure at the time. I think there is a knee-jerk reaction in many neighborhoods to preserve and a knee-jerk reaction that if something’s going to be built it should be the same. I don’t think one should build the same; I think one should build significant and important, and what may be viewed as architecturally beautiful.
When those two towers first stood there, on the West Side Highway, along the stretch of blocks that were developed in a mediocre fashion or not even developed, I think they looked like two gems that were sort of rising out of rubble.
…to fight against glass high-rise condo towers in Greenwich Village
Andrew Berman, executive director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
When the buildings [173 and 176 Perry Street] were completed, I have to say, it was sort of a breathtaking site. I mean these two enormous glass and steel buildings seemed about as foreign to Greenwich Village as you could imagine and were clearly a signal of things to come along the Greenwich Village waterfront unless swift action was taken.
Certainly this was something people in the neighborhood had been working on and fighting for, for years, but I think in some ways the arrival of these two towers several years ago was really like throwing down the gauntlet. It was a clear signal of now or never if people wanted to preserve what was left of the neighborhood or see it be entirely turned into the new Miami on the Hudson.
You know, the buildings themselves, I would say are, if you kind of remove them from their context and either look at them just from New Jersey or look at them from the water, they’re sort of beautiful objects. The problem is when you actually attach them to the streets of Greenwich Village, particularly if you’re looking at them from inland, they really seem to have almost no connection whatsoever to the neighborhood. And it’s more than just a sort of aesthetic thing.
The buildings are largely occupied by people for whom this is one of probably a dozen residences they have throughout the world and so the relationship between the building and the neighborhood is not dissimilar to the relationship between the actual residents and the neighborhood, which is one of sort of removal and disconnection.
Without a doubt people are often uncomfortable about change. Look, Greenwich Village is a neighborhood that’s been about change since its inception. I would say, however, that the towers represent as radical of a departure from what had been the underlying spirit and character of the neighborhood as you could come up with.
I think there’s definitely a great sense of loss on a lot of people’s part associated with these buildings, a loss of what for so long has been the sort of intimate, gritty, multi-layered texture of the Greenwich Village waterfront which these two buildings kind of obliterate.