Amenities at the Hotel on Rivington include in-room spa services, a gym, pet-friendly floors and a DVD library: all pretty routine by current boutique hotel standards. And yet the two-year-old property still stands out — at 21 stories, it’s the tallest building on the Lower East Side, and its glass-walled façde affords views unparalleled in the medium-rise neighborhood.
But it won’t tower over the area alone for long.
Units are currently on sale at the 16-story Blue condominium at 105 Norfolk Street, which also boasts an all-glass — in this case, blue-hued — exterior; occupancy is expected by the end of the year.
Not everyone is thrilled. Many neighborhood critics and local politicians say the rise of the Blue casts a dark shadow.
Freddy Malang, a student at Fordham University and a Lower East Side resident for two years, said the Blue blocks the view he used to have from his roof on Orchard Street.
“They should have kept the skyscrapers in Midtown and the Financial District,” said Malang. “This is not what the Lower East Side is about.”
Angelo Cosentini of On the Level Enterprises, the Blue’s developer, disputes the complaints.
“Isn’t that the nature of New York City, that it’s constantly changing?” he said. “I wasn’t looking for 8 million people to love it. Professional architecture critics have almost unanimously approved.”
Community Board 3, however, which proposed a rezoning of the East Village and Lower East Side last year, shares the concerns of residents like Malang. In response, the Department of City Planning unveiled a preliminary draft proposal to downzone 141 blocks in the East Village and Lower East Side this summer.
That means the Lower East Side’s shift from 19th-century brick tenements to hyper-modernist glass houses in the sky may be short-lived.
Under the city’s current plan, building heights will generally be capped at eight stories, although Houston and Delancey streets, as well as the west sides of Avenue D and Chrystie streets, will allow inclusionary zoning with top-outs of about 12 stories.
According to Rachaele Raynoff, press secretary for the Department of City Planning, the rezoning has momentum.
“Currently, we are working collaboratively with the Community Board, other civics and elected officials to build consensus before we complete our final proposal and environmental review,” said Raynoff. “We are aiming to begin the formal public review process sometime next year.”
Raynoff said the area hasn’t been rezoned since 1961, and new zoning will help maintain the two neighborhoods’ built context.
“Addressing out-of-scale development and achieving orderly growth is critical to fostering appealing and productive communities,” she said.
But that development is already well-established. A few blocks from the Blue, the Pomeranc Group is building a 141-key, 19-story hotel on Allen Street between Houston and Stanton. The developers expect the hotel to open within a year, and it too will sport a curtain wall.
The shiny towers may stand in contrast to the Lower East Side’s squat tenement buildings, but their owners see them integrating well.
Michael Pomeranc, a principal in the Pomeranc Group, said his hotel will contribute to the Lower East Side’s diverse sensibility.
“If you build a high-rise in an area where there’s 1,000 high-rises, it doesn’t add much,” he said. “We don’t feel that our building has no relationship whatsoever to what’s happening around it. We’re on one of the biggest blocks in Downtown, and it makes sense to have a big building on a big block.”
If the downzoning occurs, the Lower East Side’s extant high-rises stand to profit handsomely.
“Both Paul Stallings from the Hotel on Rivington and the Pomeranc people think the proposed downzoning will be very positive for them,” said Mitchell Adelstein, president of CRG Realty, which handled the financing for the Hotel on Rivington and the Pomeranc hotel on Allen Street. “They also think the buildings will be very positive for the neighborhood, because they’re going to bring a lot of people there.”
Cosentini said the downzoning would benefit his building but would nevertheless be a shortsighted move.
“If I were a greedy person, I’d say it was great,” he said. “But I think you’re limiting the number of units that can be built, and it’s a classic case of the city closing the door to new developments when there’s demand.”
Avi Voda, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, said the bigger buildings draw more commercial entities to the neighborhood, and that a downzoning would detrimentally affect the Lower East Side’s ability to attract prominent retailers.
“If the downzoning goes through, it will look like Soho, because they’ll have to combine buildings together rather than building high,” said Voda, who is marketing the seven-story condo Switch Building at 109 Norfolk Street, a couple doors down from the Blue.
Barrie Mandel, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group and the Blue’s broker, said that though she believes height restrictions should be imposed on the area, exceptions will inevitably be made for future developments.
“In the case of the Blue, it’s on a big, wide block, and I don’t think it’s out of place there,” she said. “Do I think it’s a building that merits an exception? Yes. Do I think there are other buildings that will merit an exception? Yes.”
Fresh Lower East Side fare fetches solid prices
Despite a weaker market, new developments on the Lower East Side are fetching strong prices.
“There’s a lot of demand to live in the neighborhood,” said Avi Voda, who is marketing the Switch on Norfolk Street, where prices are averaging $970 a square foot. “If you look at the Avalon Chrystie Place, they’re renting one-bedrooms for $4,200.”
Voda said it was easy to establish comps for the Switch by looking at pricing for newer developments like 115 Allen Street.
Pricing the Blue’s condos, however, was challenging, said Barrie Mandel, the development’s broker.
“It was hard to establish comps because the building is breaking new ground for the area; it’s a trailblazer,” she said. “The units that are left are going for around $1,100 a square foot, though sales prices have varied depending on when the various units came on the market and what the spaces were like.”
The new hotel on Allen Street developed by the Pomeranc Group was going to contain over 30 condo units, but the developer decided to simply construct a hotel because of the city’s hot hotel market and because it seemed suited to the location.
“We decided to go fully hotel because it made more sense with the structure we were building,” said Michael Pomeranc. “The condos were getting lost in the sauce, and it just didn’t feel right.”