foes aim to topple tower plans

Opponents of a planned 668-foot tower at 200 Amsterdam Avenue are gearing up for a key appeal hearing in their bid to block construction of the tower, which if built would be taller than any building on the Upper West Side.

The city's Board of Standards and Appeals will hold a public hearing March 27 on a local land use group's contention that the project's building permit was not validly issued and should be revoked.

At 668 feet, the luxury condominium tower would exceed the height of any existing building on the Upper West Side. (Another proposed condo development, on West 66th Street, would top the nearby 200 Amsterdam project by just over 100 feet.)

Excavation work is underway at the site of the planned tower, near 69th Street and Amsterdam, the former location of Lincoln Square Synagogue.

An organizational and informational meeting in advance of the appeal hearing attracted dozens of Upper West Siders to Rutgers Presbyterian Church on West 73rd Street March 19.

“Apparently everybody in this neighborhood realized that if this building goes up, it's going to be the whole neighborhood that's open to 700-footers,” said Olive Freud, the president of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, the group that filed the appeal. Freud urged those at the meeting to voice their support at the March 27 hearing.

Helen Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side in the City Council and has signed on in support of the appeal filed by Freud's group, said at the meeting that the 200 Amsterdam project speaks to “concerns about the broader issues of development on the Upper West Side: buildings that seem — and in my opinion, are — completely out of scale and out of context that keep getting proposed for our district.”

“The New York City zoning laws are supposed to prevent this kind of development, to ensure predictable, contextual proposals,” Rosenthal said. “But the developers keep finding loopholes – or they perhaps are inventing loopholes – in order to build bigger and bigger buildings.”

At issue is the large, irregularly shaped zoning lot that forms the basis of the building's height, the shape of which opponents have likened to a gerrymandered political district. The tower itself would occupy only a small portion of the zoning lot, which stretches across much of the block, winding throughout the paths and driveways of the neighboring Lincoln Towers housing complex, at some points connected by narrow 10-foot strips of open space.

The 110,000-square-foot zoning lot encompasses portions of several tax lots on the block. Members of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development argue that zoning lots, which are used in determining a building's maximum permissible floor area, must be composed of entire tax lot — rather than partial tax lots, as are used in the case of the planned development.

The Department of Buildings disagreed with that assessment in issuing the building permit for the project in September 2017. But in a March 9 letter to the Board of Standards and Appeals, the Department of Buildings changed course, stating that its previous interpretation of the zoning resolution — that zoning lots can consist of partial tax lots, which it relied on in issuing the building permit — was incorrect. But despite this reversal, the Department of Buildings argued that to apply this new standard to the already-issued building permit would be “arbitrary and capricious,” and stated that the validity of the building permit should stand.

“Now that the Department of Buildings has accepted the fact that the zoning lot does not comply with the zoning resolution and should not have been approved, the argument now becomes: can the permit be revoked based on that acknowledgement?” said Frank Chaney, the attorney representing the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development.

Chaney will argue that the permit for 200 Amsterdam should be revoked at next week's hearing, but declined to share specific details on the argument he will make, which he said is still being refined. Chaney said the Board of Standards and Appeals will likely require one or more follow-up hearings before making a determination on the case.

“We're going to push very hard to minimize the number of follow-up hearings so we can get a decision, because all along while this is going on they're continuing to prepare the site to build the building,” he said.

The five-member Board of Standards and Appeals is the city agency responsible for ruling on appeals of zoning determinations. The board's chair, Margery Perlmutter, recently announced she would recuse herself from the case, Rosenthal said, because the law firm at which she was formerly employed had worked on behalf of the developer on the 200 Amsterdam project.

Whatever the outcome of the appeal, Chaney said he is “very certain” that the case would subsequently end up in court. “If the Board of Standards and Appeals decides in our favor and revokes the permit, I guarantee that the property owners and their attorneys are going to take it to court,” he said. “If they decide in favor of the owners to not revoke the permit, then very likely we're going to go to court.”