Green hero’s woes, p. 9
Volume 82, Number 20 $1.00
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Hudson Square, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933
October 18 - 24, 2012
Double the Love: Nonprofit meals provider to grow BY LINCOLN ANDERSON God’s Love We Deliver is embarking on an ambitious project to more than double the size of its Soho headquarters building at Spring St. and Sixth Ave. When completed, the $22 million project would allow the organization to cook and deliver twice as many meals as it currently does to individuals afflicted with H.I.V./AIDS, cancer and other serious ill-
Courtesy Pier 40 Champions
A view of how Pier 40 could look under a new plan proposed by the Pier 40 Champions coalition. Two 15-story towers — either for residential or commercial office use — would be built on land just east of the pier, but still within the Hudson River Park.
Leagues toss a change-up on Pier 40 buildings idea BY LINCOLN ANDERSON The notion of constructing housing on Pier 40 to raise revenue for the cashstrapped Hudson River Park has met stiff resistance from some quarters — including from many Lower West Side residents and, most notably, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, whose district includes the pier. Now, a coalition of the area’s youth sports leagues, which heavily use the crumbling West Houston St. pier — and which also support residential use on it — are “putting on a shift,” to use a baseball term. Their idea is still to construct new buildings in the park, not on Pier 40 itself, but instead in the open area between the pier
and the Hudson River bike path. That area technically is within Hudson River Park. A rezoning would be needed to allow the towers’ construction since the area’s zoning is manufacturing, from its days as a working waterfront. The towers’ height is pegged at roughly 15 stories, and was based on the height of the nearby Morton Square apartment complex, which is around that tall. Due to the cramped space in front of Pier 40, the buildings would be narrow, only about 99 feet wide. These towers would have less square footage than the towers seen in renderings in an earlier study for Pier 40 done this
past spring by HR&A and Tishman. That study, also commissioned by the local youth sports leagues, found that adding 600 to 800 market-rate units on Pier 40 would generate high revenue for the park but with low impact when compared to other possible uses, like entertainment or destination retail. One rendering in that earlier study showed residential towers massed along the pier’s northern edge. Called Pier 40 Champions, the new coalition includes P3, Downtown United Soccer Club, Greenwich Village Little League and Gotham Girls soc-
nesses. The new, five-story building would sport a rooftop garden for vegetables and herbs that would be used in the food the group delivers to its clients. Volunteers — including possibly even residents from a 14-story luxury tower planned on an adjacent site to the north — would tend the rooftop
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N.Y.U. trustee’s company did hire goons for demo BY SAM SPOKONY A spokesperson for a company owned by Daniel Straus, an N.Y.U. Law School trustee, has now admitted that the company did in fact have “security” attend an anti-Straus demonstration that was led by a student group and the company’s striking union workers. The students — members
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of New York University’s Student Labor Action Movement, or SLAM — continue to claim that during their protest against Straus on Sept. 11, the supposed security (which they instead derided as a group of “antiunion thugs”) harassed them with threats of violence and homophobic slurs.
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EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 16
CHURCH O’CHEESE PAGE 12