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A DEBATE OVER PARKING ON 74TH STREET NEWS Will the looming educational and medical complex on 74th Street create a parking and safety problem?
DOWNTOWN HAILS WHITNEY’S RETURN The museum’s new neighbors anticipate crowds, but mostly for the better
BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
A joint-venture by Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and CUNY Hunter College to build a medical and educational facility on East 74th Street has cleared almost every hurdle needed before construction can begin. Taken together, the hospital and school will occupy a 1.1 millionsquare-foot building on 74th Street between York Avenue and FDR Drive. Sixty percent of the space will be allocated to MSK’s cancer outpatient facility and CUNY will occupy the remaining 403,000 square feet. The only thing standing in the project’s way is an appeal of a dismissed lawsuit that was brought by Yorkville residents who allege the city engaged in spot zoning when it approved the project and that its environmental review process was flawed. But another, much smaller, component of the lawsuit has raised a question over whether MSK/CUNY, and the city in approving the application, provided an adequate amount of parking to meet the new facility’s demand. Al Butzel, an attorney representing the Yorkville residents who brought the suit, organized under the moniker Residents for Reasonable Development, said demand for parking will far exceed supply when the facility is completed in 2019.
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BY GABRIELLE ALFIERO
After almost 50 years uptown, one of Greenwich Village’s famed museums is coming home. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which got its start a century ago when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded her Whitney Studio Club in the neighborhood, will once again open downtown. “People have been very positive about it,” said Tobi Bergman, chairman of Community Board 2. “It started in the Village and it’ll be great to have it back. It will be great to have an art museum here.” The Whitney’s newest incarnation — a $422 million, Renzo Piano-designed building at Gansevoort and Washington streets — opens its doors May 1 and hosts a block party the following day. Its neighbors mostly seem ready to embrace the museum as their district’s cultural beacon. While the Whitney calls the bustling, predominantly commercial Meatpacking District home, the quiet, tree-lined Village blocks just south of Gansevoort Street retain a cozy atmosphere, where children ride scooters past charming brownstones and baby carriages line the sidewalk outside a nursery school on Horatio Street. On a recent afternoon, neighborhood residents said they were gen-
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The Whitney Museum, seen from Gansevoort Street. Photograph by Karin Jobst, 2014. erally looking forward to what the museum’s visitors would bring to what was one of the Village’s — and the city’s — quieter enclaves just a few years ago. Merav Harris, who lives a block south of the museum on Horatio Street, said the Whitney would change the neighborhood’s texture for the better, even though she worried her rent would increase.
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“I think we need the arts,” said Harris, 29, about the commercial district. “It’s all about shopping.” Bergman, the community board chairman, noted that this pocket of the West Village isn’t overwhelmed with foot traffic, although he expects more taxis will travel the area’s cobblestone streets in route to
WEEK OF APRIL
23-29 2015
Our Take THE DANGERS OF SPRING After an interminable winter, there’s something glorious about the first warm day of spring. But the sunshine brings danger, too. Last weekend, as New Yorkers scrambled outside to enjoy the warmest day of the year, 20 people were shot in the city, one fatally. In part, the surge in violence sticks to a familiar seasonal rhythm: criminologists will tell you that as the weather warms up, and people head outside, crime rates rise, too. Criminals are no dummies; they don’t like the cold any more than the rest of us. But this year’s warm season brings with it some unusual omens. While the city protested the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island and police shootings around the country, a lot of risidual anger remains. Warmer weather, combined with the spark that could come from yet another shooting at any moment, could prove particularly dangerous. That, and myriad other reasons, makes it that much more important for Mayor Bill deBlasio to approve the 1,000 additional police officers that NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has requested. The mayor is a smart student of our civic history. He knows that no New York mayor -- ever -- has been effective without the support of the NYPD. Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday April 24– 7:26 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com.
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