Monday, January 20, 2024
Sunny. High 26 degrees.
After the snow on Sunday, the beginning of this week is expected to be extremely cold. Temperatures will sit between 8 and 26 degrees through Thursday.
Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Monday is also Inauguration Day.
Upper West Side News
By Gus Saltonstall
Rumors are swirling that Kamala Harris, who officially leaves her job as vice president today, might be eyeing a home on the Upper West Side, as first reported by the New York Post’s Page Six.
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, was spotted earlier in January touring a $20,000-a-month three-bedroom apartment in the Park Loggia building on West 61st Street between Broadway and Columbus, according to the Post.
The new Upper West Side luxury building has 24/7 doorman service, security, a rooftop and outdoor terrace with Central Park views, a fitness center, golf simulator, music practice rooms, and more.
According to the Post, citing an unnamed source, “the soon-to-be-former VEEP and Second Gentleman intend for Los Angeles to continue to be their base when they leave Number One Observatory Circle [in Washington, D.C.] this week.” But the same source “conceded that Emhoff has indeed been casting his eye over some homes in the Big Apple on the couple’s behalf.”
Emhoff’s daughter also lives in Brooklyn.
You can read more — HERE.
Actor Mark Ruffalo visited City Hall this month in an effort to help preserve the West-Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side.
Ruffalo met with First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer and City Councilmember Gale Brewer to discuss the ongoing dispute between preservationists and a developer over the fate of the church at the corner of West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, sources told the New York Post. The church congregation says it can’t afford needed repairs and has asked to sell the property to a developer who would build condos in the space.
Brewer, who has sided with those who want to preserve the church, said it “is not falling apart,” according to the Post. “I was there two nights ago. Beautiful, not falling apart,” said Brewer. “It does need money for the roof, which we have, and then we can take the scaffolding off.”
The last update in the long-running West-Park Presbyterian Church saga was that the church was withdrawing its request to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant a “hardship application” that would have cleared the way for the 133-year-old church to sell the property and have it demolished.
The congregation issued a statement at the time saying that it would resubmit the hardship application, when the ongoing litigation around the building was resolved. That litigation is still ongoing.
On Saturday, a mist rolled into Central Park with the warmer weather and rain.
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I walked by the church yesterday and I noted to my wife that the scaffolding surrounding the church has been there for over twenty years.
My guess is with Gale Brewer and Mark Ruffalo spearheading the drive to save the church this scaffolding will remain for another twenty years and the UWS will continue to have a decrepit and unsafe empty building.
The stall tactics by some who refuse to do anything about this church remind me of something Trump or Giuliani would do. The status quo is favorable to them so use any trick in the book to prolong the process and delay an actual decision, which has a greater than zero chance of being negative.
At this point I really don’t care what they do with the church. Just do something. I’m tired of the perpetual scaffolding on that corner. And I don’t want the church crumbling and killing people.
As I have said many times before, the religious organization that owns the church/land is being selfish and irresponsible. The ideal solution is to sell the land and build something for the community there. Don’t try to squeeze every last penny out of it. That is the win-win.
I don’t think its selfish to accept the market value of the land the church owns. If anything, the non-profit tenant is selfishly trying to control the facility that they don’t own & the neighbors are selfishly trying to preserve their own views.
I don’t have a lot of confidence in Ms. Brewer’s understanding of construction costs.
Can I get 60 minutes to walk Ms. Brewer and/or her staff through the construction documents and estimates for my building? My building is also not “is not falling apart” still has to pay millions of dollars for facade work every five years due to the Facade Inspection Program/Local Law 11.
Ms. Brewer voted to modify in 2019 law to make it more costly and onerous. It is pushing out long-term residents.
Do normal constituents get to talk about these challenges, or only movie stars lobbying to restrict redevelopment of structures that they don’t have to pay for?
I don’t think she has an understanding of a lot of things. Economics, construction, the list goes on and on. How did she win by such big margins in an area that is rather well educated?
Local elections have low turnout and are not well covered so it is difficult to differentiate between candidates. I think Gale is mostly good on the important issues, this church redevelopment is one of her big misses.
The church is falling down. Please build something there.
If we all hurry, we might get over there in time to watch the final chunk hit the large pile of rubble.
Thanks to Isabelle Tietbohl for her beautiful, evocative photos, and to WSR for publishing them.
This church continues to be an eyesore. Knock it down
Kamala should stay in CA, NY already has enough problems…
Sounds like you may be the problem. Having her in NY would be great
What would be great about it?
Yeah, but that would still leave Rudy and Eric.
And don’t forget the road block that’s Trump. tower that will be crawling with police again at our expense
Better than support illegal immigrants at our expense…
Agreed: Musk and Melania should both have been deported long ago.
I grew up on 87th street in the 60s and still live in the neighborhood, we need to save this beautiful structure and make it flourish again
I’d love to see this building restored and put to use as well. But here’s the thing: churches generally aren’t very useful as anything but, you know, churches, and there doesn’t seem to be a congregation that’s interested in this one. It might also be useful as a performance space, but we already have a lot of those here on the UWS. Previous attempts to repurpose churches (remember when a developer tried to convert the one on 96/CPW to condos?) generally fail.
If we can’t find an angel who will foot the bill for repairs and restoration and a useful purpose for the building, maybe it’s time to cut our losses as a community.
20k a month. Not bad for a high school teacher.
Re. Former Vice President Kamala Harris apartment hunting on the UWS she might consider the Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West.
Good location with great city views.
Why would someone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution give a penny to the guy who’s threatened to dismantle it (in spite of having taken the same oath)?
Disregarding the question of overdeveloping, I’d like to ask readers if they really think the church is beautiful? Perhaps I have tipped my hat: I don’t like it much but I’d like to hear what others think. Again, this is apart from the question of what might replace it or whether it should be preserved.
Glad you asked. I consider it gorgeous as well as historic. Anyone with an appreciation of architecture would think more than twice before tearing down a work by Leopold Eidlitz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Eidlitz). Sadly, that leaves a great many folks, or at least a few highly vocal ones.
I have been on the UWS since I was born 60 plus years ago; that building always scared me.
If Mark Ruffalo believes that it’s so important to save the church, then he should purchase it and pay for the necessary renovations to make it safe to occupy.
Thank you! Between Ruffalo, Damon, Bacon, Sedgwick and the other celebs who have been “actively” attempting to save that building, they have WAY MORE than enough money to do it themselves; in fact, it would be “pocket change” for them. Yet I don’t hear a peep coming from any of them in that regard.
And let’s not kid ourselves. For (most of) those against tearing it down, this is about “light, air and views,” not about the building itself. The building is an eyesore, useless to its (now tiny) congregation, and would have been torn down ALREADY were it not for a NFP that still rents space there.
The whole thing has become a truly cosmic joke.
That church is not worth being landmarked. The people involved are a sanctimonious Hollywood celebrity who gave the church big fat check for $1OOO and a dead weight lifelong politician who does literally nothing.
These people block the OWNERS of the church from their right to sell their property. This is a Kafkaesque idiocy.
It would be much better to have housing where families can live and contribute to the neighborhood than a crumbling church without enough members to even keep the roof repaired.
As per Ms. Brewer: “It does need money for the roof, which we have, and then we can take the scaffolding off.”
OK, Gale get to work then; and just out of curiosity, how much have you raised for the new roof? When last we checked, the Center at West Park had collected a cool $16k including the stunning donation of 1,000 whole dollars from Mr. Ruffalo himself.
When the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew was in major disrepair and looking to demolish the building and develop its property, a developer came forward with a truly amazing plan. It would have built a normal-size West End Avenue building, but left the bottom three floors of space for the Church (which, at the time, had a decreasing congregation) AND a community center, left a large portion of the basement for the Church’s food pantry and soup kitchen, and even built a separate entrance for the Church on the corner, catercorner to the building. It then would have sold the apartments on the nine to twelve floors above the church for high prices (at that time; now, they could command even more) in order to make back their costs.
This would have been a win-win-win for everyone – except that the protests against tearing it down continued, because it was never about the church itself, but about “light, air, and views.” The same holds true for West Park – most of those against tearing down the church don’t give a whit about it – they just don’t want to lose their “light, air and views.”
You are correct.
Know the enemy, people:
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-masterful-1884-west-park.html