Transit lines are life blood

Greening the Empire State: Exploring New York's Energy Options

Transit Lines are Life Blood
Gotham Gazette
Gotham Gazette Web
Baruch School of Public Affairs
- SERVING CHELSEA-CLINTON, GREENWICH VILLAGE, FLATIRON, MIDTOWN AND SOHO -

Community Views

Your Forum for Ideas, Comments, Information, and General Gripes.



HIGH LINE RAILBANKED! CONSTRUCTION TO BEGIN IN 2006.

Dear Friends of the High Line,

We are thrilled to share fantastic news with you. Marking the
single biggest advance for the High Line project since its
inception, the High Line has been railbanked, clearing the way
for construction to begin in 2006. (Click here to read the press
release.)
http://www.thehighline.org/newsletters/111605_pr.html

Railbanking was our most important goal when we started Friends
of the High Line in 1999. This is a historic moment for the
project.

In order for the High Line to be railbanked, two actions took
place. [1] The City of New York acquired title to the High Line
from the railroad, CSX Transportation, Inc. [2] The City and CSX
signed a Trail Use Agreement, permitting the rail structure to be
used by the public as a recreational amenity.

Please join us in thanking Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the
Bloomberg administration, and CSX Transportation, Inc., for their hard work to achieve this crucial advance. We also thank the Speaker of the New York City Council, Gifford Miller, for his
visionary leadership and funding commitments to the High Line;
Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton and
Representative Jerrold Nadler for the nearly $20 million in
federal funds they've brought to the project; and all our elected
officials for their longtime support, including Governor George
Pataki, State Senator Thomas Duane, State Assembly Members
Richard Gottfried and Deborah Glick, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and City Council Member Christine Quinn.

On a related note, this weekend is your last chance to Creative
Time's "The Plain of Heaven," set in an out-of-use meatpacking
plant adjacent to the High Line. It's free to visit the 14
wonderful art pieces (many of them inspired by the High Line's
coming transformation). The rail siding on the top level of the
exhibition offers a great view of the southern end of the High
Line, which is where construction will begin, starting next year.
For more information, click here.

We could not have reached this exciting place without of all the
Friends of the High Line.

Thank you.

Robert Hammond & Joshua David
Co-Founders, Friends of the High Line

PS. A note about "Groundbreaking." We had intended to mark
railbanking, which paves the way for the start of construction,
with a symbolic groundbreaking ceremony this month. But we have chosen instead to celebrate groundbreaking at the start of
construction, in a few months time. We will keep you updated
about plans for groundbreaking and any related celebrations via
this E-Mail Newsletter. To subscribe, visit
http://www.thehighline.org.


Read the Official Press Release
http://www.thehighline.org/newsletters/111605_pr.html

Posted by: Robert Hammond and Joshua David



RIP for the BIG CUP in Chelsea (closing forever on Sunday Aug 28)--after almost 11 years

RIP for the BIG CUP in Chelsea (closing forever on Sunday Aug 28)--after almost 11 years

No kidding--after almost 11 years as the defacto "Cheers" for Gay
Men in NYC ---its all coming to a quick end..

The Sign outside says they are to close their doors forever on Sunday
Aug 28..no details given and the staff only just foundout
themselves....

-----.today the place was full of allot of truly sad 20-somethings--- .

I suspect that either the landlord wanted to astronomiclly raise the
rent------ or maybe after almost 11 years--the owners just wanted to
move on--

Many may laugh but the place had allot of meaning and importance
especially for those gay men that were young and new to NYC and just
finding themselves etc etc.....in recent years a bunch of GLBT kids
from the local high schools would come in and hang in between classes
etc etc---and a noticeable after theater crowd and even parents with
strollers from the neighborhood----and it was sorta a town square for
Chelsea--albeit more so so for Gay Male Chelsea-------in as much as
there ever was one---

Somehow I doubt very much that hanging out at one of the zillion local Starbucks will be quite the same!

Maybe for Sunday-----the Lady Bunny and all the other fab drag-sters of NYC--should show up in fab 40's funeral attire and the gym boys can don black arm-bands or black speedo'es or whatever..?


Posted by: Gaius Laurent



The New Headquarters for The New York Times--Various Articles and Viewpoints

WE were getting a lot of mail from readers complaining that I never write about New York buildings, so my employers decided to build one. Not just any building, but a work of architecture, a project with the potential to raise the quality of building in New York. Last week, when I learned that Renzo Piano had been chosen to design the new headquarters for The New York Times, I knew that we had such a project.
The intended site is the east side of Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets, across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The plan depends on the approval of the board of directors of The New York Times Company, as well as city and state permits to lease the site. Piano was chosen from among three finalists. The others were the British architect Sir Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli of New Haven. The architects of a fourth proposal, Frank O. Gehry and David Childs of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, withdrew from the competition several weeks before the final choice was made.
The images of all four plans presented in these pages, including Piano's, are studies. The goal of the selection process was to choose an architect rather than a design. In a process like this, it is common for a proposal to undergo substantial revision after the architect is chosen. Architect and client may even decide to start again from scratch. The client is looking for a set of intangibles: a texture of thought, a feeling of compatibility, the sense that something historical has been set in motion by the first encounter.
It is too soon to evaluate Piano's design, and it will never be possible to assess what the other finalists might have done. But it is not premature to talk about some of the issues raised by the proposals, and by the selection process itself. Nor is it too soon to state that Piano has been given the chance, and unquestionably possesses the skills, to design the most important corporate skyscraper to be built in New York since Eero Saarinen's CBS Building in 1965.
I am a part of this story, a footnote who gets to tell the tale. At the invitation of Michael Golden, the vice chairman of The New York Times Company, and with the approval of my editors, I met periodically, over a six-month stretch, with the group responsible for choosing an architect for the new Times building.
I had serious reservations about crossing the line from the news department to the corporate side of the paper. The Times does not permit its critics to serve on arts juries. This policy is wise, not only because it constrains us from abusing the authority of the newspaper and from potential conflicts of interest. More important, sitting on a jury removes us from our natural habitat -- the realm of ideas and values and their artistic expression -- where we go in search of stories. That realm is our reality.
I am not a disengaged critic. The cultural dimension of building stirs me emotionally. I have minimal interest in personalities or politics, except as these play out on a symbolic or allegorical plane. Architecture's practical dimension is one of the things that make it exciting to write about, but the practicalities do not lack outspoken advocates. The metaphoric dimension is less easily grasped, particularly in a city like New York, which has seen solittle thoughtful architecture in recent years.
THIS is where a critic can be useful. The symbolic level is where architecture itself kicks in. When it does, land use rises above the level of real estate speculation. Buildings earn the space they occupy on other than economic terms. Defining those terms is what a critic does. More important, his job is to insist that those terms, while not quantifiable, are as substantial as the materials from which buildings are made and the money it costs to build them. My job is to say: architecture is real. Over the months, I had ample opportunity to do my job. I also learned about factors that have eroded New York's status as a city where serious architecture is possible.
The selection of an architect for The Times building was conducted as a 50-50 partnership between The New York Times Company and Forest City Ratner, a real estate development firm whose projects include Metrotech, the office complex in downtown Brooklyn. The Times building will be slightly under 700 feet, or 45 stories, tall. The lower half of the tower will be occupied by the paper's newsroom, its business division and corporate offices. Space in the top half will be leased to outside tenants. A six-story base will include an atrium for shops and restaurants and an auditorium for lectures, forums and other public events. Forest City plans to occupy one floor of office space. The Times assumed primary responsibility for selecting an architect.
I attended meetings of the Design Advisory Group, composed of staff members of The Times and Forest City, occasionally joined by representatives of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Authority, a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, and of the Economic Development Corporation, a city agency. A smaller group was designated to arrive at a consensus on the final choice.
I'm not going to report on what transpired behind closed doors. Here, I want to sort out some thoughts that occurred to me in the course of looking at the four finalists' designs At the last meeting I attended, when there was movement to revive a proposal that had been previously passed over, someone present observed aloud that we seemed to be on shifting ground. I felt I had been on shifting ground the entire six months.
In fact, architecture itself is always on shifting ground. Architects try to pin down ideas that are floating in the cultural atmosphere, chief among them, perhaps, the evolving relationship of self to community in a modern democracy. There's nothing inherently stable in that relationship, or in the processes architects and clients use to articulate it in urban space.
The guidelines for the selection process were prepared by the client partners and presented in impressively large, handsome books. The guidelines struck me as a road map to mediocrity. In the criteria for evaluating previous work of the firms being considered, ''architecture'' was folded in with objective standards, like whether a firm produces works within budget and has extensive experience with skyscraper design. The truth is that architecture can't be quantified. And to judge from recent additions to the New York cityscape, prior experience with skyscraper design struck me as possible grounds for disqualification.
Architecture, meanwhile, was defined as ''compatible/compelling design vocabulary.'' If compatible meant contextual, this standard was an open invitation to all kinds of mischief. Architecture should contribute to, rather than fit in with, its surroundings. Compelling, besides being generally incompatible with compatible, suggested to me a standard of formal values more suitable for architectural photography and rendering than for architecture itself. The concept is oblivious of the relational values from which architecture is made: of outside to inside; top to bottom; structure to expression; content to form.
Somehow, however, we got from that unpromising start to a stunning outcome. Renzo Piano's design embodies those relational values, and others, in radiant form.
Piano, who has offices in Genoa and Paris, is the world's greatest living practitioner of what I call ''normative'' architecture. Others call it ''the classical humanist tradition,'' which sounds more dignified. But why not just come out and say it? He's Italian.
Piano's aesthetic is as much urban as it is architectural. All Italians know that when you get a bit of money, you do something to ornament the city. You put up a church, create a nice civic square, commission a statue. Then, when the money goes away, the church is still standing. The statue remains. As Piano mentioned to me, ''even when people are poor, they don't have to live in a poor way.'' They still have the richness of their surroundings. He has brought that philosophy to projects in Berlin, Paris, Sydney and other centers of cosmopolitan life.
We're at the crest of a building boom in New York. The city is feeling very rich. But with a few exceptions -- Columbus Center, the Rose Earth and Space Center at the Museum of Natural History, LVMH Tower -- I see few buildings that will be worth preserving for the future. In fact, if it were possible to cancel most of the current construction, the world would be a better place. The 1980's, too, were a time of vast mediocrity. What Piano brings to the job, apart from his talent, is a deeply ingrained sense of civic responsibility, a conviction that The Times must give back, through architecture, the good fortune it has enjoyed.
I don't want to make too much about Piano's Renaissance humanist lineage. He lives in different times. Nonetheless, he shares with Michelangelo, da Vinci and Brunelleschi the belief that art and science exist within the same cultural continuum. This idea has been evident from the first building that brought Piano wide recognition: the Pompidou Center in Paris, designed in collaboration with Richard Rogers and completed in 1977. Controversial when new, the this exoskeletal structure set off a debate that helped make it the most visited tourist attraction in Paris. For The Times project, Piano will employ new techniques in structural engineering, vertical circulation and curtain wall construction, in association with Fox & Fowle, the architects of the Conde Nast and Reuters buildings in Times Square.
ISEE The Times project, in its present form, as a work of urban landscape. The building's base, which Piano describes as Baroque, is made of concrete slabs that float, at 11 different levels, around three sides of a central atrium. The programming of this space needs work. The Baroque idea (to draw people in) is valid. Once there, people should experience something beautiful. Current renderings, however, show something like a media mall, in a Fun Palace configuration that recalls the work of the British architect Cedric Price from the 1960's. There is too little contrast with the city outside.
Anyone who has gone for a ride on the Pompidou's escalator knows that Piano is a great poet of circulation. Now he is playing with ways to organize the tower's elevators. Instead of a central elevator core, he prefers a side arrangement that would give office floors the spaciousness of a piazza. What I'm waiting for, however, is to see how he plans to connect the building to the Eighth Avenue subway and Port Authority station. The connection could turn the tower into an infrastructural midtown gateway.
Piano has planned additional landscape features for two upstairs levels. He envisions the roof of the base as the site for a water park, a shallow pool that would reflect the tower on its surface and bounce sunlight back up onto the tower's skin. This poetic device could become a setting for instant squalor, not to mention a source of leaks. There will be a garden on the roof, protected by extensions of the glass curtain wall above the building envelope.
What is New York's cityscape about? Escaping gravity and heaviness without losing touch with the ground. The Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the Seagram Building and other New York landmarks embody this idea. For The Times tower, Piano has designed a triple-skin wall that lifts the material city's grid into a metaphysical realm. A thermal wall of double-pane panel is shielded on the exterior by a sunscreen of white ceramic rods. These last are interrupted at eye-level by bands of fixed, slender blinds. Inside the offices, movable blinds or shades will increase the layers to four.
Piano has used this system before, usually in combination with orange masonry panels. Here, the metal, glass and ceramic surface will shimmer without interruption across the entire expanse of wall. Indentations at the corners will allow the expression of the walls as independent planes. This effect will be heightened by the extension of the glass high above the roof line.
Piano uses terms like vibration, breathing and magic to describe what he calls the ''immaterials'' of architecture. It is with these qualities that the reality of his architecture resides. But he comes from a family of builders. And he works within a tradition of close collaboration between architects and those who fabricate their work. He reminds us that the term design originated in the Renaissance with the Italian word for drawing. The concept signified the architect's emergence as a specialist apart from building. From it, we derive the conception of architecture as the meeting ground for matter and mind. Piano will invite New York to revisit that ground.
Cesar Pelli designed a perfect bullseye for those who can't help enlisting The Times as a target for resentment. Pelli is the house architect of the monoculture, a designer of iconic corporate towers that bear less relationship to their surroundings than to other corporate icons around the world. To create these, he often borrows forms from the iconography of ancient authoritarian regimes. At the World Financial Center in Battery Park City, for example, the four towers are variously crowned with a pyramid, a ziggurat, a dome and a mastaba.
Pelli's use of these symbols reflects the formalist idea that they have been cleansed of their original meanings by subsequent usage and can now be appreciated as abstract geometric shapes. I never bought this idea, and Pelli's design for Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, based as it is on regional motifs, suggests that Pelli himself is prepared to abandon it when he chooses. In any case, the triumph of formalism was never so complete that viewers aren't free to locate meanings even where the architect chooses to deny them.
For The Times proposal, Pelli selected the obelisk, that most ancient authoritarian symbol. Since its appearance in ancient Egypt, the obelisk has been recontextualized many times over. Its meaning has changed in each context. In Baroque Rome, it represents the triumph of the Christian church over pagan superstition. In Washington, it is a tribute to the symbolic founder of the first modern democracy. In New York, it is the archetypal skyscraper, a sign of material aspiration.
But we are living in a time when our liveliest minds are engaged in challenging forms of authority and the codes that represent it. Hierarchy, paternalism, control: visual symbols cannot, after all, be detached from the power relationships that govern social behavior. Indeed, globalization, and its monocultural effects, have made it ever more urgent to reject the idea that symbols can be used as purely abstract forms. It is an assertion of social and artistic responsibility to insist that forms have meanings.
One of the things we know about the monoculture is that it is protean. Its appearance constantly morphs. This mutability diverts attention from the fact that the underlying economic power relationships remain the same. Pelli's design, for example, draws from a recent avant-garde preoccupation with folded planes. This motif has appeared in the work of Peter Eisenman and others. A high-style French version of it materialized in New York last year in Christian de Portzamparc's glass facade for the LVMH Tower on 57th Street.
PELLI has regularized the folded plane motif, and in doing so turned its meaning into the opposite of that intended by architects associated with this motif. Others have used the folded plane to challenge classical notions of hierachy. Pelli's obelisk affirms them. It is symmetrical. It is without scale. The pattern of its window mullions is nearly identical throughout. From top almost to bottom, it is an authoritarian object.
On the ground floor, the motif changes. The obelisk rests on a ''happy face'' base of retail shops. This, too, is part of the monocultural structure. Buy a pair of khakis. Consume the festival atmosphere. Literally support what some might call your oppressors, the folks who peer down from the structure's upper floors.
I was disheartened by the inclusion of Pelli among the finalists. Evidently, my message about the reality of architecture wasn't getting through. I could accept that this slick corporate object might represent a developer's view of The Times. I could not accept that it represented the paper's view of itself. Yes, The Times is a powerful institution, but of a particular kind. It is not part of so-called ''black car'' culture. We take subways. The newsroom reaches daily toward the Enlightenment ideals of free speech and independent inquiry, however imperfectly. The newsroom itself, as well as its coverage of news, has been powerfully affected by debates over authority that have unfolded in architecture and throughout the culture. The paper has the responsibility to challenge and correct, not blindly affirm, the corporate world's view of itself.
Pelli's obelisk stood as aloof from these issues as it did from the site's physical context. Aloofness, in fact, is what clients hire Pelli to provide. This arm's-length attitude extends to Pelli's relationship to his own buildings. The architect, an agreeable man, likes to tell potential clients that, in his native Spanish, pelli means skin, and thus he naturally came to think of the building skin as the essence of architecture. He leaves most of the rest to specialists in other fields.
It is true that there are many historical precedents for emphasizing facade design over space and structure. It is also true that Mr. Pelli has designed some attractive building skins. But the thing to bear in mind is that the equation of architecture with building skins is what most developers want to believe. They want the image of architecture without the expense and inconvenience of the real thing. Pelli provides that image for people whose interest lies in denying architecture's reality. This denial goes far toward explaining why New York architecture is in such bad shape. Why go through this process to end up with more of the same?
Norman Foster also creates power fetishes, but they are unquestionably works of architecture. Their elegance is mathematical as well as esthetic. Sir Norman Foster thinks holistically. He gets his mind around structure, space, program and image, making of them an integrated system. He turns problem-solving into art. And he is acutely responsible to the well being of those who inhabit his buildings.
His proposal for The Times didn't work for the clients, who saw it as not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the building's lease tenants. The design is a space frame in the shape of a right triangle. Along the hypotenuse, winter gardens were planned at intervals of seven stories. Each seven-story segment was conceived as a village in a vertical urban stack. The effect was an apotheosis of the New York set-back.
The combination of three (sides) and seven (floor intervals) illustrates the mystical-mathematical fascination of Foster's work. What I liked best about this plan was the implied shapes that would result if the triangle were multiplied. Double, turn upside-down, and you get a rectangular solid. Double this, and you arrive at a square. Viewers may well have perceived these ghost shapes in the midtown context.
Anyone who is less than 100 percent enthusiastic for a Foster building in New York must feel like the ingrate of all time. I prize few qualities higher than rational thought. But I don't fully trust its architectural expression. My generation was strongly influenced by Robert Venturi's 1966 book, ''Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.'' We came to appreciate the non-straightforward, the hybrid, the slightly deranged. Some of also us came to suspect that pure rationality too often serves to mask a highly irrational will to power.
At my last meeting with the group, someone asked which of the four proposals I preferred. I replied that if I were in their shoes, I would find it painful to choose between Piano and Gehry/Childs. The two teams had not designed equally good versions of the same thing. They had designed two different things. Two entirely different beasts. One rational and classic, the other Romantic and Gothic. Unlike the 19th-century critics who debated which style was best, we know that classical and Gothic represent more than different tastes. They correspond to different mental faculties, the right and left sides of the brain. Yet Piano's design is clearly sensuous, and Gehry/Childs's design incorporates the classicism of the International Style.
The truth is, I was madly in love with the Gehry/Childs proposal. Gehry's work will do that to you. It doesn't want you to keep your distance. From the outset, Gehry had told the clients he intended to design them ''an object of desire.'' He and Childs made good on the promise. As I sit here, I'm looking at a six-inch-tall glass model of their design. Am I a masochist, or what?
I will have the opportunity to write about the Gehry/Childs proposal next May, when models and sketches of it will be part of the Gehry retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. I need the distance, after all. For now, my attraction to it is based on my preoccupation with dualisms, on the cultural as well as the psychological plane. I believe collaboration between ''name'' architects is the wave of the future. The Gehry/Childs plan was a true collaboration, by two outstanding architects of different cities, skills and outlooks, who between them produced a major miracle.
There has been speculation about why the Gehry/Childs team withdrew. Mine is that the proposal was defeated by the very factors that made it great: the attempt to create a shared reality from four different points of view. However much they may have agreed on economic and practical matters, The Times and the developers represented two cultures. This made for unusual discussions with all the teams but Pelli's, who alone among the four finalists has embraced with something like passion the pragmatics of commercial real estate development. With the Gehry/Childs proposal, the structure changed shape. What was, in effect, a three-way conversion was enlarged to four. The lines of communication increased exponentially.
Partnerships between two firms are common in architecturally ambitious projects. Usually, however, tasks are divided between a signature, so-called ''design architect'' and an ''executive architect,'' reponsible for more detailed drawings and other construction documents. This will be the arrangement between Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Fox & Fowle. The Gehry/Childs team, however, was not usual. The two firms had to devise novel ways to implement a pioneering arrangement. They, too, represented two cultures. The clients had to believe that the arrangement between them could work in practical terms.
Could four cultures intertwine? Where would the design work be done? Would the architects' two staffs get along? Would David Childs feel overshadowed by Frank Gehry? Would there be overlap between tasks? Would this affect fees? The share value of Times stockholders? Who would be in charge? Would the curtain wall work? Could the clients accept that, under any circumstances, architecture cannot be achieved by relying on standard real estate procedures? Given the ambition of this proposal, and the city's virtual innocence of all things architectural for many years, such obstacles to realization were inevitable.
Another factor must be confronted. Its name is love. In a 1959 essay on ''The Sublime and the Good,'' Iris Murdoch writes: ''Art and morality are, with certain provisos, one. Their essence is the same. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.''
Frank Gehry has always insisted that to do his best work, he needs a close relationship with a strong client. What he is really saying is that he needs a client's love. This is not a diva thing that suddenly came over him when he became the It Architect. To judge by a 1969 interview about the client-architect relationship, published in Designers West, Gehry has been saying the same thing all along. His job is to empathize with the client's reality. He expects the same
IT has always been clear that Gehry packs emotion into his work. What is less apparent is that much of this emotion emanates from his relationship to the client. In the case of the Times project, Gehry believed that he had demonstrated his affection for the paper by entering a competition in the first place (something he no longer does), by devoting much time, money and energy to the design (the Gehry/Childs design was the most highly developed of the four), and by producing a work that differs substantially from the Bilbao Museum and is in no sense inferior to it.
Gehry felt that his feelings were not reciprocated. This I understand completely. I once offered my resignation here for the simple reason that I felt I wasn't appreciated in proportion to the energy I was putting in. I was wrong, and so was Gehry. From the day he and Childs presented the project at 229 West 43rd Street, the tide of opinion began to shift in their direction.
For me, this shift was the most extraordinary part of the process. Just a week before, the clients had regarded Gehry with suspicion, as someone who might produce something unacceptably funny, weird or arbitrary. By the time the presentation was over, roughly half the people present had psychologically moved into the building. (Or so indicated a poll that was taken shortly therafter.) In fact, there is a great deal of passion circulating through 229 West 43rd Street. But The Times does not typically wear its heart on its sleeve. And I suspect that any developer's ''due diligence'' procedures are about as tender and heartwarming as a visit from the I.R.S.
This episode brings to mind a poem of Auden's:
If you see a fair form, chase it
And if possible embrace it,
Be it a girl or boy.
Don't be bashful: be brash, be fresh.
Life is short, so enjoy
Whatever contact your flesh
May at the moment crave:
There's no sex life in the grave.
But is this lusty philosophy suitable for what is still widely thought of as the newspaper of record?
Great buildings break rules. Piano will give us something subtler, more refined -- more normative -- than the design conceived by Gehry and Childs. Yet I'm confident that Piano's will be great. Since the 1970's, the reigning law in New York building has been: thou shalt not commit architecture here. That rule will now be shattered by Piano -- with luck, beyond repair.




Sowing Greener Pastures Indoors; Eco-friendly Firms Create Productive, PC Work Spaces

By Aaron Dalton
Published by Crain's New York on May 16, 2005
Early next year, 2,000 Hearst Corp. employees will move to the cutting edge.
At the company's new West 57th Street headquarters, they will walk on carpets and tile floors made from recycled materials such as tires and bottles. Office walls are covered in low-vapor paints and concrete surfaces are finished with a low-toxicity water-based sealant. Many of the employees will sit at formaldehyde-free Steelcase workstations, which also boast a high percentage of recycled content.
“Every part of the building has been looked at with a green eye,” says Brian Schwagerl, Hearst's director of real estate and facilities planning.
On the heels of the first push toward environmentally friendly buildings--structures that focused on improving energy efficiency through advances in insulation, lighting and ventilation--another movement has emerged. Corporations such as Hearst are taking their ecological concerns indoors to their work spaces.
A crop of sensitively appointed spaces is beginning to blossom across the city. Projects include headquarters for publisher Rodale Inc. at 733 Third Ave., The New York Times Co. at Times Square and the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo.
“We are seeing a growing trend among clients who are coming to talk to us about projects where we might include sustainability and green design,” says Guy Geier, a principal in the interiors practice at Fox & Fowle Architects.
While green furnishings can cost as much as 10% more up front, tenants figure they'll get a big payoff down the road in the form of lower levels of chemical irritants in the atmosphere. According to some studies, better air quality can translate directly into improved employee performance. One company saw a 40% drop in absenteeism after taking steps to improve the quality of its office air.
Practically pretty
Another benefit: Despite all the talk of recycled trash, firms don't need to slum it aesthetically to go green. The 100,000-square-foot Rodale space boasts handsome wood floors made of bamboo, taken from groves that can replenish themselves in just five years. Suben/Dougherty Partnership, which designed the space, notes that hardwood flooring typically comes from trees that may take a century to mature.
For the 1.3 million-square-foot New York Times property and the 40,000-square-foot Wildlife Conservation Society space, interior designers at Fox & Fowle have opted for wood that's certified to have come from nonendangered forests. They have chosen chairs that can be shipped flat and assembled on-site, reducing the amount of disposable packing materials required.
At the Hearst tower, even the three-story stream of water cascading down clear glass blocks in the lobby will play an important environmental role: It is designed to add humidity to an otherwise dry environment, using rainwater from the building's roof.


The Fine Print
'Times' to Commoners: Go Elsewhere
Don't soil our publicly subsidized new HQ with your riff-raff
by Paul Moses
August 16th, 2005
THE VILLAGE VOICE

When The New York Times and Forest City Ratner Companies open their grand new office building on Eighth Avenue, it won't have a Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's, or Nathan's, because they are specifically forbidden under terms of a land deal with the state. But a Starbucks or Cosi would be just fine.
The lease, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, also bars renting space in the 52-story building for "a school or classroom or juvenile or adult day care or drop-in center." It forbids "medical uses, including without limitation, hospital, medical, or dental offices, agencies, or clinics." It gives the New York Times Company "the sole and absolute discretion" to reject United Nations or foreign-government offices, including any "considered controversial" or that are potentially the focus of demonstrations. It bans any "employment agency (other than executive-search firms) or job training center" and auction houses, "provided, however, the foregoing shall not apply to high-end auction houses specializing in art and historical artifacts." Discount stores are forbidden. And the deal bars "a welfare or social-services office, homeless shelter or homeless assistance center, court or court-related facility."
In fact, any government office is excluded from the building if it would attract people who arrive "without appointment."
Lease restrictions that exclude the public may not be unusual in luxury office buildings, but there is an irony in this case. The Pataki administration, acting on behalf of the New York Times Company, condemned the property for a so-called "public purpose." This is the standard the Fifth Amendment sets for the state to invoke the immense power of eminent domain.
At one time, "public purpose" usually meant a highway, bridge, or utility service—something the public was actually allowed to use. But now it's routine for the courts to declare it a "public purpose" for the state to seize privately owned land so that another private owner can erect a very private office building where the public can't even buy an inexpensive taco. In this case, the services many New Yorkers most need—health, education, job placement—are officially locked out of a building that will be heavily subsidized by city taxpayers. And, it should be noted, this is a site with unique public access, located across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and upstairs from the city's subway crossroads.
"Our new building will be an attractive and welcome addition to Times Square for all New Yorkers to enjoy," Times spokesperson Toby Usnik said in an e-mail interview after the company was asked if it had any comment on these provisions in its deal with Forest City and the Empire State Development Corporation. "We have worked with our partner, Forest City Ratner Companies, to define general categories of tenants that will complement our new building, including food and retail establishments with broad appeal. These are common types of establishments that New Yorkers and visitors alike now expect to find when visiting the new Times Square."
Such notions of a "public purpose" could well change as a result of outrage across the political spectrum over the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on June 23 that allowed the city of New London, Connecticut, to seize homes for private development. While the court ruled in favor of condemnation (and in 2003, also declined to hear a case against the Times project), the majority was troubled enough by the apparent unfairness to note that states can restrict the power of eminent domain, and that many have done so.
This has spurred a move across party lines in Albany and other statehouses to limit government's ability to coerce land deals for private developers. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat, proposed a bill, for example, to make condemnations more costly for the private developer and create a commission to review the "public purpose" standard. The bill would provide for displaced renters to be paid one and a half times their annual rent; property owners also would be compensated at one and a half times the market value of their property, according to Jim Malatras, legislative director for Brodsky, who chairs the Assembly's Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions.
It comes too late to help the owners of the 16-story office building, student dormitory, business school, hat shop, and fabric store bulldozed to make way for the Times headquarters. And the Brodsky bill doesn't quite come to grips with the key issue: Exactly what "public purpose" should allow government the right to take your home or the place where you work? But it's a start.
One yardstick for deciding this tricky question can be found in a concurring opinion Justice Anthony Kennedy issued when he cast the swing vote in favor of the bulldozers in the New London case. He wrote that deals "intended to confer benefits on particular, favored private entities, and with only incidental or pretextual public benefits," should be forbidden.
Condemnation of private property for private development in New York City is often done as part of a no-bid deal that favors politically powerful businesses—companies that are major campaign contributors, hire politically connected lobbyists, or in the case of the Times, are media companies with enormous clout.
David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and expert on eminent domain, said some condemnations in New York City might have failed the test Kennedy set in the New London case. "The Kennedy concurrence implies that sweetheart deals made in back rooms might not pass constitutional muster," Reiss said, "and as many development deals in New York are conducted in back rooms, it raises concerns that they would not be constitutional under Kennedy's view."
If Kennedy is to be taken at his word, it follows that special steps should be taken to avoid favoring the politically connected when the state's power is used to condemn land for a private developer. That could mean requiring competitive bidding, timely release of all records, and City Council approval for any condemnation and related tax breaks. That would replace the no-bid deals, secrecy, and "three men in a room" approval process marking such projects as the Times building (which was quietly approved by the Public Authorities Control Board).
In the Times deal, the city and state made a no-bid pact despite prior plans to seek competitive bids for the choice midtown site the newspaper company wanted. The Times also got tens of millions of dollars in city subsidies based on what it said were the high costs of keeping 750 workers based in the city instead of New Jersey—costs that, it was clear at the time, were vastly overestimated by Times executives, as the Voice has reported ("The Paper of Wreckage," June 17, 2002). The Times got these subsidies even though, as previously reported, another developer, Gary Barnett, said he would build a 50-story office tower without heavy tax breaks. Barnett—who made headlines recently by competing with Forest City Ratner Companies to build in downtown Brooklyn—even owned part of the site.
The question remains: Would the Times deal with a favored developer have passed Kennedy's test?
"The Supreme Court was in fact asked to take cert [hear an appeal] in our case and refused," said Usnik, the Times spokesperson.
"Presumably that was because the justices did not see a constitutional problem in the condemnation."
Further, he said in an e-mail, New York courts found that the Times building benefited the public by replacing urban blight in Times Square. These are not the minor or "pretextual" benefits that Kennedy was concerned about, Usnik said. (You weren't aware that booming Times Square is still blighted?)
But is that enough of a "public use" for the state to seize one privately owned office building to replace it with a more exclusive one that someone else owns? Reiss, the Brooklyn Law professor, suggested that the standard should be "substantial use by the general public." It would be interesting to see that applied to an office building that bars all employment offices except for executive-search firms.
But any change in New York's eminent-domain law will have to overcome strong opposition. The Bloomberg administration made New York the only city to come to New London's aid with an amicus brief, arguing that jobs can be created if city officials are free to determine what a "public use" is. What it means is that unless your household employs more people than, say, a basketball arena, you're unprotected.
See you in Starbucks.

At Times Tower, Great Gray Lady Gets Less Green

By Matthew Schuerman,
New York Observer
8/8/2005 edition
The New York Times has repeatedly trumpeted national standards for “going green”—building environmentally friendly buildings.
For its own headquarters, though, The Times is opting for a more cost-efficient option. The Gray Lady, it seems, will keep its color.
The paper of record has chronicled how the new national standards for green-building designation are currently being adopted by the Hearst Corporation, Bank of America tower developer Douglas Durst and Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein.
An Aug. 25, 2004, Business Day article, for instance, said the “group of green building standards” was having a “rapidly expanding influence” on the real-estate world.
But The New York Times and its co-developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, recently decided that it is not worth the cost or the fuss to get certified—and that they can do just as well without them, according to the co-architect on the project, Bruce Fowle.
“It is probably the equivalent of a silver or a gold rating,” said Mr. Fowle, co-founder and senior principal of Fox & Fowle Architects, who is designing the 52-story tower with Italian architect Renzo Piano. “They have decided it is time-consuming and costly, and they are doing so many things that are right and correct, and some of the prerequisites are not that meaningful.”
To help the newspaper-developer duo make its decision, Mr. Fowle’s firm drew up a chart showing the relative costs and merits of achieving certification under the five-year-old program, called the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (or, in industry jargon, LEED). Mr. Fowle called the costs “substantial,” although he would not name a specific price.
Officials at The New York Times and Forest City Ratner would not consent to an interview for this story. But MaryAnn Gilmartin, executive vice president of Forest City, said in a statement, “With respect to the New York Times building, we consulted and incorporated LEED specifications wherever possible throughout the building. However, we wanted the architect to drive the design rather than design to LEED specifications.”
The decision by The Times and Forest City puts Mr. Piano, an acknowledged environmentalist, and even more so Mr. Fowle, a pioneer in sustainable buildings, in an awkward spot. Mr. Fowle’s firm designed the Helena and 4 Times Square, which is widely acknowledged as the city’s first green office building. It was never certified because it went up before the LEED system came into place.
For the Times headquarters, Messrs. Piano and Fowle will place hundreds of ceramic tubes on the outside walls of the building, running horizontally, which will keep sunlight from heating the structure. Computerized louvers will turn up to varying degrees depending on the time of day and angle of the sun, and the building will burn its own natural gas for electricity and use the excess heat to create steam and hot water.
But no longer will contractors be required to keep track of how much of the construction debris is recycled, which is a big component—and hassle—of certification.
“It becomes more of a point scheme as opposed to a means to encourage innovation,” Mr. Fowle said of the LEED specifications. “For all the innovation, we were only going to get a few points. You can create a zero-energy, neutral-climate building, 100 percent off the grid, and only get a few points for it.”
And those points are expensive—which is surely a consideration in the present real-estate environment.
Expected to open in 2007, the New York Times building will be half-occupied by The Times, with the other half leased out by Forest City Ratner. So far, Forest City does not have any leases for its 600,000 square feet, according to a source knowledgeable of the project.
Green-Building Greenbacks
The Times’ decision, made in June, is as much a reflection of the state of green buildings in New York as it is of the financial calculus of a team of developers. LEED standards specify a few prerequisites that developers must follow (clean air, energy-efficiency minimums), and then gives them a menu of items (use renewable energy, recycle storm water, plant a greenhouse on the roof), each worth a point or two, from which they can choose. Twenty-six points gets a new building certified, 33 a silver, 39 a gold, and 52 out of the possible 69 points garners platinum. Building according to LEED standards adds somewhere between 1 percent to 5 percent to the cost, and while some measures may save money in the long run, the main attraction financially has been the marketing pull that an officially green building will bring.
Then again, that marketing pull may not be that strong—or not strong enough to make up for all the headaches that developers and architects privately complain about with the LEED system: namely, that you have to keep track of how much construction debris gets recycled and shop for special materials not knowing if, in the end, you will even get blessed by the green gods who make up the U.S. Green Buildings Council, the nonprofit that runs the program. The council, according to spokesperson Taryn Holowka, has accredited 20,000 professionals that can provide guidance to developers, and their presence on a team earns another point for the project.
“LEED has not taken off as quickly as they anticipate, and the reason for that is it’s costly and time-consuming,” said Lou Mantia, managing director of asset services and a portfolio manager for Cushman & Wakefield, the real-estate services firm. “The majority of tenants are not willing to pay the extra cost for a LEED building. It’s a good tool, but it needs to be tweaked—maybe a little more than tweaked.”
Apartment buildings are the exception: The Solaire, in Battery Park City, and the Helena, on 57th Street, are both LEED-certified buildings whose owners can charge a premium for being green. But there, the same people who will benefit from more fresh air and light are the ones making the decision to rent or buy.
Ashok Gupta, the air and energy program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, defended the LEED standards.
“The question is: How does one independently verify if something that someone is doing is green?” he said. “If you want to do it, my belief is you want people to believe that you did it, and sure, you can go around telling people all that you did, but that will be long and complicated. That’s what LEED is for. It’s shorthand. What we are talking about is market transformation, and the more people who adopt LEED standards, especially in these beginning stages, the better.”
At the same time that LEED is being temporarily abandoned by environmentalists like Mr. Fowle, the rating system is under attack from the right. The old-line vinyl and lumber industries have established a competing certification system called Green Globes and have lobbied municipalities to adopt it as their standard. Bill Walsh, founder of the Healthy Building Network, has called the upstart program “a textbook model of industry green-wash, designed to confuse the market and drive down standards by rewarding minimal efforts with a maximum public-relations bonanza.”
Follow the LEED-er
Still, the complexities of the LEED system have not been enough to scare away the three developers who are competing to erect the first certified green office building in New York City. “Competing” is a bit of exaggeration, though, because, as in a high-school talent show, there is a category for just about everybody.
Larry Silverstein will probably cross the finish line first when his 7 World Trade Center opens next March. But Mr. Silverstein is applying for certification under a new rubric, reserved for buildings created by developers “on spec”—that is, without one majority tenant in mind—and therefore a bit easier to achieve. Anyone following New York real estate does not need to be told that 7 World Trade Center is being built very much on spec—and on faith. Only one company—his own—has committed to leasing space there, and then but a floor. A spokesman would not even confirm a report, first printed last week by Crain’s New York Business (and picked up in The Observer’s own daily real-estate blog, The Real Estate), that an American Express subsidiary would lease 20,000 square feet there.
Other structures at Ground Zero—Mr. Silverstein’s other four towers, the cultural buildings and memorial—will be required either to earn LEED certification or something very much like it. The something very much like it is what has environmentalists furrowing their brows now, but officials at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation argue that their guidelines, now in draft form, will ultimately be stricter than LEED guidelines and will be monitored by a panel of independent consultants.
Coming in second place will be Sir Norman Foster’s bigger and better Hearst Corporation palace uptown at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street. Or make that first place, for the Hearst tower—the original 1928 pediment has been gutted and a 42-story glass pyramid placed on top—will be the first gold-rated LEED-certified building in New York City for an owner-occupied property! Try writing that on the back of a ribbon.
All joking aside, there is plenty for Hearst to be proud of. The side offices have entirely glass exterior walls and glass interior walls also, so that even the lowliest fact-checker, the most poorly paid coffee-fetcher laboring in the central pod, will receive some natural light—and won’t have to bother bringing in that 40-watt high-intensity clip-on job from Target.
That and other environmental features, according to Brian Schwagerl, Hearst’s real-estate director, will save the company $50,000 a year in energy bills and $12,000 in water savings once the building opens next fall. It also qualified Hearst for $5 million in tax credits from the state’s energy program. You do the math.
Coming in third place—no, make that first again!—is the Bank of America tower, at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. That 2.1-million-square-foot building won’t open until 2008, but its developer, Douglas Durst, is trying for the city’s first platinum rating for a spec building. (It qualifies as spec because Bank of America is only going to occupy half of it.)
Mr. Durst emphasizes the word trying—it was the condition for his project being awarded $650 million worth of triple-tax-free Liberty Bonds, which were part of the post–Sept. 11 federal relief package for New York City. (Another $2.8 million in tax credits will fall out of the sky when it meets state standards.) But some onlookers doubt whether anybody can achieve platinum in a city like New York, where it is much harder than the suburbs to earn LEED points through elements like a bicycle room.
It’s not that people doubt Mr. Durst’s environmental commitment—he was the one behind 4 Times Square, and as far back as the early 1990’s was retrofitting his buildings to save energy. He got onto his tree-hugging kick as a business proposition.
“It really started with my wife and I,” he told The Observer. “We are avid horse people, and where we live in Westchester county, there is really no place to dispose of the horse manure, so we decided that if we could compost our horse manure and other people would pay us to take away their horse manure and use it to grow vegetables, we would have money coming in from two sources.”
This triangular horse-manure/compost/vegetable-garden trade only occasionally turns a profit—“It hasn’t been the financial windfall we had hoped”—but the tomatoes are said to be mighty fine!
Building green is sort of like that too. Mr. Durst said the green features played absolutely no role in leasing up 4 Times Square, while so far with the Bank of America tower, prospective tenants have responded with uneven interest. “To be honest with you, I don’t think anybody is going to lease in the building because it is platinum. I think the real selling point is that it’s going to increase productivity by 10 to 15 percent,” he said. “Some tenants get it just as some people do and some don’t.”
The New York Times may be one of those that gets it—but don’t bother to give it a ribbon. It doesn’t want one.
—Additional reporting by Sara Levin


THE NEW YORK TIMES
METROPOLITAN DESK
Blight to Some Is Home to Others; Concern Over Displacement by a New Times Building
By DAVID W. DUNLAP (NYT) 1517 words
Published: October 25, 2001

Blight is what state officials see on the block of Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets: a shabby blend of sex shops, prostitution, loitering and drug dealing that scarcely welcomes the world to the new Times Square.
They plan to acquire 10 properties on the block and turn the whole site over to The New York Times Company and Forest City Ratner Companies, which would build a 52-story tower, the lower half to be occupied by The Times, the upper half by other office tenants.
Blight is not all that would disappear from the block in the wake of this project, however. So would the fedoras, porkpies, homburgs and boaters at Arnold Hatters; the $600-a-yard French hand-beaded lace, delicate as hoarfrost, at B & J Fabrics; the studios where students learn audio engineering and multimedia production at the SAE Institute of Technology; and the dorm rooms at Sussex House, around the corner, where a few of them sleep at night.
As the 42nd Street revival moves from Times Square toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal, so does the now-familiar pattern of small landlords and entrepreneurs -- some vital, some marginal, some irreplaceable -- giving way to companies like Condé Nast, Reuters and Ernst & Young.
But even if well charted, the process is no less wrenching for those who stand to lose buildings and places of business, some of them after three generations.
The owners feel as if they have known the worst of both worlds. Their properties have been under the shadow of condemnation since 1981, when the block was identified as the potential site of a merchandise mart as part of the state-sponsored 42nd Street redevelopment project. That prospect depressed values, discouraged tenants and inhibited private development.
Now, they stand to lose their buildings just as 42nd Street has roared back to life, and blight -- the original rationale for condemnation -- has abated. They expect to receive far less in the condemnation settlement than they would if they were approached individually to make private deals.
''They never even came to ask if I wanted to sell,'' said Joseph Orbach, who has owned the 16-story building at 265 West 40th Street with his brothers, Markus and Sidney, since 1978. ''They're just taking it.'' There are some 30 tenants, including architects and engineers.
At a condemnation hearing on Sept. 24 and in later interviews, owners expressed anger that a large corporate neighbor, The Times, was getting the benefit of a fully assembled 80,000-square-foot development parcel at a price of $84.94 million, in addition to city incentives that may reach $29 million.
''It is obvious that The Times can get a much cheaper deal by hiding behind the condemnation process,'' said William F. Wallace, whose family has owned the land under 620 Eighth Avenue, at 40th Street, since the turn of the last century.
The six-story turquoise building that now stands on the Wallace property was designed in 1963 by Wechsler & Schimenti. After many lean years, Stratford C. Wallace said he and his brother put more than $3 million into the building and attracted two new tenants in the late 1990's: the Taylor Business Institute and the SAE Institute.
Udo Hoppenworth, the vice president of SAE, which enrolls about 200 students, said the school intended to stay in business. But much will depend on its ability to find comparable space. SAE will also face exceptional moving expenses for its large, sophisticated sound consoles.
Around the corner, the eight-story, 140-bed Sussex House dormitory at 260 West 41st Street is awaiting word on how much the state will offer for the property. ''If we can't pay our debt, there's a good chance that there won't be a Sussex House,'' said Thomas Alessandrello, the vice president for operations.
The dormitory now houses students from 21 schools. One, Jared Grant, a sophomore at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said of the neighborhood, ''It's a nice lively area.''
Those are not the words the government would use.
''Prostitution, drug use and loitering are still common,'' particularly around the sex stores on the north end of the block, according to an August 2001 memorandum by state officials. The buildings ''generally present a shabby front entrance'' to the revivified 42nd Street strip, the memorandum stated, and are ''developed to only a fraction of their theoretical capacity.''
Giving these reasons, the Empire State Development Corporation plans to assemble a site to which it could take title as early as February.
Brokers working for the state will help find replacement space for displaced companies, said Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the state agency. The state will pay moving costs, he said, as well as some costs of re-establishing business elsewhere, like new signs and stationery.
The state will lease the site to The Times and Forest City Ratner for 99 years. The 776-foot-tall Times building would have 1.37 million square feet of space, about 40 percent more than zoning rules would ordinarily allow on the site. The unusually large parcel, 200 by 400 feet, is well suited to the newspaper's need for large, open floors.
The building is to be completed in 2005, when The Times would move from its current headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street, three blocks away.
The developers will pay the site acquisition costs, though they will recoup anything above $84.94 million as a credit against rent, meaning that the city will forgo some future revenue.
''What The New York Times is trying to do is ride the taxpayers of New York,'' said Gary Barnett, president of Intell Management and Investment Company, which owns a parking lot at 250 West 41st Street.
Owners on the block contrast the $84.94 million acquisition cost for the Times site (which works out to $62 a square foot for the potential development) to $77.78 million paid this year by Howard and Edward Milstein for a 70 percent interest in a parking lot at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street (or $130 a square foot for the 850,000-square-foot development potential).
But Mary Ann Tighe, vice chairwoman of Insignia/ESG, who is The Times's real estate adviser, said the Milstein property was inherently more valuable because of its 42nd Street exposure and because it is already cleared. Depending on how the 30 percent share of the Milstein site is valued, she said, the effective price there could be less than $90 a square foot.
As for the incentives, Michael Golden, vice chairman and senior vice president of The Times Company, said in February, ''It's our responsibility to all of the stakeholders in this company to be as competitive as we can be.''
Times executives had no comment for this article and referred questions to Ms. Tighe, who suggested that the owners' current protests were aimed at extracting a higher price for their properties. ''They've known about this coming forever and a day,'' she said.
That does not necessarily make it any easier to find new space for 20,000 bolts of cloth. ''We're both pretty nervous,'' allowed Scot R. Cohen, who runs B & J Fabrics with his father, Mel A. Cohen. The 61-year-old business has been at 263 West 40th Street since 1955 and is patronized by Broadway costume designers like Martha Bromelmeier, who was scouting the other day for silk Jacquard. ''They do have the best fabrics,'' she said.
Scot Cohen wishes The Times would look elsewhere for its new headquarters. ''There's space a block away that's available without condemnation,'' he said, referring to the Milstein site. ''Why do they have to be here?''
That is what the Rubins are wondering. They have been selling hats at 620 Eighth Avenue since the building was constructed almost 40 years ago. ''A big part of the business is being in the same place for a long time,'' said Mark Rubin, whose father, Arnold, took over from his uncle, Sidney Jacobson. Mark Rubin has broadened the store's global reach through www.ahat.com and intends to keep operating even if he has to move, though his father hopes to stay at No. 620.
''I have three years on the lease and I'd like to complete it,'' Arnold Rubin said. ''At that point, I'm ready to go fishing.''






The Paper of Wreckage
The 'Times' Bulldozes Its Way to a Sweetheart Land Deal You Will Pay For
by Paul Moses
June 17th, 2002 6:00 PM

Thanks to a deal with the Pataki and Giuliani administrations, The New York Times Company is in line to get a choice midtown property at tens of millions of dollars below market value—and city taxpayers will foot the difference, newly disclosed records show.
Under the deal Governor George Pataki announced December 13, the state-controlled Empire State Development Corporation will use its power of condemnation to take the property from its unwilling private owners and turn it over to the Times for a 52-story corporate headquarters along Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets.
The outlines of the deal were reported in the Times as it developed last year, but a city official's affidavit in a lawsuit and documents disclosed in recent weeks in response to Freedom of Information requests show there are what even the city itself calls "huge" additional costs to taxpayers that officials had not revealed—about $79 million.
The property's present owners charge that the Times used its clout as a powerful newspaper publisher to grab the valuable land away from them through a sweetheart deal with city and state government.
"You just don't think things like that can happen in this country," said Scot Cohen, who runs his family's B & J Fabrics, a garment district fixture since 1958 in a 16-story office building that the Times wants to demolish. "You work hard to build something up, and then someone who is bigger than you can take it away."
The Times denied that the deal was skewed in its favor. "We believe that the deal is a fair one for both sides in light of the benefits the city will receive and the risks the company is taking," spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said in an e-mail interview. She said the Times has risked building even if the real estate market turns down.
But documents show that another developer said he was willing to undertake the risk of building a 50-story office tower on the site with no subsidy on the property's cost. After the Times expressed interest, the city and state abandoned previous plans to seek bids on the property, which is privately owned but in the Times Square redevelopment area.
Instead, the state and city signed off on a sole-source deal in which the Times and its politically connected partner, Forest City Ratner Companies, are to get the property under a long-term lease for $85.6 million—well below market value, according to an expert at M.I.T. The deal also includes $26.1 million in tax cuts for the Times and a break on payments that substitute for property taxes.
If the court sets a higher condemnation price than $85.6 million, the developers would have to lay out the extra money. But the sweetener in the deal is that the Times and Forest City will be able to deduct the extra cost as an 85 percent credit against the payments they make in lieu of property taxes (called "PILOT"). This means taxpayers will cover all costs above $85.6 million, an amount described as "huge" in a city memo.
Just how "huge" a windfall city officials expect to give the Times has been a carefully guarded secret. Both the city and state economic development agencies have declined to answer any questions for this article and refused to release property appraisals. The Times said it did not do an appraisal.
But in an affidavit filed at state Supreme Court in Manhattan, city Economic Development Corp. senior vice president Raffaela Petrasek confirmed that city officials expect the Times to get years of subsidies from the city treasury to pay for the high cost of its land deal.
Petrasek did not quote a dollar figure, but admitted that the Times and Forest City would be able to reduce their PILOT payments for up to "six years after the construction of the project was completed."
The payments, after phasing in for the three to four years the deal permits for construction to be completed, run about $14 million a year. The developers' 85 percent break during this span would be worth at least $79 million, an attorney for the opponents said. The Times and Forest City get to charge interest on the money they advance above $85.6 million, and it's subtracted from the PILOT.
Despite the high price tag, Petrasek contends in her affidavit that the deal is justified because the city would still get much more money in PILOT payments in the long run than it now collects in property taxes on the site.
But that ignores an alternative: Another developer, Gary Barnett of Intell Management and Investment Company, said he had offered to build a 50-story office tower on the site without the "cap" the Times is getting.
State officials have questioned whether he could deliver, but Barnett responds that his company developed the 50-floor Planet Hollywood building in Times Square without a public subsidy.

William Stern, chairman of the state economic development agency in the mid 1980s, said he also believed the property was worth far more than the Times will pay. He said anything over $85.6 million becomes "a direct subsidy from the treasury," and called the decision to cap the cost "bizarre."
"It's clearly being done because the Times is so influential," said Stern.
Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois, said the deal "gives the appearance of impropriety" and will undermine the Times' ability to criticize similar arrangements between government and business.
"This is a similar thing with the Los Angeles Times three years ago with the basketball arena, the Staples Center," he said, recalling how the L.A. Times staff rose in opposition upon learning that the paper and the a

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