Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio. Over the last few weeks, you've
Speaker 1: heard from some of our staff as they showcase their
Speaker 1: favorite episodes from our archives. Now it's time to hear mine.
Speaker 1: Since conservation and the enduring character of New York are
Speaker 1: topics close to my heart, I wanted to share with
Speaker 1: you an episode with someone fighting the good fight.
Speaker 2: Andrew Berman.
Speaker 1: Berman is the executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit
Speaker 1: that works to document, celebrate, and preserve historical and significant
Speaker 1: buildings in downtown New York. Named one of the one
Speaker 1: hundred most powerful people in real Estate by The New
Speaker 1: York Observer, Berman is a lifelong New Yorker whose work
Speaker 1: led the charge against development plans by NYU and Donald
Speaker 1: Trump and secured landmark protection for over one thousand buildings.
Speaker 1: We'll have an update with Andrew Berman later in this episode.
Speaker 1: We began my twenty fifteen conversation with Andrew Berman discussing
Speaker 1: the One that got Away, the one building he wasn't
Speaker 1: able to save that still haunts him.
Speaker 3: You know, this is gonna sound sort of strange, but
Speaker 3: one of my personal favorites that we lost. Was this
Speaker 3: beautiful building called the Tunnel Garage, which, believe it or not,
Speaker 3: was a parking garage which you would never think who
Speaker 3: would care about a parking garage. It was one of
Speaker 3: the first purpose built parking garages in New York. It
Speaker 3: was this beautiful Art Deco building that had a medallion
Speaker 3: on it that was an image of a model t
Speaker 3: Ford emerging from the Holland Tunnel, which hadn't even yet
Speaker 3: been built. When this tunnel, which was built near the
Speaker 3: entrance to the Holland Tunnel, where was this. This was
Speaker 3: on the corner of Broome Street and Thompson Street, so
Speaker 3: sort of at the edge of soho the South Village.
Speaker 3: Beautiful building. I mean it really, if there's a parking
Speaker 3: garage anywhere on Earth that people would raize about, it
Speaker 3: was this one. And it had been on sort of
Speaker 3: lists for years of a building to be saved. A
Speaker 3: developer came along and bought it and said, you know,
Speaker 3: I just want to tear it down and build a
Speaker 3: slightly larger condominium building. Here.
Speaker 2: How many stories eight stories? How many units?
Speaker 3: I think about thirty or so, you know, a pretty
Speaker 3: a bland, you know, sort of you'd never look at
Speaker 3: it a building, you never look at it twice.
Speaker 2: What's another example, Well.
Speaker 3: Here's one where sort of the opposite. There was a
Speaker 3: vacant lot at the northern end of the Greenwich Village
Speaker 3: Historic District and there was a plan to develop it,
Speaker 3: which we had no objections to. You know, vacant lots
Speaker 3: are there to be developed. But the developer put forward
Speaker 3: a proposal for this thirteen story curving, entirely glass walled
Speaker 3: building in the Greenwich Village Historic District and we thought
Speaker 3: that's ludicrous, that would never never be approved. What does
Speaker 3: that have to do with the Greenwich Village Historic District.
Speaker 3: The notion is new development in these areas should kind
Speaker 3: of fit the character. They don't have to mimic it.
Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be some bo town, some compatibility.
Speaker 3: The Commission unanimously approved it, which we were really taken
Speaker 3: aback by.
Speaker 1: What's one that was a tremendous victory for you Where's
Speaker 1: Where's something where you guys really fought and you scored.
Speaker 3: I'd say one of the ones that we're most proudest
Speaker 3: of is the part of Greenwich Village south of Washington Square,
Speaker 3: what we often call the South Village the part of
Speaker 3: Greenwich Village that everybody associates with, you know, the folk Revival,
Speaker 3: the beat Nicks in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: Bleaker McDougal. That area amazingly was not protected by landmark protections.
Speaker 3: Any of those buildings could have been demolished and replaced
Speaker 3: with pretty hitty beach in New York. Yes, very much so.
Speaker 3: And after really fifty years of people trying to get
Speaker 3: that area of landmarked, we were able to get it
Speaker 3: landmarked in two stage shake. It took thousands of people
Speaker 3: really coming together and pushing the city. One part of
Speaker 3: it is we actually had to almost sort of blackmail
Speaker 3: the city. They wanted to get an area adjacent to
Speaker 3: that rezoned as basically a sort of a stop to
Speaker 3: a developer, Trinity real Estate in this case, and we
Speaker 3: pushed the city council to say, we won't approve the
Speaker 3: rezoning that you the city want, unless you move ahead
Speaker 3: with this landmarking that the community has been asking for
Speaker 3: for years. So we really kind of backed them into
Speaker 3: a corner. And to be honest, we sort of used
Speaker 3: election year politics as a bit of a cudgel. You know,
Speaker 3: people were trying to look like they were being friendly
Speaker 3: to the community. So we were able to make them
Speaker 3: do something that they had not wanted to do and
Speaker 3: had been unwilling to do for years.
Speaker 2: What area do you live in yourself?
Speaker 3: I actually live in Hill's Kitchen, so I'm a bit
Speaker 3: further to the north. But I'm a lifelong New Yorker.
Speaker 3: I've worked in the village. I grew up in the Bronx,
Speaker 3: but I've been working in the village and on the
Speaker 3: West Side of Manhattan since for over twenty years.
Speaker 2: Now, where'd you go to schools?
Speaker 3: I went to Bronx High School of Science, so I've
Speaker 3: lived in New York my whole life.
Speaker 2: What about college? Where did you go?
Speaker 3: I went to Wesleyan University. Well, do you study art
Speaker 3: history with a focus on architecture and urban planning?
Speaker 1: Talk about, if you would, what happened to Christine Quinn
Speaker 1: with the Chelsea Market, because of my understanding is correct,
Speaker 1: that was in her district. Yes, And I want to
Speaker 1: be very clear that during that political race, I endorsed
Speaker 1: Deblasio and worked for Deblasio and did not support Quinn.
Speaker 1: And this is not, you know, to bash Quinn at all,
Speaker 1: But describe what happened in that Chelsea Market thing and
Speaker 1: what you think was going on from pressures that were
Speaker 1: on her.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, so you know, Chelsea Market is this old
Speaker 3: industrial complex built by Nabisco in Chelsea that was a
Speaker 3: Nibisco factory. Bisco Factory is where the oreo was invented.
Speaker 3: It was a bakery. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And who developed into the current Chelsea Market how long ago?
Speaker 3: It was originally another group of people, including a guy
Speaker 3: named Irwin Cohen, and that was in the late nineteen
Speaker 3: nineties that had been sitting there basically abandoned, and he
Speaker 3: came up with this idea that everybody thought was crazy
Speaker 3: at the time because this was a real backwater fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago, of turning it into this huge retail market
Speaker 3: with offices and things like that, I mean.
Speaker 2: The food equivalent of a show.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was wildly successful. You know, the neighborhood
Speaker 3: around it transformed. It's a huge building. It's a beautiful
Speaker 3: old building, but it's a huge building. They have above
Speaker 3: they did not have air rights up above, and that
Speaker 3: that's that's where the key comes in with this. So
Speaker 3: they wanted to build basically two towers on top of
Speaker 3: this lovely old building, but they couldn't because they had
Speaker 3: no development.
Speaker 2: On top of the eight stories that are already.
Speaker 3: There, on top of the building that already exists. So
Speaker 3: they came to the city and they said, we want
Speaker 3: you to rezone us to give us.
Speaker 2: These developed stories. Did they want they Originally.
Speaker 3: It was going to be the addition was going to
Speaker 3: go up to something like two hundred and fifty feet
Speaker 3: in the air or something like that. I mean huge,
Speaker 3: and one on the west end, one on the stories. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: huge building, huge building. And you know, at this point
Speaker 3: Quinn had already kind of shown herself to be very
Speaker 3: willing to be accommodating to developers, so we knew this
Speaker 3: was going to be an uphill battle at best. Although
Speaker 3: Chelsea was where she was from and a lot of
Speaker 3: the people who were very adamantly opposed to it were
Speaker 3: people she'd known and worked closely with for years, we
Speaker 3: were opposed to it as well, and she did eventually
Speaker 3: approve it. A slightly scaled back version made it a
Speaker 3: little less little less bad.
Speaker 2: As the work started already.
Speaker 3: No, and it's not been clear to us why they
Speaker 3: haven't moved ahead yet, but they have all the approval,
Speaker 3: so it's really up to them to go any time
Speaker 3: that they want. But this was definitely a disappointment. And
Speaker 3: what was particularly disappointing was that there were commitments that
Speaker 3: were quote unquote made as part of this approval about
Speaker 3: how it would have to remain all independent businesses, there
Speaker 3: couldn't be chain stores and all these other kinds of things,
Speaker 3: which it turned out none of these agreements were enforceable.
Speaker 3: It was really just sort of window dressing to this
Speaker 3: approval that the city gave them. And that's disappointing when
Speaker 3: you see things like that happen. When do buildings need
Speaker 3: to come down? Things have to change, We need to
Speaker 3: make room for more people. For you, oh, it's absolutely reality,
Speaker 3: and you know we would never do you acknowledge that
Speaker 3: one you wanted to save ultimately didn't need to be saved.
Speaker 3: I'll give you an example. There's areas of our neighborhoods
Speaker 3: where we've fought for new zoning that we thought would
Speaker 3: encourage good development as opposed to bad developments, which meant
Speaker 3: the expectation was things will get built.
Speaker 2: Yes, give us an example of an area where this
Speaker 2: came into play.
Speaker 3: For instance, in the East Village, we working with a coalition,
Speaker 3: we were able to get almost the entire East Village rezoned.
Speaker 3: So the old zoning would have encouraged big, tall towers,
Speaker 3: it would have encouraged building things like dormitories and hotels.
Speaker 1: Believe it or not, but as an NYU, that's where
Speaker 1: NYU went to build a lot of their.
Speaker 3: Dormitories along Third Avenue in that area. Yes, and we
Speaker 3: didn't want to see NYU take over the East Village,
Speaker 3: so we pushed for and got a rezoning that said, yes,
Speaker 3: there can be new development here, but the size and
Speaker 3: scale of it is going to be more like what
Speaker 3: you think of the East Village. Seven story buildings, six
Speaker 3: story buildings. This is what zoning does. You can get
Speaker 3: these what are called contextual zoning disc that says you
Speaker 3: can build but to a certain height, certain number of
Speaker 3: square feet, things of that nature. So we've seen a
Speaker 3: lot of developments go up in the East Village under
Speaker 3: this new zoning that are so much more in character
Speaker 3: with the neighborhood than what would have been built under
Speaker 3: the old zoning. So we weren't pushing there to say
Speaker 3: no new buildings or nothing can ever be torn down,
Speaker 3: but that there should be new buildings, but it should
Speaker 3: really reinforce the character of the neighborhood. Just around the
Speaker 3: corner from our office, there was a huge parking lot
Speaker 3: that was just built on with an eight or nine
Speaker 3: story building. Right next door to it is a dorm
Speaker 3: that NYU built a couple of years earlier. That's twenty
Speaker 3: six stories. There have been quite a few new buildings
Speaker 3: closer to the traditional campus, but this will be a
Speaker 3: whole additional campus for the university.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like the city you turn around one day,
Speaker 1: you know, we have another subway tunnel, so we have
Speaker 1: water tunnels that are coming in. I mean, the city
Speaker 1: is constantly, constantly, constantly being changed. And if you had
Speaker 1: one wish, I mean, I'm sure you have a laundry
Speaker 1: and things. What's one wish of how you'd like things
Speaker 1: to change in the next twenty to thirty years, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I mean, I think the biggest pressing issue facing
Speaker 3: New York is ensuring that it stays a place that's
Speaker 3: affordable and accessible for a broad range of people. So
Speaker 3: I'd say, if I had one wish for the city,
Speaker 3: it would be that that somehow we could it could
Speaker 3: be a place where, you know, sort of the most successful,
Speaker 3: you know, innovators and zillionaires can live there, and poor
Speaker 3: working folks and middle class people who are you know,
Speaker 3: sort of raising kids or starting out or living on
Speaker 3: their own or sort of whatever, and everybody in between,
Speaker 3: you know, the immigrants, the longtime residents.
Speaker 1: And see some of the steps that were taken to
Speaker 1: allow for like Mitchell Lama that's.
Speaker 2: Dying, that's.
Speaker 3: Up in Mitchellama Housing, and it's it's tragic.
Speaker 1: For those who don't know who were listening that don't
Speaker 1: know what Mitchell Llama Housing was. This was an attempt
Speaker 1: back then to have the city develop property where developers
Speaker 1: would build affordable housing and manage it as affordable housing.
Speaker 1: I'm being very shorthand with this, and manage it as
Speaker 1: affordable housing for a given period of time, like thirty
Speaker 1: years or something, and then after a certain period of time,
Speaker 1: it would slowly evolve, if you will, into or evolve
Speaker 1: into private housing. They would sell it as condominiums. And
Speaker 1: right now we're hitting that place where.
Speaker 3: Especially in Manhattan, very few of them are left.
Speaker 2: A lot of them. Mitchellama's rolling over now to private.
Speaker 3: Co kindominiams, which is really changing the city.
Speaker 1: But New Yorkers have resigned themselves to the fact that
Speaker 1: affordable housing itself, just like paythons, is a thing of
Speaker 1: the past. And now more and more people who never
Speaker 1: dreamed of going to Long Island City and to Astoria
Speaker 1: and to Brooklyn is just apart of Manhattan now in
Speaker 1: terms of how many people who live and work there
Speaker 1: and put their kids in school there, but who work
Speaker 1: in the city and commute. More and more and more
Speaker 1: people have resigned themselves or even are happy to commute.
Speaker 2: Is that your experience as well?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, in some ways, I don't think
Speaker 3: it's such a bad thing that a lot of people
Speaker 3: who would have only considered living in Manhattan before now
Speaker 3: are living throughout the city. What I think would be
Speaker 3: a terrible thing is if Manhattan became a place that
Speaker 3: only the wealthy could live, and that more and more
Speaker 3: the other boroughs that became the case as well. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure that I know what the answer is. I mean, clearly,
Speaker 3: if we had a different political environment, we'd have things
Speaker 3: like mitche Lama programs and other things to create and
Speaker 3: build affordable housing, saying this is an investment in our
Speaker 3: city's future. The construction is good, it creates jobs, the
Speaker 3: fact that we give good, affordable housing to people who
Speaker 3: we need, you know, to be teachers, to be firemen,
Speaker 3: to be sanitation.
Speaker 2: We don't have housing for those people. Now, you know.
Speaker 1: One of the first things that happened in New York
Speaker 1: years ago was the police were successful in argument against
Speaker 1: the residency requirement because they said, you can't force me
Speaker 1: to live here because I can't afford the rent here
Speaker 1: on a policeman's salary. So they did away with But
Speaker 1: of course this is a city where rather than build
Speaker 1: affordable housing for people like the police and have them
Speaker 1: invested in the community they live in, they all leave,
Speaker 1: which makes them somewhat less invested, I think in the
Speaker 1: community they live in, although many of them come from
Speaker 1: the city. It seems we could do a whole hour
Speaker 1: about the power of the real estate development community and
Speaker 1: the landlords forth in this. I mean they run the city. Sure,
Speaker 1: they run the city in so many ways, and they
Speaker 1: run the city. I mean what gets built, what doesn't
Speaker 1: get built? Guys like you fight them and win because
Speaker 1: public outrage and public passions about these things still have
Speaker 1: some power.
Speaker 3: Right Well, Ultimately government makes the decisions, and while certainly
Speaker 3: the people with money and access have enormous influence over them.
Speaker 3: The average people do because they vote, and if you
Speaker 3: exercise that strength that we have, and it's the only
Speaker 3: thing we have, is the power of the vote, that's
Speaker 3: the way that we can affect these.
Speaker 2: I want to finish with this.
Speaker 1: The society has an LGBT initiative for some of the preservation.
Speaker 2: They do talk about that.
Speaker 3: Look, sure, New York and especially the village really has
Speaker 3: such a wealth of sites connected to the LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual,
Speaker 3: transgender civil rights movements. I mean the one that everybody knows,
Speaker 3: of course, a Stone Wall where the riots took place
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty nine, which in many respects kicked off
Speaker 3: the gay movie exactly. But there's many other ones as well.
Speaker 3: I mean, just around the corner from there, there's Julius's Bar,
Speaker 3: where in nineteen sixty six there was this sit in
Speaker 3: or sit in as it was called, the first planned
Speaker 3: civil disobedience for gay rights. At that time, few people
Speaker 3: sort of know or remember this. It was actually illegal
Speaker 3: to serve alcohol to someone who you knew was a homosexual,
Speaker 3: so it in essence made gay bars illegal. That's why
Speaker 3: they were all.
Speaker 2: The hotel Tennessee Williams of a state and people were
Speaker 2: breaking the law.
Speaker 3: I know. Yeah, So as a result of this, actually
Speaker 3: there was a legal case that more or less changed that, and.
Speaker 2: So that was how to put that in a movie.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: You know, back when there were very, very very few
Speaker 3: places that gay people could meet, almost all of them
Speaker 3: were in places like Greenwich.
Speaker 1: Village Preservation executive director Andrew Berman. In late June twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: just a few days before New York City's annual Pride Parade,
Speaker 1: and after many years of behind the scenes politicking, Andrew
Speaker 1: Berman and his colleagues celebrated early the Stonewall Inn won
Speaker 1: its New York City Landmark status, making it the first
Speaker 1: site designated primarily for its significance to LGBT history. Take
Speaker 1: a listen to the Here's the Thing Archives. I talk
Speaker 1: with another hard working advocate, Josh Fox, the environmental activist
Speaker 1: whose film Gasland exposed the dangers of fracking.
Speaker 3: They would say, oh, your water's fine, and then they
Speaker 3: would go and get them a glass of water. Drink
Speaker 3: sor right, well, if you think this is fine for
Speaker 3: my mother to drink, then you go ahead and drink it.
Speaker 3: And they wouldn't drink it.
Speaker 1: Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot Org. We'll
Speaker 1: have an update with Andrew Berman after the break. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. I spoke
Speaker 1: with Executive Director of Village Preservation Andrew Berman for an
Speaker 1: episode that originally aired in November twenty fifteen. Obviously, much
Speaker 1: has changed in New York since, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: sit with the Berman for an update on what has
Speaker 1: developed and not developed in that time. Two things come
Speaker 1: to mind. One of them is they say that New
Speaker 1: York is sinking under the weight of all the building too.
Speaker 1: I know you no doubt read that correct. Is New
Speaker 1: York actually sinking under the weight of man? And I
Speaker 1: know you're not a geologist.
Speaker 3: Well we'll find out. I mean either it's sinking or
Speaker 3: the water levels arising. I mean, between the two of them,
Speaker 3: where we seem to be going underwater?
Speaker 2: Is that true?
Speaker 3: Well, certainly the water levels are rising. I mean that's
Speaker 3: a big problem for New York City, which they're still
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what to do about that.
Speaker 2: When Sandy came. I'm in New Yorker. I've been here since.
Speaker 1: I have had an address in New York since nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: and then when Sandy came that was just so singular
Speaker 1: and so unprecedented. They're saying the water might come up
Speaker 1: to fourteenth Street, and I'm like, come on, I mean,
Speaker 1: get serious, all right, I could imagine this is not
Speaker 1: the Caribbean, and the water came up to fourteenth Street.
Speaker 1: Buildings wiped out in Tribeca, flooded, not just in the basement,
Speaker 1: but even the first floor were took in a lot
Speaker 1: of water. The impact of Sandy I was, I was
Speaker 1: just shocked, and I'm wondering if the city had done
Speaker 1: anything to prepare for that happening.
Speaker 3: Again, well, I know they've done a bunch of things,
Speaker 3: but I think by any measure, they haven't done enough.
Speaker 3: You know, there are some new rules in terms of
Speaker 3: construction in flood zones that you know, have to have
Speaker 3: some greater level of precaution, but they're still really encouraging
Speaker 3: a lot of development in what everybody knows is the
Speaker 3: first places that are going to flood if there's another
Speaker 3: Superstar and Sandy or something like that. The other thing
Speaker 3: that they've done or they're doing, is they're building these
Speaker 3: berms and other types of protection along very We're going
Speaker 3: to build the big wall the river in the harbor. Well,
Speaker 3: there's been everything from the proposal to build a giant
Speaker 3: wall from New Jersey to Long Island that would you know,
Speaker 3: a floodgate that would keep it from coming in, and
Speaker 3: then you know, some more modest proposals. But right now
Speaker 3: East River Park in the East Village and Lower East
Speaker 3: Side has been completely leveled because they're rebuilding it at
Speaker 3: about fifteen feet higher, I believe than it used to
Speaker 3: be as a way of protecting the neighborhoods adjacent to it.
Speaker 3: Although a lot of people would argue that it's not
Speaker 3: the best plan and it's doing more harm than good,
Speaker 3: But there's piecemeal things going on throughout the city to
Speaker 3: try to address that.
Speaker 1: In the years I've lived in the city, of course,
Speaker 1: I've seen tremendous change on a number of levels. I
Speaker 1: do notice that it's like, especially in midtown, I just
Speaker 1: see so many goddamn ugly buildings going up here, and
Speaker 1: I see those kind of those tall, thin shafts along
Speaker 1: the East fifties there, those big buildings went up there
Speaker 1: which are so ugly. Why do you think the city
Speaker 1: allows so much construction in Manhattan rather than diverting it
Speaker 1: out to like the Bronx, working with the state of
Speaker 1: New Jersey and so forth, to not have what we have.
Speaker 1: And part of that, of course, is the pressure on
Speaker 1: the village and what your organization is focused on to
Speaker 1: knock everything down and rebuild that. Why do you think
Speaker 1: the city it just thinks that, you know, the Manhattan's
Speaker 1: going to look like some obscene megalopolis like twenty five
Speaker 1: years from now.
Speaker 2: Why do you think the city doesn't fight that? Well.
Speaker 3: I think it's a couple of things. There's obviously a
Speaker 3: tremendous demand from the real estate industry. They see the
Speaker 3: opportunity to make money. And you know, the city's always
Speaker 3: been controlled by the real estate industry, either directly or indirectly,
Speaker 3: you know, campaign contributions, lobbying, influence, etc. You know, So
Speaker 3: I think that's a big part of it. I think
Speaker 3: that's where the most money is to be made in
Speaker 3: many cases, although we've seen explosive development in places like
Speaker 3: the Long Island City waterfront and downtown Brooklyn Williamsburg, so
Speaker 3: that you're definitely seeing some of that kind of stuff
Speaker 3: in other parts of the city, even Bedford Stuyvesant has
Speaker 3: seen an explosive amount of development. But you know, this
Speaker 3: city is very hesitant to put restrictions on development. They
Speaker 3: want to encourage as much of it as possible. You know,
Speaker 3: our city has never done what some other cities have done,
Speaker 3: which is said, oh, certainly many cities in Europe, you know,
Speaker 3: where they say that we need to make sure that
Speaker 3: we hold on to the character of what makes our
Speaker 3: city distinctive and wonderful even as we allow it to grow.
Speaker 3: And you know, I don't think there's anybody of any
Speaker 3: reasonable mind that would say we shouldn't allow new development
Speaker 3: in New York City. We have to. There's more business.
Speaker 3: People want to live here, although shockingly, in the last
Speaker 3: two or three years, according to the Census Bureau of
Speaker 3: the population of the city has been dropping actually as
Speaker 3: opposed to to growing.
Speaker 2: Is co related.
Speaker 3: Well, it's continued after COVID, so you know, it remains
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 1: A ripple effect of all the jobs leaving and the
Speaker 1: tax space leaving.
Speaker 3: And my guess is probably a big part of what
Speaker 3: that's about is that now there's just so much greater
Speaker 3: ability to work remotely, so people don't feel as though
Speaker 3: they have to be as close to their jobs as
Speaker 3: they used to be for some types of jobs. Obviously,
Speaker 3: some don't have that flexibility. So you know, even though
Speaker 3: clearly new development needs to take place, the city has
Speaker 3: always been very hesitant about being too restrictive about that,
Speaker 3: having too heavy of a hand in terms of how
Speaker 3: they control that. And we've seen we have some of
Speaker 3: the ugliest new development that you can find anywhere. And
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people in New York would
Speaker 3: be less opposed to the new development if it just
Speaker 3: felt like it fit in contributed in some great way
Speaker 3: to the character of the area. When they're on the
Speaker 3: rare occasions when there is a building that's built that
Speaker 3: actually feels like this is a great new addition to
Speaker 3: the city. People actually do in Central Park West. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but these are these are.
Speaker 1: Rarities now in New York where I've heard rumors and
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of bullshit obviously about how they're
Speaker 1: going to start converting retail space, abandoned retail space and
Speaker 1: office space into residential space.
Speaker 2: They're going to.
Speaker 1: Allow the old SOHO, the old evolution of SOHO. People
Speaker 1: don't realize that they used to make nuts and bolts
Speaker 1: and screws and wash machines or sewing machines or whatever
Speaker 1: that was in Soho, in the old cast Iron district
Speaker 1: of Soho. And then eventually somebody finally came to their
Speaker 1: senses and said, none of this business is coming back.
Speaker 1: It's gone forever. So they then became the great residential
Speaker 1: evolution of Soho. Well, I'm wondering, is that Do you
Speaker 1: think that's going to happen in other places as well?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: So you know, it's interesting they started doing that in
Speaker 3: the Financial District about twenty years ago. They allowed some
Speaker 3: of those older office buildings there to be converted to residential. Wilworth, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: the Woolworth Building one Wall Street. Usually these sort of tall,
Speaker 3: skinny towers, beautiful buildings, classic New York skyline buildings, and
Speaker 3: it's been incredibly successful. Now, what we have, especially post COVID,
Speaker 3: is these you know, nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, these
Speaker 3: massive office buildings that nobody seems to want to move into.
Speaker 3: The problem is they're not easily adapted to housing because
Speaker 3: the floors are so big that ninety percent of them
Speaker 3: are more than, you know, twenty feet from a window,
Speaker 3: and you can't have living space where you're nowhere near
Speaker 3: a window. People are not going to it's illegal, car
Speaker 3: aren't going to and people aren't gonna live in windowless spaces.
Speaker 3: Soup to code, yeah, exactly. So the opportunities there for
Speaker 3: turning these newer, bigger office buildings into residential space are
Speaker 3: much more limited. From a purely practiced level, what you
Speaker 3: can do is you can sort of like hollow out
Speaker 3: a core. So what they sometimes do with these big
Speaker 3: old buildings is they actually remove parts of it so
Speaker 3: that all of a sudden there's an open space where
Speaker 3: you can place windows facing like an inner core or
Speaker 3: something like that. But that's of course very expensive, and
Speaker 3: then you're losing the space. So I think it remains
Speaker 3: to be seen. There's clearly more opportunities to convert office
Speaker 3: buildings to residential but it's not like we're going to
Speaker 3: suddenly see all of that empty office space in New
Speaker 3: York converted to residential use. It's just not it's not
Speaker 3: going to happen.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't see why governments that they don't work
Speaker 1: assiduously to build affordable housing and force them to do
Speaker 1: that kind of parody.
Speaker 2: In that swap, you want.
Speaker 1: To build a sixty story building in Manhattan, another ugly
Speaker 1: pencil box building to have a bunch of rich people.
Speaker 1: So we're going to all these lengths. Yes, I want
Speaker 1: people to have jobs. Yes, I want people to have
Speaker 1: construction jobs, good jobs, high paying jobs in New York.
Speaker 1: But what I also want is for them to start
Speaker 1: to explore where can we develop in the bronx to
Speaker 1: build affordable housing. And you've got to do both. You
Speaker 1: can't just sell the saudiast fifty million dollar apartments. They
Speaker 1: don't live here. And then you know, my doormaan can't
Speaker 1: get to work because now we have to move to
Speaker 1: Wanta into an apartment, not even a house.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just crazy crazy.
Speaker 3: Well, let me just say we need to have affordable
Speaker 3: housing all throughout New York City. The problem is that
Speaker 3: the approach that a lot of people take is instead
Speaker 3: of saying we need affordable house and let's build affordable housing,
Speaker 3: they say, well, we need to unleash the market and
Speaker 3: build as much market rate housing as possible, flood the market,
Speaker 3: and then that's going to bring the prices down for everybody,
Speaker 3: and you know trickle down economics. The way to get
Speaker 3: affordable housing is to build affordable housing and to keep
Speaker 3: the affordable housing that you have, which we're losing at
Speaker 3: a breakneck pace.
Speaker 1: So village preservation, when did the village become such a
Speaker 1: focus of yours?
Speaker 2: You move there to live?
Speaker 3: Well, So I've been working in the village since the
Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties. I was working for an elect official
Speaker 3: and newly elected city council member who represented the area,
Speaker 3: Tom Dwayne, Tom Dwayne, Yeah, guy, yeah yeah. He went
Speaker 3: onto the State Senate. I worked with him there and
Speaker 3: then from there I moved on to what's now Village
Speaker 3: Preservation used to be Greenwich Village Society for.
Speaker 2: A Store Preservation.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's funny. I don't live in the village.
Speaker 3: I live in Hell's Kitchen. I've never lived in the village.
Speaker 3: But like every New Yorker in a sense, but you know,
Speaker 3: like every New Yorker, village is part of what I
Speaker 3: love about New York City. And the work that I
Speaker 3: do is not because you know, I have an apartment
Speaker 3: and I'm trying to you know, preserve my view out
Speaker 3: my window or you know, make sure that only this
Speaker 3: happens on my street. There's none of that personal benefit
Speaker 3: for me other than that I think everybody in New
Speaker 3: York and the world benefits from beautiful places, historic architecture,
Speaker 3: places that have a distinctive character. We all benefit from that.
Speaker 3: That's a public good and that's what I work towards
Speaker 3: and fight for, and that's why I do the work
Speaker 3: that I do in Greenwich Village, East Village, No Hope,
Speaker 3: places like that, because these are some of New York's
Speaker 3: most historic, distinctive neighbors. So much history there, yes, so
Speaker 3: much history, civil rights history, artistic history, cultural history, and
Speaker 3: we we're the poorer if we lose that or we
Speaker 3: destroy it, which is what would happen if people don't
Speaker 3: push back.
Speaker 1: Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Breman. We'll have more with
Speaker 1: Andrew Berman after the break. I'm Alec Baldwin and this
Speaker 1: is here's the thing. I talked with Executive director of
Speaker 1: Village Preservation Andrew Berman again recently to learn what gains
Speaker 1: had been made for his organization since we last spoke
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, including the recent successful restricting. Then whyu's
Speaker 1: efforts for expansion and my evolution has been kind of
Speaker 1: remarkable to me.
Speaker 3: Very different school than when you went there.
Speaker 2: Well, it's completely different now it's like this monolith.
Speaker 1: But the thing is is that that I recently read
Speaker 1: in one of the articles that they had a plan
Speaker 1: for redevelopment that you successfully thwarted. Correct, what did they
Speaker 1: want to do?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So, for about sixty or so years now, they and
Speaker 3: any private university has been prohibited from most types of
Speaker 3: uses going into Soho and No Hoo. A year and
Speaker 3: a half ago, the city changed the zoning for Soho
Speaker 3: and No Hoo. But we successfully lobbied the city council
Speaker 3: to make it so that that restriction on private university
Speaker 3: expansion in that neighborhood stayed part of the zoning. NYU
Speaker 3: then sued to try to get that provision overturned.
Speaker 1: So, if I'm understanding you correctly, they weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: go there at all.
Speaker 3: They've never been allowed to go.
Speaker 1: Right, and now the powers that be allowed them to
Speaker 1: go there, but you wanted them to be restricted by
Speaker 1: the indigenous zoning laws there.
Speaker 3: Basically they were restricted before, and then they were restricted
Speaker 3: under slightly different but new rules, and they tried to
Speaker 3: take the city to court to say the new rules
Speaker 3: that restrict us are unconstitutional, and.
Speaker 2: They wanted to be able to do whatever they wanted.
Speaker 3: They wanted to be able to expand there as much
Speaker 3: as they wanted to, and a state Supreme Court judge
Speaker 3: threw their case out of court and said, Nope, this
Speaker 3: is perfectly constitutional. You have not been harms in any way.
Speaker 3: You were never able to locate here. You're still not
Speaker 3: able to locate here. So no harm, no foul, And
Speaker 3: at least as of today, those regulations can need to.
Speaker 2: Say are they appealing that decision.
Speaker 3: They haven't announced that they have yet, they haven't said
Speaker 3: that they won't, so we have to wait and see.
Speaker 3: But it was a pretty firm defeat that they suffered.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's always a bit of a I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say conflict of interest, but it's always
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation for me because you know, it's my
Speaker 1: alma mater and I was in in large regard, you know,
Speaker 1: very proud to go there, and you know, went to
Speaker 1: that acting program in its earliest time. I think that
Speaker 1: they I don't know when the Tish family gave the
Speaker 1: money that they did the name and they created the
Speaker 1: school that it is now, but I do see that
Speaker 1: NYU and this, and I'm not singling them mouth like
Speaker 1: with many institutions in the arts, in medicine. People want
Speaker 1: a building they can put their name on. I'll give
Speaker 1: you one hundred million dollars if you're here to put
Speaker 1: my name on the front of the New York Public Library.
Speaker 2: What was it Schwartz Shwortsman, And he wanted his name in.
Speaker 1: Front of the library. They were like, no, that's not happening.
Speaker 1: He was like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. You know,
Speaker 1: Gethen gets his name on the old Avery Fisher Hall.
Speaker 1: One hundred million bucks will buy you a lot.
Speaker 3: You know, there's the new NYU building, Paulson, his name
Speaker 3: is on it. So you know that huge new building
Speaker 3: that's gone up on Mercer, the old coles Fieldhouse.
Speaker 2: Exactly what do you think of that building?
Speaker 3: Oh god, I mean it's it's it's like the Death Star,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean it.
Speaker 2: Does look like a Star Wars movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's quite intimidating.
Speaker 2: So it looks like something that landed there.
Speaker 3: Yes, from someplace than ever.
Speaker 2: Of shooting out and wind blowing everything up.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, you'd think that the university would make
Speaker 3: more of an effort to try to at least look
Speaker 3: kind of friendly, open, appealing. I mean, this building and
Speaker 3: several of their other new buildings are just so off putting,
Speaker 3: so fortress like, so, you know, sort of aggressive.
Speaker 1: And do you find there's a reason for that, meaning
Speaker 1: energy efficiency, HVAC efficiency.
Speaker 3: It's a good question, you know. I don't know, because
Speaker 3: I'll say it almost seems like they're trying to make
Speaker 3: them ugly. But I can't imagine that's the case. No
Speaker 3: matter what I think of the NYU administration, not the
Speaker 3: individual schools, which I think do incredible jobs, it's not
Speaker 3: in their interest to make their buildings look off putting.
Speaker 3: I think they just keep getting it wrong for some reason.
Speaker 3: And you know, let me say this about NYU. I
Speaker 3: think it's a great institution. I think it's incredibly important
Speaker 3: to the success of Greenwich Village and of New York City.
Speaker 3: Half of my staff and my board are NYU alumni.
Speaker 3: But what all of us agree about is we don't
Speaker 3: want to see the university take over the neighborhood. It's
Speaker 3: important that it be an ingredient, a part of the
Speaker 3: balance of the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: And there is that perception that they indeed do want
Speaker 2: to take over the.
Speaker 3: Guest and that at least parts of the neighborhood feel
Speaker 3: like a company town. That's not what we want. We
Speaker 3: want the university to be woven into the fabric of
Speaker 3: the neighborhood, feel like a part of it, but not
Speaker 3: the dominant presence.
Speaker 1: My last question for you, one of the issues I
Speaker 1: face is that New York itself hasn't changed.
Speaker 2: It's always the same.
Speaker 1: It's always tearing down buildings and building new buildings and
Speaker 1: inspiring leaders who are not beyond some criticism, but and
Speaker 1: then like deadly dull leaders who have no who don't
Speaker 1: inspire anything. How has New York changed the most to
Speaker 1: you in your life? To me, you're from the Bronx.
Speaker 1: For me, what's changed is New Yorkers have changed, not
Speaker 1: New York. The people who come here to live have changed,
Speaker 1: and why they come here has changed. How is New
Speaker 1: York changed to you?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, having grown up in the Bronx in
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies, I would say one of the biggest
Speaker 3: things that I think I've seen change is New York
Speaker 3: has lost a lot of its edge. It was a
Speaker 3: much edgier place forty fifty years ago, and you know,
Speaker 3: that's where I think a lot of the spark of
Speaker 3: creativity and innovation and things like that come from, and
Speaker 3: it worries me that we're losing that in some way.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's still an incredible amount of creative people
Speaker 3: here in creative activity and energy and cultural institutions. New
Speaker 3: York to me feels less like it's kind of on
Speaker 3: the cultural frontier the way that it did a generation
Speaker 3: or two ago, and that concerns me because you know,
Speaker 3: New York is always, I think going to be a challenging,
Speaker 3: difficult place to live, but it gives certain rewards that
Speaker 3: you can't get any place else. One of those is
Speaker 3: this incredible spirit of innovation, and if we lose that,
Speaker 3: I think that's really the lynchpin of New York's success.
Speaker 3: That people come here because it's a place where you
Speaker 3: can see things change, happen, be created, be the first
Speaker 3: place where things happen that you wouldn't see anywhere else,
Speaker 3: and it worries me that we've lost some of that.
Speaker 1: And the root of that, to me, but by the way,
Speaker 1: is about affordable housing. I remember many years ago and
Speaker 1: what was one of the most beautiful periods of my life,
Speaker 1: the late eighties. I was here doing theater in New York,
Speaker 1: and I was really enjoying myself, and I'd just really
Speaker 1: been working as an actor for a few years up
Speaker 1: to them, and as a member of a very well
Speaker 1: regarded society of sober people. I would go to the
Speaker 1: meetings at Trinity Church and in the book would list
Speaker 1: of the meeting directory said Trinity was the name of
Speaker 1: the meeting. And I go into this meeting and the
Speaker 1: room was just teeming with these old guard artists. I
Speaker 1: mean people who painted with wroth go. I mean these
Speaker 1: were people who had lofts in what was the Old
Speaker 1: Trap and they had affordable spaces to make art.
Speaker 2: And I was around people. Then we're going to get in.
Speaker 1: Like any of those meetings, they get up and share
Speaker 1: and talk about the conditions of their life and how
Speaker 1: well they're doing or or not. And then after the
Speaker 1: MENI I'd hang out with them and talked to them.
Speaker 1: I just was thrilled to be around these people who
Speaker 1: were artists with spaces they could afford in Manhattan, and
Speaker 1: they were part of a culture in Manhattan back when
Speaker 1: SOHO before it got flipped, and especially Tribeca was a
Speaker 1: little I wouldn't say ceed, but more of.
Speaker 2: A kind of the wild West.
Speaker 1: I mean it was really kind of a like an
Speaker 1: open plane, if you will, And that's gone. Artists are gone,
Speaker 1: people won't afford are gone. They built Manhattan Plaza and
Speaker 1: said to you, if your income taxes jive with our formula,
Speaker 1: our algorithm, you can get in an apartment here, and
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. We know we needed twenty of those.
Speaker 1: We needed so many more Manhattan Plazas in this town
Speaker 1: or out in the outer boroughs to help maintain. And
Speaker 1: there's no sense of to me of that. What makes
Speaker 1: New York is that career diversity.
Speaker 3: Well, there's certainly a lot less affordability here as there
Speaker 3: are in other parts of the city, and that's the key.
Speaker 3: You need to have a place that you know, everybody
Speaker 3: can afford to live in. The workers, you know, the artists,
Speaker 3: the civil servants.
Speaker 1: Well, let me just say this to you Downtown, the
Speaker 1: warmth and the buildings and the history and everything that
Speaker 1: we crave and covet about the village, I'm grateful that
Speaker 1: you're working so hard to protect that.
Speaker 3: So thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for all
Speaker 3: your great work and for having me in here. Again.
Speaker 1: My thanks to Village Preservation Executive director Andrew Berman. This
Speaker 1: episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Speaker 1: We're produced by Kathleen Musso, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoben.
Speaker 1: Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Speaker 1: Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought
Speaker 1: to you by iHeart Radio Company,