Currently shuttered nightclub and restaurant venue on top of Rockefeller Plaza calendared for public hearing in September 2012. On August 14, 2012, Landmarks took the first step to consider designating the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza as an interior landmark. The Rainbow Room has been closed since 2009, when Tishman Speyer Properties, the owner of the building, evicted Cipriani Restaurants from the space.
The Rainbow Room opened in 1934, … <Read More>
Despite the lack of visible grave markers, Queens cemetery found to contain sufficient historical and archaeological significance to merit designation. On August 14, 2012, Landmarks designated the Brinckerhoff Cemetery at 69-65 182nd Street in the Fresh Meadows section of Queens as an individual City landmark. From 1730 to 1872, the site served as a cemetery for the then-rural community, including the prominent Dutch families who settled the area. A 1919 survey identified 77 gravestones … <Read More>
Proposed building would feature a seven-story facade on Front Street and a twelve-and-a-half-foot-wide, four-story facade on Water Street. On July 24, 2012, Landmarks considered Andreas Giacoumis’s proposal to construct a new building on a vacant through-block lot at 246 Front Street and 267 ½ Water Street in the South Street Seaport Historic District. The lot has 20 feet of frontage on Front Street and twelve-and-a-half feet of frontage on Water Street. In 2003, … <Read More>
Landmarks approved a revised proposal for the Leonard Street site despite community opposition. On July 17, 2012, Landmarks approved developer Steven Schnall’s revised proposal to replace two one-story garages at 15 Leonard Street in the Tribeca West Historic District with a residential building. The nine-story, 108-foot building would rise seven stories at the streetwall, with a set-back, two-story penthouse. In February 2008, Landmarks approved a different plan to replace the garages with a seven-story … <Read More>
This article was originally published on 10/15/2011 (see below for update).
Dissent argued that City only belatedly added consideration of rezoning’s impact on low-income residents. In April 2009, the Department of City Planning proposed a 128-block contextual rezoning of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Planning sought to preserve the residential neighborhood’s built character while allowing new construction at a height and scale consistent with existing development. The proposal called for establishing height limits, mapping new … <Read More>
City Planning Commission certified 140-block Bed-Stuy North Rezoning and 90-block West Harlem Rezoning: included in the Brooklyn proposal is a text amendment that would also apply Citywide and to areas of the Bronx. At City Planning Commission’s review session on May 7, 2012, the Commission certified the Department of City Planning’s contextual rezoning proposal for the northern half of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The Bedford-Stuyvesant North Rezoning plan would impact a 140-block area generally bounded … <Read More>