Image credit: New York City Bar Association

A centennial symposium will celebrate the Nation’s first comprehensive zoning resolution: Leaders will look to past and future impact of zoning on the shaping of better cities. The Department of City Planning, in partnership with the New York City Bar Association, announced an all-day symposium titled Zoning at 100: A Symposium for the Future to take place on September 15, 2016. The symposium marks the 100th anniversary of the City’s Zoning Resolution which, when established in 1916, was the Nation’s first comprehensive regulation controlling land use and development.

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David Karnovsky argues before the Board of Standards and Appeals. Image credit: CityLand

Board rejected arguments an exterior building treatment did not qualify as an accessory sign under the Zoning Resolution.  On June 16, 2015 the Board of Standards and Appeals voted to uphold a Department of Buildings’ determination that a design treatment on the north face of a parking garage in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan constituted an accessory sign in violation of local zoning.  The design treatment, on the north face of the garage at 332 West 44th Street, incorporated the word “BRAVO!” as part of the design.

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Jewish Home Lifecare project site.

Community board argued that Commission should require Jewish Home Lifecare’s to seek special permit for new facility on West 97th Street. Jewish Home Lifecare, a health care provider for the elderly, planned to build a new 414-bed nursing home on West 97th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Jewish Home Lifecare operates a 514-bed facility at 120 West 106th Street. However, the building’s physical plant is outdated and inefficient, and Jewish Home Lifecare planned to relocate to a new 24-story facility on West 97th Street. The building would be located on a parking lot surrounded by the Park West Village Apartments. The proposed building would comply with the zoning requirements of the area’s underlying R7-2 district. However, Jewish Home Lifecare needed the City Planning Commission to issue a certification to the Department of Buildings in order to avoid seeking a special permit to build the facility, which, if required, would trigger public review pursuant to the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.

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When asked to discuss current trends coming out of City Planning, David Karnovsky, General Counsel since 1999, offered to start the conversation with the matters sitting on his desk. From Broadway’s first air rights sale, to a new community board planning tool, to implementation of City Planning’s complex rezoning plans, the conversation revealed developing trends. Karnovsky, a Harvard Law School graduate, joined City Planning after serving as Special Counsel to the Deputy Mayor of Operations in the Giuliani administration and ten years with the Law Department working on the Charter revision, the Fulton Fish Market, and the adult use zoning text.

Legitimate Theater. With the August 2006 approval of the air rights transfer from Broadway’s Hirschfeld Theatre, the first since the 1998 code amendment creating the Broadway air rights plan, Karnovsky found himself contemplating “what is legitimate theater?” The ’98 text requires two things to complete the transfer: the Broadway building must remain a legitimate theater, and the theater owner must pay into a theater fund managed by a not-for-profit. With the Hirschfeld application underway, City Planning had no definition of legitimate theater, no established theater fund and no not-for-profit. (read more…)