Posted Apr 26, 2016, 3:56 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,747
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http://www.villagevoice.com/news/sup...ooklyn-8546538
'Supertall' Tower Is Bloomberg's Parting Finger to Brooklyn
Neil Demause
APRIL 25, 2016
Quote:
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans last week for a 1,066-foot-tall tower to be built atop a portion of Flatbush Avenue's Dime Savings Bank, all but assuring that the Brooklyn skyline will soon be dominated by a giant bronze-and-glass finger rising next door to Junior's. Reaction ranged from "enlightened urbanism at its best" (landmarks commissioner and architect Frederick Bland) to "I kind of dig the building but huh, it is tall. Too tall" (pretty much all of Twitter).
The Dime skyscraper — being built by union-busting crusader Michael Stern and real-estate arbitrageur Joe Chetrit and designed by SHoP Architects, the same people who gave us the Barclays Center's dripping-rust-colored exterior — will be undeniably tall, nearly double the height of 333 Schermerhorn Street, the 610-foot rental apartment building that last year grabbed the title of Brooklyn's tallest in the borough's never-ending game of top-this.
Media reports cited the new building's soaring height as allowable "as-of-right" — a/k/a, needing no special zoning exceptions — hence the only required permission was from the landmarks commission, an appointed board whose mission is to focus on things like how the tower will affect the neighboring bank lobby. (In case you're wondering: The teller windows will be maintained as-is until a retail tenant arrives, at which point they'll presumably be repurposed as Genius Bars or some such thing.)
How developers got to stick up a thousand-foot erection in a borough that had until recently been limited to the height of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, though, isn't so much a story of picayune landmarks bureaucracy or even the "new Brooklyn" meme. Rather, it's the fallout of a decision made more than a decade ago by the Bloomberg administration that will end up effectively doubling the height of the Brooklyn skyline.
.....The Bloomberg rezoning took a huge swath of downtown Brooklyn — everything in a triangle bounded by Fulton Street, Willoughby Street, and Flatbush Avenue, plus a few adjacent blocks — and changed that to C6-4.5, a newly invented (since this is Brooklyn, we should probably say "bespoke") category that raised the limit to a least 10 FAR, meaning buildings could be nearly triple the bulk as allowed under the old rules.
Building height, meanwhile, is governed by a set of even murkier bureaucratic designations, including the "sky exposure plane," an imaginary line rising diagonally from the street that no building is allowed to penetrate. (This gimmick — put in place in the city's original 1916 zoning law to put an end to the sky-darkening towers that were starting to clog Manhattan's narrow downtown streets — is what led to the iconic skyscraper form of midcentury, best seen in the Empire State Building's gently stepped appearance.) There are ways to work around the sky exposure plane — think Sixth Avenue's wall of glass boxes set amid bland public plazas — but the C6-4.5 designation did away with height limits entirely: Whereas under the old law, towers had to top out at no more than 495 feet; following the Bloomberg rezoning, the sky was almost literally the limit.
And the current crop of skyscrapers isn't likely to be the last. Atlantic Yards Report's Norman Oder noted in February that Ratner and his China-based development partners, Greenland, had transferred a pile of development rights from the Barclays Center site across the street, which would allow for a 1.5-million-square-foot monster building as much as 900 feet tall, which Oder dubbed the "Brooklyn behemoth." And since that site was seized by the state-run Empire State Development Corporation as part of Ratner's Atlantic Yards mega-project — something that the current occupant, a P.C. Richard store, is suing to overturn — any development there is free to ignore city zoning, meaning the Dime tower could soon have company on the Brooklyn skyline.
The Dime tower, truth be told, isn't especially ugly by modern skyscraper standards — its bundle-of-sticks profile even tapers slightly as it rises, in a nod to the golden age of setbacks. And if you're lucky enough, you may even get a chance to enjoy its views without first inheriting hedge fund wealth: Stern and Chetrit have applied for tax breaks in exchange for including twenty percent "affordable" units in their building, though that's currently on hold until the state legislature figures out whether and how to revive the 421 — a tax break program that expired earlier this year.
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