short One York v. tall tower / NY Post offers part of the (temporary) sculpture garden story

we’ve been here before (recently)
Today’s NY Post residential real estate section has two pieces of interest to Manhattan loft aficionados by Max Gross. One is a love note to the southernmost blocks in Soho, with recaps of hotels, condo development (built, and planned), even rental buildings with units asking as high as $7,000/mo along Canal Street (Gung SoHo). The other (Renew York) looks to the south, in a very focused mash note to a building I touched on yesterday (a tale of two Ones in Tribeca, Worth vs. York). The Gross mash note offers a strange hypothetical:

If you wanted to pinpoint the one property that chanted a few magic words and removed the gritty curse of Canal Street, it would probably be One York …

Why would you want to pinpoint a property that removed the “gritty curse of Canal Street”, using magic or prosaic words? Yes, One York reduced the gritty Canal Street curse, but nothing is going to remove it (yet; not while cars still need to get to New Jersey). But Gross likes the new CaVaLa Park just to the north and a bit west in the narrow triangle formed by Canal Street traffic coming east, Varick Street traffic heading south, and still more traffic exiting the Holland Tunnel heading east, and I can’t blame him. It is great to look at, and under the correct (rare!) traffic conditions is probably nice to sit in, for a while.

a pregnant parenthetical
Gross also like the view north, up Sixth Avenue, at a park, and at a new hotel:

North of One York, there’s a sculpture garden that Trinity Church has (temporarily) erected, as well as the chic new James hotel.

Yes, that (temporary) sculpture garden is nice, but did you notice that the on-line version of the article has a hyperlink for the owner of that (temporary) sculpture garden. The 5th article on the list under the hyperlink is a February 22 Wall Street Journal article about Trinity’s plans to rezone the neighborhood to the north and west of One York, including plans to build

a new 420-seat primary school … in a yet-to-be-built apartment tower on land owned by Trinity at the intersection of Canal and Varick streets and Sixth Avenue.

That yet-to-be-built tower is further described in an article from The Villager (Feb 10 – 16 edition) as a:

429-foot-tall, residential tower at Duarte Square … at the wide-streets intersection of Canal and Varick Sts. and Sixth Ave. … Trinity is also obligated to build a park on part of the property at Duarte Square as part of the development

If you look at the map with either of these articles, you will see that the site of the proposed 429 foot tower is that (temporary) sculpture garden! So maybe One York’s residents should not get used to all of the northern panorama across the cursed Canal Street.

Seriously, I don’t see how you write an article in which a lovely (temporary) sculpture garden is important enough to mention without opening up the parenthetical with very recent news, very easily found, about how temporary that garden may prove to be.

crazy thought about zoning and Soho
I gather that the re-zoning that Trinity proposes is not in Soho Proper. But would it be absurd if that re-zoning plan were considered at the same time as a re-zoning of Soho Proper that would permit residential ownership by non-artists?? (You know, as in my March 5, is renter protection the thorniest (and separable) piece of the Soho artist in residence puzzle?.)

© Sandy Mattingly 2011