BY DENNIS LYNCH | The Landmarks Preservation Commission told the owners of the Keller Hotel on Tuesday to head back to the drawing board and revise their plans to turn the Barrow St. landmark into an upscale hotel.
The owners of the individual city landmark and an adjacent lot, William Gottlieb Real Estate, want to renovate the existing building’s interior, convert some rooms into apartments, add a glass-encased rooftop addition, and also a third-story outdoor terrace, according to paperwork filed with the Department of Buildings.
William Gottlieb Real Estate also plans to demolish the neighboring one-story garages at 144 Barrow St. to construct a seven-story building attached to the Keller Hotel. Those garages are not landmarked, but at least one L.P.C. commissioner was curious how connecting a new building there to the Keller would affect the landmark.
In general, the commissioners asked the applicant to reduce the height of the planned rooftop addition.
Village residents made clear their disdain for the project at both a Community Board 2 meeting last week and the L.P.C. hearing. Neighbors of the Barrow St. landmark worry the project will create a high-priced party spot. Many are particularly miffed over the planned addition of a rooftop structure that architects, in a permit filing, called an “outdoor recreation space for residential tenants.” They worry it will be too loud for neighbors, especially for people living at Bailey House right next door.
Bailey House, where 40 people currently live, is the country’s first residence for people with H.I.V. / AIDS. The charity focuses on the formerly homeless, and offers on-site health services, counseling and of course what should be a quiet and comfortable room to sleep in.
“There’s a human cost associated with that, and I think people need to be a little more vocal about what the human impact is of doing development like this,” said Regina Joseph, who lives directly next door to the garages. “The Keller is part of the history of the neighborhood, but so is Bailey House.”
Her neighbor Daniela Turley believes the rooftop addition and the new building at the garage site would totally block off Bailey House’s light. The neighbors worry they would suffer the same fate as residents near the boutique hotel The Jane, at Jane and West Sts. The Jane’s neighbors have long complained of excessive noise, rowdy patrons and traffic generated by the trendy nightspot. Joseph also thought the rooftop addition wasn’t in line with the hotel’s history. The owners made a mock-up on the roof to show L.P.C. — and neighbors aren’t fans.
“It’s certainly out of character and out of scale,” Joseph said. “We can see it. It doesn’t matter how far you set it back. You can see it from across Barrow St., from Christopher St., from the Christopher St. Pier. The further out you go on the pier, the more visible it becomes.”
The Keller Hotel was built in 1898 and for decades catered to visitors and immigrants who disembarked from ferries and transatlantic ships at landings across what is now the West Side Highway. By 1935, it mainly housed “transient sailors,” according to the hotel’s 2007 L.P.C. designation report.
William Gottlieb, an eccentric local real estate mogul, bought the property in 1985. The late Gottlieb, who owned around 100 properties of all kinds in the city — many of them in the Village and Meat Market area — was known for his rumpled attire, driving a beat-up station wagon with missing windows, and almost never renovating or otherwise investing in his properties. Gottlieb let the Keller Hotel sit vacant for years.
The city converted it into a single-room occupancy (S.R.O.) — month-to-month rental units — in 1993, according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has advocated for its preservation. Gottlieb died in 1999 and leaving all to his sister, Mollie Bender.
Bender died in 2007 and a feud ensued among her son — who she left many of those properties to — and other hopeful heirs in the family. Her son, Neil Bender, won in court in 2010 and has been partnering and developing his uncle’s multimillion-dollar properties in recent years.
William Gottlieb Real Estate has partnered with investors on a number of projects on the old man’s properties in the Village. The company is behind the hotly opposed “Gansevoort Row” project in the Gansevoort Market Historic District that Save Gansevoort, an ad hoc preservation group, has sued over. That project would demolish a row of one- and two-story buildings for two multistory commercial buildings.
Opponents call the “Gansevoort Row” plans grossly out of context and charge that the project would replace buildings that contribute to the context of the historic district. A state civil court judge halted any work there until the lawsuit is resolved, which could happen next month.
William Gottlieb Real Estate is also behind the troubled reconstruction of the former Pastis restaurant, at 9-19 Ninth Ave., just around the corner of the proposed “Gansevoort Row” development. The plan is to turn that property into a flagship store for the interior-decorating retailer Restoration Hardware. A construction worker was killed on site there in an accident in 2015, and D.O.B. warned project partner Aurora Capital Associates that the proposed 58,659-square-foot store was almost six times as large as what the Building Code allows, according to DNAinfo.
