BY PATRICK HEDLUND | Just weeks before a collection of Chelsea rowhouses almost assuredly receives landmark designation by the city, the most historic property of the bunch had its application for additional construction work revoked to the delight of local preservationists.
The Hopper Gibbons House, which is part of the proposed Lamartine Place Historic District encompassing a dozen neighboring properties on W. 29th St., has a verifiable history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. After unearthing details of the property’s past as a home to Quaker abolitionists, a group of local preservationists began pushing for its designation as a city landmark while attempting to stop the owner from performing construction work on the building between Eighth and Ninth Aves.
In an earlier audit, the Department of Buildings had deemed the work to add fifth floor to the property illegal, but construction was still allowed to proceed on the additional floor and a penthouse unit above that. But the grassroots efforts of neighbors Fern Luskin and Julie Finch to halt construction resulted in further scrutiny from the DOB, which led the department to pull the permits for the penthouse addition.
Now, with the full revocation of the owners’ application for the work, there remains a question over whether the developers will be forced to remove the offending additions altogether.
“We all hope this will mean that these illegal additions and the scaffolding will be torn down,” said Luskin, who along with Finch just received the 2009 Underground Railroad Free Press Prize for Preservation, the highest honor in the international Underground Railroad community.
Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and an advocate for the Hopper Gibbons house, explained that the DOB’s newest ruling further restricts what the owners can do. “This is a stronger action that DOB took, and it doesn’t leave the owner in the position to fiddle with the application and re-submit it in a slightly altered way,” he said.
According to Berman, it’s a “realistic possibility” that the city could force the owners to take down the penthouse addition, which was never fully built, and possibly even the fifth floor. “It’s hard to achieve that,” he added, “but I think there’s a clear paper trial at this point that the addition should have never been approved and was never legal in the first place.”
John Hulme, the project architect, refused to comment on the matter but has previously stated that work would continue “as soon as possible.”
Currently, with the Landmarks Preservation Commission scheduled to vote on the designation on Oct. 13 — which, if successful, would add another layer of protection to the property — the chances that any construction will resume in the near future are virtually nil.
“In my opinion, there’s no basis for [work] legally moving forward,” Berman added. “That being said, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
