BY SAM SPOKONY | Longtime Chelsea residents are once again at odds with the city over quality of life complaints, claiming that their voices simply aren’t being heard when they seek action or answers from enforcement officials.
Two ongoing issues have surfaced at the behest of tenants backed by the West 15th Street 100 and 200 Block Association. While both problems stem from alleged legal infractions by neighbors on their street, the residents’ biggest beef continues to be with the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) — which the block association has gone so far as to call “lawless” in its accused indifference to the concerns of embattled Chelsea tenants.
“In a lawful society, where are we supposed to get information, if city agencies aren’t providing it to the residents or the community board?” wonders Stanley Bulbach, president of the block association and a West 15th Street resident since 1969.
Residents are concerned about the opening of a new luxury apartment building at 101 West 15th Street (between Sixth & Seventh Avenues), which features a courtyard that will be used to host outdoor movie screenings and live music performances — potentially threatening the nighttime peace and quiet of the not-so-luxurious neighbors whose apartment windows open onto the courtyard space.
And on the 200 block, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, residents say they’ve been calling 311 in vain for more than three years to complain about late night parties on the roof of 233 West 15th Street, which they fear may someday collapse due to the extreme overcrowding that has taken place.
But in one case, the DOB says it’s too early to act, and in the other, it appears that miscommunication may have been the root of the trouble all along.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, (IN) ACTION
The busy corner of West 15th Street and Sixth Ave. once housed hundreds of staff employees for the former St. Vincent’s Hospital. After the demise of St. Vincent’s, the hospital-owned building at 101 West 15th Street was eventually sold at auction in June 2010, and was bought — with a winning bid of $67 million — by a subsidiary group of Stonehenge Partners.
Stonehenge, one of the elite Manhattan developers, currently owns 22 residential properties throughout the borough’s priciest districts, including two others in Chelsea and its latest acquisition on West 15th Street.
The developer renovated 101 West 15th Street — which just recently opened to tenants — into a 160-unit, all-luxury residential space, where studios start at $3,400 per month, and one-bedroom apartments start at $4,435 per month. Stonehenge also constructed nearly 13,000 square feet of street-level retail space at the same address, which will remain separate from the residential portion of the building.
Using a flashy promotional website for the new apartment building (101w15.com), as well as a pitch to prospective tenants on its own site, Stonehenge says that 101 West 15th Street “combines an unparalleled location, a completely renovated interior and cutting edge amenities to offer a truly unique living opportunity for the discerning rental apartment seeker.”
But one of those amenities, which the developer calls an “outdoor movie theater,” is making neighbors nervous about future noise problems — and some are calling on the DOB to stop Stonehenge from creating the movie theater (or at least investigate the matter), claiming that any use of the outdoor theater would violate city zoning laws.
According to renderings and information on the 101 West 15th Street website, the movie theater’s screen will be housed in part of the building’s courtyard area. The screen and seating for the theater — which will take the form of a wide staircase linking the basement gym to the courtyard, thus providing amphitheater-style seating — will both technically sit between the basement and just above ground level, although there will be no enclosure to block light or noise resulting from the movies being shown.
Robert Boddington, president of the co-op at 115 and 115 ½ West 15th Street, a member of the 100 and 200 Block Association, and a block resident since 1972, pointed out that a potentially huge problem with the open-air theater space is the fact that the 101 courtyard is part of an outdoor space that also includes the back windows of the buildings at 113, 115 and 117 West 15th Street, as well as 114 W. 16th Street. (The 101 West 15th Street building already covers the space for what would have been numbers 103, 105, 107, 109 and 111).
“Anyone can watch movies in their apartments, but this is basically like cutting a hole in the basement [of 101] and letting out all that sound, and making everyone in those neighboring buildings listen to it,” Boddington said.
Boddington also explained why he believes that the sound in the courtyard will carry so easily, and so annoyingly, to neighboring windows. He held a noise meter outside his own window (approximately 75 feet away, he said) to measure the loudness of two amplified music performances that have already been held in the outdoor space behind 101.
The first concert, in July, took place between 2pm and 5pm and registered a reading of 91 decibels on the noise meter, Boddington said. The second concert, in August, which took place between 7pm and 9pm, registered a reading of 81 decibels.
According to data published on the website for the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the average person should not be continuously exposed to 91 decibels worth of noise for more than two hours, at the risk of suffering hearing damage.
It is partly for this reason that Boddington, in his quest to convince the DOB and other city agencies like the Department of City Planning (DCP) to weigh in on Stonehenge’s outdoor movie theater, has the full support of the West 15th Street 100 and 200 Block Association and other block residents, according to Stanley Bulbach.
Another side of Boddington’s argument, as previously mentioned, is the claim that the very nature of the staircase that forms the seating for that below-ground, amphitheater-style theater violates city zoning laws. The zoning text, he points out, states that a stairway of this type is technically not allowed to be constructed within and beneath a courtyard space.
But although he has tried for the past two months — with the help of a representative of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office — to get a response from DCP regarding this issue, Boddington said that the agency simply hasn’t provided any real answers.
The DOB (which would be the agency to block this use if it were found in violation of city codes) has also indicated that it isn’t going to get involved in the issue.
According to a spokesperson for the agency, DOB has previously judged that an outdoor movie theater of this type is not prohibited — apparently rendering any other technical arguments to be moot points, if the agency chooses not to investigate further — and that the theater is considered an acceptable accessory to a residential building, as long as it is operated for the sole private use of the building’s residents.
Any noise complaints regarding the use of the movie theater would have to be referred to the local police precinct or the city’s Department of Environmental Protection — but, as the DOB spokesperson also pointed out, it will be impossible to know how loud or disruptive the theater will actually be until it is actually put into use.
On another note, the outdoor theater at 101 West 15th Street will be used as a tool for partnership between Stonehenge and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, according to 101w15.com. This seems fitting, given that the Film Society receives “major” financial support from Stonehenge, according to its own website (filmlinc.com).
Stonehenge did not respond to requests for comment.
THREE DOZEN’S A CROWD ON THIS ROOF
Stanley Bulbach lives just down the block from 233 West 15th Street, and he, along with multiple other residents on the 200 block, say they been frustrated for about five years by huge late-night (and some daytime) parties on the 233 rooftop. But besides typical quality of life complaints about loud parties, he believes the most disturbing part of this issue has been dangerous overcrowding on the roof.
“We greatly fear that there will be a structural collapse there,” said Bulbach, speaking for the aforementioned block association he represents, and adding that he and other residents have seen up to two or three dozen people crammed onto the two-tier rooftop.
Not a large building by any means, 233 West 15th Street stands at four stories, and only the two top-floor apartments have roof access.
Other residents complained about aspects of the parties, which — back in 2010 and 2011 — were reportedly held by tenants who were professional party promoters, and included catered food and loud DJs.
“It’s gotten so noisy, and whenever they have parties, the people up there all get really drunk and stupid,” said Sharon Mear, a resident of 237 West 15th Street, who has lived on the block for over 30 years.
A resident of 227, who asked not to be named, said that she found that tenants at 233 were at one point actually charging money for guests at the rooftop parties.
While claiming that the troubling activity still takes place from time to time, the neighbors do concede that the parties have slowed down as of late, and that the 233 rooftop has been pretty quiet over the past three or four months. This probably has to do with a change in tenants in the top apartments of that building in late 2011.
“These accusations all seem very bizarre and ridiculous,” said a current tenant of one of the top-floor apartments at 233, who asked not to be named, but who said they moved into the apartment in October 2011. “We haven’t had any complaints in all the time we’ve lived here. There are no late-night parties and we’re very respectful of the neighbors.”
The aforementioned complaining residents generally scoffed at this assessment by the current 233 tenant, as well as responses by the building’s property manager, Jonathan Nagin (an employee of Superior Management, which owns the 233 building), who recently told this reporter that he believes his tenants over the years have never abused their rooftop privileges, and that they are in fact “explicitly forbidden” from throwing parties.
But, having said all that, the biggest problem here — at least to Bulbach and the block association — is still the continuing lack of response from the DOB on this issue.
Back in 2010, the parties at 233 were reportedly so frequent that the neighboring residents were calling 311 nonstop in an attempt to get the DOB to investigate and stop overcrowding on the roof.
And since there was never any response from the agency, the block association even got Community Board 4 (CB4) to write a letter to the agency in December 2010, demanding action. That letter, in nearly three years, has never received a response from the DOB.
And then, after a reported rash of parties on the 233 rooftop this past April, Bulbach and the block association tried to revive the issue by sending a letter to Speaker Quinn’s office, hoping that one of the Speaker’s representatives could finally get a response from the DOB.
Bulbach said that at meeting of the Council of Chelsea Block Associations that took place two months ago, a member of Quinn’s office reported that there was again no response from the city agency.
The block association has not taken kindly to this, and residents continue to believe that their concerns are simply being marginalized and ignored, especially given the fact that they have actually documented instances of overcrowding on the 233 rooftop.
“The issue of whether the DOB is acting lawlessly is something that people are really talking about around here,” Bulbach said. “Has the mayor’s office gone imperial? Are people just making up the laws now?”
When asked about why the DOB has never responded to a 311 call regarding overcrowding at 233 West 15th Street — and why it has never even logged one of those complaints, according to a public database on the agency’s website — a DOB spokesperson chalked it up to a sense of miscommunication that results from the type of complaints that were registered by neighbors.
In a 311 call, any mention of loud, late-night partying — regardless of accompanying complaints of overcrowding — means that the call is directed to the local police precinct, according to the DOB. Since this was apparently the case (according to the DOB) in all the 311 calls made by West 15th Street residents about this issue, none of their complaints ever even reached the agency.
With this in mind, it seems clear that, in future occurrences, residents who wish to inform the city about potentially dangerous overcrowding will have to choose their words more carefully — although this obviously leaves any positive conclusion to the issue behind a rather nebulous veil.
And, having said that, any police intervention — or lack thereof — at the 233 rooftop has apparently not had any positive effect on the situation, in the eyes of block residents.
A community affairs officer at the NYPD’s 10th Precinct did not respond to request for comment.
In addition, the DOB response to this newspaper’s inquiry — a response which did not include any actual statements on the record — did not address the fact that the 2010 letter written by CB4, and the 2013 attempt by the block association and Quinn’s office to get a response, were virtually ignored.
