5 East Village Buildings Eligible as Landmarks Just 8 Years Ago Are Approved for Demolition

Dozens of people who lived in a stretch of historic buildings in the East Village were given just a month-and-a-half's notice to leave their homes after a $127 million deal set their buildings up for a sweeping demolition. Now the stretch of Old Law Tenement apartments—that were considered historic landmarks just eight years ago—is waiting to be destroyed to pave way for a hotel targeted toward millennials.

The city on Thursday approved applications by a development group to demolish five buildings on East 11th Street between Third and Fourth avenues to make room for a rumored Marriott hotel marketed toward younger people, The Real Deal reported.

A group of neighborhood organizations and preservationists wrote a proposal to the Landmark Preservation Committee two months prior to the decision to demolish the buildings to save them. The preservationists said the LPC never responded to the letter.

"It's often the case you bring these things to the commission's attention just as the building is going through the wrecking ball, when it's too late," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and one of the groups that put together the proposal to save the buildings. "But here, they had a two-month lead, and not only did they not act, they didn't even respond to the request that we sent them. That is particularly disturbing."

The LPC did not respond to requests for comment.

Included in the letter is a document in which the LPC itself designated 112-120 East 11th St. as eligible to be a New York City Landmark in 2008.

A building is considered eligible to be a city landmark only if it is at least 30 years old and has "a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the City, state, or nation," according to the LPC website.

The buildings are Old Law Tenement apartments built between 1887 and 1892, according to city records.

Eight years later, the buildings are considered eligible for demolition.

The June 9 letter to save the buildings was also signed by Historic Districts Council, Lower East Side Preservation Initiative and East Village Community Coalition.

"This is a wonderful little piece of New York City history we are losing," Berman said.

"I've gotten a lot of phone calls asking how could they possibly be demolishing these buildings," said Simeon Bankoff, executive director of Historic Districts Council. "People came to this area, and inhabited these buildings, and created a shared history, that without the buildings, there's no record of. Without the buildings you might as well just read a bunch of books and imagine it in your head," he said.

A tenant who lived with a roommate at 120 East 11th St. from December 2013-April 2016 said Pan Am Equities waited until mid-March to inform her she couldn't renew her lease, which ended April 30, 2016. The tenant, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Patch she called the Pan Am office twice in early March, and both times they had told her she would receive her lease renewal documents shortly in the mail. When she received nothing in the mail, she called March 11 and insisted they tell her the renewal terms over the phone. They told her she would not have the option to renew her lease.

"This was the new norm," she said. "Once your lease was up, so was your tenancy there."

She received the option to use her security deposit towards her last month of rent, she said. "Otherwise, I was left to search and put money up for a new apartment in 1.5 month's time. Hardly seemed fair."

She was friendly with her neighbors, and as the buildings emptied in April, she said they took on a very "eerie air." "Definitely was an awesome building, and I was sad to be forced to move," she said.

On Tuesday morning, a flurry of announcements were still pinned to the entrance boards of the building, and takeout menus lined the doors, but there were no tenants moving in and out of the buildings, Patch discovered. Outdated signs in the entrances said Pan Am Equities, the management company that sold the buildings to Lightstone in April as part of a $127 million deal, owned the buildings. Pan Am Equities declined to comment on the demolitions.

José Chavez, the former superintendent of the buildings, told Patch on Tuesday he was given notice by the city of the buildings' evacuations six months ago, and that he officially retired from his job as superintendent 10 days ago. He said all the tenants had been evacuated, but he did not know exactly when or how they left the buildings.

The Lightstone Group filed five permits with the city to demolish 112, 114, 116, 118, and 120 East 11th St. for what will be a 300-key Moxy hotel. Moxy is a branch of Marriott hotels that targets millennials with cheaper prices and a hipper aesthetic.

Moxy's website says a location in "Manhattan/Greenwich" on 11th Street will be opening "late 2018."

Moxy announced in early 2015 that it planned to spend $1 billion on four Moxy hotels in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and one in Los Angeles. Mitchell Hochberg, president of Lightstone, called Moxy "the antidote to Airbnb" to Boutique Hotel News in June.

Neither The Lightstone Group nor Marriott responded to request for comment.

"We have an administration that claims that housing for average New Yorkers is their number-one priority, but they refuse to act to save these buildings. And now we're gonna have a transient hotel for millennials with a lot of disposable income," Berman said.

Community members are concerned the hotel will bring with it massive traffic jams. The block already has Webster Hall, a popular concert venue that attracts lines of people hundreds of feet out the door (remember this mess outside the venue when Kanye West was scheduled for a surprise performance in June?), a movie theater that hosts films of the Tribeca Film Festival, a large neighborhood bar, and a post office. "It's really asking for a disaster," Bankoff said.

The hotel cannot be taller than 125 ft. due to an East Village rezoning law passed in 2010, Berman told Patch. The law was passed in reaction to several tall dorms being built in the neighborhood for New York University students, which preservationists felt looked out of place. "The area was simply getting saturated with college students, and in a sense now, with this new hotel, it's sort of a different version of the same thing," Berman said.

Correction: The local bar Village Pourhouse is 122 East 11th Street and will not be included in the demolition. Amsterdam Billiards is located at 110 East 11th Street and will also not be included in the demolition.

All images except historic photo from 1937 by Sarah Kaufman/Patch