Union Square Tech Hub Gets Full City Council Approval

GRAMERCY, NY — The Union Square Tech Training Center earned the City Council's unanimous approval Wednesday, despite community concerns that the 21-story project will kick start a wave of high-rises in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The tech hub will replace the former P.C. Richard & Son store on East 14th Street at Irving Place, where non-profit Civic Hall will run a digital skills training center to create a path for New Yorkers toward well-paying jobs in the tech industry.

Civic Hall was recently granted $100,000 from Microsoft to go toward the training center, which was proposed by the de Blasio administration as part of the mayor’s New York Works initiative and is expected to create more than 600 jobs.

Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, whose district includes the 240,000-square-foot tech center, was unable to secure sweeping land use protections for which local preservationists fiercely advocated.

Instead she was able to negotiate a protective commercial zoning measure in the neighborhoods south of 14th Street, landmarking up to seven Broadway properties and commitments from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Housing, Preservation and Development agency to work with locals on preservation and tenants rights campaigns in the area.

The deal was a worthy compromise in Rivera's eyes, she said in a statement after Wednesday's 45-0 vote.

"In the end, I recognized that walking away would not only leave our community without a top-flight tech training enter, but also without a single neighborhood protection," said Rivera in an open letter to her district. "Voting no meant we would still get a tall, glass office building and the same threats of overdevelopment."

The proposal faced staunch criticism form the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, which fears the project's up-zoning will spur hyper-development in the area and transform the surrounding neighborhoods into a hodgepodge of gleaming, glass towers.

Preservationists with the group long pushed for the tech center's approval only if it came with zoning regulations to limit the height of incoming developments. The final deal did not include such protections.

The group called the approved plan "a fraction of a fraction of the neighborhood protections" locals demanded.

"While the protections being offered are better than nothing, they will not be sufficient to protect the neighborhood from the rising wave of out-of-character development, which will be exacerbated by the approval of the commercial up-zoning of the 14th Street site for the Tech Hub," said the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation in a statement.

"This approval sends a signal to developers that this part of town, from Union Square to Astor Place, is in fact an extension of Silicon Alley, and now part of 'Midtown South,'" the statement continued.

Image courtesy of Mayor's Office of New York City