City Planning Commission votes for rezoning of St. Vincent's site to permit residential use

The City Planning Commission today approved a rezoning of the shuttered St. Vincent's Hospital site in Greenwich Village that will permit Rudin Management to convert several of the former hospital buildings to luxury condos, and to demolish others and replace them with new high-rise luxury condo construction.

The proposed rezoning must now go to the City Council for public hearings and a vote; the rezoning only takes effect if approved by the Council.

"Thanks to today's actions by the City Planning Commission, the West Side of Manhattan is now one step away from seeing a significant revitalization of the St. Vincent's campus and its surrounding area," said William Rudin, CEO of Rudin Management, in a statement. He added that the project will create more than 1,600 construction and permanent jobs.

The developer plans to erect a luxury condo tower with a total of up to 450 units plus five townhouses on Seventh Avenue from West 11th to West 12th streets.

Additionally, Rudin Management plans to convert the hospital's O'Toole Building into a 24-hour emergency-care center and transfer it to North Shore-LIJ Health System. It also will create a new 16,500-square-foot public park and a new 564-seat public elementary school at the Foundling Hospital.

Community Board 2, which represents the neighborhood, had voted against Rudin Management's plans in October expressing concerns over density in Greenwich Village and increased traffic to the neighborhood. The board, however, did approve of the new open space that will be created from the development. Other critics of the plan point out that the emergency-care facility fails to adequately replace a full-service hospital in the neighborhood.

"It's deeply disappointing that the City Planning Commission rubber-stamped this plan and granted a well-connected developer privileges which were originally intended for a hospital," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in a statement. "To do so opens a Pandora's box of profoundly negative potential consequences, not just for this neighborhood but the city as a whole."

The hospital's plan has been very controversial for it originally called for the demolition of the low-rise O'Toole building to make way for a major new curved hospital building designed by I. M. Pei's office.

Although the building lies within the Greenwich Village Historic District, the hospital won the right to demolish on the grounds of economic hardship.

When the hospital went into bankruptcy in 2010, however, its plans for a new hospital were scuttled and the fate of the nautical-like design of the O'Toole building seemed saved.

The hospital had made a deal with Rudin Management for most of its properties on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets and planned to pay for the new hospital with the proceeds from the sale to Rudin.

According to Rudin Management, the new condo tower, which will take the place of two old Seventh Avenue hospital buildings, will be 203 feet high, 33 feet or five stories shorter than it had originally planned. Also, under the new plan five historic buildings on the campus will be adaptively re-used.

The plan was broadly opposed by the local community, which objected to a private developer of for-profit luxury housing being granted the same the special zoning privileges given to St. Vincent's Hospital in 1979 for the construction of large new hospital buildings.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation opposed and continues to oppose the proposed rezoning. The St. Vincent's site was zoned specifically to facilitate hospital development in 1979. Rudin, it maintains, is seeking to have the site upzoned for luxury residential development in order to build at nearly the same bulk and density given to the former hospital, although the hospital was given permission for extra-large buildings based upon the public service it provided. The Rudin condo development, the society argues, will serve no such public purpose, and zoning for this site, and for the West Village generally, limits residential development to a much smaller scale

"It's deeply disappointing that the City Planning Commission rubber-stamped this plan and granted a well-connected developer privileges which were originally intended for a hospital," said GVSHP Executive Director Andrew Berman. "This opens a pandora's box of profoundly negative potential consequences, not just for this neighborhood but the city as a whole. We urge the City Council not to make this same mistake, and to protect our neighborhoods, and our public facilities and the special considerations given to them, from being exploited in this way by private developers," he added.

Rudin Management presented new plans in September for St. Vincent's Triangle at the intersection of Seventh Avenue, 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village.

The triangular block has long been used as a trucking facility by St. Vincent's Hospital that owned much of the block across Seventh Avenue and the Edward and Theresa O'Toole Medical Services Building across 12th Street.

The hospital had planned to build a new hospital on the O'Toole site and had sold its numerous buildings on the east side of Seventh Avenue to Rudin Management that plans to convert some of them to residential use as well as build new residential buildings on the site.

Rick Parisi of M. Paul Friedberg and Partners presented the park plans at a Community Board 2 meeting. The plans call for a 15,102-square-foot park with more than 600 seats, 31 trees and 4,861 square feet of plantings.

Melanie Meyers, a Rudin spokesperson, said that the park would likely include a memorial, perhaps for the Sisters of Charity of New York, who founded St. Vincent's in 1846, adding that "two representatives of the Queer History Alliance proposed that the triangle be used for what they called the New York City AIDS Memorial Park."

Among the many residential buildings nearby are the six-story, 104-unit cooperative apartment building at 145 West 12th Street, the 16-story, 106-unit cooperative apartment building at Lawrence House building at 145 West 12th Street, the 19-story, 214 condominium apartment Century Towers at 175 West 12th Street, and the recently completed, 30-unit condominium apartment building at One Jackson Square.