The great Georgian-style Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Center on the east side of First Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets is one of the finest looking institutional buildings in the city and has since 1984 served as a homeless shelter.

Last year, the city indicated its intention to have it converted into a hotel and conference center and to transfer its homeless people to an existing facility in Brooklyn and to have the process go through the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP).

According to a article in today's on-line edition of The New York Observer by Dana Rubinstein, Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James said that not sending the project through ULURP "is a cute way of trying to go around the City Council, and I'm confident it will be subject to a legal challenge."

In a recent letter to Community Board 6, the article said that Christina DeRose, senior project manager at the City's Economic Development Corporation, said that it was determined by the New York City Law Department that the use restrictions associated with the project only apply for a disposition of the building to her corporation and since "HHC will lease the Psych Building directly to the selected developer and retain the lease revenue for Bellevue Hospital, her corporation will not take title to the property and therefore ULURP restrictions are not applicable." The article added, however, that Ms. DeRose "emphasized that, once a bidder is chosen for redevelopment, the proposal will still go through an extensive public review process."

The article said that some Brooklyn politicians are concerned that the redevelopment of the hospital will have an important impact on the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Crown Heights "one of the most notorious homeless shelters in the system." The Bellevue facility now houses Manhattan's largest homeless shelter with 850 beds.

The article said that the city has "committed to opening another Manhattan intake center in its place, though it has yet to indicate where" and "Mrs. James argued that the backtracking on the ULURP process removes one of the opposition's main points of negotiating leverage with the administration."

The city's "intake center for homeless men" originally was at East Third Street and the Bowery before it was moved to the exceeding handsome Bellevue building at 400 East 30th Street along Hospital Alley on First Avenue.

"The city's dangerous plan will significantly reduce access to emergency shelter for vulnerable homeless men sleeping on our streets, and will inevitably lead to worsening street homelessness in Manhattan," Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said in testimony prepared last Spring before an Assembly committee on Social Services, adding that she urged "the state to halt the city's plan and to ensure that the 'front door' of the adult shelter system is located in or near Midtown Manhattan, where most street homelessness is concentrated."

Robert V. Hess, the city's Commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services, however, countered in testimony at that hearing that the intake model was an outmoded and ineffective way of helping the homeless. Instead, he said, the department had shifted its emphasis toward outreach and permanent housing. In a September 19, 2008 article in The New York Times by Sewell Chan, Mr. Hess maintained that "bypassing shelters and trying to place homeless adults directly into regular housing --'permanency, not temporary stopgaps' -- is the more effective strategy."

The building was erected in 1931 and its patients have included Eugene O'Neill, Norman Mailer, Charlie Parker, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Ginsberg and Mark David Chapman.

It was designed by Charles B. Meyers who was also involving in the design of the great Art Deco-style Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street.