| NYguy |
Sep 23, 2014 11:56 AM |
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/ny...mark.html?_r=0
A Tower Will Rise Next to, and Over, a Paint-Spattered Landmark
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SEPT. 22, 2014
By ARIEL KAMINER
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In a city built on unlikely juxtapositions, there may be no odder neighbors than the Art Students League, which occupies an ornate French Renaissance-style building at 215 West 57th Street, and the Nordstrom Tower, an ultramodern pillar, at least 1,500 feet tall, that will rise beside it.
Beside it, and above it, to be precise. Starting about 300 feet up, the eastern edge of the Nordstrom Tower will jut out 28 feet over the league’s 1892 home, which is a landmark, making this improbable piece of streetscape even more curious: the brash upstart reaching out to a fragile dowager for support.
Is the relationship a beneficial one? The answer, as they might say in one of the Art Students League’s drawing classes, is a matter of perspective.
Planned to be the tallest residential structure in the hemisphere, the tower belongs to a new class of buildings — most clustered in the area directly south of Central Park — so extravagantly vertical that a new term has been coined for them: not just tall but hypertall. Its top story will be higher than the top floor of 1 World Trade Center (but lower than its needle).
In 2005, the Extell Development Corporation paid the league $23.1 million for 136,000 square feet of air rights, part of the more than one million square feet it assembled from buildings in the area. Last year, the idea emerged to push the tower slightly off the edge of its pedestal; the shift allowed for a better floor plan for Nordstrom, the tower’s main retail tenant, and better views of the park for the tower’s residential tenants, as well as bigger and presumably more expensive apartments for them to live in.
For 6,000 additional square feet of air rights for the cantilever, Extell paid the league an additional $31.8 million. “They kind of got me back for the good deal I got years ago,” said Gary Barnett, Extell’s founder and president.
For 139 years, the Art Students League has opened its doors to all comers, from empty-nesters looking for a new hobby to celebrated painters, sculptors, printmakers and the like. The list of its most famous alumni reads like the index of an art history textbook, including Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ai Weiwei, an honoree at its coming gala. Most classes meet five times a week, for three and a half hours a day, and cost just $230 a month, which works out to about $3 an hour. More than 2,500 students are currently enrolled.
Designed by Henry Hardenburg, the architect of the Plaza and the Dakota, the league’s building is a time capsule. Classrooms look as they might have 50 or 100 years ago, with paint-spattered folding chairs that Lee Krasner might have sat on, arranged in a semicircle from which Norman Rockwell might have sketched a nude model.
Late-20th-century technology is not present, to say nothing of early 21st-century gadgets. As for phones, there are a couple of old wooden booths in the lobby, but they are used for storing human skeletons, a prop for anatomy studies.
It is all undeniably charming, but charm has its limits. “We need everything,” a teaching assistant told a visitor, unprompted. Not just equipment and supplies, she said. “Space. Air!”
For those who have pursued the deal with Extell, the giant next door represents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to multiply the league’s funds, to enrich its programs, to expand its classrooms, to renovate its home and to welcome more students than ever before.
“I want people to come in,” said Ira Goldberg, the league’s executive director, “and feel like it’s Jerusalem, walking into the past and feeling connected with history.”
But to a portion of the league’s members, the deal is a rip-off of skyscraping proportions. Last fall, a group that called themselves ASL Unite rallied opposition to the cantilever, arguing that the league’s leadership had fallen for a weak offer and unverified promises about the safety of the construction process, much of which would take place right over their heads.
“Do you really want to be under that?” asked Richard Caraballo, who has taken courses at the league since 2007. At One 57, another hypertall project by the same developer on another block of the same street, a crane came close to toppling over during Hurricane Sandy, snarling traffic and displacing neighbors.
In a members’ referendum last February, the majority of votes supported the sale, in part, Mr. Caraballo alleged, because the league had suppressed voter turnout. But the ensuing lawsuit went nowhere, and the deal went through.
Behind the discord is the implication that a powerful real estate player effortlessly outmaneuvered a dowdy old nonprofit. Mr. Barnett says the two organizations are not so different. “We share an ambition for great art and, in our case, great architecture, and we aspire to create beautiful buildings the same way their artists aspire to create beautiful objects,” he said.
In search of that beauty, the Extell construction workers have spent most of a year slamming heavy machinery into solid bedrock for the tower’s foundation. The hole is now about 80 feet deep at its deepest, and the drilling continues.
As Hardenburg’s building hides its elegant face behind scaffolds, art students have started to decorate the area in front of it. An Art Nouveau portrait, a bold geometric composition: “You want to get a sense of the league,” Mr. Goldberg said, “just walk down the street and see all these very different approaches to art-making.”
The building’s scaffolds will come down when the tower has gone up around it. “You know we’re an art school,” Mr. Goldberg said, enjoying the sight of the outdoor paintings. “Now, we’re a caged art school.”
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