Will residents benefit or suffer? many ask.
By Lynette Raheb
lynetteraheb@aol.com
Architects rendering by Beyer Blinder Belle
Investors have made a $32 million bet on Hunts Point’s future.
Now the question is: If they win, who loses?
In announcing their purchase of the gargantuan American Bank Note building on Lafayette and Tiffany streets, Taconic Investment Partners and Denham Wolf Real Estate Services sketched an ambitious vision of a building—and its surrounding neighborhood—growing prosperous and prominent.
“We look forward with great enthusiasm to establishing a major cultural focal point for New York and the region, with emphasis on the visual and performing arts and a retail food center comparable to Manhattan’s Chelsea Market,”proclaimed Charles Bendit, co-founding partner of Taconic.
Plans call for the food center to occupy a ground floor whose forbidding brick façade has been removed to let in light and for “visual arts, performing groups, architects, web designers, film production/studios, emerging green businesses” to occupy the rest of 400,000 square feet of space,” said Paul Wolf in announcing the acquisition. The building, he promised, “will be an expansive regional hub that will offer a nest for creativity and a destination for all to enjoy.”In keeping with that vision, the new owners have forced social service agencies that help the homeless out of the building.
Jonathan Denham said Denham Wolf has been working with the non-profits and other tenants to keep them in the building. But the new owners have raised the low rents that for years have attracted artists, leading some to say they plan to pack up and move on, while others who have agreed to pay more worry about their future.
Politicians have hailed the acquisition. At a reception arranged by the new owners in the building’s massive third floor expanse on March 20, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion addressed a full house of representatives from community organizations, hailing the change as emblematic of “the new kind of city being born across the United States.”
The borough president said the refurbished Bank Note building would help correct the stigma that has persisted in the public imagination since sportscaster Howard Cosell looked out from the press box at Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”
At its February meeting, Community Board 2 voted overwhelmingly to approve plans for renovations the new owners propose. But a handful of board members who dissented expressed concern about gentrification, and one board member who voted for the plans was overheard asking, after she viewed an architects’rendering of the food court, whether neighborhood residents will be able to afford to buy or eat there.
In the press release announcing their purchase, the new owners point to the continuing presence of such artistic and environmental institutions as Arthur Aviles Typical Theater and BAAD!, The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance; Sustainable South Bronx; The LightBox-NY Studio and “artists and an eclectic mix of tenants.”
Artists were originally recruited to the building by The Point, the community center that itself owns and occupies one of the American Bank Note company’s former warehouses. With lots of vacant space to fill, Max Blauner, who had purchased the building in 1985 for $5.2 million, agreed to house the Aviles company and rent small studios at rock bottom rents as low as $2.50 a square foot in return for The Point’s help in finding tenants.Artists in the building are split about the new direction the building is taking. Some think the changes will raise the profile of the neighborhood, and of their own work, but others are packing their bags.
Pepper, a former ballerina who has directed a non-profit that now runs six dance programs for South Bronx school children, has occupied a studio in the building since 2003. But she and her organization, Contemporary Ballet Theatre, are now seeking new quarters, rather than agreeing to be moved to a different floor of the building, where they would be required to pay double their present rent of $400, and share their space with another tenant.
“It’s really sad that we have built this community, we created this buzz, and, guess what, we’re not going to benefit from the change,” she said.The diminutive dancer was hurling plastic bags filled with dance costumes across her cluttered studio while the celebration was happening one floor below.
“My disgruntledness is that we’re being forced out, but isn’t that what happens in other gentrified areas?” she said. “Look at Harlem.”But while a number of tenants have left or are in the process of looking elsewhere, others are staying put, with differing outlooks on the transition.
Robert Seyffert, a painter who has been renting a small studio lined with artwork by his grandparents, both of whom were prominent early 20th century artists, says it’s increasingly hard to afford workspace anywhere in the five boroughs. He lamented that rising rents in the Bank Note building represent the end of an era.
“As you can see from downstairs,” he said, referring to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, “it’s over.”Seyffert reflected for a minute while his two young children lounged on worn sofas.
“It’s a little unfair to ask the owners to entirely subsidize us,” he added. “But they should be fair.”
Sibrena Stowe-Fernandez, who runs a media company that helps promote hip-hop musicians and supplies American TV programming to foreign countries, is not only staying in the Bank Note building, she is bullish on the building’s facelift. Working in a building with caché, she said will be good for business.
“People say, wow, there’s a building next to the Bruckner called the BankNote? I never knew!”Led by Carey Clark, owner of the Q art framing studio in the building, some of the artists have formed the American Banknote Artists Collaboration, or ABAC, to negotiate with their new landlords.
Clark said she “was not particularly put off”when she got an eviction notice. She has reached an agreement that will more than double her rent in stages over an 18-month period from $525 to $1150 for her 650-square-foot studio.
She and other members of ABAC said in interviews that they understood that the new owners have a bottom line to meet. Instead of feeling victimized, Clark looks at her situation as a “business to business perspective,”she said.
Kay Reese, a business consultant and fellow artist who works with Clark, said she thought the sale would spur artists to become “aware of their role as a business.”
“There are many positive ideas coming from the group,” said Clark, but she added that she was uncertain about the long-term impact of the building’s sale on the community. “I am curious how the relationship will work” between the landlords and ABAC, she said. “It is too early to judge.”Having renegotiated its lease, which runs through 2015, with the old landlord, BAAD is not affected by the sale.
The new owners have hired Charles Rice-Gonzalez, the executive director of BAAD, as their publicist. He sees the building, now re-christened with the trendy name BankNote, as a “gem in the Bronx.”
Saying, “Tenants never anticipated the building would be sold,” Rice-Gonzalez defended the evictions and rent increases. “To make the community stronger it’s difficult to make room for everyone,”he said.
“The sale is a step in the right direction. It’s a very good move for the community,” said Orlando Marin, a member of Community Board 2 at the board’s February meeting.
Marin said the Living Room, the homeless shelter evicted by the new owners, needed to be relocated. Its services are admirable, he said, but drew negative attention.
“The new owners are aware that the community wants to keep”the arts and environmental organizations that are currently there, he said.
Roland Lopez, chairman of the board’s health, environmental, and human services committee, voted in favor of the renovations, but said, “I had reservations. This could be a mixed blessing.” He asked, “
What is this going to do to our neighborhood?
Joe Hirsch contributed reporting to this story.