At today’s public meeting before the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, representatives of the West Park Presbyterian Church faced pointed questioning from commissioners on the core claims underlying their hardship application to demolish the 135-year-old UWS landmark. The exchange laid bare what independent experts have long argued: that the alleged hardship presented to the Commission was not inevitable but manufactured – the product of a series of deliberate decisions by the church designed to clear the path to a $33.4 million sale to luxury developer Alchemy Properties.
Commissioners pressed the applicant on why the church owners never attempted to market approximately 80,000 square feet of transferable air rights, whose transferability became greater after December 2024, despite the Commission’s own precedent requiring active marketing before citing lack of buyers as evidence of hardship, with a commissioner noting directly that prior hardship determinations have taken a negative view of applicants who failed to do so.
Commissioners acknowledged that, in 2024, the joint non-profit created by the church with The Center at West Park was validating the intention of financial sustainability and maintenance of the building. Commissioners noted it as a successful model two blocks away at St. Paul and St. Andrew, where a similar arrangement helped leverage a $5 million renovation grant, questioning why that model was never pursued with a different partner rather than abandoned entirely. They also questioned whether the owners ever pursued additional sources of funding including public or private grants, or even other potential business opportunities which the church owners acknowledged were never pursued.
Perhaps most damaging was the exchange during which commissioners noted directly that The Center at West Park had submitted a repair proposal in September 2024 that the church refused to allow to proceed, and questioned how an applicant could claim a building is too expensive to repair while having rejected a funded offer to do exactly that.
In response, The Center at West Park issued the following statements.
Debby Hirshman, Executive Director, The Center at West Park:
“Today the Landmarks Preservation Commission asked exactly the right questions, and the church’s representatives had no good answers. In 2024, they rejected a fully funded repair program, never tried to sell the 80,000 square feet of valuable air rights, and walked away from a tenant partnership that commissioners noted was working at West Park and is successfully working in a comparable landmark church two blocks away. This was an applicant whose every action was taken to obtain hardship.”
“Beginning in 2024, we raised the money, hired the architects, submitted the bids, and filed for the permit. The church blocked every single step and then stood before this Commission and claimed the building can’t be repaired. The Commission’s own independent engineer confirmed our numbers. There is nothing theoretical about what we put on the table. It was real, it was funded, and the church’s representatives said no.”
Mitchell Schamroth, Board President, The Center at West Park:
“Post-CoViD, The Center at West Park proved the financial sustainability and capacity to maintain this building with a $1.2 million profit in 2024 and the raising of $11.6 million to do all necessary work on the facade for the removal the sidewalk shed, in consonance with the LPC’s independent expert. The record speaks for itself and today the commissioners were paying very close attention to what it actually shows.”
Featured image credit: DepositPhotos.com
