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Ominous news for the Park West Village neighborhood
by Hillel Hoffman
March 19, 2010 - The proposed construction of a 22-story nursing home by Jewish Home Lifecare on West 100th Street has raised serious concerns about the safety and environmental consequences of locating a large health care facility on one of the most crowded streets on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Previous construction of a 30-story residential building by the Chetrit Group at 808 Columbus Avenue has already reduced vehicular access to the 16-story residential buildings at 788 and 792 Columbus Avenue to a single entrance from West 100th Street.
Hillel HoffmanThe construction of a large nursing home building adjacent to this single entrance - with all of the various kinds of daily traffic that such a facility will generate - will pose a significant danger to hundreds of residents, many of them senior citizens, who live in these two smaller residential buildings. It will also affect fire, EMS and police responses to emergencies throughout the Park West Village neighborhood.
Recently, Jewish Home Lifecares's plans have taken an ominous turn. According to a March 4th article in the Columbia Spectator, P.S. 163 has been in discussions with Jewish Home Lifecare to add classrooms to their proposed nursing home building. Ethan Geto, a spokesman for Jewish Home Lifecare, is quoted in that article as saying, "The community and elected officials would have to accept the fact that [the] building might need to add on a story or two depending on what the school asks for."
Yet Jewish Home Lifecare has never even presented its building plans to the residents of the Park West Village neighborhood. And no discussions between Jewish Home Lifecare and P.S. 163 about adding even more stories to the proposed nursing home building have included us either.
On the contrary, at a meeting of the Park West Village Tenants' Association on December 15, 2009, parents of children from P.S. 163 presented the members of the Tenants' Association with an entirely different plan. We were told that the Chetrit Group would build above the school in exchange for constructing more classrooms behind the school, that arrangements would be made for Jewish Home Lifecare to build above the Health Department building on West 100th Street, and that the existing open space would be preserved within the western block of Park West Village.
What became of the plan we heard back in December?
Once again it appears that the residents of the Park West Village neighborhood are the victims of secretive negotiations and questionable practices.
First came the proposed land swap between Jewish Home Lifecare and the Chetrit Group, which seeks to capitalize on a zoning carve-out that was intended solely to accomplish a beneficial public purpose, not to enable private real estate development. Second, the presentation to the Tenants' Association by P.S. 163 parents that included preserved open space within the western block of Park West Village, followed by the news that P.S. 163 is negotiating with Jewish Home Lifecare to create more classrooms by enlarging the very building that threatens the open space intended to benefit thousands of Park West Village neighborhood residents.
What's entirely clear is that our Upper West Side neighborhood is threatened by a boneheaded proposal to build a huge nursing home on a side-street block that's already congested along both sides with double-parked cars. The block already struggles to serve a fire station, a police station, a government building, a library, a church, and a new underground parking garage that will generate even more traffic soon. And it has yet to absorb the impact of even more new retail establishments in the pipeline directly around the corner along both sides of Columbus Avenue.
We need Jewish Home Lifecare, the Chetrit Group and P.S. 163 to keep us informed of exactly what they intend to do in the Park West Village neighborhood.
We need Jewish Home Lifecare and the Chetrit Group to explain to us why they cannot be held to the original understanding with the community: that Jewish Home Lifecare was given a zoning carve-out on 106th Street so that a private real estate developer could utilize its residential development rights there to finance the rebuilding of its 106th Street campus.
It is discouraging that our only source of current information is a local newspaper.
We need our elected officials to correct this situation and take a public stand on the critical land use issues that confront the residents of the Park West Village neighborhood.
Speak Out now on our discussion board.
Mr. Hoffman has lived in Park West Village since 1976. He was elected to the Board of Directors of Westsiders for Public Participation, Inc. on March 4, 2009, where he now serves as Vice President. He is a member of the Park West Village Tenants' Association since the early 1980s.
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