Hospitable!

Village residents totally consumed by the issue of overdevelopment are even starting to turn on critical infrastructure:

Although St. Vincent’s has had meetings with a community working group for the past few months, no specific development plan has yet emerged. The current hospital includes a maze of eight connected buildings between 11th and 12th Sts. on the east side of Seventh Ave. S., including the Coleman tower on Seventh Ave. S. at 11th St., completed in 1970.

On the west side of Seventh Ave. between 12th and 13th Sts. is the three-story O’Toole building, the former National Maritime Union hall, now used as St. Vincent’s community health facility. A triangular property between 12th St. and Greenwich Ave. on the west side of Seventh Ave. is where the hospital stores oxygen tanks.

St. Vincent’s, with Rudin as a development partner, intends to demolish the O’Toole Building and erect a state-of-the-art hospital that could rise 20 stories or higher. On the east side of Seventh Ave. S., Rudin would have the option of demolishing all or part of what is there and constructing market-rate apartments, which would pay for the new hospital. Rudin would also have the option of adapting existing buildings on the east side of the avenue for residential use.

The project would be staged to allow St. Vincent’s to provide full hospital service throughout the construction period.

In the wake of the Berger Commission report on hospitals in New York State, Cabrini Medical Center on E. 19th St. and St. Vincent’s Midtown — formerly St. Clare’s — on W. 51st St. between Ninth and 10th Aves. will close, leaving St. Vincent’s in the Village as the only West Side hospital between Lower Manhattan and W. 59th St., Kingham said.

But critics, like Philip Schaffer, of 144 W. 11th St., insisted that the project is driven by real estate concerns, rather that medical ones.

“This is not a philanthropic operation,” Schaffer said. Questioning the need for a major hospital in the low-rise residential Village neighborhood, he suggested that St. Vincent’s move to the Hudson Yards in the West 30s, “where the stadium was supposed to be.”

. . .

Christopher Cormac, a W. Eighth St. resident whose family has lived in the Village since 1938, said, “We’re talking about building a 21st-century medical center for most of Manhattan in a residential neighborhood — in the Greenwich Village Historic District.” Despite the proximity of the Seventh Ave. S. subway, “This is not the most accessible place in the city,” he said.

Kingham replied that St. Vincent’s owns the property where it is now and added, “We’ve been here for 150 years.” The remark only provoked groans from the audience.

The flexible 21st-century hospital that St. Vincent’s wants to build is especially appropriate in New York City in an age of terrorism, Dr. George Neuman, St. Vincent’s medical director of perioperative services, told the forum.

“Our emergency room needs to be able to deal with four times the number of patients it can treat ordinarily,” he said. Rooms have to be built that take air in, rather than let it out, when doors are open, in order to prevent respiratory syndromes like SARS to spread, he added.

But some audience members took offense at references to terrorism and bio disasters.

“Fear mongering is not the best way to present the project,” said Chris Bianchi, a second-generation Village resident who lives on W. 13th St.

Hammer And $ickle

Manhattan real estate is irresistible — even to the most die-hard commies:

As the price of Gotham real estate climbs ever higher, the socialists who embrace the ideas of common ownership espoused by Marx and Lenin decided to stop mothballing their precious office space across the street from the Chelsea Hotel and turn it into hand-over-fist cash.

“This is Manhattan. It’s the biggest rental market in North America,” said Libero Della Piana, state chair of the state Communist Party. “We live in a capitalist society, and in order for us to play our role, we have to make money.”

Two months ago, the local hammer-and-sickle crowd opened the doors of its swanky, eight-story headquarters to yet another new tenant, Dumann Realty.

“We believe the market is great. We believe Chelsea is coming up,” said Richard Du, president of Dumann, which leases commercial and retail space in Manhattan.

And if that’s not ironic enough, know that this story can only get, uh, richer:

[Richard Du] laughed at the idea that the capitalist forces of Manhattan have forged a financial partnership with his realty company and the commies.

“I come from Vietnam,” said Du, who grew up with landmines outside his front door before leaving his homeland at age 13, unable to read or write.

“This is a free country,” Du said, “and everyone has to work together for financial freedom.”

. . .

The party, which bought the building 30 years ago, wouldn’t say how much it is raking in from tenants. But based on the latest local real-estate prices, rent for each 5,000-square-foot floor in the building could command well over $135,000 a month, considering the space is in the heart of Chelsea.

Other tenants in the building include two record companies, an art-supply store and the Sheila Kelley S Factor Striptease dance school, which features pole dancing.

Capitalism looks pretty good at the socialist headquarters, as they have been able to renovate their cramped 1970s-style office into a sleek, open-air space with environmentally friendly furniture.

Preservationists Uneasy As Developers Eye More “Suicides”

The irony of 34 East 62nd Street was that by purposely destroying the house in order to keep it from his ex-wife, Dr. Nicholas Bartha’s ex-wife would earn even more from the land.

Last summer, real estaters thought a new house on the property would fetch $15 million. Now they’re hoping to get $30 million:

A super-luxe eco-friendly townhouse is being planned for the upper East Side lot where suicidal Dr. Nicholas Bartha detonated his brownstone last year.

The built-from-scratch five-story mansion on E. 62nd St. will have a bamboo-fringed garden, underground pool, spiffy all-glass elevator — and an asking price of $30 million.

“Our mission is to preserve the quality of this landmark site while making the house appropriate for today’s lifestyles,” said Janna Bullock of the Russian Investment Group, which hopes to get city approval for the ambitious plan in the next few weeks.

If the modern glass-and-stone townhouse gets built, it would add a spectacular punctuation mark to one of the stranger New York stories of recent years.

The reclusive Bartha, 66, blew up the house last June 10 to avoid handing it over to his ex-wife in a bitter divorce. He touched off a raging explosion and fire by turning on the gas valve and igniting the building.

The so-called Dr. Doom survived the initial blast but died a few days later. Passerby Jennifer Panicali, 23, was injured in the explosion but recovered.

RIG bought the plot for $8 million from Bartha’s estate.

Whither The Tremendous Egos?

Ridiculously outsized notion gets Calatrava-ed:

The proposed penthouse at the top of the Woolworth Building was to be one of the most coveted living spaces in New York. With five floors, 7,500 square feet, a private cylindrical glass elevator, and a terrace with sweeping views of nearly the entire city, the apartment would provide, as Corcoran Group CEO Pam Liebman put it, “tremendous ego gratification,” and cap off the conversion of the 1913 building’s slender Gothic tower into apartments. In 2000, the Witkoff Group, which owns the building, said it would add a screening room, wine cellar, cigar lounge, and spa under the building in hopes of luring residents east of the heart of Tribeca. But now nobody will; after gutting the tower, Witkoff is shifting gears. In another sign that the office market is hotter than the condo market, the Woolworth tower is being converted back to commercial space.

Not sure it’s a true sign that the condo market has cooled, but you’ve got to appreciate the symbolism.

Location Scout: Woolworth Building.

The New Tenements

The shocking truth (courageously revealed in today’s Times) is that perfectly respectable middle- and even upper-middle class educated (albeit underemployed) youths (did we mention these youths are Ivy League or similar?) can no longer afford living in Manhattan:

As the apartment-hunting season begins, fueled by college graduates and other new arrivals, real estate brokers say radical solutions among young, well-educated newcomers to the city are becoming more common, because New York’s rental market is the tightest it has been in seven years. High-paid bankers and corporate lawyers snap up the few available apartments, often leading more modestly paid professionals and students to resort to desperate measures to find homes.