Last week, Community Board 2 voted overwhelmingly against required approvals for current plans for huge developments at 375 Lafayette/20 Great Jones Street, 27 East 4th Street next to the Merchant’s House Museum, and 56 Great Jones Street/354 Bowery. Each is located within the NoHo Historic District, and require approval of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Here’s more details on each:

• At 375 Lafayette/20 Great Jones Street, a developer seeks approval for a more than 200-ft.-tall, 225-ft.-wide apartment building that would be unprecedented in its massive scale for this neighborhood, and unrelieved in its monotonous design. We are calling for the planned building to be scaled back, the building broken up, and the design rethought to add greater variety, texture, and rhythm to the facade to make it more appropriate to its historic surroundings. The proposal will be heard at the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday, March 10. 

TO HELP:

• At 354 Bowery/56 Great Jones Street, a developer plans to build a 300-ft.-tall apartment tower abutting but just outside the NoHo Historic District, which requires no special approvals due to the 2021 SoHo/NoHo rezoning, but is also seeking to expand the tower by 5,000 square feet by having it cantilever slightly over 354 Bowery within the historic district, which does require LPC approval. Village Preservation, CB2, other preservation organizations, and many neighbors spoke against it at the hearing on Tuesday, February 25, and Assemblymember Deborah Glick wrote the Commission urging them to reject it. The Commission voted 5-1 to approve, which is just shy of the six votes needed for passage (five commissioners were absent), and so the item will be voted on again at a later hearing. 
• Plans for a 105-ft.-tall building next to the Merchant’s House at 27 East 4th Street, which the Museum says would threaten permanent damage to their landmarked publicly owned structure, have been scheduled for a March 17 LPC hearing, but we’ll let you know when they are.