And that may mean the planned tower at 388 Hudson Street tower gets even bigger, or has less affordable housing

Sometimes the cat hops out of the bag long before you expect it to, and something you hoped would remain under wraps for a while longer is suddenly public information. That’s exactly what happened for proponents of demolishing the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center in early July when Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue did a media tour inviting reporters to inspect the center, as she made the argument that the building was beyond repair and should be demolished. Her Manhattan borough commissioner and project manager for the center came before the Community Board 2 Parks and Land Use Committees on July 10 making the same argument, repeatedly, that the center was in such bad shape — because it was over 100 years old, because it was built in stages, because repairs would cost money — that the only reasonable course of action was demolition. This in spite of the fact that the building was a designated landmark on the city, state, and federal levels, and has provided generations of not just Villagers but a diverse cross section of New Yorkers with both community and recreation.

Because the center has been closed for four years without any substantial repairs, it’s been unable to provide any of that since 2020. And if the city and some decision-makers have their way, it won’t ever again.

Their plan? Demolish the center, and include a new one at a tower slated to rise down the block at 388 Hudson Street. What would happen to the recreation center site? Well, it would have to continue to provide the entryway and changing facilities for the adjacent outdoor pool with its Keith Haring mural, as well as the mechanical equipment that allows the pool to function — all of which are in or under the current Tony Dapolito Center.

But beyond that? No one will say just yet, but a lot of non-Parks uses are being bandied about as possibilities along with demolition of the existing building. This even though state law prohibits alienation of parkland unless it’s accompanied by a commensurate addition of park space to the surrounding community, and this community has one of the lowest ratios of park space per capita of any in the city — a shortcoming that was supposed to be addressed by creating a park on the 388 Hudson Street site, but which will now be home to a very tall tower instead. And so might the Tony Dapolito Rec Center site.

The Parks Department has made clear they want to demolish the Tony Dapolito Rec Center, and are “open” about what could go on the site — which clearly includes non–Parks-related uses.

The Community Board has thus far not commented on the Parks Department’s clearly stated intention to demolish the rec center, and have instead encouraged the city to include plans for a new center at 388 Hudson. Several key members of the board have publicly and privately expressed great enthusiasm about non-Parks uses going into the Tony Dapolito site.

City Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who will have a large say over what happens here, has only said that the city should include “some” recreation facilities at 388 Hudson Street, but has taken a wait-and-see approach about demolishing the Tony Dapolito Rec Center and what if anything its potential replacement might be.

Borough President Mark Levine, another key figure in the process, has thus far been largely silent. 

As with so many things the city tries to do around land use, this one is complicated with many moving parts that will impact one another, and have profound implications well beyond this site — from demolishing a protected historic building based on questionable premises, to how long users of the rec center have to go without facilities, to how big the planned tower at 388 Hudson Street will be, to whether or not affordable housing is lost from that planned development, to whether or not Greenwich Village also loses an all-too-rare designated Parks and Recreation space.

Here are the main points on the table, and their implications:

Losing a landmarked building based upon specious arguments. So far the city has said that they want to demolish the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center because it’s old, because it was built in stages, because it was originally built for different purposes than its current use (a public bathhouse rather than a public recreation center), and because it would cost money to fix (something they should have been doing for years). If that all becomes an acceptable rationale for demolishing landmarked buildings, we may end up having to say goodbye to a pretty big chunk of our neighborhood — a prospect for which powerful forces in government and our city have been increasingly loudly advocating.

The Tony Dapolito Recreation Center is no older than many city recreation centers that have been restored, and is actually relatively young compared to the many 19th-century buildings in our neighborhoods that are regularly repaired and upgraded. The much older Public Theater on Lafayette Street, for example, was also built in three stages, and for a much different purpose than it is now used (a library, and later an immigrant processing center), and unlike Tony Dapolito, was empty and abandoned for years before it was restored and repurposed by a nonprofit group with assistance from the city. The city just okayed a vastly larger sum for restoration of a recreation center in Brownsville than what they say Tony Dapolito would need. And the list of examples goes on and on, illustrating why and how buildings like this and older are repaired and restored all the time.

Some proponents of demolition have engaged in the fiction that the building isn’t landmarked, it just happens to fall within a historic district. This is disingenuous and misleading at best. Every building in a historic district is landmarked, though it’s true that some can be considered of no historic or architectural significance, and therefore potentially OK for demolition with a suitable replacement. That’s clearly not the case with the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center though, which was landmarked in 2010 (at the urging of Village Preservation) as part of an expansion of the Greenwich Village Historic District that specifically focused on immigrant history — the kind embodied in the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center. The expanded district, largely located east of here, stopped short of Seventh Avenue South — except that the Landmarks Preservation Commission at the time included an additional, noncontiguous section to capture the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center and the adjacent Hudson Park Branch Library (also integral to that history), showing the lengths to which they went to ensure this building was landmarked. The landmark designation report, which makes clear which buildings are considered undistinguished and expendable and which aren’t, gushed at length over the rich history of this building.

The same is true when the building was added to the State and National Registers of Historic Places as part of the South Village Historic District (also proposed by Village Preservation), affirming the near-universal acknowledgement of this building’s historic significance and the importance of its preservation and perpetuation.

A longer than necessary delay in restoring recreation facilities to the area. The city and proponents of demolishing the Tony Dapolito Center say that the quickest way to restore recreation services in the area is to give up on Tony Dapolito entirely and simply build a replacement center in the new 388 Hudson Street development. This proposition strains credulity. Optimistic predictions about the amount of time it would take to build and open 388 Hudson Street are five to six years, and that’s almost certainly not likely to be the actual time frame. Development of the site — first proposed in 2021 — is already behind schedule. Such projects, involving private developers, lots of money, and complicated moving pieces, almost always take considerably longer than predicted. Just look a few blocks away to the new public school and public recreation space promised in 2013 at Duarte Square (shovels still not even in the ground), or the affordable housing promised in 2016 at 550 Washington Street, where construction is only now just beginning.

Especially given that repairing the Tony Dapolito Center is necessary to reopen the adjoining outdoor public pool (which the city says will remain), repairs should begin on the site right away. The four-year delay has no doubt made them more complicated, the need more severe, and the expense greater. But they should wait no longer.

To facilitate that process, decisions should be made soon regarding what facilities should stay at the existing Tony Dapolito Rec Center, and which can be moved to 388 Hudson Street. For example, if a regulation basketball court can’t be placed in a renovated or even a possibly expanded Tony Dapolito Rec Center (one of the main reasons the Parks Department has argued for the center’s demolition), one could go into 388 Hudson Street (though it should be noted that the incredibly popular West 4th Street Basketball Courts, which the Parks Department itself describes as “a basketball mecca and one of the most famous streetball destinations in the world,” is also notable for its smaller than regulation size, which many argue is part of what makes it so appealing). The same can be said for the Tony Dapolito Center’s indoor swimming pool, which the city claims is too small and therefore another reason to demolish the center (here, too, it should be noted that while the pool is narrower than most indoor pools at Manhattan recreation centers, it’s also longer than most). But given the need for affordable indoor recreation facilities in Lower Manhattan, the Tony Dapolito Center should continue to provide those services — whether weight rooms, exercise classrooms, volleyball court, track, or a whole array of facilities this center has and could continue to provide, while housing the necessary mechanical equipment and entrance to the outdoor pool it must keep providing.

Making the enormous planned tower at 388 Hudson Street even bigger and taller, and/or losing some of the affordable housing planned to go there. One of the many flaws in how this process is being handled is that moving all of the Tony Dapolito facilities into the planned new building at 388 Hudson Street will clearly either make that proposed development even bigger — at up to 355 ft. tall, it will already be the tallest building ever constructed in Greenwich Village — or take up space that could be occupied by affordable housing (the purported main purpose of the development), or both. The development can support one below-grade floor that can’t be used for housing, which clearly could contain recreation facilities. Above ground, however, any space used for recreation facilities would take away from the affordable housing that is supposed to be included in the building.

The city disingenuously claims that on the wider lower floors of the building there will be significant area that can’t be used for housing because it’s too far from required windows for living spaces, and the rec center could go there instead. This seems highly exaggerated if not entirely false. Numerous apartment buildings in the neighborhood have equally large lower floors that are used for housing, and the space the city claims can’t be used for housing in the center of the building will be taken up by elevators, stairs, and lobbies anyway.

The alternative is that the city includes both the recreation center and the housing, making 388 Hudson Street even larger than it needs to be, when it will already be massive and oversized compared to its surroundings — not only the four-story rowhouses of the Greenwich Village Historic District across JJ Walker Park, but even the very large loft buildings that are found to its west and south. Discussions have included using as much as three above-ground floors of 388 Hudson Street for recreation center facilities, which would likely increase the height of the building by about four stories, since the upper floors of the structure will be narrower than the lower ones on which the recreation center would go. Given that the Tony Dapolito Rec Center can continue to serve as recreation space, and should be much quicker to repair than waiting for the completion of 388 Hudson Street, there’s absolutely no logic to adding insult to injury by making 388 Hudson Street unnecessarily larger, just to replace recreation facilities that can and should be restored and remain at the Tony Dapolito Center.

Losing the Tony Dapolito site as dedicated parkland, with who-knows-what being built there. There’s already talk about a “mixed-use” project at the Tony Dapolito site, meaning non-Parks and non-Recreation–related uses. If recent history is any guide, this will almost undoubtedly mean some sort of large, likely high-rise development on the site, abutting a well-used park and outdoor pool, and within a designated historic district. This will not only cast a shadow on the park and pool, and conflict with the scale and character of the historic district. It will also alienate precious park space, of which this community has too little, when a long-promised addition of park space at 388 Hudson Street meant to alleviate that dearth is no longer going to be delivered. 

So what happens now?

The good news about all of this is that getting approval to demolish the Tony Dapolito Rec Center and build something other than a Parks Department facility on the site is a very complicated multistep process, which would include a lot of opportunities for public input and holding decision-makers accountable. It may also require action by the state legislature, bringing additional local legislators like Assemblymember Deborah Glick and State Senator Brian Kavanaugh into key decision-making roles on this.

The bad news? A lot of people who will get to make or have an impact on that decision, such as the Parks Department and some Community Board 2 members, seem very positively inclined toward demolishing the center and replacing it with something other than a parks/recreation facility. Where Councilmember Erik Bottcher and Borough President Mark Levine, two other key players, will end up remains to be seen. They have both been very receptive to Mayor Adams’ related plans at 388 Hudson Street. And the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which should serve as a bulwark against any proposal to tear down the building, is ultimately controlled by the Mayor, and will likely do his bidding on this (though preservation organizations across the city and state have already lined up against the demolition plan).

What to do now?

The most important thing to do now is let decision-makers know how you feel about this — that demolishing a historic landmarked building for specious reasons is unacceptable; that forgoing repairing the Tony Dapolito Rec Center because building a new one at 388 Hudson Street “will be faster” is a nonstarter; that making the gargantuan 388 Hudson Street development larger than it needs to be to accommodate existing recreation facilities that can and should be repaired, or to unnecessarily remove affordable housing from it, is unacceptable; and that the Tony Dapolito site, no matter what its fate, should remain 100% parks and recreation space.

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