A day of destiny is at hand for 200 Amsterdam Ave., the nearly completed, 52-story condo tower at West 71st Street which a judge ordered to be half torn-down. City developers are on pins and needles, because if an appeals court doesn’t reverse the ruling, it could stymie other buildings under construction — and even impact some famous existing ones.
On Wednesday, a four-judge panel of the state Appellate Division will take up the case by developers SJP Properties, Mitsui Fusodan and the city’s Law Department seeking to overturn Judge Franc Perry’s February decision that 20 floors be taken down because the tower supposedly violated zoning rules.
The Municipal Art Society and Upper West Side activists had sued to chop down the project, accusing the developers of using “deceptive practices” and “violating city regulations."
But project proponents said that the court was improperly trying to retroactively reverse long-standing Department of Buildings rules.
The developers argued that they had valid permits for all 52 stories from the DOB and the Bureau of Standards and Appeals. City Hall joined in the appeal, saying the approvals were based on long-standing precedents. Some apartment-sale contracts were already signed but more were put on hold pending the legal outcome.
The approvals for the $700 million project (not including site-acquisition costs) were based on DOB interpretation of an arcane, 42-year-old zoning policy permitting “partial” and “whole” tax lots to be combined in order to create a larger footprint for new construction.
The DOB over decades approved dozens of other tax-lot “loopholes,” as critics call them — including for the MetLife (formerly Pan Am) tower on Park Avenue.
Perry said the city should yank 200 Amsterdam’s permits because the DOB nixed such tax-lot combinations in 2018. But the DOB and BSA gave the developers the green light a year prior to that. The agencies, moreover, said that forbidding such combinations was merely a proposal at the time and not yet signed into law.
A project spokesman said, “If a single judge can unilaterally cast aside expert agencies’ reading of a complex technical statute, it effectively renders city agencies powerless and creates uncertainty and risk for anyone trying to do business here.”
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