I waited two hours to speak at today’s City Council hearing on the Tech Hub tower, but was glad to do so because it was a result of so many people showing up and speaking their minds!
“Good afternoon. My name is Joel Lobenthal. I am here as a downtown resident to insist that the City Council approve the Tech Hub project only if it concurrently constructs zoning and landmark protections that will safeguard the surrounding neighborhood and neighborhoods.
“We know that Tech Hub is meant to spearhead massive commercial development of the blocks to the south and east, which will–which could–virtually destroy what remains of their unique character. We already have seen one picturesque and historic low-rise building after another demolished to make way for massively scaled, inappropriately sited condos, hotels, and New York University dorms.
“I have spent fifty years wandering the Village, where I’ve lived most of my adult life and have seen not only the topography but the character radically change–and not for the better.
“Speaking of Luchow’s [an earlier speaker had brought it up], for my nineteenth birthday, my grandmother, born in 1897, book me to dinner at Luchow’s. She had been going there for sixty years. Luchow’s was of course later torn down to make way for an NYU dorm. That tradition, that lineage and continuity were destroyed.
“Until the 1990s this North East pocket of the Village housed many small, , independent used bookstores where as a budding and aspiring writer I spent many a hour browsing and too many a dollar purchasing. They had been seeded throughout these blocks for decades before I found them. My father, who is eighty-eight, remembers them from his student days in the 1940s. Now they are all gone, forced out by wildly inflated rents. Only the Strand remains, which I believe owns its building, which has made its survival possible.
“To reiterate, no protections, no Tech Hub. Thank you.”