East Village residents, do not adjust your monitors. What you are looking at here is not a new rendering of the NYU dorm now rising behind the St. Ann's facade on East 12th.
Residents of the Upper West Side, on the other hand—this religious conversion's for you! Behold the rendering for a 21-story mixed-use apartment building planned for the northeast corner of West 86th and Amsterdam, where the West-Park Presbyterian Church now stands. Cleverly, unlike the East Village heathens, it seems they're working God into the new design. Per CityRealty, the building will contain a "new skylit congregation space near the top of the existing sanctuary structure just to the west of the church's prominent clocktower, which is being preserved."
Bill Traylor, president of Richman Housing Services and an 86th Street resident, told a crowded meeting at the Goddard Riverside Community Center at 593 Avenue that the affordable apartments, all studios on floors 5 through 10, will have a separate entrance that will be part of the surviving red-sandstone facade and that the condo apartments will have their own entrance with a marquee in the new mid-block tower that cantilevers slightly over the rear of the sanctuary structure. The condos will be on floors 11 through 21. Some members of the public attending the meeting said that separate entrances was "segregation" and Mr. Traylor replied that for financing reasons the church, the affordable housing section and the condo sections needed to be legally separate and that the intent is for the affordable units to be in perpetuity and not subject to the whims of the condominium owners. Mr. Traylor's company is the sixth largest residential property owner in the United States.
Hoo boy. Anyone think we haven't heard the last of this one?
· West-Park Church redevelopment plans shown [CityRealty]