West Village activists: no longer content with Landmarks meeting protests and now taking to the 'nets with Google SketchUp and YouTube. A tipster alerted us to this video titled, dramatically, "The Rape of the West Village," about the ongoing construction at the old Whitehall Storage facility. As the dubbed-over narrator points out, 150 Charles Street takes up almost an entire city block and is the largest undeveloped property in the Village. When developers the Witkoff Group applied for a warehouse conversion, they characterized the neighborhood as an "area of street-walled, lot-lined converted factories and warehouses." Well, not quite. And while the group behind the video admit that the old factory was "ugly" and a "massive neighborhood eyesore," it was short enough to allow daylight on their tree-lined, sun-dappled streets.
The new Cook + Fox-designed edifice, which retains the warehouse's old three-story facade and adds anywhere from 11 to 20 stories, would be as tall as Richard Meier's Perry Street development and approximately three times as wide. Anyone have additional intel? You know where to find us.
· Whitehall Storage Building coverage [Curbed]
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