Shaking Down Solow

"It's too big," is the objection uttered by the chairman of the City Council's zoning and franchising committee, Tony Avella, in response to developer Sheldon Solow's plan to build six residential towers with 4,000 apartments and one office tower on the old Con Edison site South of the United Nations.

What an attitude. Imagine if, when New York City was being created from the boroughs, the fear that "It's too big," had prevailed. Today Los Angeles would be America's largest city. If the "It's too big" attitude had held sway, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the General Motors Building would have never been built, nor the World Trade Center or Time Warner Center, and New York's skyline and international reputation, not to mention its tax base, would be the poorer for it. This isn't some national park or rural haven we are talking about, after all, but the center of Manhattan.

And this "It's too big" complaint is coming not from an ultra-left-winger, but from a Council member with mayoral ambitions, Mr. Avella, who recently described himself to our Alicia Colon as "a conservative Democrat."

It's not as if Mr. Solow hasn't done what he can to accommodate the council. He's already scaled back the number of parking spaces included in the project to 400 from 1,500, according to NYU's Plan NYC Web site. He's agreed to set aside more than 600 units for "affordable" housing and to build a public school that will accommodate 630 students. The plan includes a riverfront playground. All of this on land that Mr. Solow owns and for which he is seeking no special subsidies from the city.

In return for this, Mr. Solow has been greeted not with open arms, but with demands for additional concessions in return for approval of the project by the City Council. Some complain that the towers will be higher than the U.N. Secretariat building, as if that ineffective headquarters of Israel-bashing and the oil-for-food scandal ought to be deferred to as the pinnacle of the East River skyline the way the Capitol is in Washington. Puh-leeze.

As the economy slows and politicians fight, big building projects are running into delays and obstacles all over the city, from the Moynihan/Penn Station project and Hudson Yards on the West Side to the Deutsche Bank Building and Fulton Transit Hub fiascos near ground zero to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Here is a project that is privately funded on which a developer is ready to move full steam ahead, a project that the City Planning Commission has already approved, and the City Council is subjecting Mr. Solow to a shake-down. A vote that had been scheduled for today was postponed so that the politicians could have time to try to extract more goodies from Mr. Solow, who has already spent more than $100 million clearing the site. It's shameful. And if the consequence is that the site lies fallow instead of being put to productive use as quickly as possible — well, the people of New York will have Council Member Avella and others like him to blame.