The slogan “Help keep New York filthy” is scrawled on the graffiti-filled wall running the length of the 135,000-square-foot Beaux Arts building at 605 E. 9th St. that was the subject of a contentious hearing held on Tuesday by the Board of Standards and Appeals. The building’s owner is certainly doing his part to live up to the slogan, some concerned neighbors say. An elderly Irish man sitting on the stoop across the street cites broken windows, trash strewn the length of the front, and “rats, rats, rats inside.” Opened in 1904 as a public school to anchor the teeming immigrant neighborhood around Tompkins Square Park, the once handsome P.S. 64 is now a mess – and deteriorating daily. It is “a closed, shuttered eyesore,” according to testimony by state Assemblyman Steven Sanders, who represents the East Side of Manhattan.

A lawyer who represents the shareholders of the neighboring upscale Christodora House, Howard Zipser, says the developer is “trying to put the building in such a bad condition it has to be demolished.”

Its future is a matter of angry debate in the East Village, with many – perhaps most – residents and elected officials opposed to the developer’s plans to replace the school with a 19-story dormitory, holding 222 dorm units and a 45-car underground garage.

In 1998, developer Gregg Singer and his partners paid $3.1 million for P.S. 64 at a public auction conducted by the Giuliani administration. They agreed to maintain it as a “community facility.” The chairman of Community Board 3, David McWater, recalls that residents of the East Village assumed the deed restriction would protect cultural and community groups that had been using the building. Instead, Mr. Singer immediately moved to evict them.

Under the zoning resolution, a community facility includes hospitals, churches, homeless shelters, libraries, museums, nursing homes, monasteries, or dorms. Mr. Singer and his partners, however, do not have a school or university that says it wants or needs the dorm. Though they’ve created a nonprofit group, University House, to run the dorm, they are essentially building on spec.

As allowed under community facilities zoning, created by the Wagner administration in 1961, Mr. Singer and his partners applied to the Department of Buildings for a work permit to construct a far larger building than normal. The extra rentable space amounts to a substantial and much sought-after subsidy. The result on the Lower East Side has been a smattering of out-of-scale buildings shooting up in the middle of low-rise blocks. A preservationist, Andrew Berman, who is executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, says New York University alone has built at least 11 outsized buildings downtown.

Fearing that the developer was about to build an “illegal, oversized structure” on the P.S. 64 site, the Department of Buildings denied the permit, saying that any dorm must be “controlled by an institution for the institution’s benefit.” (The Department of Buildings had already been badly embarrassed by a speculative dorm built a few blocks away on East 3rd Street.) Mr. Singer asked the Board of Standards and Appeals to order the buildings department to grant the permit, arguing that the DOB cannot deny a permit simply because it “suspects” a “possible future illegal use.” Mr. McWater testified that Mr. Singer is “circumventing community plans by trying to avoid meeting the most minimum regulations.” What’s not to believe that in a year or two he won’t petition the city to get rid of the restriction altogether? Mr. McWater asks. “He’ll say, ‘My dorm isn’t successful. I need an economic hardship variance.’ That’s how this works.”

Mr. Berman calls the building a “Trojan-horse dorm.”

A lawyer for Mr. Singer, Jeffrey Glen, contended that “90% of what’s going on is that the BSA commissioners are interested in the event that a building is built but can’t be profitably used as a school dormitory. Our position is that while this is a perfectly legitimate inquiry, DOB doesn’t have the right to withhold a permit based on whether or not the building is likely to be a success.” DOB Deputy Counsel Felicia Miller testified that the agency defines a dorm “in terms of ‘institutional nexus’ to avoid the situation where we might erroneously permit oversized non-community facility residences.” A building occupied by a group of theology students, she added, would not qualify as a monastery.

A zoning lawyer and neutral observer, Howard Goldman, said the buildings department is correct here. “The city charter gives the Buildings Department the responsibility for interpreting the zoning resolution, which only has the bare bones of what’s required. Buildings puts flesh on the bones through their specific requirements for applications that come before them,” Mr. Goldman said. There is no other way to do it, he added. Otherwise the zoning resolution would be 10 times longer, which nobody wants. “Buildings is saying to the developer: Show us who’s going to occupy this site. Show us the terms of the arrangement. Show us this is not a speculative benefit but it’s really for the benefit of a specific user.”

At the standing room-only hearing, held at 40 Rector St., on Tuesday, every single public official or neighborhood resident who spoke opposed the dorm. “Opposition is coming from virtually every quarter,” said Mr. Berman. “It’s hard to find anyone in the neighborhood who supports it.”

An activist and founding member of the East Village Community Coalition, Roland Legiardi-Laura, argues that community facilities should “reflect the real needs of the neighborhood. An ambiguous college dormitory for an as yet undetermined palette of university students would not create anything of real value to the East Village, which is host already to thousands of college students. This is a very strange concept, to have a building rented out to a mishmash of schools. Students won’t feel any loyalty or connection to the community, and are likely to be more of a disruption rather than less.” Community Board 3 does not have a single college or university within its borders.

The East Village faces a difficult future, as it tries to balance the needs and desires of its residents with development pressures. It has retained its low rise character in part because it is poorly served by public transportation, parks, and schools, even as it is overburdened by large public housing projects on the edges. A worried City Planning Commission is studying the neighborhood’s overall zoning. But so long as community facilities zoning trumps all other rules, neighborhood character cannot be protected.