C.B. 4 ok’s Covenant House hotel, with reservations

The north side the former Covenant House building, whose conversion into a hotel was recently approved by Community Board 4.

By Chris Lombardi

Last Wednesday, the former Chelsea home of Covenant House, the nation’s largest child-welfare nonprofit agency, came one step closer to becoming a luxury hotel building in its entirety when Community Board 4 approved a new hotel chain’s conversion plan for part of the space, much to the chagrin of some board members and area residents.

The full board approved the conversion application, brought by the soon-to-be hotel’s owner, Hampshire Hotels, by a vote of 28–12, but not without attempting to contain the operation’s potential impact on the neighborhood. Board members attached as many strings to their approval as possible, prohibiting a hotel nightclub, demanding a “green” building and exacting an oral commitment to hire hotel staff locally.

That was enough to appease most on the board and in the audience at Wednesday’s meeting, held at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, although many of those same people would have preferred alternative uses for the building had circumstances been different, uses that would help prevent the neighborhood from being turned into a playhouse for the rich, with attendant traffic, noise and other problems.

The issue was brought before C.B. 4 in the first place because of a chain of events that took place over the last six years. The 35-year-old Covenant House, which had owned the famed modernist building on Ninth Avenue between 16th and 17 Streets since the late 1980s, sold its western wing in 2001 to what is now the glitzy Maritime Hotel, which has often been portrayed as an aloof operation with little respect for the once-gritty neighborhood surroundings. Covenant House was recently forced to sell the other half of the building because of rising operational costs, and Hampshire Hotels is set to transform that portion into a 300-unit space, most of which would also be a hotel.

The building, at 100 Ninth Avenue, was designed by Albert C. Ledner and built in 1966 as headquarters for the National Maritime Union. It was constructed to look like a ship with two distinct wings, with porthole-shaped windows and a sloping front, and filled the entire block. According to architectural historian Christopher Gray, the sloping front was designed to also accommodate the setback requirements of the zoning laws: “As novel on the exterior as the union’s former main building,” Gray wrote in the New York Times in 2001, “it [this newer space] was efficiently laid out inside to accommodate medical and recreational facilities for union members.”

As shipping’s fortunes faded, the building was sold to a series of buyers before Covenant House purchased it in the late 1980s. (A similar spate of buy-sells also befell the Bayview Correctional Facility further west.)

A national network of shelters for runaway youth founded in 1972 by Father Bruce Ritter, Covenant House grew into a behemoth in the 1980s, when it became one of the early “thousand points of light” highlighted by the Reagan-Bush administration. Over the years, it has weathered numerous problems, with Ritter himself forced to resign after a sexual abuse scandal in 1990 and more recently, and with charges from lesbian, gay and transgender youth that they were tormented by Covenant House staff in its three New York shelters. Still, the organization has continued to expand its programs, which have also proved costly—as when Covenant House New Orleans reopened in 2006. The Chelsea building’s sale, in two halves, was part of the agency’s consolidation of its New York programs, including its flagship teen hotline, the “Nineline” (1-800-999-9999).

Stacey Flanagan, a member of Community Board 4 and a program coordinator at the Medical Health Research Association, was in high school when she first volunteered for Covenant House, “feeding sandwiches to the poor.” So in 1998, after a tour in the Peace Corps helping urban youth in Costa Rica, Flanagan went to work with the agency she knew best—Covenant House. By then, Flanagan told Chelsea Now this week, the agency was already renting out much of the building’s space to other nonprofit organizations: “Catholic Charities had a lot of space there,” she remembered.

Flanagan, who now has a Ph.D. in nonprofit management from the New School’s Milano School of Public Policy, said that as the cost of running the building increased in the 1990s, Covenant House was faced with a dilemma: It was hard to find enough groups willing to pay “a reasonable rent,” she said, for what was admittedly quite an odd building. “The porthole windows didn’t make it easy—they were too high up,” she remembered.

Those same porthole windows are, of course, now cited in glossy brochures for the Maritime Hotel, whose owners, Sean K. MacPherson and Eric Goode, bought the western half of the building in 2001 for $19 million and now charge room rates averaging $300 a night. “We could go higher,” a Maritime representative told The New York Times, but they didn’t want to seem unreasonable.

In its four years in the neighborhood, the Maritime has already given the word “hotel” a bad name. At Wednesday’s meeting, residents and board members complained about increased traffic on the already congested intersection at Ninth Avenue and 16th Street, noise from the lively bars across from the Robert Fulton Houses, and the hotel’s general lack of interest in, or commitment to, the surrounding neighborhood.

“I asked [the Maritime’s owner] if he’d provide any jobs for the poor,” remembered board member Miguel Acevedo, a longtime resident of Robert Fulton Houses, “and he said flat out: No!”

Enter Hampshire Hotels, who, not surprisingly, scored a number of points with C.B. 4 by agreeing to hold a job fair for local workers, part of a long list of stipulations drafted by the board’s Chelsea Planning and Preservation Committee before they would grant the company the variances they needed, which the committee did on March 19 before sending the application to the full board.

At last Wednesday’s meeting, the company’s plans were presented by four representatives of 346 W. 17th Street L.L.C., a subsidiary of the international Hampshire chain that spawned the boutique hotels “Night” and “Dream,” in addition to the ubiquitous, and quite expensive, Hampton Inns (one of which is located at a former homeless shelter at Kennedy Airport). By “scooping out” a mid-block section to create a courtyard, then using the decreased “bulk” to add one story to the 11-story building on 17th Street and three stories to the five-story building on 16th Street, Hampshire’s plan called for creating 270 transient hotel rooms as well as 74 short-term apartments.

Saying they wanted a “long-term relationship with the community,” company representatives pointed out the changes they had already made to conform to the C.B. 4’s demands, such as agreeing that their restaurant would not be a nightclub and increasing the building’s setback from 10 to the required 15 feet. They pledged to work with the board on traffic and to ensure that local residents are among the hotel’s 270 planned employees. “Miguel has my number!” promised Eran Nornberg, vice president of the local company.

Still, the approval didn’t happen easily. Local resident Linda Riera, a lifetime resident of 16th St between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, said that the Maritime was more than enough.

“The amount of noise, the amount of filth, makes it very difficult for the people who live there,” Riera said. “To get through the traffic you almost have to walk over the car tops.” She added that “to think about putting another major hotel in there—across from the Fulton Houses, where there are a lot of elderly and children, and within walking distance of three schools—it’s crazy!”

Meanwhile, board member Corey Johnson asked whether, with everything else already going up in Chelsea, a “hotel district” was really what people wanted for the neighborhood. Others asked whether Covenant House could have chosen a different solution to the fiscal dilemma presented by their building, much as General Theological Seminary is now trying to do. J.D. Nolan, board co-chair, quoted local real estate experts who had said the sale was the best fiscal option. Stacey Flanagan, recounting her experience there, said (as she later told Chelsea Now) that Covenant House had no other option but to sell.

Still, Flanagan was among 12 board members who voted against approval of the variance, the rest acceding to the wishes of the patient corporate cluster who promised to work with everyone in the room. She voted against the hotel, Flanagan told Chelsea Now the next day, because she, like Johnson, hated the way it would help accelerate the loss of the Chelsea she has loved for so long.

“I tried going to the Maritime several times, to get a sense of the place,” said Flanagan, who was herself priced out of Chelsea when the rent on her 250-foot studio was raised to nearly $1,400 a few years back. “When they ask you for your credit card before you even order a drink, what does that tell you? And how could I vote for a homeless shelter turning into something like that?”