Board 2 Approves Proposed CUNY Dorm By 21-10 Vote
BY THOMAS COGAN

At a late moment in a long meeting, one Community Board 2 member said of the City University of New York Graduate Center project in Long Island City: "It would be easy to embrace this project in its entirety- in a vacuum." Easy to love, but for some not easy to trust, the CUNY plan had come to a vote at the Board 2 April meeting after a presentation by the builder's architect that was free of hoopla and seemingly considerate of the neighborhood into which CUNY proposed to expand. Despite that, some local residents were skeptical, perceiving defects in the school and builder's claims of virtue.

The other matters requiring votes were a dual street renaming at Queensboro Plaza, speed bump requests on residential streets in Sunnyside Gardens and, also in Sunnyside, a proposal to make Barnett Avenue a one-way street, in one direction or the other; it elicited a great deal of opposition.

O'Connor Capital Partners, designated builder of the CUNY Grad Center's proposed complex of residential apartments, student residences and faculty town houses, is asking for a variance from the requirements of the zoning in that part of Hunters Point. Were it granted, the variance would allow O'Connor to build, a market rate residential building at 5-11 47th Ave., 13 stories in height, instead of one merely six stories high. Howard Goldman, attorney for the builder, said the variance was the minimum viable to realize minimal returns from the residential building.

The graduate student residence, initially called a dormitory before images of Ph.D.-candidate beer busts led O'Connor and CUNY to use another word, would be six stories high and 15 faculty townhouses be part of the project as well. Architect Jay Valgora, head of the firm Studio V, enumerated many of the good things that would come once the variance was allowed. Before any construction commenced, he said, O'Connor would, at its expense ($6-8 million, Valgora said), clean up the deposit of heavy metals left in the ground at the site after many decades of industry. Being a school, CUNY would be committed to development even of elementary education in the vicinity, Valgora said; being intellectually aware, it would support arts organizations by bringing the Queens Council on the Arts from its current headquarters in Forest Park in Woodhaven, and it would provide park and garden areas. It would widen streets leading to the East River, he added. Then he got to what he called "the part I love- motherhood and apple pie sort of stuff"- when he said there would be no homes or viable manufacturing sites displaced. It wasn't a matter of yielding to some sort of landmark mandate, he said, since there was none; instead he believed much of the historic structure of Long Island City should be preserved beside the new architecture. He attempted to show with slides how the new buildings, if allowed, would be nowhere near as tall as the structures already built or under construction between them and the river.

School officials, graduate students, CUNY faculty members, a visual artist living in Long Island City and Matthew Quigley, president of Plaxall, a plastics manufacturer on 46th Avenue near the project site, were among those addressing the meeting to implore the board to approve the variance and the project in general. Hoongyee Lee Krakauer, chairwoman of the Queens Council on the Arts, said that while her Woodhaven-based organization serves boroughwide, most of its grantees are in Long Island City and Astoria, so relocation to Hunters Point would be quite practical. Goldman said that if O'Connor Capital Partners is able to get brownfields cleanup money to defray the expense they are bearing, any excess funds could be expended on community improvement. But critics and skeptics spoke too, all of them deploring the size of the 13-story residential building. Comparing the relatively modest size of that building with the high-rise residences along the river was misleading, one of them said, because the project was located in the neighborhood, where 5th Street, one of the streets on which it would stand, would be too narrow for a building of that size. Another Hunters Point resident said the current parking problem would only worsen with new residents. Valgora replied that a garage with 90 parking spaces would be part of the project, and it would be underground, in contrast to the aboveground garage at Queens West. Carol Terrano of the board pointed out that the number of proposed residences exceeds 400, so 90 parking spaces would be quite inadequate. The architect countered that residents would probably resort to mass transit, to the extent that the need for parking spots might not be that critical. He said he understood that the Queens West garage was not filled to capacity, for all the proclaimed need for parking spaces. Then he reemphasized that he had no wish to build a garage so large it had to be above ground.

At the February meeting, Bernard Caligari, a trade union official, had asserted that the demolition company tearing down the vacant buildings to make room for the site was run by a man with countless violation citations against him. At the April meeting he said that when that man was forced to retire from the project, the demolition company that was named as a replacement looked suspiciously like one controlled by him. An O'Connor official said Caligari was misinformed, but the union official persisted, adding that hazardous duties such as asbestos removal were being performed by non-union workers earning $7 per hour.

Before the board voted on the project, Lisa Deller of the board's land use committee listed six stipulations that the committee was making to CUNY and the builder. The first of them asked that the graduate and faculty residences remain just that in perpetuity; second, that the Queens Council on the Arts increase its outreach to Long Island City artists; third, that the proposed garden courtyard area be open to the public during daylight hours; fourth, that the general residential building should have 20 percent of its apartments "affordable" for residents at or below 80 percent of area median income; fifth, in the event brownfields tax credits are granted to the project, the developer should send part of the money to the community for use in a library or other community institution, and sixth, CUNY should establish a mentoring relationship with local schools, from P.S. 78 to LaGuardia Community College. All were included in the motion on which the board voted. Steve Cooper, a board vice-chairman, urged approval of the project, saying that it was largely a benefit to the community and if it were rejected, some worse project would doubtless follow in its place. The motion was carried 21-10; largely in opposition were board members who are Hunters Point residents.