Preservationists said a tentative plan to flatten a historical recreation center has struck a nerve.
After two committees of Manhattan Community Board 2 positively received the city Parks Department’s proposal last week to replace the deteriorating Tony Dapolito Recreation Center with a new facility across the street, Village Preservation said its members have generated thousands of letters protesting the tentative demolition plan.
Parks and the Department of Housing and Preservation announced that they are considering demolishing the timeworn recreation center, in which they found serious structural issues, and building a replacement at the base levels of the nearby incoming affordable housing complex at 388 Hudson Street.
Members of the community board gave a tentative greenlight to the part of the plan around building a new rec center as part of the 388 Hudson St. development, but decided to wait before weighing in on the proposed demolition. Village Preservation is against both ideas.
“There certainly seems to be widespread opposition to this idea and this plan on the basis of everything from people who are sentimentally attached to the rec center, people who think it’s crazy to just say, ‘We’re gonna just demolish a historic landmark building simply because it needs repairs,’” said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation.
Village Preservation has reached out to Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who indicated that he is not opposed to new facilities at 388 Hudson but that it’s too early to draw conclusions. “No decisions have been made regarding the future of the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center or what facilities may be built at 388 Hudson Street,” said Bottcher. “I look forward to working with Community Board 2 and other stakeholders to determine a path forward.”
Berman said that in spite of the Tony Dapolito building’s serious problems he sees no justification for demolishing the rec center, a structure that was part of the reason the district around it was included in a 2010 historical landmarking process.
Inside the facility last week, Parks staff displayed the reinforced scaffolding that the agency put in place to shore up the vaulted ceiling from collapsing and protections on the exterior to prevent parts of its stone facade from crumbling off. A renovation project that was initially estimated to cost between $4-to-6 million escalated to $20 million after the city discovered these structural issues.
“Most recreation centers in the borough of Manhattan date to the early part of the 20th century. Virtually all of them have been renovated and brought up to code at some point,” Berman said.
But it’s not just the idea that the historical building should be destroyed that bothers Village Preservation. It’s the concern that building a new recreation center on the first two stories of the 388 Hudson Street development, as the city floated, will add height to the proposed tower that preservationists say is already too large for the neighborhood. Throughout the envisioning process for the 388 Hudson project, Village Preservation has taken a staunch position for reducing the size of the building, and limiting it only to affordable housing.
A letter to Mayor Eric Adams about the 388 Hudson project, Berman wrote that he could support locating supplemental facilities in parts of the new development at 388 Hudson Street that cannot be used for housing, like a pool in the basement, as Parks has suggested, but nothing above ground that could feasibly raise the height of the building.
Last week, Parks and HPD pitched its plans for a new recreation center as the quickest way to restore a working rec center to the neighborhood, since Tony Dapolito has stayed closed since the pandemic. Berman was skeptical of this claim. The city has acknowledged that between the request-for-proposals, zoning and construction process, the project will take a number of years to complete.
“The idea that it would be quicker and cheaper to simply build a new public recreation center at 388 Hudson Street strains credulity and cannot be asserted with any firm assurance,” Village Preservation wrote in the letter.
Community Board 2 will consider the plan furthe at its stated meeting on Thursday.
