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CO-OP BOARDS TOGETHER VS. MTA

Co-op Boards Together vs. MTA

2nd-ave-subway400px
 

Nov. 25, 2009 — They say you can't fight City Hall. Maybe so. But some co-ops on the Upper East Side banded together recently and fought a winning battle against an equally hidebound and Byzantine bureaucracy the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The issue: the locations of the 72nd Street entrances to the Second Avenue subway, a monumental project conceived in 1929, with on-an-off construction be-ginning 1972, and with revival groundbreaking in 2007. You'd have thought there wouldn't be any big last-minute changes.

But there were. One dangerous and illogical one in particular. Here's what happened — and what a band of building-board brothers did….

The original plan called for two entrances where a reasonable person might expect to find them – at the northeast and northwest corners of Second Avenue and 72nd Street. But in fall 2007, the MTA decided to move the northeast-corner entrance to the middle of the block on the north side of East 72nd Street, between First and Second Avenues. Not only that, the MTA proposed two mid-block entrances pro-tected by soaring glass canopies. That got the neighborhood's attention.

"We accepted that there was going to be a subway stop at Second Avenue," says Valerie Mason, vice president of the co-op board at 320 East 72nd Street, a 40-unit building erected in the late 1920s. "Then, literally overnight, the station entrances were moved from the corner to the middle of the block. They looked like two huge soccer goals. The MTA said they had encountered some problems at the corner. What I saw was an attractive nuisance and a safety hazard."

The MTA said it was moving

the entrance without

studies or a public hearing.

 

Alan Schnitzer, a lawyer who was then serving as president of a nearby co-op at 340 East 72nd Street, got the ball rolling. "He contacted several co-ops," Mason recalls, "and said, 'Let's have a meeting and see if there are any objections.' "

In December 2007, representatives from a half-dozen co-ops arrived at Schnitzer's apartment to share information and discuss alternatives to the MTA's new plan. They agreed to make their concerns known to elected officials, including Jessica Lappin of the city council, State Senator Liz Krueger and Congresswoman Caroline Maloney. The neighbors also discussed suing to have the relocation of the entrance declared illegal.

Phyllis Weisberg, a partner at the law firm of Kurzman Karelsen & Frank, filed a lawsuit in state court on behalf of the co-ops at 320 and 340 East 72nd Street. Two co-ops across the street filed a similar suit in federal court. "The basis for the lawsuits was that under state and federal law, certain environmental impact studies have to be done and public hearings have to be held," Weisberg says. "Five days after the [2007] public hearing, the MTA said they were moving the entrance. They did that without studies or a public hear-ing."

Lobbyist Renovations

The co-ops at 320 and 340 East 72nd Streets hired Kasirer Consulting, a lobbying firm, to help get their message to elected officials. Julie Greenberg, a lobbyist with Kasirer, says, "We briefed them on putting together information on traffic and safety issues, and then making their case."

Meanwhile a handful of co-op residents on the block got busy mobilizing their neighbors. "We started to engage the buildings on the block," Mason says. "We asked people to attend community-board meetings [and to] write to elected officials. We had huge turnouts at the meetings, and we made presentations showing how the new entrances would be unsafe. Since they're in the middle of the block, they would cause people to start jaywalking on a main crosstown thoroughfare."

The activists got 1,500 signatures on a petition and convinced 11 co-op board presidents to write a joint letter to the MTA and elected officials objecting to the proposed relocation. Portis Hicks, a retired lawyer who is now vice president of the co-op board at 340 East 72nd Street, was a major force in the mobilization.

"I became the point person in our building to keep people apprised [and to] try to get other buildings interested," Hicks says. "We called buildings where we knew people [who would] get in touch with board members." It wasn't that difficult to get people involved, he says. "The MTA sprang this change on us from the bottom of the deck, and it was going to change the character of the neighborhood and create a safety hazard."

Next page: What Price Success? >>

 

 

 

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