Hot mess of a bridge
Dreamy West Side project hits reality
JUST call it a Spaghetti Western. After more than a year of work on a new 151st Street pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway, the $24 million construction project on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has gone terribly wrong.
Behind a green privacy fence, there is now a 15foot-high mass of green twisted rebar, cascading down like so much pesto pasta over what was supposed to be a bridge abutment.
(Any sense that this was how it was supposed to look evaporated the minute I started taking photos. “I’ll confiscate your camera,” one construction worker said, obviously joking. “What is that, a Nikon?” But it got serious a moment later when they were asked what went wrong. One called his boss and the others walked away and said they couldn’t talk about it.)
The future bridge project has been eagerly watched by park visitors and West Side Highway drivers as the preparations dragged from fall into winter and finally into an approximately two-story-high plywood form before concrete was recently poured.
When it was removed, the concrete didn’t quite cover the double abutment, leaving it looking like Swiss cheese.
The current volcanic-looking mass of rebar and smashed concrete is a result of the construction workers from contractor E.E. Cruz tearing the work apart.
After an inspection, according to New York State Department of Transportation spokeswoman Diane Park, “The concrete did not meet our strict quality-control standards and we are having the contractor remove it and replace it at his own cost.”
Park says the pedestrian bridge is still “on track” to be completed in 2017, even though its own sign states winter 2016. Eventually, the arched pedestrian bridge will provide a walkway and bike access from West 151st Street in Washington Heights across the Amtrak train tracks and West Side Highway and connect the neighborhood with Hudson River Greenway.
Frozen residential rents are sending thoughts of conversions dancing through apartment building owners’ heads. Rather than encouraging more rental housing, the Rent Guidelines Board decision for the second year in a row to freeze one-year rents and allow a 2 percent increase for two-year leases could discourage investment and spur conversions of apartments into condos.
“It’s disincentivizing the ownership of rentals,” warned Time Equities honcho Francis Greenburger, who is now seriously considering the conversion of some of his 21 city apartment buildings.
Greenburger says he could have turned these buildings into condominiums at any time over the last 25 years but chose to keep them in his portfolio as rentals.
But now, after experiencing 10 percent hikes in property taxes and zero rent in- creases two years in a row, Greenburger is taking a hard look at the numbers.
Over the last 10 years at six of his buildings, Greenburger determined the average tax increase was 9.47 percent at the same time the average allowable rent increase was 2.56 percent.
While higher taxes lower the property value, less income also lowers values, which eventually leads to less city tax revenue. “Taken to an extreme, this can lead to inadequately maintained housing that is eventually abandoned by owners, as it was in New York City in the 1960s,” he warned. “If conditions become onerous enough, the mayor can talk me into not being a rental owner.”
But worries about frozen rents are not stopping buyers looking for safe-haven investments. “There is a whole crowd snapping these up because, if you are in there for 10 years, you will be fine,” explained investment broker Peter Hauspurg of Eastern Consolidated. “It’s a flight to safety and is the real estate with the greatest upside — as long as you can hang on and feed the beast until rent increases return.”