PRAY TO (LAND) LORD
9/11 chapel asks rent break to stay open
A chapel that served as a sanctuary for 9/11 first responders may have to close because its Battery Park City landlord has tripled the rent.
St. Joseph’s Chapel on South End Avenue may shut its doors by June after the Archdiocese of New York warned that it will stop paying the $263,000-per-year rent, which Gateway Plaza Management has been charging the chapel since 2014.
The chapel is a satellite of nearby St. Peter’s Catholic Church, and parish leaders negotiated a 10-year lease in 2009 with Gateway which set its rent at 90 percent of fair market value for the area, or about $85,000 a year.
But the rent ballooned five years later as lower Manhattan recovered from the financial crisis.
“It has been a tremendous hardship on the parish to continue to pay the new rent and we have asked them to consider lowering it so the chapel can remain there,” said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling.
The 130-year-old congregation once served Syrian and Lebanese Christians who immigrated to “little Syria” in lower Manhattan.
The modern chapel, located since 1983 in Gateway Plaza, includes a cornerstone from one of its earlier Washington Street structures.
Several historians, 9/11 advocates, and five Arab-American associations have spoken up in an effort to save the chapel.
“This artifact is an invaluable testimony to the long history of ArabAmericans,” the groups wrote in an April 3 letter to Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and local politicians.
The chapel served as a respite in 2001 for weary rescue workers who slept on its floors as they searched Ground Zero for survivors and remains in the first days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Battery Park City resident and parishioner Justine Cuccia remembers the “random acts of kindness and love” of first responders in 2001.
“I saw hope in people’s eyes and that chapel represents that to me,” she said. “To me it is as sacred ground as across the street [the World Trade Center]. A community was built there and it will be dispersed if you get rid of the chapel.”
Gateway, which is owned by the Lefrak, Fisher and Olnick families, offered to cut the rent from $80 per square foot to $70 per square foot. A Gateway/Lefrak spokeswoman called the offer “well below the rent called for by the church’s lease” and “a community gesture.”
But parish leaders have told parishioners they could afford to pay only $17 per square foot and asked Lefrak to respond by April 17.
Historian Todd Fine said it was “obscene” St. Joseph’s could close while Battery Park turns into a government-subsidized “luxury playground.”
“It is a failure of the post-9/11 project,” he said. “It is everyone’s responsibility.”