Hell’s Kitchen residents and advocates are raising red flags after the City’s Department of Buildings (DOB) appeared to accept a developer’s application to raze a historic, century-old building where demolition protections are in place.
404 W50th Street is a four-story brick tenement building from 1880 just west of 9th Avenue. Photo: Catie Savage
Developer Benjamin Braka and real estate investment company Aetna Realty filed plans late last month to demolish the four-story, yellow-and-brown brick residential building at 404 West 50th Street (bw 9th/10th Ave). In its place, Braka intends to develop a new eight-story building — but there’s a catch.
The property is located in a preservation area of the Clinton Special District — created in 1974 — that covers much of Hell’s Kitchen and is intended to preserve the neighborhood’s affordability and character. It prohibits the demolition of “any building containing dwelling units,” unless deemed unsafe, according to zoning regulations reviewed by W42ST.
The building is listed in DOB records as containing two dwelling units — and we even found an old StreetEasy listing for a one-bedroom apartment for rent in May 2022 for $2,750 — leaving members of Hell’s Kitchen’s Manhattan Community Board 4 (MCB4) to wonder why the agency is considering issuing a permit to tear it down.
Images from a StreetEasy listing for a one-bedroom apartment in the building that was delisted in May 2022. Photos: StreetEasy
Aetna Realty purchased the building in April 2022 for $10 million, property records show — just a month before the apartment on StreetEasy was delisted.
The demolition is “not permitted, period,” MCB4 member Joe Restuccia said after the Clinton-Hell’s Kitchen Land Use Committee’s meeting this week. The Committee unanimously agreed to take a firm stance and send a letter to DOB, urging it not to approve the permit.
“No demolition does not freeze development” on the site, Restuccia stressed. “This is a building that could be gut renovated, that could be added to, and you put money into it. The difference is, you will not knock it down.”
The ground floor of 404 W50th Street is currently being used by Amish Marketplace around the corner on 9th Avenue. Photo: Catie Savage
“We have buildings all over the neighborhood that have new structures inside, that have been added to,” Restuccia said.
This isn’t an isolated instance, Restuccia said, highlighting at least 15 sites across Hell’s Kitchen where developers attempted to demolish buildings within a special zoning district in the past decade.
“This is a fight that we have had many, many, many times before,” said Paul Devlin, co-chair of the committee.
The affordable housing nonprofit organization Clinton Housing Development Company, of which Restuccia is president, has created a map that shows which buildings in the core of Hell’s Kitchen, known for its prewar tenement-style architecture, are protected from demolition — and those that have already been illegally demolished.
Map of the Special Clinton District showing all buildings that are protected from demolition. Image: Clinton Housing Development Company.
But Restuccia warned that last year’s approval of the City of Yes, a citywide package of laws intended to increase housing development, would further incentivize developers to build within the neighborhood, by increasing the amount of additional square footage that they can build.
He pointed out that the DOB’s online filing system, DOB NOW, is lacking a tag for when demolition is restricted at a location, in addition to the tag for special districts. “They have all kinds of checked boxes and that’s not one of them,” Restuccia said.
When asked why the agency was considering the demolition permit if demolition is restricted on the site, DOB spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said that the permit had not yet been denied or approved and that “property owners are not prohibited from filing a demolition or construction application for their property with the Department of Buildings.”
Rudansky reiterated that DOB already has public-facing tags for Special Zoning Districts, but did not state why a tag for demolition restrictions could not be added.
Aetna Realty did not return a request for comment.