The 118 East 1st Street development by Robert Marty, Cynthia Wu and their architect Warren Freyer marks yet another act of senseless gentrification of the already hurting and disfigured neighborhood. This development for a handful of new rich tenants at the expense of occupants who live in adjoining buildings is an unconscionable contribution to total evisceration of the East Village/Lower East Side community. As pointed out by this blog, No. 118 was one of five new East Village projects identified by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation as an oversized new development ... "in the neighborhood's affordable housing zones [that] were approved by the city without requiring affordable housing."
I live in the building just west of that cancerous implant condominium. In my apartment the construction caused massive cracks inside all my rooms and fractures in the outside elevation, causing rain water leaks into my apartment. Debris from the fractures keep falling into my space. I have repaired and painted over some of the fractures already four times and they still keep re-opening and growing. Now because the elevation walls keep on shifting, my windows have become skewed and their the frames began to crack as well. Mold is growing in between the glass panes and I cannot close my windows. Warren Freyer has been unhelpful and unwilling to hire scaffold workers to replace the windows that his construction broke, telling me me that "you cannot stop progress" and "other people do that as well". Surely it is hard to expect that the developers who force their condo construction into the filthy, noisy, overcrowded Houston Street corporate hipster hub will behave in a civil fashion.
Tragically, when that implant condo is erected, the apartments on the east side of our building will loose most of their daylight. Three of my windows on the third floor, one to my bedroom, one to the kitchen and the bathroom one, will become grim shafts. This very act of economic bullying deserves special attention of New York City lawmakers. This invasive condo will literally steal our sunlight. The new wealthy tenants will bask in the sunlight which used to be the best thing about our otherwise run down tenement apartments. I can see clear legal argument that would make this kind of economic brutality criminal.
