LOWER EAST SIDE BUILDING SAVED
Quick Action Averts Demolition of 16 Apartments
By Steven Wishnia
Interviews by Eileen Sutton

When a backhoe operated by a politically connected contractor cracked the foundation of 182 Avenue B on March 4, the 16 households there could have met the same fate as tenants in three other damaged Lower East Side buildings did recently. Their building would have been declared “in imminent danger of collapse,” and they would have been barred from rescuing pets or retrieving possessions before it was demolished.

This time was different. Quick mobilization by tenants and neighborhood activists, plus the interventionary clout of local Councilmember Margarita Lopez, saved the building. The city issued a stop-work order against all six sites on developer Donald Capoccia’s Del Este Village condominium project, and most of the tenants were able to move back in late March.

“We successfully put in place a mechanism that was able to stop the possible demolition of that building without a good reason for it,” Lopez said on March 4. “As soon as we heard, we moved there immediately, and we called every one of the elected officials of the area.”

The building is next to a former parking lot that is one of the six sites for Del Este Village, a “middle-income” (prices start at $117,000) condo project sponsored by the New York City Partnership, built by Capoccia’s BFC Construction, and sponsored locally by former Councilmember Antonio Pagan’s old nonprofit. At about 9:30 on the morning of March 4, a BFC backhoe digging a trench next to the south wall of 182 Avenue B apparently hit the building’s foundation.

“There was an incredibly loud crack like a tree being felled, a huge noise that I knew wasn’t normal,” said tenant Dan Yeomans. “They were afraid the building was going to fall down immediately, so they brought us all out here. They started ringing our buzzers and beating on our doors until we left.”

“I took my coat, and went downstairs,” said Estelle, another tenant. “But they told me no animals. I have all my stuff inside. All my stuff.”

Tenants, who said the BFC workers told them the building would have to be torn down, contacted Lopez and other city officials, while trying to obtain a court order preventing demolition. By that evening, a construction crew was at work shoring up the foundation with huge beams.

“The engineers that came from the Buildings Department and the emergency units from the Mayor’s office concurred that that building did not need to be demolished and what needed to happen was to secure the wall, and to make the contractor who created this problem fix the wall and put it back together,” said Lopez. “And this was a step forward instead of backwards, like in the case of 172 Stanton, where that building was demolished without giving us a chance to even look into it.”

The accident came when Capoccia’s projects and the recent demolitions of three neighborhood buildings had already spawned a network of opposition. A leading contributor to Pagan and an illegal donor to Mayor Giuliani, Capoccia’s company renovated the five squatted buildings evicted at gunpoint in 1995 and 1996. Last December, he bulldozed four community gardens to make way for Del Este Village, and he is slated to take two more garden sites for luxury housing.

“I think that if there hadn’t been a lot of agitation around housing and gardens, and what had happened around Stanton Street, they would have gone in with an order of demolition and brought this thing down in a single night,” said Stephen Duncombe, one of a group picketing Capoccia’s East Third Street co-op that night. “But they can’t do that any more.”

BFC faxed out a statement claiming credit for saving the building, telling City Limits that the problem was “prior structural distress” at 182 Avenue B. But city engineers afterwards found problems at the other Del Este Village sites where BFC has started construction. The Shadow, a neighborhood anarchist newspaper, reported that the company had not posted the required permits at the sites, and did not have permits for equipment it was using.

According to Lopez, 11 buildings were at risk. “Although we had an emergency situation immediately, I was able to point out to city officials that this was a potential disaster waiting to happen,” she said. “Because the other sites have the same situation, and unless a precaution is taken, it will be the same story with worse conditions, because some of the other buildings are not kept as well as that one was.

“I’m very concerned about the lack of building inspections and the lack of site inspections where construction is going on,” she added. “And I’m concerned that this issue is right there, and we need to look at it as a city policy in terms of safety.”

Many Lower East Side residents believe the Giuliani Administration has a conscious policy of tearing down old buildings on the slightest pretext, turning aging low-income housing into valuable vacant real estate. City officials deny this, saying safety was the sole reason for their rush to demolish a squat at 537 East Fifth St. in February 1997, an SRO at 26 East First St. last July, and a tenement at 172 Stanton St. in January. But conspiracy theories are often true on the Lower East Side, where venerable poor, countercultural, and activist communities intersect with the most overheated, greed-fired, politically wired real-estate market outside of Asia. Whatever it was, this time it didn’t happen.