The Fight Over Tearing Down a Landmark Red Church

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Tonight’s All-Star Game means we’re halfway through the baseball season, and the Yankees and the Mets are in first place. We’ll see what one of our sports editors has to say about a Subway Series in October. But first we’ll look at a landmark church on the Upper West Side that is seeking permission to demolish its nearly 140-year-old structure for an apartment building.

The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated more than 37,000 landmarks large and small, from Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan to a 120-year-old carousel in Forest Park, Queens, preserving them all.

Today it will hold a meeting about doing the opposite — allowing the demolition of a landmark building that, the owner claims, imposes a hardship. The commission has done that only 13 times in the 57 years since it was established.

At issue is the storied West Park Presbyterian Church, which has dominated one corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 86th Street since the 1880s. The church wants to go ahead with a deal worth more than $30 million that would replace the structure with an apartment building. Inside the new structure would be a 10,000-square-foot community center that the congregation could use or rent out, just as it now leases its building to an arts group, the Center for West Park.

The church’s proposal has put it at odds with preservationists and with lawmakers, including City Council member Gale Brewer, whose district includes the site.

Building owners often grumble about landmark status, which forces them to clear even routine repairs with the landmarks commission. But West Park needs more than routine repairs. Roger Leaf, the chairman of the West Park Administrative Commission, estimated that fixing all of the building’s problems would cost $50 million, money he said the church does not have.

As in many congregations, the people in the pews have dwindled: Leaf said West Park has 12 members. The church has not had a full-time minister for several years. It asked the Presbytery of New York City, which oversees 89 churches and 14 communities of worship in the five boroughs, to set up the administrative commission in 2010.

That was 10 years after the West Park building was designated a landmark over the church’s objections. By then, concerns about the building were nothing new. It had been surrounded by sidewalk-level scaffolding for years, and still is.

The scaffolding makes the building hard to appreciate except from a distance, but the landmarks commission said it was “one of the best examples of a Romanesque Revival-style religious structure in New York City.” The commission praised the “extraordinarily deep color of its red sandstone cladding” and its “monumental and distinguished presence,” which made it “one of the Upper West Side’s most important buildings.”

But the leadership of the church voted in 2020 to sell the building.

Leaf said the building “no longer serves the needs of the church” and is “beyond repair in our view.” Its deal with Alchemy Partners, which converted the top 30 floors of the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan into condominiums, is for $33 million.

“The problem we have here is a lack of will on the part of the presbytery and the developer because they are much more invested in destroying this building so they can replace it with luxury condos,” said Michael Hiller, a lawyer representing the center, which is fighting the church’s proposal. “This development is a money grab.”

Hiller said the center had offered $3.5 million for the building and would let the presbytery share in the profits if it sold the air rights or the building itself. He said the church had not responded. The church, through a spokeswoman, said the center had not shown that it had the money for the purchase or the repairs that would be necessary.

Leaf said the new building would reorient the church. “With the right resources, this congregation can resurrect itself, if you will,” he said, adding that if the proposal to demolish the church stalled, “it’s almost certain this congregation will end up disbanding.”

Weather

Monday’s drenching downpours added up: It was the rainiest July 18 on record, with 1.85 inches in Central Park, according to preliminary figures from the National Weather Service, displacing the record set 10 years ago by 0.09 inch.

Now we’re in line for several scorching days, starting today, with highs in the mid-90s from now through at least Friday and lows in the high 70s at night. The humidity and temperatures on will combine for a heat index of around 100 degrees.

Here’s how to stay hydrated in high heat. And here’s how to keep pets safe.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).

The latest Metro news

• For monkeypox patients, pain and a struggle for care: As New York City and the federal government strain to supply vaccines, patients face a private battle to find treatment and relief.

• $4.2 million: The federal government has quietly paid victims of a guard who admitted to sexually abusing several female prisoners at the Metropolitan Correctional Center from 2012 to 2018.

• $900,000 for Maloney, from Maloney: Representative Carolyn Maloney holds a commanding financial advantage over her crosstown Democratic primary opponent, Representative Jerrold Nadler, thanks to a benefactor: herself.

Arts & Culture

• The end of “Saturday Night”: “Mr. Saturday Night,” Billy Crystal’s musical about an aging comedian trying to reboot his career, will close on Labor Day weekend.

• Gish Prize: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of the dance ensemble Urban Bush Women, was awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given to artists who push boundaries and contribute to social change.

Well, what about a Subway Series?

The All-Star break — the midpoint of the baseball season — seemed the right moment to wonder about a Subway Series. Is that what we should expect for October? I asked Benjamin Hoffman, a senior editor in sports who manages the section’s baseball coverage, to weigh the prospects.

It had started to feel like destiny. The Yankees were a juggernaut, excelling at all facets of the game, while the Mets kept winning no matter how many injuries piled up. The thought of the season ending in a Subway Series began to form, with seemingly few obstacles in either team’s way.

But as May turned to June, and June to July, the magic of the Mets’ season started to wear off. Batters not named Pete Alonso started to falter, close wins became close losses and the Atlanta Braves — who had roared back to overtake the Mets for the National League East last season, ultimately winning the World Series — began filming a shot-for-shot remake.

Even the Yankees, who have had the best record in baseball for virtually the entire season, started to show some wear and tear in recent weeks.

But with the All-Star break now here, it is still easy to look at both clubs and see the possibility for this year’s World Series to be a New York City-only affair.

The Yankees are seemingly unstoppable. With two blowout wins over the Boston Red Sox to end the first half, they are 64-28, and they have outscored their opponents by 199 runs. Their pitching has durability concerns, but there is no question that the team is talented enough to win it all.

The Mets have thus far held Atlanta off and go into the break at 58-35, good enough for the second best record in the N.L. behind the Los Angeles Dodgers.

They recently got Max Scherzer back from the injured list, and his co-ace, Jacob deGrom, is getting close to making his first major league start in more than a year. Factor in the Mets being attached to every trade rumor, thanks to owner Steven Cohen’s willingness to spend, and the team’s offensive issues could disappear overnight.

Expectations should be tempered, though. While the Subway Series was once a fact of life for Major League Baseball — the Yankees faced either the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series 13 times between 1921 and 1956 — it has been a rarity since. The only edition to come since the Giants and Dodgers bolted to California before the 1958 season was in 2000, a World Series remembered as much for Roger Clemens’s decision to throw a piece of a broken bat at Mike Piazza of the Mets (Clemens claimed he thought it was the ball) as it is for the actual competition (the Yankees won the series in five games).

METROPOLITAN diary

Spotted

Dear Diary:

I was visiting my brother in New York in winter 2004. He took me to dinner at Honmura An in SoHo.

Two people soon were seated next to us.

“Yoko Ono,” Matt mouthed. “Sean Lennon.”

We feigned New York cool, not interrupting or acknowledging them while we all enjoyed our delicious Japanese noodle dinners.

A few nights later, we were at the Park Avenue Armory for the winter antiques show. And there she was again: Yoko Ono.

She pointed at my brother.

“You were at Honmura An the other night!” she said.

Fame works two ways, I guess.

— Tavenner Hall

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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