Mondrian SoHo - 9 Crosby Street
This is going up on Lafayette Street, just north of Canal. I think it is a new tower going up on a gutted existing base. It's visible from the Brooklyn Bridge, but not especially memorable in person or from afar.
Anyone know what it is? If we don't get an answer from Lofter in the next 24 hours, then it doesn't really exist.
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That is the new Mondrian Hotel at 150 Lafayette. Article on curbed today about it.
I hate it.
http://curbed.com/archives/2009/05/1..._soho_site.php
It wrecked the street wall, and in back, they put a little "garden"; i.e., they tore down a building to replace it with.... nothing.
I don't understand these quasi-suburban developments. It's practically a tower in a park.
Thanks. I'll change the thread title.
The building they tore down last week on Crosby was a 1-story Pile of Stupid yellowish bricks circa 1965. Until recently it housed the Chinese Community Dialysis Center. That is where the garden / restaurant / party place is supposed to go. But locals are fighting it (Mondrian needs a variance).
Worse is what they did on Lafayette, where they tore off the front 1/3 of the old ~ 15-story building at 150 Lafayette (an early 20th C behemoth of steel and masonry that took them months to tear apart). There will be ~ 2-story section fronting onto the Lafayette sidewalk. By minimizing the footprint and grabbing air rights from the Crosby Street lot Mondrian can now set back the tower and go tall.
It's a fancy version of the McSam / Kaufman disease.
^ Design by mathematical formula.
There's a better way to mandate urban massing: form-based zoning.
Ask Haussmann about this.
These zoning laws drive me absolutely insane. I thought we learned from the 1960s, an era which Jane Jacobs an others decried as having suburbanized skyscrapers ringed by concrete. Here we are back again at the same mentality. Damn NIMBYs. Damn, damn, damn NIMBYs.
Do you really think the nimbys are ultimately the ones to blame for this recent influx of setbacks in NYC?
^ Extremely good point.
It's definitely not. Lack of good urban planning is what at fault here.
08.15.09
What was on this site previously?
150 Lafayette was basically a twin to the building seen at the left in the second photo above: early 20th C masonry ~ 12 stories that came right out to the sidewalk and went straight up. They chopped off the front of that one to build the Mondrian, but left the steel up to the first floor along Lafayette (plus another small section of original steel that rises higher at the south end of the site; you can barely see remnants of it in the photos above). This allowed for the additional height for the new hotel.
At the "rear" portion of the site at 9/11 Crosby (this lot is now totally cleared and to become a "garden" and entryway for the Mondrian) was 2-story utilitarian yellow brick thing (circa 1960) that for the past several years was home to a neighborhood dialysis facility.
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Thanks, Lofter.
It seems that it was a decent building. At least the one on Crosby was lousy and good to lose.
This stretch along Crosby Street, the southernmost block of what for many years was an "alley' of sorts for the large buildings along Broadway one block west, was a quiet little street with little pedestrian or vehicular traffic (Crosby ends at Howard Street , one building to the south). That has changed in the past two years as high end clothing & design stores have started to move into this block (continuing the transformation of Crosby Street that has been on-going on the blocks to the north for a number of years).
The stretch along Lafayette on this block was similarly dead pedestrian-wise, and basically was a by-way for folks traveling from Soho to the Chinatown / Foley Square areas. And for vehicles it was comparatively quiet, as much of the traffic moving south on Lafayette would cut west at Broome, heading for the Holland Tunnel. The Museum of Chinese in America has just opened directly across Lafayette, and no doubt the arrival of the Mondrian will change the area to a great degree.
This block is partially included in the proposed Soho Historic District Extension, which is now calendered for designation at LPC and will be most likely approved this fall. The Mondrian's Crosby Street lot is part of the extension, but the Lafayette site is not. Since the two lots have now been combined into one larger tax lot this might prove to be a problem come designation time.
Crosby is really nice. I love the cobblestones and the nice old buildings.
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