By Jacob van Winkle
The neighborhood decided once what should go on the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and West 54th Street. It did not ask anyone. In 2020, after the old building had come down and the lot had settled into gravel and brick, somebody threw flower seeds over the fence. Then somebody else did. By early summer the corner was purple and pink from the sidewalk to the graffiti on the back wall, flowers coming up through broken brick and chunks of concrete, with nothing watered, nothing tended, and nobody’s permission.
Every summer after that, for four years, they came back on their own. People stopped. One morning in May 2024 I watched a woman crouch on the sidewalk and put her camera through the chain link to photograph the flowers, the way you would photograph a monument, and I photographed her doing it. Neighbors talked, more than once, about what else the corner could be. Then the barriers went up, the pop-ups arrived, and the flowers did not come back. That was the neighborhood’s say on this lot. It lasted four summers and it was an accident.
Say we wanted more than an accident. Say a few hundred people who live within two blocks of the corner agreed that what it needs is a place to buy milk. Who would we tell? Nobody. There is no one to tell, and that is the story of this lot. It is worth telling before somebody else decides for us.
For most of ten years the corner has been a fenced lot, a staging yard, the subject of five rat complaints to 311 in a single year, and lately a row of pop-up shops and e-bike battery-swap stations behind concrete barriers that never come down. Neighbors ask what is going to happen there. The answer has been sitting in the Department of Buildings the whole time.
The lot is 201 West 54th Street, 7,542 square feet, 75 feet on Seventh and 100 feet on 54th, owned by Extell Development. In April 2021 Extell filed plans with the Department of Buildings for a 40-story hotel with 400 rooms, designed by SLCE Architects. In September 2023 it withdrew that filing and refiled at 512 rooms and about 180,000 square feet. The new application has sat in objections since October 2023. Dormant, on paper. The approval behind it is not.
Since December 9, 2021, building a new hotel almost anywhere in New York City has required a special permit. That means a public review: the community board holds a hearing and votes, the City Planning Commission decides, and the City Council has the final word. The city made that rule because hotels change the streets around them in ways apartments and offices do not, and it decided the people on those streets should be heard first.
This lot is exempt. Extell filed its hotel seven months before the rule took effect and had foundation and excavation approvals in hand the same year, and the offering now circulating says that grandfathers the hotel. No community board hearing. No Council vote. No public process of any kind. Whoever owns this corner can build a 512-room hotel here as of right, the way you would build a garage.
There is a catch. To keep that status the hotel must be substantially complete by December 9, 2031. After that date the exemption expires and a hotel here would face the same hearing as every other hotel in the city.
And the lot is on the market. The brokerage BKREA has been circulating an offering since spring that leads with the hotel approval and the 2031 date. It describes the site as part of an assemblage with 846 Seventh Avenue next door and 1710 Broadway behind it, and lists the buildable area at 192,508 square feet, assembled from the lot’s own zoning, Theater District bonuses, and development rights bought from neighbors. The same square footage could be built as market-rate apartments, as of right, with no deadline at all. The price is “guidance upon request.”
So the buyer’s choice is simple. Build a hotel by 2031 and skip every hearing. Or build anything else and take your time. In neither case does anyone ask the block.
That is not unusual, and we should be honest about it. Most of New York is built as of right. A developer who follows the zoning does not need anyone’s permission, and the neighborhood finds out when the fence goes up. What is unusual here is that the city carved out one exception, for hotels, on the theory that neighbors deserve a say about them in particular, and this corner escaped the exception by a matter of months.
It is also, literally, nobody’s corner. Three City Council districts meet at Seventh and 54th. The lot is in Council Member Brewer’s district. The Adlon, directly across 54th, is in Council Member Wilson’s. The east side of Seventh below 54th is Council Member Maloney’s. The people who would live in the shadow of this building and the building itself do not share a council member. When there is no hearing, there is also no office whose job it is to call one.
We are not against building here. Nobody who lives on this block is. An empty corner on Seventh Avenue is an insult, and the pop-ups are not an answer. The question is what gets built and how it meets the street, and the honest position is that the neighborhood has no way to ask it, formal or informal, beyond a handful of seeds.
An informal way is easy to describe. The buyer, whoever it turns out to be, comes to Community Board 5 and to this association before filing, and tells the block three things: what is on the ground floor, where the cars and trucks go, and what happens at the property line at night. Extell has done that kind of presentation two blocks away for the Wellington site, because there it had to. Here it would be a courtesy. Courtesies are worth asking for in writing, and we will.
A formal way exists on paper. It is dated December 9, 2031. If the hotel is not substantially complete by then, the hearing the rest of the city gets comes back to this corner. Five years is enough time to build a hotel. It is also enough time to build a record of what this block wants, so that if the date arrives, the answer is ready.
And one ask survives either building. A 40-story hotel has a ground floor. A 40-story apartment tower has a ground floor. That is where the grocery store lives, or does not. West 54th between Seventh and Broadway is one of the narrowest blocks in the neighborhood. It already carries the Midtown North precinct, the drop-off traffic of two hotels, and the delivery trucks for everything on the Broadway side. A hotel entrance and a taxi queue on that block is one future. A door that people who live here walk through every day is another. The difference is a decision about 75 feet of frontage, and right now no one who lives here is in the room where it gets made.
The flowers are gone. The gravel they grew through is under the pop-ups now. But for four summers a fenced lot on Seventh Avenue looked like something the neighborhood chose, because for once it had. Here is how to make that happen on purpose.
Know the date. December 9, 2031. If a hotel is not substantially complete by then, the public process returns.
Tell your council member you are watching, whichever one you have. This corner has three. Council Member Brewer’s office has the lot. Council Member Wilson’s office has the Adlon. Council Member Maloney walked 56th Street with us in August and asked for specifics. This is one.
Join us. Become a member. We will publish every filing on this lot as it appears.
Authored by Jacob van Winkle, Treasurer, West 50s Neighborhood Association.