What the Department of Buildings Decided Not to Write Down
A follow-up to Remove Illegal Sign.
In May we published what we knew about the illegal LED advertising sign at 230 West 54th Street, and we said we expected action.
We got an answer. It is not the one we expected, and it has turned out to be the most revealing thing the Department of Buildings (DOB) has done in eight years.
In June, the DOB quietly brokered an agreement with the building’s owner to reduce the sign’s brightness on a staggered schedule. While Community Board 5 was notified, neither they nor our neighborhood association were shown the document. Because we have been completely cut out, we do not know its terms, its schedule, who signed it, or what anyone committed to. We have asked for these details repeatedly, and we are still asking.
Whether the sign is dimmer is not the question, and we will not be drawn into arguing about it. The sign is unlawful and it would be unlawful at half the brightness.
The question is this. For eight years the DOB told this neighborhood, in complaint dispositions and inspector notes and meetings with residents, that it could not act on this sign. Then, under pressure, the DOB got the owner to change how the sign operates in a matter of weeks.
An agency that can do that was never unable to act. And its authority is not in question: the Department of City Planning confirmed in writing, in 2023, that enforcement here “falls entirely under DOB.”
The sentence
On June 11, 2019, Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal wrote to the DOB Commissioner to say the DOB had been applying the wrong law to this sign. It had been citing Zoning Resolution 32-644, a provision from 1973. The controlling provision, since 2001, is 32-64.
We have written about that letter before. What we did not know, and what we could not have known until DOB was compelled to produce its internal records on a FOIL appeal granted May 15, 2026, is what happened inside the DOB after it arrived.
Staff drafted a written response. The matter was escalated to Commissioner Melanie La Rocca and to Constadino Sirakis. And then, in November 2019, Patrick Wehle, a DOB Assistant Commissioner, wrote this:
“We decided on a phone call in lieu of the attached draft response to her letter.”
They wrote the answer. They escalated it. And then they decided to deliver it by telephone, so that no written response to a sitting Assembly Member’s correction of the DOB’s own legal error would exist.
The DOB is still withholding that draft, citing an exemption for internal deliberations. We have until September 15, 2026 to challenge that withholding in court.
Look at what happened next. In March 2020, a DOB inspector recorded in the DOB’s own database: “a C6-7 zone, no sign restrictions.” The wrong law, nine months after Rosenthal’s correction. In May 2023, another inspector recorded “light pollution is not within DOB jurisdiction,” the same month City Planning confirmed in writing that it falls entirely under DOB.
Rosenthal’s correction was received by the Commissioner herself; she is a named recipient on the produced chain. What it never became was a written correction to the people enforcing this sign. Their own entries prove that: the wrong law in March 2020, no jurisdiction at all in May 2023. Absence of a written record is the entire function of a phone call in lieu.
The one time someone wrote it down
There is an exception, and it is the most damning document we have found.
On March 10, 2020, a DOB inspector named Martin Oxner went to 230 West 54th Street in response to a complaint about the sign. He filled out the DOB’s standard Sign Inspection Checklist. It is a pre-printed form with blank boxes, and what an inspector marks on it is what the inspector saw.
Under the illumination heading, Oxner marked the box for “Electronic Changing/Flashing.”
The permit for this sign does not allow that. Section 23A of the sworn application for Job 122707400 checks a single illumination type: Direct. The box for flashing is not checked. There has, in fact, never been a flashing sign lawfully permitted at this address. The oldest record we have, a 1971 permit for a clothing store, is captioned in the city’s own hand: “non flashing business sign.”
Oxner marked two more boxes. Asked whether the required decals were present, he marked No. Asked whether they were readable, he marked No. Under Administrative Code §28-502.5, an outdoor advertising company must display its name, its registration number, and the permit identification number on every sign it controls. On March 10, 2020, according to the DOB’s own inspector, they were not there.
So a DOB employee stood on the street, looked at this sign, and recorded on a DOB form that it was operating in a mode its permit does not authorize and that it was missing the identification the law requires.
Six days later, on March 16, 2020, a different DOB employee closed the complaint. Nothing in the record shows anyone went back to look. The disposition reads, in full:
“Sign inspection performed, reviewed by Signs Unit. Sign is legal per permit #’s 123121576, and 140676445. Location is a C6-7 zone, no sign restrictions.”
No violation warranted.
The two permits cited, Job 123121576 and Job 140676445, are equipment work permits for structural work. Neither is the sign permit. The permit that actually authorizes this sign, Job 122707400, appears nowhere in the disposition.
A structural permit speaks to whether something is safely attached to the building. It says nothing about whether a sign may be 793 square feet, project eight feet over the sidewalk, flash, or shine into bedrooms across the street. The one permit that speaks to those questions is the one the DOB did not cite, and it allows direct illumination only.
So the field record and the decision do not describe the same sign. One of them was written by the man who went and looked.
The pattern
Once you have seen that sentence, you start to notice that the missing document is never an accident.
The DOB has now produced the plan examiner’s first objections, and says the ones that matter cannot be found. The permit for this sign, Job 122707400, was examined three times by the same Manhattan plan examiner. He disapproved it on March 24, 2016. He disapproved it again on March 20, 2017. However, forty-eight hours later he approved it on March 22, 2017.
Something changed in those two days, and the DOB cannot say what. In July, in response to our records request, it produced the examiner’s objection sheet from the first disapproval: seven typed objections, including that the sign “will not block any windows, doors and fire escape.” The sign that was built covers windows. The DOB’s own 2017 violations say so.
The sheet from the second disapproval, the one resolved forty-eight hours before approval, is the sheet the DOB says it cannot find. Not withheld. Not privileged. Not found. It located the 2016 sheet from the same job, by the same examiner, on the same form. Its own procedure requires these sheets to be created and sent to the applicant. We have appealed.
One more detail from the sheet it did produce. It lists the property’s zoning district as C6-2. Every other document in the file, including the application under review, says C6-7. Advertising signs are not permitted in C6-2 at all. Maybe a typo, on a form no one signed. But it is the only surviving record of this sign’s examination, and it misidentifies the rules that applied.
We want to be precise about what we are and are not saying. We are not accusing the examiner who reviewed this sign of anything. We have no evidence of wrongdoing by him and we do not allege any.
What we will say is that a plan examination record should exist, and this one does not. In March of this year, the Manhattan District Attorney, in a case investigated jointly with the Department of Investigation, announced the indictment of a DOB Assistant Chief Plans Examiner on bribe receiving and conspiracy charges. He is accused of accepting bribes to divert plan reviews to his team and pressure them to fast-track approvals without the required scrutiny, across more than three hundred projects. There is no evidence connecting the examiner in that case to this sign, and we do not suggest any.
We do not know what happened during the plan review of this sign. That is the entire problem. The DOB will not tell us, and the record that would tell us has gone missing.
The enforcement unit’s review notes do not exist either. In October 2017 the DOB issued three Class 1 violations at this property. The handwritten remedy on each, in the inspector’s own hand, was “Remove illegal sign.”
In March 2018 the DOB’s own Administrative Enforcement Unit disapproved the owner’s certificates of correction. Those letters, signed by Constadino Sirakis as Acting Commissioner, required that the sign’s anchors be removed as a condition of correction.
The anchors were never removed. The sign was never removed. In June 2019, the DOB accepted the certificates of correction anyway.
We asked for the internal review notes that would explain how a unit which had demanded physical removal came to accept a correction without it. The DOB’s answer, on appeal, was that no such records were found. It cited no exemption, which means it is not claiming those records are privileged. It is claiming they do not exist. That appeal was denied on May 29, 2026. We have until September 29, 2026 to bring it to a court.
And now the brightness agreement, which nobody will produce.
Four decisions that mattered to hundreds of people. Four times the DOB declined to write down why.
What the record does show
The Department of Buildings has been more careful about what it does not write than about what it does. What survives is damning enough.
The sign that was approved is not the sign that was filed. The application filed in March 2016 was for a non-illuminated sign of roughly 1,265 square feet, projecting six inches from the wall, at a stated cost of $5,000. That is what was disapproved.
What was approved in March 2017, under the same job number, was an illuminated LED advertising display of 793 square feet, projecting eight feet from the wall, at a stated cost of $150,000. The engineer of record had been replaced by a different professional entirely.
A thirty-fold increase in cost. A change from an unlit sign to a lit billboard. A projection sixteen times greater. A new applicant. All of it processed as an amendment to an existing application rather than as the new sign it plainly was.
The approved plans cite two different laws on the same page. Plan sheet T-100.00, stamped acceptable by the DOB, carries a section header reading “32-64.” Every compliance claim beneath that header cites 32-644, the repealed provision.
And the plans say this. They represent that “the sign will not reflect into residences, loft dwellings or artist living/working quarters.” The justification offered is that the “building is a transient hotel and not considered a residence.”
Read that twice. The claim is that the sign cannot shine into homes because the building it is bolted to is a hotel. The homes it shines into are across the street. Roughly 180 apartments have direct exposure. The DOB accepted this and issued the permit.
And the current facts remain what they were. The annual sign permit expired June 30, 2022. The advertising company operated for thirteen months without a valid registration, a lapse the DOB’s own billing system labels a “late renewal.” BTO Nitro Buyer LLC, the Blackstone Tactical Opportunities vehicle that bought the advertising rights to this sign in June 2023, has never registered as an outdoor advertising company at all, which the DOB confirmed to us in writing. Its own registration letters state that a registration “is not transferable,” and that issuing one “shall not be deemed to constitute permission or authorization to maintain a sign which is otherwise illegal.”
Two complaints filed on April 17, 2026 have now gone more than three months without an inspection.
The curtains
One more thing, because it tells you what kind of solution is actually on offer.
In December 2018, a representative associated with this sign offered a resident of 205 West 54th Street six hundred dollars for blackout curtains.
On May 18, 2026, the same person telephoned me, unsolicited, on my personal cell. They are the filing representative of record on the DOB’s permit for this sign. They gave me an explanation of the zoning, citing the repealed provision, the same one that appears on their own filing. They offered, twice, to have the hotel pay for window treatments for affected residents. They mentioned they had done it before.
Eight years apart, the same offer. Buy the neighbors curtains, and the sign stays.
The brightness agreement is that proposition in an official envelope.
We never asked for the sign to be less bright. We asked for the law to be enforced.
Where this stands
Two matters must reach a court by September 15 and September 29, or they are gone. The first is the DOB’s withholding of the response it wrote to Assembly Member Rosenthal and chose not to send. The second is its claim that no records exist explaining how it accepted a certificate of correction for a sign that was never corrected.
We need residents. If you live in a building with a current, direct view of this sign and it affects your home, we want to hear from you.
And to any reporter reading this: every document quoted here is a PDF obtained from the Department of Buildings under the Freedom of Information Law. We will send you all of it.
One more reason this matters now. Across the street, at 1710 Broadway, a 54-story hotel is under construction. The developer’s renderings show a comparable LED sign at its base, on the same corner of 54th Street. No sign permit has been filed yet; we check the filings weekly. Whatever the DOB accepts as the resolution at 230 West 54th becomes the template for that application the day it arrives.
Eight years ago this was a story about a bright light. It is not anymore. It is a story about an agency that made a series of decisions it preferred no one be able to read, and that has now been caught, in its own words, choosing to answer a State Assembly Member by telephone so that nothing would have to be written down.
The decisions in this story were made under prior leadership. The DOB today is led by Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, and a Member of the City Council has written to him directly asking for enforcement of the violations documented here. The record of what happens next is his.
We would like the Department of Buildings to put its position in writing.
That is the entire ask. It has spent eight years making sure it never has to.
This article is part of the Ameritania Sign Campaign. The full public record, every document and filing, is on the campaign page.
Authored by Jacob van Winkle