From left: Andrew Berman, executive director of Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the Chelsea Market

A coalition of neighborhood preservationists and other community groups are stepping up the fight against a plan to expand the Chelsea Market retail and office complex with a petition.

Jamestown Properties, the owners of Chelsea Market, have proposed adding a hotel and separate nine-story office tower on top of the existing land marked building at 75 Ninth Avenue, one of the largest and most successful retail and commercial complexes in New York.

The firm commissioned a study in November 2011, which claimed the proposed expansion would result in more than .6 billion in economic benefits to the city. But opponents of the plan say the expansion would ruin the existing property and create additional problems for a neighborhood that is already facing excessive development.

“These two structures they want to build on top of them would really hurt the integrity of the buildings,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “There’s also a fear that we’re seeing the neighborhood really, really overdeveloped.”

Late last week, the organization launched an online petition to collect signatures from residents opposed to the expansion.

In 2011, Jamestown bought out its partners at Chelsea Market to take control of the property, which has 1.2 million square feet of office and retail space, and is home to companies including Google and the Food Network.

In 2011, Jamestown proposed building an 11-story glass cube, measuring 240,000 square feet, on top of the 10th Avenue side of the existing complex, as well as a 90,000-square-foot hotel on the Ninth Avenue side of the property.

Plans for the commercial expansion were scaled back after opposition from local community groups, who complained that the glass structure was out of character with the existing property.

Community Board 4 held a meeting on the expansion in late January, and another public hearing is scheduled for Thursday evening at the Fulton Auditorium, at 119 9th Avenue and 17th Street, in which further discussion will be held on the proposed expansion.

The project must be approved by the city Department of Planning and the City Council before Jamestown is allowed to move forward with the expansion.

A spokesperson for Jamestown was not immediately available for comment.

The Real Deal New York

If you participated in one of the 59 regional No Pants Subway Rides today in 27 countries across the world, leave us an agent report in the comments below letting us know how it went. Post links to any photos and videos from your town’s event as well. Let us know how many people participated and what the temperature was. Reports from the New York ride are here.

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Improv Everywhere

Passed by this window a few years ago and created this very small painting. Pretty much sums up my feelings about my hometown, as if you didn’t already know. Love to all my faithful readers, wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.

SJF New York Art

Uta Barth, …and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.2), inkjet print, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

The centerpiece of Uta Barth’s latest solo show is a photo series depicting a continually morphing strip of light beneath her living-room curtains, a preposterously simple conceit which nevertheless yields complex optical illusions. As this diaphanous sliver shifts course over an afternoon, it variously resembles a snake, a line on an EKG or a trail of cigarette smoke, all the while transforming the space between the camera, the curtain and the window into an ambiguous territory where volumes flatten or swell, and light can pass for white paint.

Two glimpses of Barth’s hand arranging the curtain folds remind us of her agency, but it’s nature’s hand that propels the work’s attractively simple narrative as the sun’s changing position gradually increases the width of the band. At this time of year, as the onset of winter makes Barth’s invitation to contemplate sunlight especially attractive, the work entices us into the pleasures of solitary idleness that are at odds with the pace of everyday urban life.

In the back room, by comparison, a second group of photographs depicting built-in closets and drawers in the artist’s bedroom seems coldly architectural. Each image is emblazoned by squares or rectangles of light cast from an opposite window: One features a particularly bright patch that suggests celestial or alien visitation; another, a band of shadow over a door latch, creates the illusion that the surface of the print is scratched. But otherwise, the real drama of transformation takes place in the front gallery.

Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 839, Dec 1-7, 2001.

New York Art Tours

Francesca Woodman, Blueprint for a Temple, 1980.

Contrary to its title, there’s nothing particularly subversive about ‘Spies in the House of Art,’ the Metropolitan Museum’s enticingly titled exhibition of its contemporary photography collection, which opened yesterday.  Photos, films and videos take museum display and visitor responses as subject matter, but the mood of the best pieces is more fond criticism than biting institutional critique.  Still, by bringing the myriad ways we navigate the museum experience to our conscious mind, the show counteracts purely passive viewing pleasure.

A standout is Francesca Woodman’s 1980 ‘Blueprint for a Temple.’ Completed a year before her untimely death and marking a major shift from her small scale photos, this 15 foot high photo collage of a Greek temple supported by her friends dressed as caryatids and printed on blue architectural blueprint paper playfully remakes ancient culture while forces a connection between past and present that resonates with the Met’s newly crafted Moroccan court.

The show’s second major highlight, Rosalind Nashashibi’s and Lucy Skaer’s 16mm film ‘Flash in the Metropolitan Museum’ from 2006 was shot at night with a flash strobe as the artists moved through the museum, momentarily illuminating Greek ceramics one minute, African or Medieval European sculpture the next.  Unclear images, seen for a moment in varying scales and unflattering angles turn usual museum display on its head while creating an alluringly mysterious anthropological study that is equal parts ‘Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Mixed Up File of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.’

Less familiar work comes across as amusing and fresh, like Laura Larson’s photograph of a display in the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia which delights in pointing out the tasteless clash of style in a Regency settee, a wallpapered landscape and patterned marble floor.  Sophie Calle’s text and image of a gender-ambiguous blind person describing the ‘terrific ass’ of a sculpture in Paris’ Rodin museum invites reflection on our own ideas about beauty.

By comparison, a photo of a shelf of stored artworks by Louise Lawler, an image of a painting by Tim Davis with his flash blotting out the subject’s face and a video by Lutz Bacher following a young adolescent through the Picasso Museum in Paris look at art stored, reproduced or visited in unexpected if not particularly compelling ways.   In a sense, the Met itself undermines the less nuanced work in the show – the stunning artwork and displays encountered on the way to the 2^nd floor photo galleries are a tough act to follow.

New York Art Tours

Ian Schrager

Ian Schrager is chairman and CEO of Ian Schrager Company, a hotel and real estate development firm established in 2005. Prior to establishing the company, Schrager was at Morgans Hotel Group, which he cofounded in 1984 with the late Steve Rubell, with whom he created the legendary nightclub, Studio 54, in 1977. Schrager’s more high-profile New York projects include the 2006 redesign of the Gramercy Park Hotel as well as residential properties such as 40 Bond and the Gramercy Park Hotel’s 50 Gramercy Park North condos.

The Real Deal New York