Holman, a private art dealer who watched the transformation of the largely abandoned building into apartments and lived there for nine years, until he received a notice saying the rent on his large one-bedroom loft with 16-foot ceilings was going up from $2,400 to $3,800 a month. ''It was impressive, always an impressive building,'' said Thomas S. Nevertheless, former tenants mourn the loss of a place they called home.
Building managers attributed the bugs to a supermarket on the ground floor and say they affected only a few units. Tenants say that moisture in a layer of ash and fill in the floors rotted subfloors in much of the building, including all public hallways, and that unusual warehouse beetles, perhaps brought in long-ago cargoes, inhabit the deep recesses of the building and have dug their way out into some apartments. The landlord-tenant strife has also brought to light problems of the sort that sometimes surface in older buildings. Their aim is mainly delay: they hope to get a final two-year stabilized lease before they face rent increases of $1,000 a month or more. Some stayed and paid significant rent increases or, in some cases, negotiated smaller ones, while others moved out.Ī small band have hired lawyers or are in court challenging the expiration of their rent-stabilized leases, citing promises made in older leases. While the loss of rent protection at the Archive was not unexpected, it forced many longtime tenants to cast a sharp eye over their neighborhood and their lives. The initial rents, however, are set at market rates. While the State Legislature grappled last week with the future of rent regulation for tenants in nearly one million New York City rent-stabilized apartments, the Archive is in a special category of regulated buildings: newly constructed or renovated buildings that limit rent increases for a number of years in exchange for real estate tax reductions. The people of the Archive - the artists, bankers, photographers, models and fashion designers who made its unusual apartments their home and helped bring a once rough-edged corner of the West Village back to life - are facing the end of rent protections provided as part of the complex deal that saved the building.
Now the building, the largest structure in Greenwich Village, is going through another significant transformation. It is the city's only major structure in which a private preservation group was in effect an equity partner in the deal that transformed it into apartments, a hugely complex arrangement that provided more than $7 million over the years for a revolving loan fund to help brownstone owners and churches restore their landmark buildings. WHAT is now known as the Archive Building rises above Christopher Street, a block from the Hudson, like a vast red brick fortress, its rounded corner at Greenwich Street protruding upward like the prow of a powerful ship.įor more than a century, from its origins as what was heralded at the time as a major federal pork barrel project to the 14 years it took the New York Landmarks Conservancy to prod its redevelopment into 479 loftlike apartments with up to 20-foot ceilings, there has always been something bigger than life about it.Īlthough the unadorned and spare building, marked by thick brick arches and graceful granite bands, is an officially designated landmark, it also looms large in the history of preservation efforts for another reason.
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