A24 TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019
NAlmost every week, Jeremy Schaller
gets a call from a developer who wants to
buy the two unremarkable four-story
buildings that house Schaller and Weber,
a German sausage and sauerkraut land-
mark on the Upper East Side of Manhat-
tan.
One developer even offered him $24
million, almost quadruple the market
value of both buildings.
The developers, Mr. Schaller and pres-
ervationists believe, want to demolish
the buildings and add another soaring
tower to the Yorkville neighborhood
landscape that historically was com-
posed of working-class walk-ups and
mom-and-pop shops, though dappled
with expensive terraced high-rises of
more modest scale.
But Mr. Schaller has turned every of-
fer down, even those that promised he
could reopen the store in the proposed
tower.
“This store is iconic and its aesthetic
would be compromised if we knocked
down the buildings,” said Mr. Schaller,
40, the third generation of Schallers to
run the shop.
Other building owners, however, have
been unable to resist such offers, and so
the neighborhood where Mr. Schaller’s
store has long sat is rapidly disappear-
ing.
The relentless march of tall buildings
that has spread across New York has
overtaken Yorkville, as the Second Ave-
nue subway, the city’s newest transit
line, attracts new settlers and makes the
neighborhood particularly enticing to
developers.
A dozen towers with prices or rents as
lavish as their amenities have opened in
the past five years or are nearing com-
pletion in a neighborhood once celebrat-
ed for its homespun immigrant Middle
and Eastern European character. Some
of the buildings soar to 50 and 60 floors,
far higher than the 20- or 30-story high-
rises that residents are accustomed to.
Another dozen building projects have
started construction or are on the draw-
ing boards.
As a result, longtime residents see a
neighborhood that took shape in the last
decades of the 19th century receding and
shrinking.
Most of the descendants of the Ger-
man, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak im-
migrants who found work in the brew-
eries and cigar plants are long gone. So
are all but a handful of the restaurants
and shops that served those families —
places like Paprikas Weiss, once the
Hungarian Zabar’s, and Glaser’s Bake
Shop, celebrated for its black-and-white
cookies.
The neighborhood’s boundaries are
sometimes debated, but Yorkville is gen-
erally thought to stretch from 72nd or
79th Streets to 96th Street between Lex-
ington or Third Avenues and the East
River. But it still retained a distinctive
small-scale charm, and neighborliness
that urban thinkers like Jane Jacobs
prized.
In recent decades, the walk-ups and
other low-rise buildings have provided
homes for newly minted college gradu-
ates, young families, older pensioners
and strivers from the country’s heart-
land. They were willing to wash their
clothes in a coin laundromat. They ap-
preciated shoe-repair shops, fishmon-
gers and diners whose workers they got
to know.
Now the neighborhood is losing what
Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Mu-
nicipal Art Society, a preservation group,
calls its “sense of place.”
Margaret Price, who has lived in the
neighborhood since the early 1980s, said
the new towers erased Yorkville’s singu-
lar character.
“We could be living anywhere now,’’
she said, “and you can’t distinguish it
from any other place.”
The administration of Mayor Bill de
Blasio, however, believes it must put a
priority on maximizing housing as the
city’s population mushrooms toward an
anticipated 9 million and the homeless
population swells. Several towers, offi-
cials said, have 20 percent or more of
their apartments set aside for low- and
modest-income families.
“In the face of a widespread housing
shortage, we must not impose restric-
tions preventing high-opportunity, tran-
sit- and service-rich neighborhoods like
this one, adjacent to the nation’s largest
jobs center, from doing their fair share to
address the housing needs of New York-
ers,” Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for
the Department of City Planning, said in
a statement.
One of the city’s leading developers,
Gary Barnett, who completed a nearly
400-foot building on Third Avenue in
Yorkville and is planning three more tall
towers in the neighborhood, said new
buildings must be high because land in
Manhattan is finite and expensive.
“Would you have a New York City that
doesn’t build anymore?” he said. “People
move in and say no more development,
but is this what you want? We’re a city of
eight million people. We’re not a little vil-
lage.”
Much of the grumbling, Mr. Barnett
added, is driven by “wealthy Upper East
Siders who want to keep everybody else
out.”
Still, preservationists and other critics
say that what is happening in Yorkville is
also happening in Long Island City,
Downtown Brooklyn, Crown Heights
and the Lower East Side, gradually eras-
ing features that make each neighbor-
hood distinct.
“Everyone in the city who cares about
the cultural identity of their neighbor-
hood should be watching Yorkville as a
warning sign,” said City Councilman Ben
Kallos, a grandson of Jewish Hungarian
immigrants whose district includes
Yorkville. “The last thing a residential
neighborhood needs is more glass tow-
ers for billionaires.”The new buildings are replacing apart-
ments in walk-ups and townhouses that
were affordable because they were rent
regulated, said Mr. Kallos, who is work-
ing on legislation to require buildings
over 210 feet to include affordable apart-
ments with preferences given to current
neighborhood residents.
Mr. Barnett, however, contended that
most of the walk-ups on the avenues had
been emptied by small landlords seeking
to sell to developers and that many build-
ings, including his, contain apartments
that sell below market rate to make them
more affordable.
The debate in Yorkville is also playing
out in many American cities that are
grappling with a housing shortage as
neighborhoods fight new housing plans
by complaining of increased traffic,
blocked views and overburdened serv-
ices. To accelerate development, Minne-
apolis, for example, recently eliminated
zoning that restricted land to single-fam-
ily homes.
In Yorkville, Alida Camp, the chair-
woman of the local community board,
says that the neighborhood’s “shared
sense of community” is fast disappear-
ing, and that the area is becoming a
“more anonymous neighborhood.”
“For me personally, it’s like watching
New York melt,” she said.
The ever-taller architecture is cer-tainly transforming the neighborhood’s
look. “The sky is disappearing,” said
Irene Merbo, a retired nursing adminis-
trator who was born in the neighborhood
in 1933.
But some urban experts say new glass
towers reinvigorate neighborhoods.
“Yorkville had to change as Manhat-
tan is becoming even more of a magnet
for people to live and work here,” said
Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban plan-
ning at New York University. “What
makes New York different from other cit-
ies is that we’re constantly replenishing
our population and reinventing our-
selves. Cities that stand still are dying.”
Most of the new development is being
spurred by the 2017 opening of the Sec-
ond Avenue subway, whose three new
stations and one renovated junction
shortened walks to and from Yorkville’s
eastern stretches and eased crowding on
the nearby Lexington Avenue lines,
among the nation’s most congested.
Most of the mid-blocks are protected
by zoning limits of six and seven stories,
so almost all the new construction is tak-
ing place along the avenues — First, Sec-
ond, Third and York.
Those avenues are chock a block with
five- and six-story buildings whose rail-
road apartments and one-bedrooms
have provided housing for generations of
modest-income workers like DavidRosenstein, who works in public rela-
tions and lives in a Second Avenue rail-
road apartment.
“For me the only question is what do
we do with the people who are dis-
placed,” he said.
One building in the neighborhood that
has generated controversy stretches
over 520 feet, a height the developer
achieved by inserting a 15-story mechan-
ical void — space for systems like air con-
ditioning and water pumps that builders
have taken advantage of to build higher.
An even taller 68-story building is
planned along Yorkville’s northern bor-
der.
A stroll through the neighborhood re-
veals several rows of long-vacant stores,
a telltale sign not only of fading retail in
the age of Amazon, but — as has proved
the case in many parts of the city — of a
developer closing down businesses to as-
semble a footprint for another tower.
Curiously, Mr. Schaller, 40, has found
that business actually picked up more
than 20 percent after the Second Avenue
subway spurred new construction, with
more deep-pocketed residents spending
more on his selection of 100 German
beers, cured hams and European
cheeses.
“It’s good for business,” he said, “but
the neighborhood has lost a lot of its com-
munity feel.”Towers Crowd Yorkville: ‘We Could Be Living Anywhere Now’
LOOMINGA dozen towers have opened in Yorkville, fueled in part by the opening of the Second Avenue subway. Above, 360, right, and 389 East 89th Street.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMESSea of Glass Transforms
A Once-Modest Enclave
By JOSEPH BERGERAT THE WATERYorkville stretches from roughly 72nd or 79th Streets to 96th
Street between Lexington or Third Avenues and the East River in Manhattan.
CARL SCHURZ PARKA dozen building projects in Yorkville have started con-
struction or are on the drawing boards, many of which soar 60 stories.
FIRST AVENUEResidents worry the high-rises are changing a neighborhood
once celebrated for its homespun immigrant Eastern European character.
‘It’s good for business,
but the neighborhood
has lost a lot of its
community feel.’
JEREMY SCHALLER
Owner of Schaller and Weber, a German
sausage and sauerkraut landmark, about
how the onslaught of new development
has improved his bottom line.