Parkchester by Jeffrey S. Gurock

Author:Jeffrey S. Gurock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: NYU Press

Figure 8.1. Photo of restored, graffiti-freed Parkchester buildings and Metropolitan Avenue, 2005. Courtesy of Ronald L. Glassman.

8

Renewal Efforts

Although Harry Helmsley asserted in 1968 that it was glamorous to own Parkchester, a decade later he was already exceedingly frustrated with the state of his Bronx acquisition and, in fact, with the whole business of residential real estate. In 1980, he told a reporter that if he could divest himself of “residential properties” he would be pleased to do so. In 1984, Helmsley started quitting the rental market in a significant way, selling “some of his buildings in the 2,700 apartment Tudor City complex” on Manhattan’s East Side, contending that such housing was “an impossible business to be in.” By that time, rent-control and rent-stabilization laws had thoroughly undermined his condominium conversion plans in many parts of the city. Parkchester, his long-time headache, was the foremost case. Almost from the outset, in his view, delaying tactics “gave rise to state legislation, since amended, that impeded conversions in the city for several years.” By the early 1990s, with all the turmoil around the neighborhood about the company’s ownership practices and the welter of legal problems faced by his family on a variety of fronts, it was time for the aging real estate mogul and his associates to move on.1

In the winter of 1994, a highly placed representative of the Helmsley group in charge of Parkchester approached the not-for-profit Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) with a proposal to sell the now unwanted and physically distressed property. For CPC president Michael Lappin, this augured to be the most ambitious project for his organization, which for more than twenty years had been working with bankers and government to prevent housing abandonment and rehabilitate blighted neighborhoods in various parts of the metropolis and upstate New York.

The CPC was an initiative of the New York Clearing House Association, a highly influential combine of major commercial banks, whose legacy in the city dated back a century. Under the leadership of David Rockefeller, who chaired the group’s urban affairs committee, a valiant effort was made “to demonstrate that the city could marshal its resources to combat the wave of abandonments that plagued the metropolis.” At the very time when Gotham was in steep decline, top officials of financial outfits like Chase Manhattan Bank and the New York Bank for Savings were working to rebuild the city, in which they were heavily invested.

This mission intersected both with Lappin’s professional experience and his personal agenda. As a self-described “social justice activist,” while a college student in the mid-1960s, and later while in graduate school, he had worked down south in Mississippi and Kentucky, helping build schools in which he taught poor black youngsters, and participating in other endeavors under Lyndon Johnson’s poverty programs and subsequent federal initiatives that aided the families of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, he secured a position in the Office of Programs and Planning within the city’s Housing Administration. Having previously attempted

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