Update on the Finger Building

Photo: Katie Carman

As noted last week, there was a hearing on the Finger Building of Northside in front of an obscure city agency called the Board of Standards and Appeals. After over two hours of sometimes grueling testimony, the community's appeal to stop the Finger Building from rising to sixteen stories is in a stalemate for the moment. The fight will continue at an upcoming hearing scheduled for October 7, 2008.

Representing the appellants NAG and the People's Firehouse, Attorney Kevin Christopher Shea cited legal precedent to support the community's claims against the project and forcefully questioned the unexplained decision made by the Department of Buildings (DOB) to reverse its December 30, 2005 decision to revoke the permits and approvals to build the wildly out-of-context 220-foot luxury tower.

The origin of this appeal arises from an odd coincidence. Thirty days after the DOB's Brooklyn Commissioner Susan Hinkson issued a written "intent to revoke the approvals and permits" for the Finger Building, she was reassigned to serve as the Borough Commissioner of Staten Island. The revocation order was never acted upon and subsequently rescinded. When the BSA Chair, Meenakshi Srinivasan, asked the DOB spokesperson to explain the reasoning behind this unusual chain of events, she was told that the DOB "wanted to maintain the status quo" provoking spontaneous cries of disbelief from the 30+ local residents that attended the hearing.

The community's argument is that since the developer can at this point in time only demonstrate the legal control of enough space to build the 10-story building (based on being grandfathered into old zoning that was changed in May 2005), the permit to build the 16-story building should be revoked and new building plans submitted that conform to the existing building.

The attorneys for the developer Mendel Brach, invoked the "doctrine of laches" (the failure to appeal in a timely way, a situation based on the DOB's delay in issuing a decision), and argued that revoking the permit for a 16-story tower would be an infringement of the development rights of their client.

The fight will continue at a hearing tenatively scheduled for October 7. Join your neighbors and speak out at the next BSA public hearing:

Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA)
Tuesday, October 7th
Time to be Announced
40 Rector St., 6th Floor: Hearing Room E
(Take the #1/ W/R train to Rector St. or the 4/5 trains to Wall St in Manhattan)