Mulry Angle

An Architect’s Flotilla of West Side Buildings

The New Orleans architect Albert C. Ledner’s three offbeat creations for the National Maritime Union came ashore in New York in the 1960s, their porthole facades impudent in the face of doctrinaire modernism. The union sold off all three buildings within two decades. One of the pair on Ninth Avenue and West 17th Street is now the Maritime Hotel; the other, too, may soon morph into a hotel.

But the fate of the third building — owned by St. Vincent’s Hospital at Seventh Avenue and 12th Street — is uncertain. The hospital wants to replace it with a high-rise, despite pleas from the preservation group Docomomo and despite the facade’s status as a landmark. read more

Demand for Affordable Housing Injected into Mulry Development Debate

(from The Villager)

The Village Independent Democrats’ demonstration on Nov. 14 for including affordable housing in the St. Vincent’s Hospital/Rudin Organization redevelopment was low-key compared to the a meeting of the hospital’s Community Working Group that followed, at which hecklers showed no restraint.         

Working Group members, who have been meeting with hospital officials for nearly a year, gathered again on Nov. 14 protesting that the 330-foot-tall, new hospital building proposed for the west side of Seventh Ave. and the proposed 265-foot-tall residential tower on the avenue’s east side would overwhelm the neighborhood. read more