Landmark Upper West Side Church Withdraws Demolition Application

A lease dispute temporarily has put on hold plans to tear down a landmarked church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and replace it with a high-end apartment development.

The congregation’s plan to demolish the West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue has generated high-profile opposition seeking to preserve the 19th-century red sandstone-clad Romanesque Revival building, which was built in 1889 and designated a landmark in 2010.

The dwindling congregation of the Upper West Side church applied for a hardship exception from NYC’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2022, seeking to sell the property to developers who plan to replace the dilapidated church building with a new condo apartment tower.

The commission had scheduled a vote on the church’s application that was supposed to take place this week. However, lawyers representing the church sent a letter to the commission on Friday withdrawing the application until a lawsuit the church has filed against a tenant is resolved.

The West Park congregation said in a statement that it would apply again for approval to sell the church building and demolish it, expressing confidence that the Landmarks Preservation Commission eventually will approve the application, according to a report in the New York Times.

“After more than two decades of trying to keep up with repairs and waiting for unfulfilled promises of fund-raising to come through, we ran out of time and money and must explore other options for our congregation’s future,” the statement said.

The congregation reportedly has a $30M contract with Alchemy Partners to demolish and redevelop the church.

The application to demolish the church has drawn opposition from a group of A-list celebrities, including actors Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, the rapper Common and comedian Amy Schumer, who are calling for the building’s preservation.

The effort to preserve the church is supported by Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side on the City Council. Brewer told the NY Times she hopes the hold on the congregation’s application leads to another buyer emerging who will buy the church property to preserve the building.

The opposition to the condo project has characterized its efforts to save the church as a David vs. Goliath struggle between the people of the neighborhood and large corporate developers. Ruffalo, who lives near the church, declared at a public hearing on the application last June “it’s about the people versus the corporations in this city.”

The church’s congregation, which totals about a dozen members, has a different perspective.

Roger Leaf, chair of the West Park Administrative Commission, created by the Presbytery of New York in 2020 to manage the space and find a buyer, told the June hearing that the congregation is trying to stop its “financial bleeding” and aims to use proceeds from the real estate transaction to continue to serve needy people in NYC.

“It’s ironic that the wealthy neighbors of this church, who have multimillion [dollar] apartments, who have windows overlooking this space, are claiming that they are the little guys,” Leaf said, according to an NY Times report on the June hearing.

According to Leaf, conditions in the church building are deteriorating. He estimated that a renovation would cost at least $50M, with $14M needed to fix crumbling facades and $4 million to correct fire code violations.

The 2022 application to Landmarks Preservation Commission said the deteriorating church building posed a hardship to the congregation, asking the commission to allow the redevelopment.

The commission, which was established in 1960s in the wake of a public campaign to save Grand Central Terminal led by former First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, has rarely granted hardship applications.

There have been 14 hardship applications for individual landmarks since NYC’s Landmarks Law was adopted. Of these, six were approved, five were denied and three were withdrawn.