City seeks contractors to build garage tower

By Albert Amateau

The Department of Sanitation is putting its three-district garage proposed for Spring St. out to bid this week.

The invitation to potential contractors for the 120-foot-tall garage, to serve Sanitation Districts 1, 2 and 5, covering Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village, and Midtown between Lexington and Eighth Aves., appears in the Feb. 3 City Record.

The deadline for responses is March 31, and the Sanitation Department expects to be able to award the bid by the end of May, said Steve Brautigam, Sanitation’s assistant commissioner for environmental affairs. Construction is expected to take a little more than three years, and the department estimates the project’s total cost at $385 million. The site, on the north side of Spring St. between Washington and West Sts., is on property owned by UPS and used by the delivery service to marshal its trucks. Sanitation is negotiating with UPS to share the property’s use.

A salt shed to serve the three Sanitation districts will be built on the south side of Spring St. on department property that now serves Sanitation District 1, covering most of Lower Manhattan south of Canal St. The salt shed is not part of the garage construction bid and will be built separately, a department spokesperson said.

The project has been driven by a court-approved agreement calling for Sanitation to get its garbage trucks off Gansevoort Peninsula to allow the site to be developed as part of the 5-mile-long Hudson River Park.

The project was bitterly opposed by a group of Hudson Square and Tribeca neighborhood property owners and residents who filed a lawsuit to block it. They tried but failed to convince the city to build Hudson Rise, a smaller Spring St. facility, that would serve only two Sanitation districts.

On Jan. 11, State Supreme Court Justice Joan B. Lobis dismissed the lawsuit, but the plaintiffs announced on Feb. 3 that they filed a notice appealing the dismissal to the Appellate Division.

Phil Mouquinho, the long-term owner of PJ Charlton’s restaurant and a spokesperson for the Hudson Sq. plaintiffs, said the group has been working for more than a year with the city to try to find an alternative site for a sanitation garage serving Midtown, but now it’s clear never intended to seriously consider them.

“By announcing an R.F.P. to bid out a construction contract, the city rejected our award winning Hudson Rise plan which would have put a two-district sanitation garage under a rooftop park,” Mouquinho said in a statement.

Another plaintiff, Carole De Saram, president of the Tribeca Association, said the plaintiffs had standing to create the original plan for Hudson River Park, “but now [the judge] has explicitly denied us the opportunity to uphold the rules of the Hudson River Park Act which safeguards the park and its surrounding community,” De Saram said. She said she hoped the appeals process would lead D.S.N.Y. and the community to arrive at a consensus for a better solution.

Albert@DowntownExpress.com