Pushing Tin Preservationists blast city’s approval to move Seaport’s historic Tin Building BY COLIN MIXSON Downtown preservationists say the city’s landmarks commission is all wet for allowing a historic Seaport building to be moved because the developer said it was necessary to protect it from flooding. The Landmarks Preservation Commission ruled on Mar. 22 that Howard Hughes Corp. could uproot and relocate the landmarked Tin Building, after the developer told the panel that the move is necessary to raise the 1907 structure above the flood plain. But opponents say that argument is misleading and that the developer likely harbors ulterior motives for relocating the venerable building, which housed the Fulton Fish Market until 1995. “The Tin Building has a very simple shell and was always meant to flood. It was designed to withstand flooding,” said Gina Pollara, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, which provided testimony opposing the
Tin Building’s relocation. “So, they claim they had to move it … because it had to be raised, and that’s not entirely correct. They’re moving it because they want to move it — not because it has to be.” To prove her point, Pollara pointed to St. Ann’s Warehouse, a performing arts institution in Brooklyn, which is based in a Civil War-era tobacco warehouse. The building — smack in the middle of a flood zone on the borough’s waterfront — was adapted to weather intense floods and includes a cheap, plywood finishing on its walls, which can be ripped out and easily replaced if any water damage occurs, Pollara said. “They got building permits, they’re in the flood plain, and they just built it so it’s floodable,” she said. “It’s existed there for so long because it was designed to flood and shed water — that was the whole point. So, the idea that [the Tin Building] has to be moved out of the flood plain is nonsense.”
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The Landmarks Preservation Commission signed off on the plan by Howard Hughes Corp. to move the historic Tin Building so it can be raised above the flood plain, but preservationists say the move is unnecessary.
Howard Hughes praised the commission’s ruling allowing the developer to dismantle the Tin Building and relocate it farther east, away from the waterfront, so the structure can be raised without hitting the elevated FDR Drive nearby. Once the building has been shipped out and shored up, the developer plans on converting the space into a food hall run by celebrity chef JeanGeorges Vongerichten. “We’re pleased to have support from both Community Board 1 and the Landmarks Preservation Commission on our plans to reconstruct the historic
Tin Building into a 21st-century center for food and commerce,” the company said in a statement. Besides concerns about storm resiliency, Howard Hughes expects the move to the inland side of the FDR Drive to increase the building’s visibility and accessibility to the public. But in addition to arguing that the structure can be made flood-resistant without relocation, opponents of the move also told the commission that the building’s waterfront location is an Tin building Continued on page 13
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