Blighted Area? Not at All!
Damon Bae’s commercial laundry on Third Avenue in East Harlem may never be mistaken for the kind of glamorous businesses found near Wall Street, Times Square or Madison Avenue, but it is a thriving concern in this neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings and vacant lots.
The laundry, Fancy Cleaners, serves the five dry cleaning stores Mr. Bae owns in Manhattan, and the small retail dry-cleaning operation he opened inside the laundry has attracted customers from Harlem and beyond in the five years since he moved here from Murray Hill.
“I didn’t expect such a huge volume,” Mr. Bae said. “There aren’t many residential buildings nearby. But you offer a good price, and people will find you. You should see the line on Saturdays. I’ve even got people coming from the Bronx.”
But Mr. Bae, and more than a half-dozen other small-business owners in this neighborhood bound by Second and Third Avenues, from 125th to 127th Streets, are waging an uphill fight to hold onto their property. The Bloomberg administration has so far moved successfully in the courts to condemn six acres on behalf of a big developer for a $700 million East Harlem Media, Entertainment and Cultural Center.
“I think that the city is going to take away our properties and businesses so they can make another developer with deeper pockets a lot of money,” Mr. Bae said.
The city approved the project in 2008. It will include office and retail space, a small hotel, cultural space and 800 apartments, 600 of which will be set aside for low-, moderate- and middle-income families.
The first phase of the construction — a 49-unit residential building at the southeast corner of 125th Street and Third Avenue — is nearing completion.
Many of the business owners knew that a large stretch of the area was included in a 150-block urban renewal effort that was approved in 1968 but never quite materialized. But property owned by at least three of the businessmen was not included in the renewal zone, at least not until 2008, when the Bloomberg administration added those parcels to the mix.
At the time, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the creation of jobs and housing, and the city justified taking the private property by declaring the area “blighted” — a description that Mr. Bae and the other business owners found galling.
The city owned most of the land, allowing it to sit fallow for decades while turning down Mr. Bae and other business owners who wanted to buy parcels to expand their operations.
“It’s artificially manufactured blight,” Mr. Bae said.
In a recent decision by a panel of judges at the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, Justice James M. Catterson agreed. He said the city’s claim of blight and underutilization were “nothing but a canard to aid in the transfer of private property to a developer.”
But he said he was forced to concur with the court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Mr. Bae and other property owners because recent rulings by the Court of Appeals had “made plain that there is no longer any judicial oversight of eminent domain proceedings.”
The battle against eminent domain in East Harlem has received less attention than similar disputes at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, Willets Point in Queens and the Columbia University expansion in West Harlem. But in each case, longtime businesses wer
e pushed out to make way for large developments.
Jacob Toledo, the owner of Cycle Therapy, runs the city’s largest motorcycle dealership in a refurbished five-story building on East 127th Street. Rows of new and used Triumph, BMW, Honda and Yamaha motorcycles and scooters line the neat sh
op, while the smell of oil hangs in the air. Mr. Toledo says he may be forced to close his business permanently if the city takes his land.
Five years ago, he said, he crisscrossed the city looking for a new location after he was pushed out of a site on the West Side of Manhattan by new zoning and rising real estate values.
Only days after buying the orange-colored building in East Harlem, Mr. Toledo said he learned that the property might be condemned.
“I don’t think we can find any place in the city that can fit my business,” he said.
Evan Blum, another local businessman, is not part of the lawsuit to stop eminent domain on 125th Street, but he is very much opposed to it. This is his third encounter with eminent domain, he said.
“The city makes it so hard for the small businessman to exist,” Mr. Blum said. “I’m not politically connected. Small businesses can’t make contributions to politicians. So the big guys always win.”
Mr. Blum owns the building housing Demolition Depot on the south side of 125th Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Celebrities, billionaires, restaurant owners and brownstone dwellers make their way to Demolition Depot for that must-have claw-footed bathtub, or for gargoyles, stone lions and chestnut doors.
However, a building he leases across 125th Street, stocked with four floors of marble, wood and stone fireplace mantles, is threatened by the condemnation effort.
Nearby, Gary Spindler, the owner of Uptown Auto Repair, also says he worries about the future of his business if the property is condemned. He bought the business in 1999, attracted to its location near the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, formerly known as the Triborough. “I thought I was buying an opportunity to run our business and have the property appreciate in value,” he said.
Proponents of the project argue that the property owners should have known that someday their property could be subject to eminent domain because it sat within the old urban development zone. But both Mr. Spindler and Mr. Bae said title records indicated that their properties were not part of that plan when they bought them.
“Our properties were carved out of the urban renewal plan,” Mr. Bae said.
The business owners say they remain in limbo while the court case plays out.
“Now I don’t know if I’ll be here next year,” Mr. Bae said. “I’m afraid to make an investment in my business.”