There is a 2009 document - the “originalist text,” as one community-board member calls it - from which the controversy over the parking lot stems. Untangle the whole thing and you can begin to understand why it is so hard to turn a parking lot into an apartment building in the most crowded city in America, where survival is indeed starting to feel miraculous. But approving these 112 units of affordable housing took 13 years - a tortured saga that lasted through three mayoral administrations, three successive City Council members, multiple teams of city planners, hundreds of hours of community-board meetings, a stream of op-eds, strongly worded letters flinging accusations of political betrayal and NIMBY entitlement, piles of bureaucratic minutiae, and the construction of one billion-dollar megamall. In July, the Lirio was approved to move ahead by the City Council, aiming to relieve a fraction of need like a tiny blast of steam from a pressure cooker. The name was an homage to its future residents, the developer said, because the Lirio tree “has witnessed the entire span of New York City’s history, and it has survived miraculously.” The developer chosen by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Hudson Companies, had named the building the Lirio, after the city’s oldest living tree: Liriodendron tulipifera. There would be supportive housing on-site providing medical and mental-health care. The rest would go to low-income renters making $66,880 or less a year. Since 2009, the city has wanted to turn the parking lot into apartments, the official plans for which were announced in 2021: 112 permanently affordable units, 59 of which were intended for formerly homeless long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS. The lot was on publicly owned land, among only a thousand or so sites that remain property of New York City, which meant that, unlike a private lot, the site did not have to make a profit.
In many ways, the parking lot was a prize - “one of the few available pieces of dirt left,” as one city worker put it, in a housing-scarcity emergency that has lasted five decades. Behind, more shiny towers, more brick tenements. Windowless slabs hug the lot from two sides: on 54th, the beige wall of a large building owned by the MTA, whose employees park their cars in the lot on Ninth, the concrete side of a glass-sheathed apartment building. On the corner of 54th Street and Ninth Avenue on Manhattan’s far West Side, a blue fence skirts a gray parking lot. Photo-Illustration: Curbed Photo: Hudson Inc.
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