Atmosphere outside ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’ at the Palace Theatre on September 22, 2017. (Photo by Walter McBride/Getty Images)Getty
Renovations on the Palace Theatre have not begun, and the project already has a problem.
Despite several attempts over the past few months, the real estate developers behind the $2.5 billion project have been unable to obtain permission to inspect the neighboring building and install monitoring equipment. Both tasks must be completed before the construction work can begin, and the real estate developers are now asking a state court judge to grant them access.
The real estate developers, Maefield Development, L&L Holding Company, and Fortress Investment Group, plan to place the historic Broadway house on sixteen jacks, and then lift it up while monitoring the vibration one inch at a time until it is perched 29-feet above street level. The engineering feat is expected to create 70,000 square feet of lucrative retail space spread across the ground floor and three underground floors.
“After the first inch, the rest is just repetitive,” commented veteran engineer Anthony Mazzo, who helped roll the Empire Theatre across 42nd Street in 1998. There should not be a problem elevating the theater, he added, “as long as the building doesn’t know it’s moving.”
Before the excavation work can begin on the site, local construction laws require the real estate developers to complete a pre-construction survey of the surrounding area, and install vibration sensors and crack gauges on the neighboring properties. “The Monitoring Equipment is designed to protect the Adjacent Premises from attendant harms associated with the Project,” explained Robert Wolfson, one of their engineers. “In fact,” he said, “such protection is necessary to protect the Adjacent Premises, its occupants, and the public at large during the Project.”
However, the real estate developers claim that their neighbor at 1552-1560 Broadway has not been cooperating.
According to their petition, the real estate developers first asked the building’s owners, SL Green and Jeff Sutton, in August 2017 for limited access in order to complete the two required tasks. Three formal letters were sent in the mail, along with a standard access agreement and a monitoring plan.
One year later, after multiple follow-up messages, SL Green instructed the real estate developers to contact its lawyer about getting access. The real estate developers tried to get in touch with him, but many of their messages went unanswered.
In October 2018, the lawyer representing the neighboring building finally responded to the real estate developers, and asked them to put some money into an escrow account for legal and engineering fees. The two sides negotiated an amount, and signed an escrow agreement in December.
But, after putting the funds aside, the real estate developers allege that the lawyer for the building next door was still dragging his feet with the standard access agreement and monitoring plan.
“I don’t understand the delay on this matter, other than your client purposely trying to delay our client’s project,” complained a lawyer for the real estate developers in a message to the lawyer for the building next door. “We were hoping that this phase would be expedited based on the amount of time it took to finalize the escrow agreement, as well as the months our client reached out without a response before that,” he grumbled, adding that the agreement on the table “should be easy to finalize.” “It is clear your client is refusing to grant our client’s request for access,” he stated.
“As such,” the real estate developers argue in their petition that they “had no choice but to commence the instant proceeding for a Court-ordered license to the Adjacent Premises to install Code-required protections at the Adjacent Premises in order to prevent further delays to the Project.”
Construction was scheduled to start next month and be completed within about three years.