Riverside Park Community

Riverside Park Community
"front" of building, Broadway side
General information
Type	Apartment
Architectural style	Modern
Address	3333 Broadway
Town or city	New York, New York
Country	United States
Coordinates
Current tenants	1,200
Completed	1976
Technical details
Structural system	Expansion Joints
Material	Concrete slab, Brick
Design and construction
Architect	Max Wechsler
Architecture firm	Max Wechsler and Associates
Other designers	Richard Dattner and Henry LeGendre

The Riverside Park Community apartment complex is a group of five buildings ranging in height from 10 to 35 stories at 3333 Broadway between West 133rd and 135th Streets, in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. Completed in 1976, it was the largest residential structure in the United States. Together, the five buildings include 1,200 apartment units and were designed to accommodate nearly 1,190 families. The complex also includes the KIPP Public High School and the Infinity Charter school. The present manager of the property is the Urban American Management Corporation. Urban American Management is considered to be a slum lord type of company by most, making it very difficult if not impossible for tenants to get their issues addressed by blatantly evading and disregarding concerns. It's widely know that this building is categorically one of the worst in Manhattan as it is ridden with violations, adding new ones everyday. It's also ridden with open drug activity such as consumption, solicitation, and distribution, and as a result has become the most common place in the neighborhood for loitering drug addicts. The building is also infamous for it's rat infestation problem that has been widely documented by local news as recently as September 2015. The building management refuses to pay a private company to handle the trash of the thousands of tenants allowing it all to amass, and instead waits every few days for the city to come and pick it up resulting in a serious rat infestation/colonization where the car entrance of the building is. The biggest safety risk however are the elevators. Most of the residents are elderly or have children and rely on these in a building this size, however most of the time they are not working as a huge hazard and detriment to safety of tenants. There is a shady third party contract in place to keep the decrepit elevators and laundry machines there, even though the building is now privately owned, and surely can afford better.

History

Designed by architect Max Wechsler, the original plan called for 5 buildings arranged in a semi-circle at varying heights facing West 133rd Street. The plans also included plans for a public school, a medical building, a pharmacy and a playground facilities for 1,800 children. The community was constructed under the Mitchell-Lama program, a state-run program created in 1955 that provided low-interest mortgage loans and property tax exemptions to landlords who agreed to provide low-income residents with affordable housing at below-market-rate rents.

At a cost of $54 million, the Educational Construction Fund developed this project as the first phase of a total renewal of the area between West 125th Street and 135th Street, from Broadway to Riverside Drive. When the property first opened, in Spring 1976, the director of sales received over 9,000 applications in the rental office. At the time, a family of five had to meet a basic income requirement of $13,000/year to qualify for housing. Federal subsidies, however, made it possible for people with incomes less than that which was required to obtain housing in the building. In 1976, a one-bedroom apartment cost $228/month and a two-bedroom apartment cost $272. Today, the rents for those apartments start at $1,750 and $2,250, respectively.

In 2005, after the loan was paid off, the then landlord Jerome Belson controversially opted the community out of the program. Per the guidelines of the Mitchell-Lama program, "any owner can withdraw from the program after 20 years upon paying off the mortgage". At the same time, BSR, the management company for 3333, sold the property to Cammeby’s Realty Corp. for $85 million.

Following the withdrawal from Mitchell-Lama, a class action lawsuit was brought against the current owner by many of the building's tenants, alleging that they were not properly notified of the rise in rental costs and for systematically harassing them to move out and make room for tenants who can afford to pay higher rents. The case was dismissed without merit. At the time of its development, the area surrounding the site of the Riverside Park Community consisted primarily of low-rent tenement housing and mixed-use commercial/residential building types that made up much of Broadway in West Harlem.

Since the previous owner of the property opted out of the Mitchell-Lama program, some housing advocates asserted that as many as 300 residents moved out of the building in the course of three years and some tenants are concerned that the building will no more be affordable. In 2008, "a group led by the Legal Aid Society filed a class-action suit in State Supreme Court against the building's owner, arguing that a provision requiring that the property remain dedicated to low and moderate income housing had been removed by the City and the prior owners without proper public notice, and that this was a major contributing factor to the efforts to force residents out." The State Supreme Court dismissed the case, citing that all claims, including those of harassment, were without merit. All attempts to appeal that decision have also failed. The president of one of the building's tenant associations, Alicia Barksdale, asserts that many of the tenants believe that it is not fair for them to ever have to move, regardless of the changes in the neighborhood.

In 2007, Cammeby’s sold the property as part of a portfolio for $278 million to Urban American Management, nearly triple the previous value. No longer under Federal regulation, the new management company aims to house the local college students from Columbia University and other young professionals.

Design

Architect

The principal architect was Max Wechsler of Max Wechsler & Associates. Two architectural consultants to Wechsler were Richard Dattner and Henry LeGendre. The New York Times credited Dattner and LeGendre as the architects who designed the housing complex. Seven days later, the Times printed a letter to the editor, from Max Wechsler, proclaiming that his firm was in fact the lead design team on the project and Dattner and LeGendre “served as consultants only.”

Max Wechsler & Associates also built a high-rise residential building at 300 East 34th Street in the 1970s. He practiced architecture in New York City throughout his whole career. He died on September 23, 1993.

Site and context

At the time of its inception, the site of the Riverside Community Housing complex was mainly made up of multifamily tenement housing. West Harlem suffered from street crime at the time, and New York City in general was facing the monumental trend of suburban flight. Urban planners, politicians, and developers alike were pushing to finance projects such as 3333 Broadway to keep middle-income families from moving out of the city.

The building was built on a lot covering approximately 285,000 square feet (26,500 m²) in the Manhattanville section of Harlem. To the west of the buildings lies the West Side Highway (NY 9A) and beyond that the Hudson River. To the east of the site is Broadway. Across West 133rd Street to the south is the Manhattanville Bus Depot, and across West 135th Street to the north of the development lies a row of early-twentieth-century brick tenement buildings.

Materials

The tenement housing surrounding the site of 3333 Broadway typically is decorated with classically derived ornament, while the Riverside Housing is clearly designed in the modernist tradition. There is very little ornament or applied decoration on the brick and concrete facade of the building. The exposed slabs at each floor give the building a horizontal element, likely to contrast the immense vertical nature of the structure. This detail is typical of housing design in the 1970s and was inexpensive to build, not to maintain, and the exposed slab was prone to heat loss due to a lack of insulation. The windows also read as windows and nothing more, as they were designed to lay perfectly flush within the exterior walls. The interior communal spaces have similar modernist elements, with floor-to-ceiling windows, rounded columns and terrazzo flooring throughout.

The front facade (where the main entry exists) is pulled away from Broadway to create an entrance. This design was most likely due to the Zoning Resolution of New York City, which calls for specific building height to setback ratios. Nonetheless, the setback of the building entrance creates a sort of public space at the corner of 135th and Broadway.

3333 Broadway is built using concrete foundations and a concrete structure. The facade is a typical brick cladding system. The floors are built of concrete slab, and they are exposed through the facade. The five buildings are connected using expansion joints, so that when the building moves they (the buildings) will not push into each other and cause damage to each other or fail structurally. The buildings themselves (as is the case with all tall buildings) utilize the method of incorporating expansion joints to alleviate damage that could be caused by the average loads placed on a building. These forces refer to the dead loads of the construction materials themselves, the live loads of the people and things that may be brought into the building, and the wind loads that occur at the exterior of the building.

Form and use

The building is built as a courtyard complex, with the five tall buildings built in a "c"-shape with the courtyard in the center. The five buildings are built above the grade of Broadway, and the public school and park that serves as the school's playground exist below the grade of Broadway. The playground fronts Broadway and serves as a connection to the West Harlem community. This public face is different from many of the other housing complexes in Harlem that are also built in the style of a courtyard building. Where many other housing complexes in the neighborhood have a communal space that serves only the residents of the building, the Riverside Community complex has this public space that is more integrated into the community and thus more successful, in that it is a less dangerous place for children to play and a more exposed place, which deters crime, but doesn't actually deter anything, rather facilitating places for random people in the community to loiter and harass while partaking in open drug and alcohol use. The courtyard in the center of the complex is more typical to the types of housing complexes in New York City in that it is completely private and is used only by the residents of the complex, except for the common areas in the "back" of the building facing Riverside, which is home to more rats than likely people inside the building.

I.S. 195 also has a playground facing Broadway that creates a dialogue with the street. Although surrounded by a 20-foot-high (6.1 m) fence separating the street and the playground, and dropped below street level, a passerby can see children playing, beneficial to this neighborhood.

The complex at 3333 Broadway also uses the idea of the interior courtyard to create communal spaces for the residents of the building. Inaccessible from adjacent city streets, the courtyard is raised up, above the parking garage, and sits nestled between the five towers. In the courtyard were benches, trees, shrubs, and various concrete planters and designed hardscape surfaces, but as of November 2015 it remains a torn up construction site with a flooded abandon "playground". Similar to the facade of the building, the materials used in the courtyard are predominantly brick and concrete. The courtyard is surrounded by continuous floor-to-ceiling glazing, which creates a permeability between the buildings and the courtyard, and also gives the towers the quality of being lifted off the ground.

References

Notes

Sources

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• Wechsler, Max. “Project in Harlem.” New York Times 20 June 1976.
• Wechsler, Max. “Somebody, Wake Up!” New York Times 7 Nov 1976.
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• Display Ad. New York Times 25 April 1976.