300 Upper East Siders Joined Elected Officials to Stop the Blood Center Tower
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, State Senator Liz Krueger, Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright, Council Members Ben Kallos and Keith Powers, and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer joined around 300 Upper East Side residents, community groups, and students and families from the Julia Richman Education Complex yesterday in a rally against New York
In The News: UES residents at war with New York Blood Center over HQ building plans
Read Melissa Klein's article at the New York Post about the ongoing fight against the Blood Center/Longfellow redevelopment.
The New York Blood Center Advances Its Egregious Proposal – Help FRIENDS Fight It!
On April 19th, the New York Blood Center certified an application at the City Planning Commission for an astonishing array of rezoning, special permits, and amendments for a new building on their site at 310 East 67th Street.
Ask YOUR questions of the Blood Center/Longfellow tower proposal
Following an announcement last week that the New York Blood Center/Longfellow commercial office tower proposal at 310 East 67th Street has entered the “pre-certification” phase of the City’s official public review process, known as ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), the project team will appear tomorrow at the Zoning and
FRIENDS In the News
FRIENDS has been featured in recent news pieces covering the community opposition to the New York Blood Center/Longfellow commercial tower that would undo decades of community-minded human scale zoning on the midblocks in our neighborhood
Preserving our Green Upper East Side
You know FRIENDS speaks up for our historic architecture, and the preservation and zoning mechanisms in place to maintain the scale and character of our community.
Scrapping the ‘Tower on Stilts’
We are thrilled to announce that 249 East 62nd Street, the poster-child example of egregious loopholes in supertalls, has been purchased by a new owner, with a new architect, and a new as-of-right design. The proposal that was dubbed the Jetsons' Building is "outta here"!
TODAY: NY Blood Center Environmental Scoping Session
Today, December 15, NYC Department of City Planning will hold its first scoping meeting for the New York Blood Center development. The scoping hearing reviews the Draft Scope of Work for the environmental impact statement which the Blood Center must complete before the project enters the formal public review process, or ULURP.
NY Blood Center: Learn More Today and Speak Out Next Week
The New York Blood Center released plans in October 2020 to demolish its modest 1930 building on a large through-block site on East 67th Street between First and Second Avenues. Replacing the three-story building would be a 334 foot midblock commercial tower, anchored by the Blood Center on the first five floors,
Proposals Chipping Away at the Midblock
One of FRIENDS’ earliest initiatives, led by our founder Halina Rosenthal, was the successful effort to bring contextual zoning to the midblocks of the Upper East Side. The R8B zoning district was mapped across vast swaths of our midblocks in 1985, hailed by the New York Times as “the most