Great news! The Federal Communications Commission has rejected Boldyn Network’s appeal of the  adverse effects findings for the 100 Horatio St. and !00 Jane St. 5G towers. The FCC upheld the New York State Historic Preservation Office’s determination that these futuristic three-story-tall towers would have adverse effects on the Greenwich  Village Historic District and the Gansevoort Market Historic District. You can read the FCC’s decision here.

Since the consulting parties, the public and the SHPO were shut out of the appeals process, we don’t know any details about how the FCC reached its decision. The entire situation was quite odd. It turns out that no applicant had ever tried to appeal an adverse  effects findings decision before, and the FCC had no process in place to handle such an appeal. The only way we were able to obtain a copy of Boldyn’s appeal was through a Freedom of Information Act request, and when we did obtain a copy it turned out that Boldyn had incorrectly summarized the SHPO’s findings about the 100 Horatio Street tower, and had failed to give the FCC the comments submitted by the consulting parties and the public in response to Boldyn’s initial applications for both towers (which they were legally required to do).

Save Gansevoort and our allies, including Village Preservation, have spent the past 4 months deluging the FCC and other federal entities with concerns about the exclusion of the consulting parties and the SHPO from the process, the total lack of transparency, and Boldyn’s flawed appeal submission. We believe that our efforts helped encourage the FCC to do the right thing.

Representative Jerry Nadler and his office have been extremely helpful throughout this process, and we owe him a big THANK YOU! Unfortunately Representative Dan Goldman, our local congressperson, has been completely unresponsive to our concerns.

We hope that Boldyn will now walk away from the proposed 100 Horatio and 100 Jane Street towers, but it’s quite possible they will attempt to negotiate measures to “mitigate” the adverse effects.  If they do initiate such a negotiation,  the consulting parties would participate and any decision would have to be approved by the SHPO. The most common mitigation measures would be to move the towers’ locations or change the design of the towers. Any design change would require hearings and approval by the NYC Public Design Commission. Save Gansevoort strongly believes that any adequate mitigation must include moving both towers significantly farther away from the boundaries of the historic districts.

As always, stay tuned…