SUTTON PLACE CO-OP GARDEN PUBLIC PARK

Not that Sutton Place South Corporation, the co-op that owns the building, didn't fight like a Five Corners brawler to keep that from happening. What lessons that can be drawn from its ultimately losing fight are hard to discern: You can't fight City Hall? Money can't buy everything? Who knows?

About the only thing that's clear is: Don't swear potential buyers to secrecy about a land lease that's expired — because you'll have a hard time convincing anyone you're not doing something shady.

Drive, He Said

The story goes back to 1939, when a World's Fair was rising in Flushing and WPA projects were booming. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, using eminent domain, took the parcel in question to help create the East River Drive, now the FDR Drive. The city agreed to cover that section of the freeway with a deck and lease the land atop it back to the building for a nominal $1 a year (rising to $1.46 a year by 1980). According to the 1939 agreement the city also promised two feet of soil "suitable for planting," with both aesthetics and automobile noise-dampening apparently in mind. The co-op built a gated private park, contributing, it said, $15,000 toward the original cost of constructing the deck and landscaping the garden.

That lease expired in 1990, during Mayor Ed Koch's administration. For reasons no one can pinpoint — or admit to, given the building's much-monied pedigree — nothing much happened about it during the succeeding Dinkins and Giuliani administrations. The co-op said in 2007, during the inevitable lawsuit, that it and the city "had several discussions about extending the lease, both in the years prior to its expiration and since, but final arrangements were never agreed upon." It also claimed that in 1995, "without following the land use review procedures mandated by the City Charter," the city "purported to" transfer jurisdiction over the property from what was then the Department of Docks to the Department of Parks & Recreation.

Finally, in 2003, New York State announced a $136 million plan to rehabilitate the highway from E. 54th to E. 63rd Streets — ripping up the garden, replacing the deck's waterproof membrane and then restoring the land — and needed to confirm the land's ownership. Investigation and negotiation among the parties went back and forth until the state Department of Transportation, in cooperation with the city Parks Dept., told the co-op on May 31, 2007, that within a month it would begin the process of converting the garden to a public park.

That's when the Sutton hit the fan. . . .

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