SUTTON PLACE, P.2

About two weeks later after the notification, Sutton Place South Corporation gathered two law firms and filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan seeking an injunction to prevent the city, and the state on the city's behalf, from taking over the land. Its rationale? That the building's 1925 deed gives the eastern boundary as the high water line of the East River. The co-op contended that the 1939 agreement only allowed the city to build that part of the highway "on the building’s property, above the high water line," and that the agreement "did not affect ownership of the property."

As well, the location of the high water line was in dispute. The co-op said photos taken during the road's construction showed the line "substantially farther east than where the City now contends it is located." The city, however, was going back to original documents, locating the line where it was indicated on an 1820 survey.

So far so good. Now the question becomes: If the co-op board believed all this were true and that it was in the right and would prevail, why did it do what it did next? To avoid any confusion, we quote The New York Times in 2005:

"The co-op board later passed a resolution requiring prospective apartment buyers to review the semi-secret status of the garden and to sign a strict confidentiality agreement. The resolution states that the board 'upon the advice of counsel, decided not to seek the renewal or extension of the lease.'"

Swearing prospective residents to secrecy? Making them co-conspirators in a plot to keep a clearly public dispute private? That less-than-honorable way of going about things may or may not have made the co-op look sneaky and underhanded and affected its credibility before the court, but there seems no question it didn't look good to local politicians, the area's Community Board 6and, well, the public went it eventually would up plastered in the press.

Settlement at Sutton Place

Yet ironically, all's well that ends well. On November 1, the city and the board agreed to each pay $1 million for the design and construction of a 10,000-square-foot park over the FDR, allowing the public to "have access to a beautiful piece of the waterfront," City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin (D-5th District Manhattan) said in a statement. The co-op agreed to give up claims of ownership to that part of the existing garden closest to the East River, and the city agreed to relinquish its claims on the nearly 4,000 square feet of the garden closest to the building. The co-op gets to choose the architect, and this new park will be designed for quiet activity and not, say, volleyball.

All things considered, it seems an equitable solution, and former co-op board president George Gould — an undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Reagan administration — said his stewardship's negotiations with the city were all amicable. But trying to keep public land for yourself when you know the lease expired, and then making residents and prospective buyers complicit in your cover-up? That's more Nixonian than Reaganesque.

See more Web-exclusive articles on our Site Map. For print-magazine articles back to 2002,  join our Archive >>