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Four months after the city unveiled a preliminary plan to spur new development in the heart of midtown, three prominent houses of worship in the neighborhood are pressing their case to get a share of the cash bonanza the proposal is expected to generate.
St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Bartholomew's Church and Central Synagogue, whose ornate buildings are among the city's most prominent landmarks, have about 2 million square feet of air rights among them - a trove that could be worth $400 million or more - that they have never been able to sell. The trio sees the city's proposal, designed to spur construction of a new geeration of bigger, state-of-the-art office buildings in the core midtown business district, as a golden opportunity to finally cash in.
In order to do so, they want the city to allow them the
same flexibility it is giving itself under the plan: to sell air rights to any and all qualifying sites in the wide swath of midtown where the city aims to stoke development.
Among other things, the houses of worship argue that they could sorely use the cash injection.
"We have been given this responsibility to maintain historic structures, and yet as part of that we have not been allowed to realize the value of those structures, and that puts us in a difficult position," said Lawrence Graham, chief administrative officer of St. Bart's, the huge Episcopal church on Park Avenue and East 51st Street. "We should be part of the process...