Rivington House Must Be Returned to Community, Lower East Siders Say

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — As Mayor Bill de Blasio put forth a new plan to replace the Rivington House on Thursday, many in the community doubled down on their hard-line stance to return the former nursing home to its original use.

"The official Community Board 3 position is there is no mitigation," Susan Stetzer, district manager of Community Board 3, told Patch Friday. "We want the Rivington House returned to the community."

The mayor's office announced Thursday it found a new site to "replace" Rivington House with mixed-use affordable housing and a "healthcare setting" for more than 100 seniors. While local officials and community members approve of the replacement site at 30 Pike St., they will still do everything they can to get the old Rivington House back, multiple sources told Patch.

The city removed two deed restrictions from the property earlier this year, paving the way for owner The Allure Group to sell the building to a developer of luxury condos.

The city is funneling the $16 million it received from waiving deed restrictions for The Allure Group on the Rivington House into the new senior housing facility. But many community members don't want the money; they want the original Rivington House returned.

"At one time, I thought that maybe in my senior years, I'd be able to use Rivington House," Bob Humber, who tends the garden in the park across the street from the former nursing home and has lived in the neighborhood for 48 years, told Patch. "I'd be a client there — which was taken away from me, which I feel very bad about."

The statement on 30 Pike St. from the mayor's office said the new facility would be a "mixed-use affordable housing and healthcare setting," but some neighborhood members are wary it won't be a real nursing home facility like Rivington House was.

"Senior housing is really important, it's very, very needed, but it's housing. Housing is very important, but is not the healthcare facility that a nursing home is," Judy Wessler, the retired former director of New York City organization Commission on the Public's Health System, told Patch. "It doesn't have medical services, so it's not equatable."

"I think that this issue is disgraceful the way it was handled by city government," Wessler added.

"This community was the victim of a broken process, City error and unscrupulous developers looking to make a buck," de Blasio said in a statement Thursday. "Our reforms will prevent that from ever happening again. This investment is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to the health of this neighborhood."

Council Member Margaret Chin, who represents the Lower East Side, thanked de Blasio in Thursday's statement. But Thursday afternoon at the City Hall hearing, Chin took a firmer tone and insisted the mayor's office do everything they can to return Rivington House to the community.

Chin asked Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris while he was in the hot seat if he had exhausted all the legal options for returning Rivington House to the community.

"Have all the options — including landmarking, eminent domain — have you explored these options so that we can get Rivington House back?" she asked.

"I believe we will continue to explore those options," Shorris answered. Then the deputy mayor suggested that the state and federal investigations underway could potentially lead to the return of the building.

"I mean, that's a good start," Chin responded. "We don't want to give up yet. We want to fight to make sure that this facility is going to come back to the community. We're urging the administration to explore all options to make sure that this happens."

During the hearing Thursday, in which several City Council members grilled Shorris about the Rivington House scandal, Shorris repeatedly dodged accountability and said the mistake was a problem with the "process," not "policy," of the mayor's office. Meanwhile, community members remember the shock they were in when they were told Rivington House would disappear. They were not kept in the loop.

"The community really didn't know about what was going on, we had no idea that it was going to be taken away from us," Humber told Patch.

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