Demolition Permits Filed For Yorkville Corner

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The wrecking ball is coming for a former boutique bed & breakfast and the recent temporary home of a neighborhood diner, according to city records.

But the small lot sizes mean that any future developer will most likely build to a lower height than the maximum permitted by zoning.

Two buildings at York Avenue and East 81st Street — 1530 York Avenue and 502 East 81st St. — will be reduced to rubble, along with a third building on the York Avenue lot, with no immediate plans in the work for the future for the two lots.

The permits were filed last month by Sergey Rybak, of Rybak Development, a Brooklyn-based firm behind several other Upper East Side developments, including 126 East 86th St. and 333 East 82nd St.

City records show that Rybak purchased the two lots in June for $10.4 million.

No building permits have been filed for the site, and Patch reached out to Rybak for comment on what could be in store for the corner, but they didn't respond.

What's clear is that despite both sites falling well within the high-density tower zoning district, allowing for a tower-on-base structure with virtually no height limit — or a non-tower building with a height limit of 210 feet — the rules for standard building setbacks and the size of these two lots make it unlikely that anyone will look to build higher than about 125 feet tall.

"By the time you put in the setback, you're not going to have much building left," said local zoning expert George Janes.

Zoning requirements state that buildings above 125 feet must have a 15-foot setback to allow for more light to reach the street. The small lot, Janes explains, makes it difficult to build above that height.

Most developers, he said, would probably look at the two lots and aim to build right up to 120 feet tall without any setback and call it a day.

"The lot is only 25 feet wide," said Janes, "and once you put in that 15-foot setback, your building is only going to be 10 feet wide."

And for the former hotel, Janes said, once the building is demolished, that building use code can no longer be grandfathered in, making it unlikely that a hotel will return to East 81st Street.

The East 81st Street hotel, called the Gracie Inn Hotel, closed in 2015. According to Yelp and Tripadvisor reviews, the formerly "cute" bed and breakfast started to go downhill in its later years.

On the corner of York Avenue, the building most recently served as a temporary home for the popular Gracie Mews Diner while its First Avenue home underwent renovations in 2021.

The building in the rear of the York Avenue lot was formerly a laundromat.