Q: My name is Yukie Ohta and I am here with Sean Sweeney, Executive Director of the SoHo  Alliance, at his home on Greene Street in New York City, to conduct an oral history interview  for the New York Preservation Archive Project. Today is October 31, 2023. Sean, is it okay for  me to record this interview? 

Sweeney: Yes. 

Q: Okay. Well, then let’s get started. Please tell us your name, once again, and give us a one to  two-sentence self-introduction. 

Sweeney: My name is Sean Sweeney. I’ve been living in SoHo since around 1977. 

Q: So you have a very interesting origin story that placed you at odds with the SoHo Alliance at  one point in time. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? 

Sweeney: Yeah. I used to attend, in NoHo—at 647 Broadway, north of Bleecker—a private  house party called The Loft, that went from basically midnight until eight o’clock, but then it had  to close there. The buildings department closed them down, the neighbors complained, so they  went to 99 Prince Street. And coincidentally, I happened to move into the same building right 

around the same time, by pure coincidence. So here’s a place that I was attending, a wonderful  private party—the origins of disco and house music, actually—and in my own building. I was  also getting employed there.  

And I thought they were unfairly branding us––the SoHo Artists Association––because they  thought it was going to introduce nightclubs and discotheques into this very quiet neighborhood.  So there were fliers on the lampposts saying, “Come to a meeting. No discotheques, no juice  bars. Danger Danger Danger.” We’re just a bunch of innocent people dancing. So I’m just a  spook—undercover kind of freak, by nature—so I volunteer. I said to David Mancuso, “I’ll go as  a spy, and hear what they have to say, and report back to you.” And David Mancuso, whose  home it was and who ran the party and deejayed, goes, “Okay.” So I just went, and there were  only about two of us there. There was a woman from The Loft, and myself, and Charles Leslie,  who was very involved with the SoHo Artists Association. And maybe, just no more than three  or four other people at the most, from SoHo, from the Artists Association. I guess they didn’t  know me, or her, because they were, “Who are you?” I forget what she said. She said, “Well, I’m  a resident.” They said, “Okay.” And he goes, “And you?” “I’m a reporter for the Village Voice.”  Understand, the CIA would always be reporters.  

So I just reported back. They wanted to shut us down. There was a demonstration of maybe  about fifty people. “No discos in SoHo.” And it wasn’t really a disco, it was a private party,  but— 

Q: It happened on a regular basis though.

Sweeney: Yeah, every Saturday night. But it was a private party in someone’s loft, and they said  it was a club––and that’s how he was able to get around the law. It was a private party, it wasn’t  a nightclub.  

So there was really no trouble. The neighbors next door didn’t like the thumping of the bass  speakers. But even people from the building didn’t complain. So in other words, it was a  mountain out of a molehill. They really searched for a solution for which there was no problem.  And then we got along well after. We tried to keep things down and there was no problem. And  that was the last I got involved with anything to do with SoHo community activism for about  thirteen years. 

Q: So what happened in the interim? And then, how did the SoHo Alliance form, and how did  you become involved in it? 

Sweeney: Well, the SoHo Artists Association was formed around 1968 to legalize residential  living in SoHo. And when that was accomplished in ’71 with the rezoning, and then in 1972— excuse me, 1973 it got landmarked. And they were involved with that as well, the  preservationists. [00:05:01] And it got kind of quiescent. Except around ’78, they also, I think,  passed a zoning amendment to prohibit clubs because The Loft, at which I worked, which is even  really ironic. And after that, it was really not much to do. I think they also had, around 1975, a  zoning amendment not to have sidewalk cafés. So this is why I had great antipathy to the  sidewalk dining sheds that now are everywhere because for fifty years, we fought to keep them out, because, you know, it was continental. On the Champs-Élysées they’re nice, but not on the  gritty streets of New York. 

Q: But then you came back. How did you get reinvolved with SoHo Alliance? 

Sweeney: Well, again, I wasn’t involved in the community. I was involved just with my friends  and kind of the downtown scene, whatever that was, of miscreants. And I think—okay, there was  a church called Saint Alphonsus located on West Broadway, between Grand and Canal on the  west side, which was demolished because, I think, the foundations were getting weak. And for a  couple of years there was a huge empty lot––I don’t know, twenty or thirty thousand square feet– –and I believe someone either wanted to build a recreation center, and this group, the SoHo  Alliance, was formed. And there was also a second attempt to build like a twelve-story building, which over-towered all the other buildings in our low rise neighborhood, with the exception of  Broadway, which has some taller buildings. So that’s when the SoHo Alliance got started. It was  an amalgamation of the now moribund SoHo Artists Association, the Downtown Independent  Democrats (of which I am now an officer), the Greene Street Block Association, and the  “Southwest SoHo Preservation Association,” or some name like that. But again, I wasn’t really  involved in that, cause that was down all the way on Canal Street, and I’m up here at Houston, so  it’s almost a different neighborhood.  

However, about 19––okay, I was involved in the [19]60s with the anti-war movement, and then  in the ‘70s and ‘80s with the Irish Republican Army, I belonged to an affinity group here. And  then when the peace treaty came—when peace was approaching, around 1990 or so—I saw on the lamppost, a sign from the community board that said something like “The Restoning of Greene and Prince.” They were gonna replace the Belgian blocks. And at the same time I also  saw a flier from the SoHo Alliance that said “Stop The Hotels.” Because Greene Street was my  street, I just figured, “Well, I better go. I should find out what they’re gonna do to my street.” So  that was my first community board meeting.  

But then I saw the list of buildings that sought to be converted to hotels. One of them was 99  Prince, also known as 147 Mercer on the northwest corner of Mercer and Prince. And it kind of  got me annoyed cause I’d lived there from about ‘77 till about ’81, at which time a new landlord,  a real estate developer called Futterman, bought it, and said, “You guys, you’re out. We’re not  renewing your commercial lease.” And we said, “Well, we’re not moving.” And he said, “Well, you have to move.” This is before the Loft Law, which gave some protections to loft tenants, similar to rent stabilized tenants. It gave them permanency of residency. We didn’t have that, so  we got a law firm, and we went on rent strike for about two years. And then, eventually, Futterman gave us about twenty-three thousand each. We also saved about two thousand in rents.  So I had about twenty-five thousand I moved out. But it was disruptive. I really liked living  there, it was ideal. It was the apex of SoHo, like in the late ‘70s, before it got really  commercialized. Twenty-five by a hundred-foot loft, thirteen windows. Freezing cold in the  winter. No intercom. A hot plate. But it was lovely, and it was just really a nice time in my life.  And to have lost that, I got a lot of resentment.  

So when they were gonna make a fancy hotel out of this, with people?! One of the developers,  André Balazs, he owned a club, or a discotheque called M.K. And I thought it was so ironic. This private party at which I worked, The Loft at 99 Prince Street, Balazs copied. M.K. was like the  downtown Studio 54. All the elite models and yuppies, they would go there. And you’re  throwing our little party out? It was like, it really got me really “F You” kind of attitude.  

So I went to one or two meetings. I just got involved. [00:10:01] The Alliance would have  meetings up here in my loft. For some reason, people didn’t want to use their house, so we had  meetings here. Before answering machines, there was something called answering services,  where an operator would be in a room somewhere in midtown, taking calls from people and  messages. And then the client would call and say, “What messages did I get?” and get a list of  messages. So I checked the answering service one September, and the operator said, “You have a  whole summer’s worth of phone messages here.” I go, “Man.” One call was someone who  worked for the Daily News. And I was also involved in the Yippies, who were like political  hippies in the ‘60s, and they really knew how to manipulate the media. And I go, “Aw man,  we’re passing up the Daily News, the New York Times, this is crazy.” So I said, “Why’re we  doing this? How come no one called up in two or three months?” And they said, “Uh, I don’t  know.” And I said, “You know, there’s something just out now called answering machines. Why  don’t we get one?” And everyone just looked at me. And you know, if you’re gonna suggest something, you can’t be a jerk and say nothing—so I said, “Okay, I’ll get it.” So we put the  answering machine in a corner and I became the spokesperson for the SoHo Alliance. And I give  good quote. So when the reporters did call, I gave them spicy little things, little quips and things  like that. 

Q: That’s what your famous for, Sean.

Sweeney: [laughs] Do you want to hear how I became the executive director? Q: Yes. 

Sweeney: Kind of a funny story. It has to do with the SoHo Grand Hotel. So we were gonna sue  on environmental grounds, that there were gonna be like two hundred rooms, and it was built on  the Lispenard swamp by Canal Street, just south of Spring Street. A lot of water. And if you have  two hundred people flushing toilets at eight o’clock in the morning, taking showers, it’s going to  

flood. And there was flooding––there’s still flooding to this day. That’s another story, how to  mitigate that flooding.  

So we sued and we needed money, so they had an art exhibit, “SOS: Save Our SoHo.” That was  one of the––except for the SoHo rezoning, that was one of the last community-wide, SoHo-wide  efforts. And a lot of famous artists gave their paintings and stuff like that. So at the same time,  around 1993—now we’re moving to 1994––nothing much was happening. People began to sell  stuff on the sidewalks, which I thought was expropriation, the usurpation of public property for  private use. You get one guy selling something, then you’re gonna have twenty, which is what happened. So I tried to get the police to chase them away. And one of the artists was very vocal and political. He led a group to oppose us opposing him. And so we had a meeting how to deal  with this. Did we want to stop artists selling their work on the street. Because here we are, a  neighborhood of artists not wanting artists to sell. It was a quandary. But eventually, people said,  “Well, you know, we just can’t have people selling on the street.” So I was organizing all these meetings. But people—I don’t want to mention names—but some people were doing a lot of  talking, but not doing the work. Too many chiefs, not enough indians.  

So we had another meeting for something else, another kind of major meeting. We were setting it  up with the table in the front, with like six chairs for the steering committee, and then the  audience, twenty or thirty. It was in an art gallery on Grand Street. And Kathryn Freed, who was  a good friend of mine and a city council member—and a member of the SoHo Alliance, and one  of the earliest members of the Downtown Independent Democrats—she said, “Sean, move these other chairs away and you sit up front alone, directing the meeting.” [laughs] I got there early to  set up. So I’m sitting there, there’s no other chairs for the other members to sit on. I’m sitting,  the lone guy behind the table, and that’s it. That’s it.  

Q: That’s how you became executive director? 

Sweeney: Really Machiavellian, isn’t it? If I’m gonna do like all of the work—I was doing like  ninety percent of the work—I want, you know, more control. [00:15:01] I don’t like meetings or  committees, it’s too many chiefs. So that’s how I became executive. Oh, I worked as a freelancer for all these years. I was a taxi driver. I was a delivery guy, and worked at The Loft as a  freelancer. So I always thought it would be nice to be an executive director. A big shot [laughs].  So like Napoleon crowning himself emperor, I crowned myself executive director. It’s very  impressive on business cards [laughs]. 

Q: Okay. Well to me, and probably to many others, you are the SoHo Alliance now, and for many years. So can you just tell me a little bit about the SoHo Alliance? Like does it have a  mission, fundraising, staffing, general activities? Who are members? 

Sweeney: Actually, around 1995 or 1996, we were going to incorporate, so we actually had a  president for a while, a vice president, and treasury. And we did that for a while. Oh another  thing! We had these big, huge annual meetings of the neighborhood, but I was the one left  plastering every lamppost in SoHo. It got tedious, you know. And then after a while, I would just  kind of make decisions, which I had the good sense of the zeitgeist of what SoHo is, and feels, and what people want. And I rarely––without bragging––I’ve rarely been wrong on what people  here want. So I felt I was the spokesman, and only very, very, very few people have ever  complained on my actions. 

Q: Is there a formal mission, and is there a formal— 

Sweeney: No, no, no, no. As a matter of fact, we were going to incorporate as a 501c3, so we did  have a mission statement. You have to do that. But then we had to fill out our income tax. And I  still haven’t done my income tax for 2022, so I ain’t gonna do one for the SoHo Alliance. I’ve  never filed income tax papers in forty years on time! So it just kind of devolved, that effort. And  there wasn’t much happening in the late ‘90s here. A little thing here and there with zoning.  

By the 1990s, the developers really came down here with a vengeance, so in the ‘90s, there were  several developments going on on vacant lots, which people didn’t want. A lot of times it was  blocking up their views, which is—okay, you don’t own your view, but I understand. And who wants high-rise buildings and things like that in a low-rise neighborhood? Q: SoHo Alliance then doesn’t have a staff. 

Sweeney: No, it doesn’t. 

Q: And you provide your services pro bono. 

Sweeney: Yeah. Our letterhead says Volunteer Community Association. We fundraise only once  a year, at around Christmastime when people are giving, and our expenses are very low. We  have about eleven hundred people on our email list, and then that, in turn, gets forwarded to  another one or two hundred. So well over a thousand people get this, which is typical. Three  percent donate, let’s say thirty people. Yeah, thirty or forty people, maybe, only, give. But that’s  enough, if all you have is an answering machine and no office, really, to speak of. With the  money we do get, however, we use that mostly for legal. Our legal battles over the years have  been very expensive. The NYU rezoning up here on Houston, we had to give twenty-five  thousand for that. The rezoning two years ago, that came up to be over a hundred and fifty  thousand. When we sued Trump, that was thirty thousand. 

Q: So all of the funding comes from basically thirty people? 

Sweeney: Yeah. Except when it’s something big, like the rezoning, then you put out a message–– sometimes a thousand dollars, five thousand dollars. For instance, when Trump—we’ll get to that later, maybe—when he wanted to build his SoHo Trump Hotel over here. This is 2005,  before he got political. But I never liked the guy. I go, “Am I the only one who hates Donald Trump?” So I said, “Can we raise enough money?” It was gonna be thirty thousand dollars to  hire a lawyer. “Can we raise thirty thousand dollars in a couple of weeks?” So I googled— Google had just come out—so I googled “the most hated people in America” and Donald Trump  was in the top ten. I decide, “Yeah. Let’s go.” [laughs] I swear to God. In two weeks we got  thirty thousand dollars. 

Q: So a targeted campaign. 

Sweeney: Yeah! And then we did another legal challenge against Trump, and the lawyer liked  our attitude so much—he was a fighter like us, Stu Klein. That was another thirty thousand, and  he did that pro bono. [00:20:00] There were a couple of buildings on Houston Street. The  neighbors who lived up there in the surrounding buildings, they would donate, you know, the co ops. Oh, that’s very important. How did we get them? We’re very lucky, because it’s a  neighborhood of co-ops and condos, and they have funds. You always have a buffer account–– you should have like six months expenses. So if you live in a neighborhood, let’s say the Lower  East Side, where everyone rents, you can’t knock on everyone’s door. You just can’t do it. You  don’t have an email list of all your tenants. So it’s really hard to raise funds in a neighborhood of  rental apartment buildings. But because SoHo is so small and low, I can even just go around and  make fliers, put them on the doors, and say, “Come to this meeting.” And then at the meeting, we say, “We need the co-op to give money.” For instance, we fought a lot of state liquor authority laws. That’s why there’s not a lot of bars  down here, because neighbors don’t want bars open till 4AM. So I had a list of everyone on that  block. “If you want to sleep tonight, come to this meeting. Oh, by the way, we need thirty  thousand to hire a liquor lawyer.” Have your co-op write the check. So that’s how we get the big  bucks. Also, when we fought NYU, we had a white-shoe law firm, Gibson, Dunn, on the top  floor of the Pan Am––Metro Life building. The last I heard, their legal charges were two million  dollars. One of their lawyers, Randy Mastro, deputy mayor under Giuliani—a big power man, power player. His firm––Gibson, Dunn––did it for free. We got like over two million dollars pro  bono. We just had to come up with twenty-five grand to pay the publicist, and the court filings, and the transcripts.  

Q: So going back a little ways, you were first involved with the opposition to the SoHo Grand at  310 West Broadway, in the ‘80s, and then the Mercer Hotel at 99— 

Sweeney: Not me personally, SoHo Alliance was. 

Q: I’m sorry. The SoHo Alliance was. 

Sweeney: Yeah. 

Q: So tell me a bit about the hotel zoning in general, in SoHo, and these two campaigns. And  how that sort of affected the SoHo community?

Sweeney: Yeah. This was before boutique hotels. This was when you think of hotel, you think of  Holiday Inn, or you think of Times Square hotels. And in those days, Times Square was kind of  sleazy. And we also thought it would be a harbinger for tourists. It would bring tourists here, of  which there were very few in those days. So we didn’t want them because we just thought it  would just turn the neighborhood into Times Square. I remember even one of our posters said,  “No Prostitutes.” It would bring in prostitution. You know, let’s say you’re having a convention with a bunch of guys, prostitutes might hang around, you might have a drug dealer. So it was a  quality-of-life question. We didn’t really have anything against hotels.  

So the Mercer Hotel was one of the first boutique hotels. And that’s really not—there’s been  very few problems, if any, from the Mercer. And even the SoHo Grand has very few problems.  We were wrong on that. We admit we were wrong. And the Crosby Street. Oh wait! Here’s an  example. So after the Crosby Street Hotel, based out of England, an English firm––Firmdale I  think—they came to us first, unlike Trump’s hotel, and said, “We’re very nice people.” And they  said, “We’re going to have a nice boutique hotel.” And they worked with us, and everything we  wanted, they gave us. “We’ll close the bar. What hour do you want, Sean, eleven?” What the  neighbors wanted, not me, I was just the conduit. And it worked out well. And the James Hotel  down here. Again, a little problem with sometimes they’re noisy, but hotels really aren’t a  problem. 

Q: But––then there was the “Trump” in quotes “hotel.” And that was a very high profile case.  How was that different? And what happened with that?

Sweeney: Okay. I never watched The Apprentice, his show. But I heard that out of, what’s the  word?—of courtesy––his team, not himself, but his team––asked to give a presentation to the  community board. Because they weren’t going for any special permits, which you need, but as a  courtesy—and he didn’t appear himself. In SoHo, let me tell you the problem. In SoHo, you can  build a new hotel, and you can live here if you convert. In those days, under the old zoning, you  could move in to a former factory or warehouse building, and convert it, and you could live  there. [00:25:03] You can live in a converted building as a resident, let’s say, and you can build a  new hotel. But you can’t build a new residential building, until the year 2021, when the rezoning  took place. So Mr. Wise Guy comes in, and thinks we just fell off the pumpkin truck. And he  goes, “Well, I’m gonna call it a condo hotel, where I’ll sell hotel rooms.” And I go, “Aw man, don’t even do that. Please, don’t insult us.” And he went ahead with it, and he famously said,  “Oh, well, I could go to the community board and it’ll take sixteen years. Or I could do it my  way and get it done in two.” “You think so, Donald? I disagree.”  

So the building began to go up. And like I said, we had raised thirty thousand dollars in one  week cause people just disliked this guy. So we threw everything––we had a great lawyer, Stuart  Klein, who was the former solicitor general for the buildings department, and counsel general for  the buildings department. He was a brilliant man. And he threw everything you could think of at  it. We filed a couple of lawsuits. We filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange  Commission because he advertised on page three of the New York Times Sunday Magazine section, at the very bottom: “makes a great investment.” And you cannot advertise a real estate  investment without registering it as an REIT—a real estate investment trust—with the Securities  and Exchange Commission. So we went to the Securities and Exchange Commission. A complaint there, a complaint with the City Council as well, then we went to—who was it? Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo, I think, was the attorney general at the time. So we put all these  complaints into his Offering Plan. And he goes, “Trump had to put down they were being sued.” So who was gonna pay two thousand dollars a square foot to buy into a lawsuit? 

Anyway, the building was going up. They had a ribbon cutting ceremony. The police kept us on  the other side of Varick Street, and we were protesting. A lot of reporters were there, and I think  his daughter, Ivanka, was there. And one of them said, after all these questions, one of them said,  

“What do you think of all those protesters over there?” And he goes, “Oh, it’s great. The  publicity is great. As a matter of fact, I just sold sixty-two percent of my units.” He just picked  that number out of his head. Well, some naifs from Europe—a Swedish soccer player, for  instance and some other people––believed him, based on his statement, and they purchased  condo units. But then all these lawsuits were happening, and they didn’t know this. Living in  Europe, they didn’t have a New York lawyer to check this out. So it came to pass that no one  else was buying in. So instead of sixty-two percent being sold, I think it was like seven percent  was sold. So they sued to get their money back. So he never sold a single hotel unit, to the best of  my knowledge. Subsequently, money wasn’t coming in. He just branded it. It wasn’t his  development. He had two Russian guys as the actual developers, I’m sure with connections to  Putin, so he just branded it. But nevertheless, there was a fifteen million dollar mezzanine loan  that they couldn’t pay. And eventually, when he got into politics, the new owners who later  purchased it from the Russians took his name off it. So it’s now operating as a nice hotel just like  we wanted. 

Q: As an actual hotel. 

Sweeney: Yeah. He also did sleazy things. He was able to go higher cause it wasn’t landmarked.  That’s why zoning and landmarking are very important for SoHo. He would never have been  able to build a building that tall in SoHo proper, in core SoHo. 

Q: I believe Donald Trump wrote about this case in one of his books. Do you want to just read  me the paragraph? 

Sweeney: The title of the book is Never Give Up, which he keeps saying. As you know, he still  thinks he’s president. And he wrote a whole chapter on this. “I Love a Good Fight.” Well, so do I! Anyway, he describes what happened from his point of view. And at the very last paragraph, 

he goes, “SoHo caused, perhaps, a few more problems than expected. But it was all in a year’s work, to us. That’s big city business, and we’re big enough to handle it. Just be sure you have the  same attitude. It will save you a lot of unnecessary anxiety.” [00:30:03] So when was the last  time you heard this guy saying anything caused him any anxiety at all? I want that on my  gravestone: “We Caused Trump Unnecessary Anxiety.” I hope he lost sleep at night. 

Q: Well, that’s quite a story. So speaking about historic districting and landmarks, what has  SoHo Alliance’s involvement in historic districting and in landmarks preservation been, over the  years? 

Sweeney: Not a lot. Yes and no. We were supportive of the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District 

Extension. So SoHo was landmarked in 1973, mostly by preservationists. It was led by Margot  Gayle and preservationists. I think the Victorian Society might have been involved as well. The  original 1973 historic district went from the east side of West Broadway to roughly, I think, the  

west side of Crosby Street. But the Victorian Society wanted all of SoHo designated as an historic district—including the west side of West Broadway, going as far as Lafayette—but the Landmarks Preservation Commission wouldn’t give it to Margot. After she died, posthumously,  I think as a tribute, Landmarks extended it. So we just supported what the Victorian Society was  doing. They did at least ninety-five percent of the work. 

Q: When was this? 

Sweeney: Whew! 20— 

Q: Around when was that? 

Sweeney: Around 2018. No, no, no, I’m sorry, 2008. Time flies. It was around 2008, 2009 it got  extended. 

Q: And now I want to move onto a very specific thing, which is The Wall by Frosty Myers.  SoHo Alliance was involved in that. It’s often called “the gateway to SoHo,” and Myers created  this public art piece in 1973. How is it that it’s still there, even after the new owners of 599  Broadway, on the corner of Broadway and Houston, announced that they were taking the piece  down in 1997?

Sweeney: For background, Frosty Myers is an iconic, minimalist sculptor. His work was in  Max’s Kansas City, a really hip, iconic downtown spot. He was one of the, I think, six artists  whose work is on the moon. He had little miniature art pieces aboard one of the Apollo missions to the moon. His work is now on the moon. So he wasn’t just some sculptor. He was the real  deal. His wife, actually, did most of the work. I think that’s why I’m not an artist. I don’t think  the SoHo Alliance could be run by an artist cause they don’t have that mentality. I love Frosty,  but his wife did a lot of the work.  

Frosty and his wife approached and said the new owner of the building wants to take it down.  Now, I didn’t even know what it was. For years, I had seen it. And it was along Houston Street in  those days, before some of these newer buildings were built. There were a whole series of  parking lots with wall murals. There was one on West Broadway, one on Wooster, one on  Greene, and his work on Broadway, as a result of when they had built the subway back in the  ‘30s. So—I thought that things were there just to hold—which they were—to hold the building  up—the wall—because it was actually a double building. But they demolished half of the  building in the 1930s, the north half. And they put these girders, these I-beams to hold the wall in  place. So—I didn’t know much about it because there was no plaque there to denote what it was.  

Then it came, because the building was landmarked––I should say, it is in the landmark district– –I was on the landmarks committee, and actually, I was the chair for twenty-four years of the  landmarks committee of Community Board 2. Yeah, also, I was appointed to the Community  Board, which was very important. It’s sort of like the mini-congress for each neighborhood, or 

the council for each neighborhood. And then I found out what the new owner was trying to do,  remove it. And he wanted to put up a big, huge—God, it must have been like a twenty, thirty  thousand-square-foot advertising sign for The History Channel to replace this work of art.  

And by this time, SoHo as an artist haven was diminishing. People were moving to  Williamsburg, the East Village, and Chelsea. So we wanted to preserve that history. And, the  name of the building was the SoHo Arts Condominium. It was owned by someone whose family  owned the New York Yankees prior to Steinbrenner, and who had a polo tournament out in  Southampton. [00:35:05]. So he was getting fifty thousand a month to have this huge billboard. I  went, “Man, you have that much money, and you’re gonna tear an iconic artist’s sculpture  down?” This was what got me angry. People come in here to pillage.  

Oh! And the irony was, he named the building the SoHo Arts Condominium, at the same time he  was destroying art. And Landmarks, by the way, I was mentioning these murals on the other  buildings along Houston Street, and though some of them were very nice, they had to go to the  Landmarks Preservation Commission to have permission to be removed, in order to put up  advertising. Which we agreed because the co-ops would get money from it. So okay. But this  guy didn’t need money, you see. So it went to the Landmarks Commission, and the  commission’s counsel, Mark Silberman, actually said, “Sean, you were pretty lenient or  reasonable, giving permission”––not permission, I don’t give permission, but––“not objecting to the removing of the art murals. Frosty’s work looks more serious. What do you think?” And I  told him what I just told you. And he basically agreed with us, that this was not just some guy  putting schlock on a wall and calling it art. 

So they led the charge. We were trying to get people, lawyers, the Volunteer Lawyers for the  Arts to help us. Landmarks Commission sued on the preservation of art. There’s some kind of  federal law, preservation of art, that you can’t destroy legitimate art, which is recognizable art.  Like Mount Rushmore, you couldn’t put a History Channel advertising on that. Then they went  to federal court. So at the end of the day—rather than go on, and on, and on—the owner of the  condominium building agreed to refurbish––in perpetuity––to refurbish the art work, to renovate  it, repaint it. But as a compromise, he was allowed advertising at the very base, maybe going up  about ten or twenty feet. So you will see there now three or small billboards. But most of the  time, you see the sculpture by Frosty—so it was a compromise. And it’s still there! And I  actually have a letter from Frosty Myers thanking me. [laughs] He said I saved it from the  bulldozers. 

Q: Wow. Apparently. 

Sweeney: If he said so! His work’s on the moon. 

[END OF FIRST AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_A; BEGINNING OF SECOND  AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_B] 

Q: This is Part Two. This is the reel Part Two of my interview with Sean Sweeney of the SoHo  Alliance. Sean, I’d like to talk a little bit about the SoHo Partnership and the subsequent  formation of the SoHo Broadway Initiative, which is the BID [business improvement district]  that covers Broadway between Canal Street and Houston Street. Could you tell me a little bit  about how all of this came to be, and the community opposition to creating a BID in SoHo, which was first proposed around 2011? 

Sweeney: Well, SoHo being in a manufacturing district, was always kind of dirty. And there was  litter on the streets. I’m talking about the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s. Then it got gentrified. And in the early 1990s, an uptown fellow, Mr. Henry Buhl—he was the heir to the General Motors or something  family—he moved down here. And I guess he thought that he didn’t want to live in these kind of  conditions, filthy sidewalks and curbs. And a homeless person came to him once asking him for  

money, and Buhl gave him some money, but said, “You should have a job instead of me giving  you money all the time.” So he thought of forming the SoHo Partnership to get recovering  alcoholics, drug addicts, maybe people who were in jail, giving them counseling, rehabilitation, and employment. That’s what they got out of it, and we got clean streets.  

Now, Peter Ballantine, who was the carpenter for Donald Judd’s sculptures, he was very  prescient, that fellow. And he said, “Oh, this is gonna really gentrify SoHo.” In fact, it did. Cause  now people—I got complaints yesterday––“The streets are dirty. What can you do about it? Should we start a BID?” someone asked me, yesterday! So Henry founded the Partnership—and  that’s his pet charity, which wealthy people all do. It went well for a few years. He actually  invited me onto the board of directors, and we’d have regular meetings. After about five years, I  noticed I wasn’t being invited to these meetings any longer. I was invited to their annual fundraiser, which was all an uptown crowd, basically. But it was very fabulous, very extravagant. And I’m sure he must have spent half the money he brought in, just on the event, instead of doing something less extravagant—so he was losing money. The Partnership was  losing money, particularly along Broadway. Because, in most of SoHo, you have little boutiques and a lot of residents that would give money. But there were very few residents on Broadway and the big multi-national chain stores by that time had moved in—Banana Republic, blah, blah, blah, Zara. People in Milano, or San Francisco, or Paris, they don’t care. They don’t contribute.  So he was losing seventy thousand dollars a year, I understand, on Broadway. I don’t know why  he just didn’t fund it, take it off as a tax deduction, but he thought he should form a business  improvement district on Broadway to clean the streets.  

Now, a control freak like Mayor Rudy Giuliani, I don’t think a single BID was ever created  during his administration cause it had so much power. And BIDs were originally for places like– –the original one was Herald Square, and then Times Square. So Buhl wanted to create something that Giuliani thought was too powerful into a neighborhood that’s not a commercial  center—you can’t compare SoHo’s Broadway to Times Square. So I knew that BIDs have a lot  of power, because they were a direct line to City Hall. They have a budget, I’m not sure what it  is now, of a few hundred thousand dollars. Our members are volunteers, and our budget is what  we can raise from the kindness of neighbors. So I thought, “This is bad.” And it was gonna raise  property taxes along Broadway to fund it.  

So the people on the upper floors on Broadway, the businesses, which were basically the creative  businesses—computer programmers, and photographers, architects, modeling agencies—were  taxed to clean up the garbage from the retailers on the ground floor based in foreign countries  and not in the city. It just seemed like a really bad idea, so I opposed it. And the SoHo Alliance, I  sent out an email to everyone, and I mentioned the detriment it could cause to our neighborhood.  It would give them too much power, which, in fact, it does. They have a direct line to City Hall. [00:05:00] I can’t get a return call from Mayor Adams.  

So it eventually passed. Margaret Chin, the City Councilwoman, liked it, and she gave the BID steering committee her approval before ever speaking to anyone in SoHo. And she didn’t want to  lose face, I guess, so when she saw the opposition, she dug her heels in. Eventually, the president  of the steering committee, who was an heir to one of the larger real estate development firms in  the city, wanted this BID. It was a real estate-driven proposal. Henry Buhl was just sort of like  their puppet, if you ask me. He was able to find one co-op that went along with it. So then  Margaret Chin said, “Ah-ha! We have residents who want it.” So we fought its creation and lost.  Fine. Okay. But it did keep Broadway clean, and it got rid of a lot of these illegal street peddlers.  And we now are getting along okay, to tell you the truth.  

The BID did close off Prince Street one weekend as some “Open Street” event, without asking  anyone who lived on Prince Street, about three or four years ago. That is an example of the  power they wield: they could close a street. But they would like to close Broome Street––not  close Broome Street entirely to traffic, but have some kind of pedestrian mall taking up half of  Broome Street. Can you imagine, with all that traffic? So that’s the problem with BIDs. And  when the rezoning came, the BID supported the upzoning and further commercialization. The  rezoning originally started because there were a lot of illegal stores, international stores, primarily. Zara was one, and then there were a few others, Uniqlo. Old zoning prohibited retail  greater than ten thousand square feet. So there were several stores greater than that, so we asked  the city to put a halt to it. And instead of doing that, they had this rezoning study. And they said,  “Aw, don’t worry, don’t worry.” We worried. That’s another story.

Q: What were they telling you not to worry about? 

Sweeney: They lied to us. Gale Brewer lied right to our face. 

Q: And you’re talking now about a rezoning study. 

Sweeney: Yeah. I’m kind of going off the rezoning cause I want to show you the power the BID has and why it’s detrimental. So we thought they were gonna clamp down on retail. Instead they  opened up this Pandora’s box. We were saying there was gonna be a rezoning, and Gale Brewer  

says, “No, no, no, it’s just a study.” At the end of the day, I don’t think the BID really cares if  artists live here, which concern was part of the rezoning. How do we balance non-artists living  here with artists? How do we balance that? Now the new zoning has a twenty thousand square  foot cap, up from ten thousand, and it can go up to forty thousand and maybe beyond—and the  

BID supported that. That’s the power the BID has. The city said, “See, the business community  wants it.” New York is run by business. C’mon, it’s the business capital of the country, among  the world’s top business capitals. So that’s the problem with BIDs. I mean, they do good, but  they also have extensive power that we don’t have. 

Q: So walk me through how the rezoning came about, and about SoHo Alliance’s role in opposing the rezoning. Why was it so controversial? 

[END OF SECOND AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_B; BEGINNING OF THIRD  AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_C]

Q: So what do you think the future of the SoHo Broadway Initiative, the SoHo BID, will be? Do  they have plans to expand? 

Sweeney: Well, I’m not that privy to their plans. But I think they got what they want. They do  keep the streets clean, and they’ve done some mitigation on traffic. I think the battle is primarily  over with them. I don’t see how they could really just keep the streets clean. The prior executive  director did want to expand to include the east-west streets. Not expand, but to take control of  beyond Broadway. Like on Broome Street, he talked about planters on Broome all the way down as far as Wooster Street, three blocks from Broadway. But he’s gone and I think there’s a new  administration there now, which is a little more friendly. And we get along pretty well now. I  think the battle’s over, really.  

Now, however, again, getting back to Henry Buhl and the SoHo Partnership, I think originally he wanted all of SoHo to have a BID. Cause when I was at one of these meetings, when I was on  the board of directors of the SoHo Partnership, his little organization to clean the streets, he  wanted to have a business improvement district. This was around 1997. And he did a survey. He  mailed out a survey, Do you want a business improvement district?” SoHo Alliance didn’t even  react! We didn’t even send out oppositional mail. And the next meeting, I said, “Hey, Henry.  How did that survey go?” And he went, “Uh, blah, blah.” He wouldn’t even give us an answer, cause no one wanted it! But Henry kind of likes to get what he wants, so he revived it a few  years ago to include all of SoHo, basically, I think, from Thompson, I guess to Lafayette, Houston to Canal. And I thought that would be the death knell of SoHo. Because again, they’ll  do whatever they want. If they want to turn West Broadway into a pedestrian mall like they did on Times Square, they probably could. Unless the mayor doesn’t want it.  

So again, I had to oppose Henry’s plans again. His appeal was, “We’re just here to clean the  sidewalks.” And as a result of all the tourists coming now—we must have tens of thousands on  the weekend—the streets are pretty dirty. So rather than have a business improvement district, a  bunch of us, several of us, around 2017 or so, formed a nonprofit called Clean Up SoHo. And we  raised money to hire street cleaners to do basic work. Empty the garbage cans, not just sweep— which is the responsibility of the buildings, by the way. Occasionally, I send an email, “Clean  your sidewalk if you’re complaining about the dirt!” But it was just so hard to raise money as  volunteers, and the key people moved away. We were very influential, the SoHo Alliance. One  of its founding members of the Alliance was the Downtown Independent Democrats. And that  group helped get Christopher Marte elected to replace Margaret Chin in the City Council when  her term was over. 

Q: For City Council. 

Sweeney: City Council. And I understand he’s given some City Council money to ACE, a  cleaning service. Maybe once or twice a week they empty the cans out. But some local people  aren’t satisfied. They bring uptown sensibilities to a downtown milieu. And they complain about  dirty streets! I reply, “Clean it yourself!” So Henry got maybe a half a dozen people to push for  an expansion of the Broadway BID to include all of SoHo. But Christopher Marte is very  responsive to community concerns. There’s a nexus between community activism and politics,  and in his last election, Marte got sixty-two percent of the vote, council-wide. In SoHo, he got ninety-two percent! And he knows that, so he listens to us. We could talk about the nexus  between politics and community activism. It’s very interesting. They go hand in glove.  

So I think from what I heard, the BID—I haven’t heard any talk for a year or two now.  [00:05:00] Henry’s not getting any younger. And although it would be nice to have clean streets,  we don’t want a mall. We don’t want more interference from business interests. Cause no matter  what you do, BIDs are going to be fifty-one percent controlled by commercial interest. That  percentage is dictated by the law that sets up BIDs. That’s the way I’m gonna feel about BIDs. 

Q: Okay. Well, I’m gonna move on to the rezoning. 

Sweeney: Ooh. 

Q: Yeah. SoHo, NoHo, and Chinatown just went through a very controversial rezoning/upzoning by the city. Can you sort of walk me through how this rezoning came about? And then about  SoHo Alliance’s role in opposing the rezoning, and why was it so controversial? 

Sweeney: [whistles] 

Q: I mean, you can just give me a— 

Sweeney: Yeah.

Q: I know it’s a very complicated topic. 

Sweeney: Okay. Real estate people, brokers, were concerned that in order to live here, you have  to be a certified artist. One member of the household has to be a certified artist. And that has  been ignored, basically, since day one. I moved here, I didn’t even know about that regulation. I  moved in innocently. So I was living here from day one, illegally. As a matter of fact, there’s a  book about this, called Illegal Living. And that’s what SoHo is all about, it’s all about illegal  living. But that’s when you were paying three hundred dollars a month. I paid, in 1981, fifty  thousand down payment for my loft. People now paying a couple of million dollars get a little  anxious if the city were to actually demand that only certified artists could live here. 

So real estate brokers wanted to change the artist requirement to eliminate the artists’  certification. And we felt that would put pressure on artists to move out, to be displaced. For  instance, we heard of the painter who, her odor—a banker was complaining to the landlord, that  the odor from her paint was disturbing him. She has a painting in Lincoln Center—Philharmonic  Hall, Metropolitan Opera Hall—and this guy’s complaining about her. He moves into SoHo–– lives next to the artist and complains. And a lady who moved in underneath a sculptor and was  complaining about the noise, went on a rent strike. So we didn’t want displacement. Then there  was talk about affordable housing. 

Q: And you’re talking now about when they were looking at rezoning? 

Sweeney: Yeah, yeah.

Q: So the sort of rezoning study that Gale Brewer did. 

Sweeney: Yeah. So what happened, Pete Davies formed the Broadway Residents Committee, partially to oppose the SoHo BID. And when he saw this rezoning, he saw the danger.  

[END OF THIRD AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_C; BEGINNING OF FOURTH  AUDIO FILE, SweeneySean_20231031_D] 

Q: So Sean, SoHo, NoHo, and Chinatown just went through a very controversial rezoning by the  city. How did this rezoning come to be?  

Sweeney: The original zoning in 1971 only permitted residential living here, if a member of the  household, at least one member, was a certified artist. But it was greatly ignored for fifty years.  Not one person was ever evicted or hassled, really, by the city. But as property values increased, and million dollar lofts were the norm, people didn’t want to put millions of dollars into it,  

risking their investment, and then maybe have to sell it at a loss if the city suddenly started to  restrict residency solely to artists. So there was that concern and motivation to change the  zoning. And secondly, large big box stores began to move in, larger than the allowed limit of ten thousand square feet. People on Broadway, particularly the Broadway Residents Committee, complained about this. The city ignored it, and when they were actually forced to, because of  violations filed—it would take about a year or two to come to fruition—all they got was a twelve  hundred dollar fine. So without asking us, the council member, Margaret Chin, and then Borough President Gale Brewer set up some study. And we said to them, “We don’t want a rezoning.” And they lied to our face. Gale Brewer particularly said, “It’s not gonna be a  rezoning.” And we knew it was. We get lied to. I don’t know how they can live with themselves.  

Anyway, so they did this rezoning, it opened up a Pandora’s box, everyone got into it. They set  up a study group of about twenty or so individuals, from preservation groups, Real Estate Board  of New York [REBNY], NYU (which lied, saying it had no intentions of expanding into SoHo–– it did, it turned out), artists groups, residents. And we were worried more about preserving the  artists here. But also to allow people to move in who were not artists but not to have them force out and displace artists. Living next to an artist can be very difficult: the smells, the noise, their  lifestyle.  

So they set up this study panel, and they did a report in 2019 giving a bunch of  recommendations. Then COVID came in January of 2020—I think the report came out October  2019. January 2020, de Blasio was asked on radio, “What is gonna happen with the SoHo  rezoning?” He goes, “Well, we’re having a pandemic. I think it’s too late in my administration to  do anything about it.” But in late 2020, some affordable housing advocates put pressure on him  to build affordable housing here, and he loved that idea. And the upzoning got passed, which  caused an increase in the permissible height allowed. It allowed big box stores greater than ten  thousand square feet, almost unlimited square footage. And they allowed non-artists to live here  legally, but they had to pay an exorbitant fee of a hundred dollars a square foot to do so––so a twenty-five hundred square foot loft would be a quarter of a million dollars––to go into an arts  fund, which we talked about to preserve the arts, during the study. But the money wouldn’t go to  preserve the arts in SoHo, it goes to preserve the arts anywhere south of 14th Street. As a matter of fact, there was a story last week. Someone from the Lower East Side was saying, “We’ve got  to get this arts fund study, get the arts fund moving because we want money.” I mean, you’re on  the Lower East Side. That wasn’t what the study was about––to fund art projects on the Lower  East Side.  

So it was a whole shambles, a bolloxed thing, from day one. It was unwanted by us. Even  REBNY didn’t want an increase in height, the Real Estate Board of New York. We asked them, “Are you here because you want an increase in the height of the buildings, the bulk of the  buildings?” They go, “No.” It was all de Blasio and these city planning people. The head person  of that, Sylvia Lee, as soon as it was passed, now works for one of the biggest real estate  development companies in New York City.  

Q: So are you saying that the city disregarded the results of the zoning study? Sweeney: In spades. They ignored everything. Yeah they did. 

Q: And put forward— 

Sweeney: ––what they thought, what these affordable housing advocates were pushing.  [00:05:00]  

Q: ––who didn’t live in the neighborhood––

Sweeney: [laughs] No! I looked up one of them. He lives in a tree-lined street in Windsor  Terrace and he wants SoHo to be high-rise. He lives in a three-story brownstone in Windsor  Terrace. But he wants your building or my building over here to be like fifteen stories. The  hypocrisy of these people. Do you want me to go on? [laughs] The architect of the rezoning,  Vicki Been, displaced people—five families. NYU owns the building where she lives. She and  her husband worked for NYU. I won’t go into it, but they’re hypocrites. She displaced a couple  of families to move into a brownstone, so she could live there by herself. 

Q: So you, apparently, from this interview, you’ve been involved in many issues over the years,  some of which can be called quality of life issues. And others would be more sort of issues that  involve the built environment. Do you see all of these issues as preservation issues, including the  ones that are not just about buildings? 

Sweeney: Well, you preserve buildings and you preserve the character of the neighborhood.  They go hand in hand. The buildings end at the building line but the neighborhood begins at the  building line. And some of the quality of life issues were—for instance, we had a lot of problems  with DOT [Department of Transportation]. They wanted to close Prince Street off—what year  was that, maybe around 2005 I’m guessing—to have a pedestrian mall on weekends. And we  fought that strenuously. It was a done deal, it was in the New York Times. They were gonna close  it, and had a community board meeting––they came to us as a courtesy. And we turned a  hundred and fifty people out, and it got riotous. SoHo people are like very riotous. At the city  planning meetings, the city planners said, “You’re the most rude community we’ve ever seen!” We fought Robert Moses, and when the Mafia controlled all the garbage collection––you know, 

we got around them. And we win, usually. So we defeated that proposed mall for Prince Street  that eventually went up on Times Square. So that abomination up in Times Square was set for  Prince Street.  

Also, SoHo became hip in the 1990s [laughs]. The Europeans discovered it and they put up  illegal sidewalk cafés, which we thought was just too continental for a quintessential American  neighborhood like SoHo. So we fought sidewalk cafés. And bars came in. A lot of bars moved  in, cause it was cool and a hip artistic neighborhood. We battled that and there are relatively few  now compared to adjacent neighborhoods. Actually, one entrepreneur wanted to open up a  nightclub down on 72 Grand Street by Wooster, and he wanted a liquor license. We fought and  defeated that. There was a law that you can’t have more than three within five hundred foot, unless the public interest is served. But the SLA [State Liquor Authority] was allowing them.  The SLA would ignore the law. So we sued and won––the liquor license for the nightclub was  denied by the court––and we set a precedent. So now, anyone wants a liquor license they come  to us first, and we say, “You’re not gonna be open till two, you’re not gonna be open till one.  Maybe eleven, maybe twelve.” So we kept bars and nightclubs outta here. They all went to the  meat market, by the way. Soho House wanted to come down here, and we said, “No! You’re not  coming into SoHo just because you’re Soho House.” They went to the meat market instead, and  they called me back a couple of years later and thanked me. And now also, Hell’s Square on the  Lower East Side is full of bars, and the East Village. So at least SoHo, during the day it’s  packed, but after seven o’clock at night, it’s kind of peaceful, generally. So we kept the quality of life and the character, the residential character, more like the Upper East Side. And Flatbush  in Brooklyn is quiet at night. So is SoHo. Other quality of life—we tried garbage—

Q: But these are all issues that you take on, in order to sort of preserve the ethos of SoHo. 

Sweeney: Yeah. You know, I don’t know, everyone thinks they own SoHo. It’s really weird.  [Sighs] [00:10:00] I was at an event like twenty, thirty years ago on the Upper East Side. It was a  little party or something. And I met a woman there. She says, “Where do you live.” I said,  “SoHo.” She’s, “ Oh! I’m a SoHo person.” I go, “Oh really? Where do you live?” She goes, “Oh, in New Jersey. But I shop there.” Everyone thinks—these affordable housing people think they  can tell us what’s gonna happen. I never saw a neighborhood anywhere in the city where people  think they can control it, they own it, like they do SoHo. So we kind of have to fight that  perception. 

Q: Okay. Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground today. Is there anything else you’d like to add?  Anything we didn’t touch on? 

Sweeney: No. 

Q: Well, thank you very much for sharing your story, and for talking about the SoHo Alliance  today. I’m going to stop the recording now. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]