Some good news….

Thank you all for your contributions. As of today, we are fully funded and are bringing our fight to the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals

The BSA is expected to hear WVCP’s appeal of the erroneously issued building permit for the Mission Building in early October. Beyond the permit itself lies a straightforward zoning question that has never been adequately answered:

Where is the legally required open space?

The simplest answer was the playground. But as demolition and construction reach new milestones, the church may argue that the project has acquired vested rights—that too much money has been spent and too much construction completed for the permit to be revoked. As work proceeds, the unresolved open-space requirement places increasing pressure on the remaining undeveloped areas of the church block.

However, vesting is not automatic merely because construction has advanced or substantial money has been spent. A claim of vested rights generally depends on substantial construction and expenditures undertaken in good-faith reliance on a legally valid permit. If the BSA determines that the Mission Building permit should not have been issued because the project failed to comply with the applicable open-space requirements, the church may have difficulty establishing vested rights under that permit, regardless of how quickly construction proceeded while the appeal was pending. Additional spending does not necessarily transform an invalid permit into a lawful one.

In the principal zoning documents on which the church has relied, the Rector’s Garden—Mother Stacey’s private backyard—has consistently been counted as part of the required open space. Yet that garden has never been genuinely open or accessible to the public.

The church has also reserved a portion of the south garden for a second planned structure: the future Social Hall.

Permanently preserving and opening the Rector’s Garden as accessible open space, similar to the Barrow Street Garden, could help the block satisfy its zoning obligations. It would also honor the zoning representations on which the church has relied since 2014. The remaining open space could potentially be provided by permanently preserving the portion of the south garden currently reserved for the Social Hall.

This leaves the church leadership with several important choices:

Will the church halt construction of the Mission Building and return that area to use as an open-space garden or school playground?

Or, if the Mission Building is retained, will the church make the Rector’s Garden genuinely accessible and permanently abandon plans to build the future Social Hall?

What the church cannot reasonably do is retain the Mission Building, keep the Rector’s Garden private, preserve the Social Hall as a future development site, and continue counting all of those areas as legally available open space.

WVCP will ask Community Board 2 to testify at the BSA hearing. We also hope that the many neighbors, parents, preservationists, and community members who have supported this effort will submit written testimony or speak at the hearing.

This may be the community’s last practical opportunity to place its concerns directly before the officials who will decide whether this permit was lawfully issued.

We will post more information next week on how to properly frame and submit testimony to the BSA.