According to an article by Albert Amateau in today's on-line edition of The Villager, New York State Supreme Court Justice Paul G. Feinman this month granted a motion by New York City to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Gregg Singer that claimed that the city's Department of Buildings, its Board of Standards & Appeals and the Landmarks Preservation Commission were conspiring to prevent him from building at 19-story dormitory on the site of a 5-story school building he had bought in 1998 for $3,150,000.

The 1908 building, which is located at 605 East 9th Street, originally was P.S. 64 and subsequently was used for many years by Charas/El Bohio community center when Mr. Singer bought it with the intention of replacing it with a 26-story dormitory on part of the property under the site's community facilities zoning. He subsequently reduced the plan to 19 stories.

The school property extends through to 10th Street and is just to the east of Christadora House that fronts on Tompkins Square Park.

Mr. Singer evicted Charas/El Bohio in 2001 and the building was declared an official city landmark in 2006 and a month later Mr. Singer began dismantling part of its facade based in part of an alteration permit he had gotten three years previously from the Department of Buildings.

Mr. Singer appealed to the Board of Standards & Appeals to overrule the Building Department's stop work order that was given because he had not yet gotten a commitment from an educational institution for the property. The board upheld the Buildings Department and Mr. Singer then sued the board but lost in Supreme Court. He then appealed to the Appellate Division that ruled in his favor but the city appealed to the State Court of Appeals that last March reversed the decision of the Appellate Division.

Mr. Singer then filed another suit to overturn the landmark designation of the building on the grounds that his alteration made it ineligible for such a designation. Last month, Supreme Court Justice Shirley Werner Korneich ruled that Mr. Singer's removal of decorative elements from the structure was deliberate and dismissed his suit on the grounds that the alterations did not remove the building's architectural, historic and cultural significance.

On December 5, Justice Feinman held that Mr. Singer's claim that his constitutional rights to due process were violated was not valid.

An editorial in the on-line edition today of Now Chelsea maintained that "the developer can still appeal," adding that "a beautiful, historic building has been left, yes, scalped," noting that "while Singer altered the building after it was landmarked, other developers who have similarly stripped buildings before they were landmarked have successfully staved off designation - as seen recently with the Dakota Stables on the Upper West Side."

"Buildings and Landmarks must work more cooperatively - or else, what's the point of landmarking? The landmarks loophole must be closed, and the crass and cynical stripping of this city's historic architecture must end," the editorial declared.