City Orders Construction Shutdown at Adams Donor’s Midtown Hotel, In Unusual Reversal

The city Department of Buildings has ordered construction work halted at a major hotel project in Midtown Manhattan owned by a prominent donor to Mayor Eric Adams, as administration officials acknowledged that the developer failed to meet local requirements for preserving affordable housing at the site.

The “stop work order” issued by the department on Wednesday requires the developer, Weihong Hu, to demonstrate that the project complies with Garment District zoning regulations before any construction work can continue at 319 W. 35th St.

The action by the Department of Buildings comes on the heels of a reporting project published last month by THE CITY, Guardian US and Documented about the mutually beneficial relationship between Hu and Adams, which highlighted Hu’s failure to provide the affordable housing after enlisting a close Adams associate to intervene.

Adams’ Department of Buildings cleared Hu to construct a 25-story hotel on the West 35th Street site, displacing two century-old residential buildings in a neighborhood with stringent protections for affordable housing — reversing years of work to preserve the units under the prior mayor, Bill de Blasio.

Since 2016, midtown’s Community Board 4 had worked to negotiate a compromise plan with Hu, under which she agreed to maintain at least a dozen affordable apartments on the lower floors of her future hotel. When the developer veered from that plan — including by demolishing the facades of existing buildings on the site — the Buildings Department, under de Blasio, issued a stop work order on the site in March 2021.

The forced work-stoppage lasted through the fall of 2022, when the Adams administration gave Hu the green light to build the hotel without replacing any of the lost affordable units.

Hu held fundraisers for Adams’ 2021 mayoral and 2025 re-election campaigns and has surrounded herself with several of Adams’ close associates, including his director of Asian affairs, Winnie Greco — whose two houses in The Bronx were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in February. Greco stayed for months in a Hu-owned Queens hotel where all rooms were rented by the city’s criminal justice agency to house people released from area jails, THE CITY, Guardian US and Documented reported.

Hu also hired a longtime Adams pal, former state Sen. John Sampson, as the CEO of one of her hotel companies, and retained another of Adams’ close associates, the Rev. Al Cockfield II, to help move her two Manhattan hotel projects forward — including the one on West 35th Street, the reporting project found.

In several meetings in 2022 regarding the West 35th Street hotel, Hu had her architect explain the bureaucratic hurdles they faced in getting the March 2021 stop work order lifted.

Cockfield and an unidentified consultant asked questions and promised to call decision makers in the Adams administration, according to a source who attended the meetings.

In June 2022, the DOB issued preliminary approval for Hu to turn the project into a fully commercial hotel, as long as she demonstrated compliance with two local zoning regulations.

After determining that Hu’s plans complied, according to an agency spokesperson, the Department of Buildings lifted the stop work order at the site in November 2022.

Now the same department has reversed course, citing one of those two zoning rules — known as ZR 93-91 — which protects residential buildings from demolition.

In response to questions about why the Adams administration had allowed the West 35th Street site to proceed as a fully commercial hotel, with no apartments, mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia in May had said the hotel developer walked away from discussions about preserving the affordable units and instead “decided to legally convert the building into a hotel.”

“Once their plans were amended to meet all zoning and code requirements, DOB had no choice but to allow construction to move forward,” she said.

Early Thursday, a Department of Buildings spokesperson said the agency had conducted an “audit,” following concerns newly raised by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for preserving affordable housing.

The spokesperson said the audit found that the developer hadn’t met all the zoning requirements — which include getting a verification from HPD that the units couldn’t be rehabilitated under any government-funded program.

City officials, including Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, are characterizing the incident — which resulted in the loss of as many as two dozen affordable apartments — as stemming from a “miscommunication.”

“DOB and HPD always strive to work closely across a high volume of development projects across the city, to ensure both public safety and compliance with city regulations,” said DOB spokesperson Andrew Rudansky. “In this case, after DOB was made aware of potential approval issues by our partners at HPD, we conducted an audit and issued a stop work order at the development project. The owners and their applicant of record will be required to demonstrate full compliance with zoning prior to resuming work at the site.”

An attorney for Hu didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

A spokesperson for HPD said the agency worked with DOB to “reexamine” how the project had been able to move forward.

“Upon further review, we found that the developer missed an important step required under zoning rules and informed DOB, leading to this order to stop all work on this project until the owner can demonstrate their full compliance,” said HPD spokesperson Ilana Maier.

Adolfo Carrión Jr, the commissioner of HPD, told THE CITY, “everyone’s encouraged by the audit.”

Joe Restuccia, an affordable housing developer and member of CB4, said the DOB’s reversal on the hotel site was long overdue given the compromise agreement he helped the board reach with Hu back in 2019.

“To say ‘It’s about time’ is an understatement here,” he told THE CITY. “We’ve given you a solution already many years ago – let’s go back to the solution and resolve it.”

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