Brooklyn architect Robert M. Scarano Jr. has crossed Brooklyn's zoning laws too many times, and the city is making the case to ban him from submitting any plans. In the worst case, he put two apartment buildings in a location greenlighted for one.
"New York City announced fresh administrative charges on Thursday against a Brooklyn architect whose name has become identified both with the building boom that has transformed large swaths of the borough and with its many excesses.
The architect, Robert M. Scarano Jr., is accused of flouting zoning rules in putting up two buildings in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - an allegation that has been leveled against him in the past. But this time, the stakes are much higher: the city is threatening to bar him from filing construction plans; such a sanction could potentially put him out of business in the city.
In this case, building officials contend, Mr. Scarano designed two rental apartment buildings on properties that were big enough to hold only one of them.
The buildings, 1037 Manhattan Avenue, which was the first to go up, and 158 Freeman Street, sit on two small lots that join together to form an "L."
According to a petition that the Buildings Department filed on May 29 with the city's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, when Mr. Scarano filed the plans for the Manhattan Avenue building in 2000, he treated the entire L-shaped property as a single lot for zoning purposes.
Officials said that allowed him to use the property's full zoning allotment to justify the building's approximately 7,000 square feet of space.
Two years later, Mr. Scarano submitted plans for the Freeman Street building - at the other end of the "L." But according to the petition, he failed to note in his plans that another building was already going up on the adjoining property and occupying the same zoning parcel."
