mobanmarketUPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Residents sounded off on what they called an ugly “blight” on the neighborhood Tuesday night: an approximately 40-foot billboard recently —and legally — erected on the property of the Bentley Hotel at East 61st Street and York Avenue that poured light into neighbor’s apartments at night.
“It has tremendous visual blight in the community,” said Community Board 8 member Michele Birnbaum at a zoning committee meeting this week.
“The lighting is terrible. The size is out of scale for signage,” Birnbaum said, echoing concerns first raised in a letter sent to the hotel from the East Sixties Neighborhood Association.
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On the ground, it was a different story.
Most neighbors and people walking by on the street Friday didn’t even notice the “visual blight” until pointed out by a reporter from Patch.
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“I’ve not really noticed it before,” said one neighbor who lives near York Avenue and East 62nd Street.
Another neighbor who lives in a building across the street from the hotel and was out walking a tiny puppy named Polly (“we just got him yesterday,” he said) told Patch that he wasn’t bothered by it.
The neighbor, who didn’t want his name used, did note that the board’s content, currently adorned in an advertisement for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose Josie Robertson Surgery Center sits just across the avenue, left him “a bit shocked.”
“I come from Europe and we are not used to seeing all these cancer or hospital advertising,” the man said, who declined to share his name. “But,” he added, “I can see how someone might be bothered.”
One neighbor walking to 24 Sycamores Park, from which one can view the empty rear of the billboard, said he agrees that the size of the billboard is out of place in the neighborhood.
Another passerby who works up the street, who gave his name as Ariel, said that he thought the billboard was good — and said he was glad it wasn’t any smaller.
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“I have a lot of family with cancer,” Ariel said. “I wouldn’t be offended by this at all — it’s good to be reminded to be more mindful of cancer.”
“If it were smaller, it would be harder to notice,” he added.
A pair of women who both live nearby told Patch that while they wouldn’t love living with the sign right outside their window, they said that there were “more important things” to complain about.
“People have to complain about everything,” one said, who declined to share her name. “There are more important things, like trying to clean up the city,” she added.
“I wouldn’t have noticed it, but you mentioned it and I looked it,” she said.
Her friend added that she would me more upset by it if it were advertising “something offensive,” she said, “but it’s a cancer ad.”
The billboard is owned by the Bentley Hotel, and the management already agreed to address some of the neighborhood concerns by shading the lights that illuminate the board, according to ESNA co-founder Judy Schneider.
“I think is a very big improvement,” Schneider said. “But that doesn’t solve the problem of the big intrusive billboard which doesn’t belong in a residential area.”
Schneider also told the board how a hotel representative told her that funds from the billboard would be going towards the migrant families currently being housed in the hotel.
A manager denied that and told Upper East Site earlier this week that the billboard was just a new business venture for the hotel.
The owners, dubbed “notorious slumlords” by the New York Post, secured a $50 million mortgage on the Bentley from Signature Bank in January 2020.
Since the lot is zoned to allow for a billboard, there is little recourse for neighbors who want to see it removed, and the Community Board voted to continue working with the Bentley management to address and mitigate the impact the sign has on neighbors.
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