Billboard food fight in Market gets hot

By Julie Shapiro

Guests of the Hotel Gansevoort are running out of places to eat. If they ask the hotel for reservations at casual French restaurant Florent, the hotel will tell them it’s not possible. What about the intimate Cafe Cluny? Nope. Or Asian eatery Spice Market? Sorry.

These restaurants are among approximately 10 in the Meatpacking District that no longer take reservations from the Hotel Gansevoort. Keith McNally, owner of the restaurant Pastis, started the boycott in response to the hotel’s recently erected billboard frame, which stretches eight stories high on Hudson St. and will hold ads measuring 1,200 and 670 square feet. Neighbors and local business owners oppose the size and location of the billboard.

“It’s so huge,” said Florent Morellet, longtime owner of restaurant Florent at 69 Gansevoort St. “Every day I pass by, I feel sad and angry.”

Morellet joined the boycott last week because, he said, “We have very little recourse but a boycott and public awareness. Only pressure, only dollars speaks to them.”

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, has led several protests in front of the hotel. The city is still investigating the billboards’ legality, which Berman thinks is a good sign.

“If the issues we raised had no grounding whatsoever, they would have said ‘Sorry, not applicable,’” Berman said. “But we’re not counting any chickens before they’re hatched.”

The hotel’s owners are aware of the boycott, but have no plans to take down the billboard, a representative said. Hotel management is not concerned about the city’s investigation because “they applied for the right permits and got all the right permits” prior to raising the billboard, the representative said.

Last night, Berman and concerned neighbors met with Hotel Gansevoort representatives. But after the meeting, he said they had nothing new to report.

The decision to boycott was not an easy one, Morellet said. He and the hotel share much of the same clientele, and he has friends on the hotel’s staff, many of whom frequent Florent. Morellet also has friends in the art and fashion worlds who stay in the hotel when they are in New York. He will now tell them to stay elsewhere, he said.

Morellet said it is impossible to tell whether he has lost money through the boycott. Hotel guests who already know about Florent and other local restaurants will continue to make reservations on their own, Morellet said. But guests who ask the hotel to make recommendations or reservations for them will miss out.

Hotel Gansevoort isn’t the only business in the Meatpacking District to put up billboards. In a letter to Berman, Michael Achenbaum, president of the Gansevoort Hotel Group, mentioned the many illegal billboards in the neighborhood, and suggested that Berman focus on those instead.

Morellet doesn’t like the other neighborhood billboards, but is angry that Hotel Gansevoort would use them as an excuse.

“You see these billboards in Gansevoort Market that are illegal,” Morellet said. “So people at the hotel feel like they can put up this big monstrous one and it’s going to be fine.”

Berman has long pushed for the Department of Buildings to investigate the illegal billboards in the Meatpacking District, and “after a long moratorium on any action by the city, our efforts seem to be finally bearing fruit,” he said. D.O.B. recently took action against five illegal billboards in the neighborhood, Berman said.

“This is a multi-front war,” Berman said. “We’re not letting up on any front.”