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Warwick Opponents Fight Back In East Yonkers

YONKERS, N.Y. – As their neighbors continue to push for historical status, one East Yonkers family is fighting the designation with a legal challenge.  

Terence Cryan and his wife, Mary, have filed a complaint against the city’s Landmark’s Preservation Board, saying they were not given adequate notice of a Sept. 20 meeting regarding the proposed Warwick Historical District.

As a result, they say that meeting should be legally nullified and a new meeting scheduled to give all neighbors a fair chance to voice their opinions of the plan.

Supporters of the plan, who knew well in advance that the meeting was taking place, were given ample time to prepare diagrams, a PowerPoint presentation and even recruit an expert, the Cryans say.

While the couple was able to attend the meeting, other individuals “were simply unable on such short notice to rearrange their schedule to be present or even to submit written remarks,” they said.

Terence Cryan expressed similar concerns at the Sept. 20 meeting when he told the board he was given only 36 hours’ notice. In response, Chairman Richard Carlson said the lack of notice was not intended.

“The instructions of the chair were to send the notices much sooner,” Carlson said.

The filing comes just days before the Oct. 2 meeting in which the Landmarks Board was scheduled to vote on whether to create the Warwick Historical District, an 18-home section in East Yonkers.

Several homeowners first submitted the plan last year after the neighborhood’s newest homeowner, Levon Kazarian, proposed demolishing the home at 101 Warwick Road. In its place, a larger home that includes both an indoor tennis court and indoor swimming pool would be built.

Supporters of the district said the move would disrupt the “unique character’ of the neighborhood.

“It is important for Yonkers to preserve our historic neighborhoods, and prevent needless destruction of their unique characteristics,” Warwick Road resident and petition co-sponsor Jack Rose wrote in a statement. “The demolition of this building would irreparably alter the character of the district.”

The Cryans, however, have expressed concerns about how the designation would affect them and other homeowners looking to make even the most basic changes to their property. It is unfair, they said, to inconvenience a large group because a few want to stop a neighbor from tearing down his home.

“It seems abundantly clear that the Yonkers historic preservation laws are being misused, and this board manipulated, to stop one property on this street from being demolished and rebuilt in a fashion which some residents find objectionable,” the Cryans’ attorney, David Venditti, wrote in his letter to the Landmarks Board.  

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