"Every excuse the city gives for why this building needs to be demolished could be used as an excuse to demolish any old building in New York." Andrew Berman of Village Preservation said that back in 2025, and as of this month his group is still writing letters over it. The building in question is the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center on Clarkson Street, a 1908 bathhouse turned pool and gym that has been locked since 2019. Seven years is long enough for a toddler to start second grade. It is also, apparently, not long enough for New York City to decide whether to fix a building or replace it.
While that argument has run in circles through community board meetings and City Hall budget lines, the three or four blocks around it have not been waiting. Hudson Street picked up a rotisserie restaurant, a cocktail bar, and a chunk of the neighborhood's evening routine, all while the pool sat empty.
The corridor around the locked gates
Cleo opened at 621 Hudson Street on April 17, from Halley Chambers and Kip Gleize of Three Top Hospitality, the team also behind Margot and Montague Diner. Chef Juliana Latif runs a kitchen built around 24-hour marinated rotisserie chicken, served with zhug, labneh ranch, or a spicy red sauce, alongside starters like chicken liver mousse and cornbread with harissa honey butter. There is no bar, but the restaurant holds tables for walk-ins, and reservations release two weeks out at 10 a.m. if you want to plan ahead rather than take your chances at the door.
A few blocks south, Keepers opened at 34 8th Avenue on July 29. It comes from the team behind Dandelion, which opened in late 2025, and was developed by hospitality veterans Will Makris, Eytan Sugarman, Emily Pires, and Elena Hristu. Makris co-founded Zero Bond and Cucina Alba. Sugarman's portfolio includes White Horse Tavern and Made in New York Pizza. The new spot seats 40 and leans into the idea of a neighborhood tavern where the bartender knows your order, serving craft cocktails and bar pies in a room built to feel lived-in rather than designed.
Neither opening is a coincidence of timing. Both sit inside the same stretch of blocks where the city's own recreation infrastructure has been frozen for the better part of a decade. Private money moved in months. Public infrastructure has moved in years, and mostly on paper.
Seven years and still no plan
The Dapolito closure started with structural issues serious enough that the Parks Department said full repair would cost roughly $20 million just to stop the building from collapsing further. From there the story split into two competing visions. One side, led by the city under Mayor Eric Adams, pushed to demolish the existing building and replace it with a new structure across the street as part of a mixed-use project called Hudson Mosaic at 388 Hudson Street, developed by Camber Property Group along with Services for the UnderServed and Essence Development. The other side, led by Village Preservation and a coalition of downtown community groups, argued the landmarked building could be repaired and wanted it reopened rather than torn down.
In August 2025 the city announced a nearly $164 million investment in what it called a transformation of the Clarkson Street corridor, including a new outdoor aquatics complex on the Dapolito site and a separate indoor recreation center across the street. The plan promised to preserve the 1987 Keith Haring mural that runs along the pool wall, a detail both sides agree matters.
That was over a year ago. The center is still closed. As recently as August 11 of this year, Village Preservation and allied groups were still sending letters opposing demolition, and the fight over whether the original building gets saved or replaced remains unresolved. Then-candidate Zohran Mamdani campaigned on repairing and reopening the center rather than tearing it down, which locals have cited as leverage now that he holds the office. Whether that promise turns into a shovel is still an open question.
"We definitely hear and understand the community's desire to preserve that history," Parks' Manhattan borough commissioner Tricia Shimamura said of the standoff.
Understanding is not the same as resolving. For a resident who used to swim laps or shoot hoops at Dapolito before 2019, the honest answer to "when does it reopen" is still nobody knows.
What actually filled the gap this year
The city's own park system, separate from the stalled rec center fight, has quietly been doing the job Dapolito used to do. Hudson River Park's Healthy on the Hudson series runs free fitness classes across the summer, and the one that actually sits inside West Village geography is HIIT on Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m. at Pier 46, foot of Charles Street. It is led by trainers from Chelsea Piers Fitness, obé Fitness, and PureGym, and it costs nothing.
A short walk north, Gansevoort Peninsula opened in 2023 as the largest stand-alone recreational space in the entire park system: 5.5 acres with a sandy shoreline beach, a ballfield, a pine grove, boardwalks, and outdoor adult fitness equipment. It is not a pool, and it is not a substitute for lap swim, but it is the closest thing the neighborhood has to outdoor recreation space that opened rather than closed in the past few years.
If you are looking for a free way to work out along the river this fall without a gym membership, here is what is actually running right now:
- HIIT, Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m., Pier 46 at Charles Street
- Outdoor fitness equipment, a ballfield, and open lawn space, daily, Gansevoort Peninsula
None of this comes from the city agency actually responsible for the shuttered rec center. It comes from a different arm of the same park system, filling a gap that the building itself was supposed to fill.
What the gap actually tells you
The West Village in 2026 has two different clocks running at once. The restaurant and bar clock moves in months. Cleo went from announcement to open doors in a single season. Keepers did the same. Both landed within blocks of a building that has now sat empty longer than either business has existed as a concept.
The civic clock moves differently. A $20 million repair estimate became a $51.8 million demolition budget line, which became a $164 million corridor promise, and none of those numbers has yet produced a reopened pool. The gap between those two speeds is not a coincidence of bureaucracy. It reflects who bears the risk. A restaurant group signs a lease, builds out a kitchen, and opens on its own schedule because the money and the decision sit in one place. A city recreation center answers to a landmarks commission, a community board, a mayoral budget cycle, and a preservation coalition with standing to file letters for years running. Every one of those checks exists for a real reason, and every one of them also adds time.
For anyone who lives near Hudson Street, the practical takeaway is not particularly complicated. The neighborhood's private economy will keep answering demand faster than its public infrastructure resolves disputes. That has been true for the length of an entire rec center closure, and there is no evidence yet that it is about to reverse.
If you are weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth given how the neighborhood moves and what still needs to get built, Ava Anz has been tracking the West Village block by block. Schedule a consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.
