Historic UES rooftop garden overlooking Met faces coop battle

This fight is blowing the roof off of one Upper East Side co-op.A longtime resident of a ritzy building overlooking Museum Mile says the board is trying to prune her rights to have an exclusive terrace garden as part of a decades-long effort to seize control of the lush roof-top oasis, according to a new lawsuit.Barbara Hubshman, who has lived at 1010 Fifth Avenue since she was a child, says the co-op is committing a “great injustice” by tweaking her lease so as to burden her with expenses whenever the building needs roof work.“They are placing the garden’s continued existence in jeopardy,” she wrote in a letter to her neighbors last spring.The resplendent 15th-story rooftop garden, a private, sprawling enclave abutting Hubshman’s unit, overlooks Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and can support mature trees with over four feet of dirt, expertly designed by famous architect Fred F.

French.The original lease allowing the garden at her 15th floor penthouse apartment was hashed out by her father in the ‘70s — and has been a bone of contention with the buildings other residents since then.

The most recent issue involves the fact that Hubshman’s current lease requires the building to pay for the costs of removing the thick dirt and trees if maintence crews ever need to get down to the building’s structure to do roof work.The new lease, however, would put those costs on Hubshman — and also make her pay a far larger share of maintenance fees, according to court documents.

She says the burden of digging up and storing the unique and historic roof garden at the board’s whim would basically guarantee the demise of the historic oasis once the old lease expires at the end of September. She filed suit against the board last month in Manhattan Supreme Court, seeing to block the lease and money damages to compensate her for the decrease in value for her apartment if the lease were go take effect.The board, however, says that the buildin...