Daily News from New York, New York • 875

II 11 Friday, January 20, 1989 DAILY NEWS' MJ 3 By KEITH MOORE he does not believe in. The project, generally referred to as the Tishman Project, is named for the construction manager. It is slated to open next year. When it does, it will contain 743 housing units for low- and moderate-income tenants. The session yesterday by the Uptown Chamber of Commerce was first in a series for prospective mayoral candidates, according to Williams.

The next one is set for March 2 at Columbia University with Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. took exception to the figures. "In a city that is 55 black and Hispanic, how can they set a goal of 20 minority employment and then say they have exceeded their goal?" Williams demanded. "Later, when it comes to the good-paying, more skilled positions such as plumbers and electricians, the figures will look a lot different," said the contractor now employed on the site. Nonetheless, Abraham Bi-derman, the city's housing commissioner who was at the session, said, "we are well over our original target." Of the 84 employed, 40 are after Koch had left the meeting in Copeland's Restaurant that they challenged them.

Unskilled work "The jobs that the Mayor is talking about are all non-skilled positions," said one minority contractor employed at the site. construction is only at the demolition stage," the minority contractor added, speaking on the condition that he not be identified. But others, such as Lloyd Williams, who chaired the meeting and is president of the Chamber of Commerce, minorities or women who either live in Harlem or have a business there, Biderman said. "Although the construction is only one-third complete, we in effect have already met our 20 goal for the entire project," Biderman said in a memorandum to the mayor dated yesterday. Who works at the site has been the subject of a continuing, behind-the-scenes battle ever since the construction project was announced.

Koch does not have an affirmative action plan because he says it would imply the use of a quota system, which By J. SAUNDERS Daily News Staff Writer The city is exceeding its 20 goal of employing minorities and women on the largest redevelopment project in Harlem, Mayor Koch said yesterday. Koch told a breakfast meeting of businessmen in Harlem that 84 of the people working at the construction site, between 138th and 147th Sts. and Seventh and Lenox were minority members andor women. Some persons at the meet ing expressed surprise at his figures.

But it was only later THE BEGINNINGS of the on-agam, Spiraling rents are Many of the 130 small, nonprofit theaters operating throughout the city face extinction by escalating rent, an umbrella group for the theaters has warned. Rent increases of up to 400 in recent years have forced a number of theaters to close or relocate, and suitable low-rent sites are vanishing, said a recently released report of the Alliance of Resident Theaters New York. Half of 64 theaters responding to a survey said their current leases will expire within the next three years, at which time they will be evicted or hit with rents they can't afford, the report said. Victims of own success The theaters are victims of the benefits they confer on marginal neighborhoods they move into, said Sari Weis-manl i4hr of the alliance's yist adt VKUVfeSgAK mWyA W. ft Vi Sfnindt SiiBSfc.

Ki off-again dome are still up there, it (the dome) down." The Planning Commission had adamantly opposed the variance. But after the Koch-Eichner compromise was announced, Commission chairman Sylvia Deutsch called it "reasonable." And the Department of City Planning, which Deutsch also heads, is expected to recommend the compromise, according to staff spokesman Martha Ritter. When Koch ordered the dome removed in November, he recalled that when he told Eichner he could have his extra ll feet, "no work was to be done on top of the building until a modified special permit was approved by the Board of Estimate after completing the city's Uniformed Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP)." Work went ahead anyway, Koch said, "on the installation of steel ribs to support a ome atop the 72d story of CitySpire." He ordered those ribs removed and, Koch said, Eichner agreed. After official approval was obtained through the ULURP process, Koch said that "the developer will be authorized to replace the ribs." Asked about Smith's latest intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said Smith "is speaking for the mayor." Daily News Staff Writer The CitySpire luxury skyscraper condominium in mid-town Manhattan was built at least ll feet too tall. But the city has quietly told developer Bruce Eichner he can keep part of the building's dome that Mayor Koch last November ordered completely dismantled.

Koch in April approved a compromise under which Eichner would get a variance allowing the 72-story condo to soar ll feet roughly the height of the dome beyond height regulations. In return, Eichner would build 7,200 square feet of dance rehearsal space next to the adjacent City Center, the dance theater. Considering that the entire dome was going to be put back up later anyway. Buildings Commissioner Charles Smith now says he has approved Eichner's application to allow the bottom segments of the dome's ribs to remain. He said removing them would be "complicated" and a potential "hazard" to passers-by below.

But, Smith continued, if the Board of Estimate and the City Planning Commission don't approve Koch's deal with Eichner, then CitySpire "will have to take the rest of far tSuofters? killing nonprofit performance spaces benina tne construction nets. TOM MONASTER DAILY NEWS productions annually that play to audiences totaling 3 The scale on Broadway has reached $50 a ticket. Alliance theaters also are laboratories of talent that occasionally throw off works that become commercial successes uptown. Among current or recent productions spawned by nonprofit theater have been "A Chorus Line," "Little Shop of Horrors," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "A Soldier's Play" and "On Golden Pond." The report urged that government and private entities work together to help nonprofit theater survive by creating incentives and financing. These might include giving benefits to landlords who provide low-cost long-term rents and to developers who create nonprofit -pe rm i ng -sperces in new bujidings.

report. "They have provided light and nighttime activity. Restaurants have flocked to the area. The property becomes more desirable, it's worth more, and all of a sudden the arts have priced themselves out of their own home, which they have created," she said. 700 productions yearly She said that an instance in recent years was the Theater for the New City, whose rent at Second Ave.

and 10th St. was hiked from $1,750 a month to $6,000. The theater was able to relocate nearby to a former retail market on First Ave. Raising ticket prices to pay the rent would drive away audiences, the report said. The alliance members Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theaters and neighborhood groups-" charge $5-i.

to $25 a ticket. They mount. mpre than700 Cops save boy on roof An emotionally troubled 15-year-old boy received professional help yesterday after two uniformed cops talked him out of jumping from a six-story building in Jamaica, Queens. Officers Thomas Sulz and Mark Gallagher of the 103d Precinct calmed the youth, who was recently released from City Hospital Center, Elmhurst, Queens, and engaged him in conversation as he perched Wednesday on the roof of the Human Resources Administration building on Ar-pher Ave- near 165th St. Ten minutes later, the boy abandoned his suicide plan and was led to safety by the cops: He was admitted to Queens Hospital, Centex:.