Manhattan Neighborhoods

[krulltime]

Sugar Hill, Manhattan:


Sugar Hill: Reclaiming a Place Where the Music Once Played

By NANCY BETH JACKSON
Published: June 6, 2004

WHEN Duke Ellington made "Take the `A' Train" his theme song in 1942, he established forever in music what everyone already knew. Sugar Hill was the place to go, the place to be, in Harlem. He lived on Sugar Hill and so did his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, who scribbled down the tune when the homesick band was playing in Chicago.

Sugar Hill, a ritzy neighborhood for the black bourgeoisie. Sugar Hill, the mythic center of the Harlem Renaissance between the World Wars. Sugar Hill, the good life.

For decades, African-Americans all over the country dreamed of living on Sugar Hill, but throughout its history, it has drawn people of all hues and nationalities.

"The biggest misconception about Sugar Hill is that at any time it was all black," said Willie Kathryn Suggs, a former ABC television producer who became a realtor after buying a Sugar Hill town house two decades ago. "Of all the Harlem neighborhoods, it has always been the most diverse."

The word "hill," too, is misleading, because the neighborhood, part of Hamilton Heights, perches on a bluff high above the Harlem Plain. When affluent and influential African-Americans began moving in after World War I, the name "Sugar Hill" came into use, probably because "sugar" was said to signify money and the sweet life. David Levering Lewis, describing it in "When Harlem Was in Vogue," wrote that in 1929 "Sugar Hill, a citadel of stately apartment buildings and liveried doormen on a rock, soared above the Polo Grounds and the rest of Harlem like a city of the Incas."

In its broadest geographic definition, Sugar Hill extends westward from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue. The southern boundary sometimes is placed at 145th Street, or into the West 130's where the topography starts climbing toward Coogan's Bluff. But the heart of Sugar Hill is in the Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District between 145th and 155th Streets, from Edgecombe Avenue to a border approaching Amsterdam and squiggling down to Convent Avenue.

In those few blocks lived pioneering civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr.; writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston; musicians like Paul Robeson and Cab Calloway; and professionals like Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to become a United States Supreme Court justice. Even into the late 1950's, Sugar Hill still delivered the good life, older residents recall, but by the 1970's, many of the row houses had been divided into rooming houses and heroin was sold on the streets.

Another renaissance is under way as Sugar Hill addresses regain some of their old cachet, pumped up by the hot real estate market and by the neighborhood's activist tradition. Prospective buyers come from downtown, Europe and Asia to bid on 19th-century town houses, some priced at considerably more than $2 million. African-American professionals have rediscovered the neighborhood. Actors by the dozens rent in historic apartment buildings.

The Hamilton Grange Public Library, which closed all but the first floor in the 1970's, recently completed a $1.2 million renovation. Jazz headliners downtown head uptown to jam at St. Nick's Pub. The Dance Theater of Harlem has its headquarters on West 152nd Street. When the 16th annual Hamilton Heights House and Garden Tour takes place today, half of the properties being shown will be in the heart of Sugar Hill.

The neighborhood has not fully returned to its old glory, however. The stately apartment buildings do not have the liveried doormen of days past, for instance. "It is the extremes right now," said Nora Cole, an actor, who on a Saturday morning was weeding one of two pocket parks maintained by volunteers on Edgecombe Avenue above Jackie Robinson Park, the old Colonial Park.

A SOLID core of well-to-do African-American families passes properties from generation to generation, yet other residents still toss disposable diapers into the Edgecombe pocket park, Ms. Cole said. Overall crime rates have dropped more than 60 percent in the last decade, according to statistics from the 30th Precinct, but drugs are still sold on some street corners.

Paula Hill, with three children under 8, says the attraction is space, which sometimes includes a backyard, and the parks in every direction. But most of all, it's the sense of community, she said. "In seven years in Greenwich Village nobody knew us, but here we have a parents' network to help each other out and address issues like schools," she said. Through it, more than 90 families keep in touch online.

While many children attend private schools in the city, a group of parents has established the Hamilton Heights Academy, an alternative school with a diverse socioeconomic mix and a progressive curriculum, within Public School 125. Ultimately to have kindergarten through eighth grade, the academy will enroll about 100 students next fall in kindergarten through second grade. Also in the neighborhood is Mott Hall (Intermediate School 223), with an academically rigorous program in math, science and technology for the fourth through eighth grades.

Until the Eighth Avenue elevated railroad reached 145th Street in 1879, the area was mostly rural, a country-home favorite because of its cool breezes. Alexander Hamilton's last home, the Grange, originally stood at what is now 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. The national memorial was moved to 287 Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights in 1889.

Residential development took off between the 1880's and World War I, spurred by subway construction in 1904. Many lots are only 16 feet wide, but architects like Henri Fouchaux and Frederick P. Dinkelberg designed block-long compositions for white upper-class clients.

Luxury apartment houses followed in the early 1900's. The Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe became Sugar Hill's most desirable address with tenants like Jules Bledsoe, who sang "Ol' Man River" in "Show Boat." The six-story Garrison Apartments, originally named Emsworth Hall, built on Convent Avenue in 1910, opened as an African-American co-op in 1929. When an apartment becomes available, it is quickly snatched up, says Nancy Love, an agent with the Corcoran Group. A two-bedroom apartment listed at $300,000 was on the market less than a week this spring.

More recent construction includes the 1956 Hillview Apartments, which since 1999 has been popular among foreigners seeking pieds-à-terre in Harlem. A prewar building on Convent has just been converted into the 10-unit Sugar Hill Condominiums, which quickly sold out with prices ranging from $339,000 to $449,000. The Bradhurst Urban Renewal Area south of 143rd and east of Edgecombe is being developed for middle-income families, adding a chain supermarket and pharmacy within walking distance of Sugar Hill.

The biggest real estate activity is in row houses, many of which haven't been on the market in decades, if ever. More are on the market now because the owners are dying or becoming too infirm to climb the stairs.

Some properties are little more than shells. Lawrence Comroe, a vice president at Corcoran, said that a facade without a roof runs around $575,000 and up.

At the other end of the spectrum is a 114-year-old town house with well-maintained original details like basket-weave lattice, offered for $2.3 million.

In between are town houses in need of considerable renovation. Lorraine D. Gilbert of ReMax Upscale Properties sees more buyers restoring rooming houses to their original single-family status, but buildings "without issues" — claims from tenants — command higher prices.

But anyone planning to rent or buy in the neighborhood should consider more than real estate values, the people who live on Sugar Hill say. It's not just high ceilings, parquet floors and gracious space. It's involvement, beginning with the early N.A.A.C.P. leaders and continuing today among parents working for better neighborhood schools.

Even in the worst of times, Sugar Hill residents speak up. A small group of female volunteers in 1985 reclaimed an eyesore triangle plot at St. Nicholas and Convent Avenues. Led by Luana Robinson, the women created a Convent Garden, today a jewel of green space with lush grass, flower beds and a gazebo.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

Yorkville, Manhattan:


Despite Upper East Side pedigree, Yorkville still affordable


By Eric Marx
July 2004

Viewed by some as one of the most affordable areas in Manhattan despite its Upper East Side pedigree, Yorkville has seen a continuous 10-year building boom that has kept inventory plentiful, although prices have begun to rise, as they have throughout the rest of the city.

A 65-block area running from 79th to 96th Street and Third to East End Avenue, Yorkville is still very much a neighborhood of contrasts - somewhat undervalued but affluent. The area attracts fresh-out-of-school graduates looking for affordable studios and one-bedrooms in the side street walkups or high-rise apartments west of Second Avenue on 79th, 86th or 96th Streets, as well as families with young children who want to be near East End's Carl Schulz Park.

A neighborhood bursting at the seams with residential high-rise development, Yorkville is often associated with the towering edifices that, according to old-time residents, make the area around First, Second and Third Avenues somewhat cold and forbidding.

A serene, small-town residential feel still dominates the low-lying townhouses and prewar tenement buildings that dot the side streets. Further east along York and East End Avenues' rolling promenades, open green spaces and discreet restaurants and shops lend the neighborhood a parochial, even folksy air.

"It used to be much more of a bargain than it is now," said Seiglinda O'Donnell, a 30-plus-year East End resident and vice president with William B. May. She offered as an example a three-bedroom post-war apartment on 86th Street between First and York Avenues, which she sold for $452,000 four years ago and which has since doubled to $925,000.

Recently built high-end buildings such as the Chartwell House (finished in 2001) on Second Avenue between 91st and 92nd Streets and the Philip Johnson-designed Metropolitan at 90th and Third Avenue (nearing completion) filled up quickly and are near 100 percent occupancy, noted Gordon Golub, manager of Citi-Habitats' East 84th Street office.

With interest rates rising, many buyers are turning to the rental market instead, and rental prices for high-end apartments in the area have increased more than 10 percent in the past six months, according to Golub.

Overall, in the past four years, about 1,000 rental units have been developed along First Avenue in the high 80s and low 90s, most of them in the $2,400 to $5,000 a month range, Golub said.

Older luxury high-rise buildings such as the Normandie Court at Third Avenue and 95th Street are also seeking to draw more high-end renters by combining units to draw families to the building.

"We've already noticed a change in more married couple types and families," said John Sutherland, director of leasing for Ogden Cap Properties, which manages the Normandie Court, a 20-year-old 1,477-unit complex that has a reputation as one of the most affordable high-rise buildings in Manhattan.

In recent months, the Normandie added a children's playroom and renovated its apartments, with particular attention focused on combining units to form larger two and three-bedroom apartments.

"We still have a number of people fresh out of college and sharing units, but the big difference is they're paying more money," Sutherland said of the building, which has earned the nickname "Dormandy Court" because of its young population.

Sutherland said rents have increased roughly 10 percent at the Normandie in the past six months, part of the first sustained resurgence for rentals in the city since Sept. 11.

Going forward, in addition to expansion northward, the neighborhood could soon see new residential development at the site formerly known as Doctor's Hospital on East End Avenue, opposite Gracie Mansion. The trustees of Beth Israel Hospital voted in May to sell the site, and have reportedly attracted over 40 bids, most of which have plans for residential development. The site could be one of the most valuable sold for development in years.

With the new and existing development, Yorkville's density is a concern to
some residents and community activists like Gorman Reilly, president of CIVITAS, a zoning land use and neighborhood advocacy group. Reilly said the population is taking a toll on the transportation infrastructure in the area. "The M15 is the most heavily used bus route in the city, if not the nation, and it's difficult to make any time [getting downtown]," Reilly said. He is lobbying the MTA for a rapid transit bus service for the area.

While the planned Second Avenue subway line - if it's ever completed- could ease transportation woes, it would also spur on more condo and retail development as the area continues to evolve, said O'Donnell - something that she and other residents in the area said they welcomed.

"Up until six months ago Fresh Direct refused to deliver to the neighborhood," said O'Donnell. "And now we have a health spa. We're thrilled to pieces. The only thing we don't have is a museum and a department store."


Copyright 2003-2004 The Real Deal.

[krulltime]

Washington Heights, Manhattan:


REACHING NEW HEIGHTS


By PATRICK GALLAHUE
July 28, 2004

Just about everything is rising in Washington Heights these days.

Rents, businesses, foot traffic — everything is on the rise, except the crime rate.

"I call it the wow factor," said NYPD Deputy Inspector Jason Wilcox, 39, the 33rd Precinct's Commanding Officer.

"The police say, 'Wow, look at that. BBQ's is here and steakhouses are opening up' . . . You can't help it."

The same street corners that once served as open-air markets for drug dealers are now home to chi-chi restaurants. And street life above 155th Street in Manhattan now means shoppers, and even bar-hoppers, after dark.

"It's an entirely different ballgame here in Washington Heights," said David Hunt, a native of neighboring Inwood and co-owner of Coogan's Bar. "Sure, the crime stats are way down, but the whole tenor of the neighborhood has changed."

Hunt said 10 years ago, one of Coogan's main selling points was the feeling of security "to be in off the streets." Now, he is considering opening a sidewalk cafe.

"It seems now the street crime is nonexistent," he said.

Not quite, but things are moving that way.

In the 33rd and 34th precincts covering Inwood and Washington Heights, murder has decreased more than 80 percent in the past 10 years. Rape is down more than 50 percent, and crime overall has plummeted almost 70 percent since 1994.

Veteran cops say the decline is the result of a multilayered approach. The most important, they say, was the 1994 creation of the 33rd Precinct, which greatly alleviated the stress on one of New York City's most thinly spread police stations.

"It was really big," said Wilcox, who was a sergeant in the 34th Precinct in the early 1990s. "The 34th Precinct was just tremendous in size and it was almost overwhelming because you had a lot of crime and a lot of area to cover. It was just too much."

Anti-narcotics programs in the area — such as the Northern Manhattan Initiative and model-block program — also took a hefty bite out of crime.

"In 1996 or so, we began to see a turnaround in the level of crime and the overall quality of life," said Walther Delgado, president of the Audubon Partnership for Economic Development.

Banks stopped abandoning the area, chain stores started to show an interest in the neighborhood, and longtime residents began to feel comfortable investing their money in the area, Delgado said.

In addition to crime reduction, Delgado credits a large part of the resurgence of Washington Heights and Inwood to the increasing business savvy of first-generation Dominican-Americans and those who grew up in the neighborhood and went on to college.

But not all of the area's changes are homegrown. Wealthy New Yorkers also have sought residences in Washington Heights and Inwood.

As a result, income and rent averages in the area are swiftly soaring.

"People are getting priced out," said Delgado.

Old-timers like Hunt say they hope rents and real-estate prices start to stabilize. But in the meantime, the old and new elements still sit comfortably side by side at Coogan's.

"They all get along," Hunt said. "I haven't sensed any anti-gentrification among the older crowd."


Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[Pottebaum]

"Up until six months ago Fresh Direct refused to deliver to the neighborhood," said O'Donnell. "And now we have a health spa. We're thrilled to pieces. The only thing we don't have is a museum and a department store."



Why would have Fresh Direct refused to deliver to the neighborhood?

[Schadenfrau]

I'm absolutely certain that the Fresh Direct truck drivers weren't too frightened to deliver groceries to Yorkville. They probably just hadn't expanded the delivery area to include it.

The fact that Ms. O'Donnell thinks Museum Mile is just too darn far away is pretty funny.

[TonyO]

Fresh Direct has been expanding its service in Manhattan for a while.

This is from their website: "We deliver to certain neighborhoods in New York. Very soon, we'll be delivering to every address in Manhattan as well as parts of Brooklyn and Queens."

[Pottebaum]

Does Yorkville have a history of high crime?

[Schadenfrau]

Not in the least. I think the only way it could be considered a rough area is if your standard is based upon the Gold Coast.

[krulltime]

Upper West Side, Manhattan:

April 2005

Looking Back: On UWS, from sleazy to staid

By Philana Patterson

Tourists and newcomers to New York might find it hard to believe that the word "sleazy" could be used to characterize the Upper West Side, but that's just how the New York Times described Broadway between 59th and 96th streets in a 1982 article, which credited the area with a "sleazy vitality" that improved on its condition in the previous decade. At the time, in the midst of its early- 80's redevelopment, the ambiance was becoming "genteel, even prissy" and "increasingly successful at attracting the class of young affluent professionals who have for so long felt at home on the Upper East Side," the Times reported.

Today, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue are lined with restaurants--some with white tablecloths and candles, some less classy--as well as boutiques and national chain stores such as Victoria's Secret and Pottery Barn. Housing prices have increased by extraordinary lengths since the Gray Lady weighed in back then, and now the Upper West Side has relative pricing uniformity up as far as 110th Street.

For decades, property values on the West Side trailed far behind those of the East Side, but in 1979, the margin narrowed dramatically, almost overnight, wrote Barbara Corcoran, founder of The Corcoran Group, in her book "Use What You've Got, and Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom."

The reason for the speedy gentrification, according to Corcoran: the "thirty-something" children of affluent parents on the East Side were moving in. She ignored naysayers who she said called her "crazy" and opened a huge West Side office to capitalize on the influx.

The Upper West Side's rejuvenation happened despite abundant graffiti, abandoned buildings and the city's fiscal crisis. At the same time neighborhoods such as the East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Yorkville and Park Slope were transformed by an urban-style social revolt.

Baby boomers rejected the lifestyles and values of their parents and "moved to rural Vermont or back to the city that Mom and Dad fled," according to the Times. On the Upper West Side that often meant moving in to new construction or renovating old brownstones and hotels. At the time, the changes were expected to push poor residents from the neighborhood, and as observers correctly predicted put the squeeze to many middle-class residents as well.

Today, the Upper West Side is synonymous with a sort of settled, familial affluence. The asking price of a five-story townhouse recently listed by Corcoran is $8.25 million, an unimaginable price 20 years ago. Two-bedroom co-op apartments averaged more than $1 million last year, and two-bedroom condos around $1.7 million. Prices reach up to $23.5 million, the asking price for three adjoining apartments being sold in the legendary San Remo that could set a record for the most expensive apartment on Central Park West.


Copyright © 2003-2005 The Real Deal.

[billyblancoNYC]

Port Morris has less crime than Williamsburg and is located in what's famously the poorest congressional district in the United States.

I think you're confusing the outward trappings of prosperity with actual progress.

If that's true, great. I'd love to see the latest numbers.

I have a question, is Port Morris mostly industrial? Does this include South and North Williamsburg, because South Williamsburg, I think, has a lot more crime than the much more gentrified Northern section?

Even if this is true, this is surely the exception and not the rule. It's pretty basic if you look at it. The city has seen some tremendous gentrification over the last decade or so, either by Yuppies or by immigrants that have money or work and get money. Not surprisingly, crime has plummeted in that time. It's a lot more than a coincidence.

The same can be said of rehabilitation of buildings, development of vacant lots, cleaning of streets, graffiti, etc.

Without the middle, upper middle, and (especially) wealthy, the poor in this city would be a lot worse off. Who do you think pays all those lovely taxes? Who pays for all that Medicaid?

What is considered BAD gentrification? Is it the artists moving into slums? Is is the banker pushing out the artist? Is it the Jamaican immigrant pushing out the American black? Is is the Chinese and Koreans pricing out the middle income whites? What's the problem? Why is it someone who likes lattes and steak frites should have less rights then someone who likes Oxtail soup or Paella? Please, explain.

[Schadenfrau]

Crime stats and neighborhood borders are readily available on NYC.gov.


Why is it someone who likes lattes and steak frites should have less rights then someone who likes Oxtail soup or Paella? Please, explain.

I assume that you're suggesting rich white people like the former and poor brown people prefer the latter?

Working with that in mind, I'm perplexed as to how you've come to the conclusion that the wealthy have "less rights" than poor people. Money brings privilege and the capacity for choice.

If someone comes along and wants to force you out of your home by paying double the rent, you've pretty much got no choice in the matter. You will have to leave. If you're a poor person, chances are slim that you're going to find an affordable new place to live anywhere in the city, because you were maxing yourself out with what you had been paying.

Thus, the latte-lover inherently has more rights than the poor could ever dream of.

[pianoman11686]

Cheek by Jowl

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/09/nyregion/10feat_xlg.jpg
Patrons at La Bottega restaurant on Ninth Avenue have a view of Fulton Houses, a public housing complex.

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

Published: July 10, 2005

IVAN LOPEZ, an unemployed forklift operator who has lived most of his life in Chelsea, was chatting about his recent lunch with Harrison Ford, a newcomer to the neighborhood. "I met him at La Taza de Oro," Mr. Lopez said, referring to a small rice-and-beans shop on Eighth Avenue.

"Well, I didn't really meet him," he admitted. "I was sitting there, and he was so close." Mr. Lopez could hear Mr. Ford talking about the luxurious loft he had bought. "I got his autograph."

This is today's Chelsea, a neighborhood of sometimes stunning cheek-by-jowl incongruity, where no one was at all surprised the other day to see a wrinkled Latino man in a Panama hat tooling up Ninth Avenue in a motorized wheelchair past two impeccably coiffed blond men in tuxedos hailing a cab.

But perhaps the biggest incongruity is this: On Ninth Avenue, in the middle of $2.7 million penthouses on West 19th Street and $3,400 jackets at Chelsea Market, stand Fulton Houses, the 944-unit public housing project stretching from 16th to 19th Streets. Although the average Chelsea household earned about $83,000 in 2000, the most recent year for which data is available, average household income among the 2,215 residents of Fulton Houses is just under $25,000.

Once, the two worlds were more similar. When Fulton Houses' 11 brick buildings were completed in 1965, the economic divide between the project's residents and those in the predominantly working-class neighborhood around it was far less pronounced. The average household income at Fulton was $5,408 in 1970, while the average Chelsea household earned $8,505.

But the character of Chelsea has evolved considerably. Gentrification proceeded gradually in the 1960's and 70's, gathering force in the late 80's and 90's with an accelerating influx of gay professionals and middle-class families. Bodegas and workingman's bars gave way to upscale restaurants. The 1990's also brought Chelsea Piers and a thriving gallery scene in West Chelsea, lending an air of hip prestige that has helped drive real estate prices skyward.

Other neighborhoods have experienced rampant gentrification around public housing. But as Chelsea becomes a place where two restaurants within three blocks have bathroom valets, the changes around Fulton vividly demonstrate what happens when a mixed-income neighborhood is pressed by forces of wealth and fabulousness.

And the area is poised to transform further still. Late last month, the City Council approved a plan to rezone 68 acres of far west Chelsea between 16th and 30th Streets. The centerpiece of the plan is the transformation of the High Line elevated railway into a 22-block-long ribbon of green space, but the rezoning will also add 5,500 units of housing to the neighborhood.

While the plan calls for about 1,200 of the units to be affordable to households with low, moderate and middle incomes, the remaining 4,300 would be market rate. And in Chelsea's sizzling real estate environment, where the median sale price of a three-bedroom condominium is currently $3 million, that means even more luxury will be bumping up against Fulton Houses.

As these waves of wealth wash up on its shores, some inside the complex feel increasingly cut off.

"We're an isolated little island," said Ann Marie Baronowski, secretary of the Fulton Houses Tenants Association. "We have great apartments and great rent, but we can't afford to do anything here. The only thing we can afford is Western Beef. There are no restaurants you can afford, no food shops you can afford, no clothing stores you can afford. You're living here, but basically all you can do is sleep here."

Inside the Brick Towers

Thursday through Sunday nights, the Fulton Houses apartment of Sonia Jamison throbs with music, laughter and alcohol-tinged conviviality. Unfortunately for her, this good cheer originates not in her home but across Ninth Avenue in the Maritime Hotel building at 17th Street, where La Bottega's restaurant, cafe and two cabanas regularly overflow with well-dressed night owls.

"I have never been over there because I can't afford that," Ms. Jamison said one recent afternoon while chatting with friends in a Fulton Houses playground. "But I see who goes in and out of there: movie stars, P. Diddy, Jay-Z. A couple weeks ago, some guys came out of there arguing and fighting because they were drunk."

Ms. Jamison, a mother of three who works as a bank customer sales representative, jabbed a finger toward the gleaming white hotel. "They put it right across the street from the project," she said, her anger building. "The bottom line is, it's for rich people."

Not everyone living in Fulton Houses resents the presence of trendy newcomers like the Maritime, the former home of a sailors' union that was redeveloped in 2003.

"Because I work and my whole family is successful, I appreciate this," David Nelson, a supervisor at United Parcel Service, said of the proximity of upscale clubs and restaurants. Mr. Nelson, who had just returned from his shift and was sitting on a playground bench, talked proudly about his eldest son, a 25-year-old movie actor whose mother grew up in Fulton Houses with famous siblings, the Wayans brothers comedians.

"It brings up the whole area," Mr. Nelson said of the high-end new businesses. "The problem is the drug dealers. If you're building around projects and you bring clientele to places around here, you're making them more money."

A Golden-Lit Playground

The midnight scene at the Maritime Hotel on a recent Saturday looked like a cross between Times Square and Tavern on the Green. Honking cabs lined up two deep along Ninth Avenue, disgorging well-scrubbed young men along with young women clutching designer handbags. A white Hummer stretch limo glided by. Above the raised plaza of La Bottega, glowing Chinese lanterns wafted in the breeze, hovering bowls of inviting golden light that provided a striking contrast to the mostly darkened windows of the Fulton Houses across the street.

In the northern cabana atop La Bottega's restaurant, accessible only through two sets of gatekeepers, young patrons sipped martinis and grooved to Foxy Brown's new single, "Come Fly With Me."

Maurice Rodriguez, the Maritime's director of operations, said petty theft had been a problem, and attributed it to young people from Fulton Houses. "In fact," he said, "on Thursday night we caught two kids who lived in the projects purse snatching." Mr. Rodriguez said that the two youths had told the hotel's security staff that they lived in Fulton Houses.

Law enforcement officials said they saw no pattern of Fulton Houses residents' being arrested for robbery.

Many patrons, meanwhile, were oblivious to the proximity of Fulton Houses. "Are they projects?" asked Lianne Graubart, a Chelsea resident and real estate agent, when told that a public housing complex sat across the street. "Are they really projects? Really?"

"Housing projects? No way," added her boyfriend, Morris Amiri, an asset manager who was wearing a white linen shirt, True Religion jeans and a tan acquired while attending a friend's wedding in Maui. "That's sad. They're all screwed up, and we're over here having a good time. I hope they're not going to be chased out."

Between shots of Patron tequila, he added: "The rich are getting so rich, and the poor are getting more poor, so you're seeing a situation where extravagance is driving people's happiness. The more they get, the more they want."

Exit the Middle Class

Melva Max, a funkily elegant restaurateur who opened the unpretentious French bistro La Lunchonette on 18th Street and 10th Avenue with her chef husband in 1988, is not among those who want more extravagance in Chelsea.

"I'm happy about a lot of the changes, like the galleries, but now it's going too far," she said the other day, pointing to lots down the block from the projects where luxury condominiums are slated to rise. "The building of all these super, very, very expensive apartments is disturbing to me."

Ms. Max, who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, noted that many customers had been priced out of the area by rising rents, while friends had sold their brownstones for $5 million and moved away. "These are like normal people, really working-class, middle-class people with kids," she said. "And it's just shocking to me that they're all selling and moving out. I just feel kind of sad."

The New, the Rich

Some people buy used mattresses on the Craigslist Web site. Austin Nagel, a 22-year-old Brooklyn real estate developer, bought a $2.7 million triplex penthouse in Chelsea Club, an icy-chic luxury condominium, 12 stories of tinted glass and cast stone rising on the site of a former parking lot on 19th Street near 10th Avenue.

Mr. Nagel, who has made a quick fortune turning Brooklyn Heights town houses into condos, stood atop his private roof recently and grew giddy as he scanned his sweeping views. He surveyed Chelsea Piers, where he works out; the high-rise where his acupuncturist keeps his office; docked boats bobbing in the glittering Hudson River; and the blocklong Chelsea Market, where one of his new neighbors, a celebrity hair-and-makeup artist, stores fine wines in the Chelsea Wine Vault. He also surveyed the dingy brick buildings of Fulton Houses, where the average monthly rent is $348.

"It doesn't even bother me that I'm looking over this," he said of the project. "These people will talk with you if you talk to them. You'll see them when you're walking your dog. They'll say, 'What's up?' They'll get to know you. On the Upper East Side, no one will talk to you."

Isolated by Affluence?

Inside the concrete-block-walled office of the Fulton Houses Tenants Association, the group's president, Jimmy Pelsey, sat with a few of the association's members and discussed the scarcity of neighborhood jobs for Fulton residents. A parade of new upscale Chelsea businesses had promised employment for Fulton residents at meetings of Community Board 4, only to later break their word, said Mr. Pelsey, who is a board member.

When Richard Born, a co-owner of the Maritime, sought a variance in 2001 to add two structures to its raised plaza, Mr. Pelsey said, "I asked in Community Board 4, 'What are you going to offer to people in the development?' " Mr. Born, board minutes show, replied that 90 percent of his project's 150 to 175 jobs would be open to the community. Later, said Miguel Acevedo, another board member, "I personally brought over 150 applicants with applications." But according to the two men, no Fulton residents were hired.

"We have several people that live within walking distance that work here," said Mr. Rodriguez, the Maritime's director of operations, who oversees most of the business's 450 employees, including one living in Covenant House, the center next door for at-risk youth. "I don't know if they specifically live at the Fulton House. We hire people of all colors and races."

The fear that rising rents and the burgeoning development of luxury condominiums might further isolate Fulton Houses and other nearby projects, the Chelsea and Elliott Houses, in a sea of affluence impelled Mr. Acevedo and others to argue strenuously for the city to include affordable housing in the rezoning of far west Chelsea. As the new zoning plan shows, they largely succeeded, and 100 of the mixed-income units will be developed on a Fulton Houses parking lot.

While Mr. Acevedo maintained that such mixed-income housing would give the children of Fulton residents a chance to stay in the neighborhood, not everyone at the gathering was so optimistic.

Joe Schuler, a powerfully built man with a salt-and-pepper Fu Manchu mustache, believes that Fulton Houses will eventually be sold to private developers. His comments echoed a longstanding rumor making the rounds at the project. "You don't have millions spent around a ghetto and have it remain a ghetto," Mr. Schuler said. "We're the sore spot in this neighborhood."

Howard Marder, a spokesman for the New York City Housing Authority, insisted that the authority had no plans to privatize Fulton Houses. "That rumor pops up all over the city, for some reason, whenever a neighborhood undergoes gentrification," he said.

Still a Gay Ghetto'

The evening after the city's gay pride parade last month, hundreds of well-groomed "Chelsea Boys" poured into the Park restaurant on Tenth Avenue near 17th Street for the club's regular Sunday party. Some chatted in the outdoor garden, which is planted with softly illuminated Japanese maples. Others cavorted in the hot tub in the Asian-theme rooftop bar area.

But Sophia Lamar, a Cuban-born transsexual who was performing at the party and wore a polka-dotted Balenciaga bathing suit and high heels, was not entirely sanguine about the area's status as a magnet for gays. "Chelsea is still a gay ghetto," Ms. Lamar said, crossing one gartered leg over the other. "I'm against ghettos, whether they're youth ghettos or black ghettos or minority ghettos or gay ghettos. I don't think there's any need to separate yourself from the rest of the society."

For this reason, she said, the juxtaposition of glamorous wealthy people with the low-income residents of Fulton Houses is a terrific thing. "I've lived in different cities in the U.S., and the housing projects are always in places where people don't go," continued Ms. Lamar, who has visited a friend's mother at the housing project and has never felt uncomfortable among its residents. "And here I think it's wonderful because it shows that there's room for everyone. Rich people are going to a supermarket, and poor people are going to the same supermarket, and that doesn't happen in any other city."

What the Barber Knows

When Manuel Manolo and his two fellow barbers are snipping away in the misleadingly named New Barber Shop on Ninth Avenue near 19th Street, the talk, by turns in Spanish and English, ranges from baseball to politics. On a recent Saturday, it settled on Fulton Houses.

Eddie Andujar, a longtime Fulton Houses resident who worked as a groundskeeper for the project for 25 years, said that it had been beautiful until about 1990, but had gone downhill since. "Because of the drug dealers, it's very dangerous over here at nighttime," he added.

There have been two homicides at Fulton Houses since late January, the police said, but neither was thought to be drug-related. "Crime in the 10th Precinct has declined dramatically in recent years," said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne. "The Police Department pays close attention to conditions there and responds accordingly." Since 1993, robbery in the precinct has dropped 74 percent and felony assault 53 percent.

Near the spinning barber pole, George Weaver, a 30-year-old Fulton Houses resident in a faded Million Youth March T-shirt, awaited his turn in Mr. Manolo's chair. Mr. Weaver, who recently received an associate's degree in business administration from Monroe College in the West Bronx, said he wished the Housing Authority would screen prospective Fulton Houses residents more thoroughly. "People from shelters don't necessarily have a sense of community," he said.

To illustrate his idea of how a community should work, he nodded toward Mr. Manolo. "He always encouraged me to stay in school every time," Mr. Weaver said.

Mr. Manolo, who has lived in Fulton Houses for 40 years and cut hair for just as long, grinned. "I took a picture of him the day he graduated from college," he said proudly as Mr. Weaver climbed into his red leather chair. With that, the courtly barber took a straight razor and ran it gently across Mr. Weaver's Afro, which fell in leisurely dark clumps onto the worn linoleum floor, mingling with the blond hair and eyebrow trimmings snipped from the customer in the neighboring chair.

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The Maritime Hotel, left, overflows with well-dressed night owls and celebrities. On the other side of Ninth Avenue, residents of Fulton Houses pay an average monthly rent of $348.

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The glowing Chinese lanterns of La Bottega, where patrons sip martinis and groove to music, oblivious to the proximity of Fulton Houses. "We're an isolated little island," said one Fulton resident.

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Rich and poor rub shoulders on Ninth Avenue. Gentrification gathered force in Chelsea in the late 80's and 90's with an accelerating influx of gay professionals and middle-class families.

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The lively scene at the Park restaurant, part of the burgeoning collection of restaurants and nightspots that have given Chelsea an air of hip prestige.

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The New Barber Shop, where Manuel Manolo, a 40-year resident of Fulton Houses, cuts hair along with two fellow barbers. Changes around Fulton vividly demonstrate what happens when a mixed-income neighborhood is pressed by forces of wealth and fabulousness.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

Lincoln Square, Manhattan:


Grand Buildings, but Also a Sense of Community


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The refurbished Columbus Circle is a gathering place at the boundary of a neighborhood that seems to
specialize in vibrant friendliness.


By C. J. HUGHES
Published: April 30, 2006

IF each neighborhood were a nation, Lincoln Square might win points for patriotism. Its residents tend to cheer frequently about how wonderful it is, and they rarely want to pack up and move away.

And to be fair, it can be hard to begrudge them. The older sections of this West Side neighborhood, those closest to Central Park, can seem downright utopian. The area is graced with buildings as grand as castles, and yet, like a small country village, people know their neighbors' names as well as their butcher's.

But despite its intimacy, Lincoln Square, which runs from Central Park West to the Hudson River and from West 59th Street to West 72nd, is unmistakably urban.

The population is ethnically diverse, and many residents are employed in the media and arts. Lincoln Square has some of the nation's finest private and public schools, and Lincoln Center, home to world-class performances of music, opera and dance, is at its geographic and cultural heart.

In the next year or so, emigrating to Lincoln Square will be easier, with the opening of a handful of new condominium buildings. The 1,000 new apartments will be some of the city's most luxurious, with landscaped rooftop bars, in-house dining rooms, 35-seat screening rooms and 75-foot-long swimming pools.

This building boom, mostly around the neighborhood's southern and western edges, rivals the urban renewal projects of the 1960's in terms of square footage. But this time around, entire blocks of the neighborhood are protected within a landmark district that is the largest in the city in terms of the number of buildings, thanks to residents like Arlene Simon, who in 1985 founded Landmark West, a still-active preservation group.

Mrs. Simon worries that the new condos will be merely be pieds-à-terre and consequently, that their owners won't have much of a stake in the community.

"When you're a brownstone owner, you talk about your modest garden and restoring your stoop," said Mrs. Simon, a former children's clothing designer who has lived with her husband, Bruce, a labor lawyer, in the Lincoln Square neighborhood since 1960. Their current home is a 2,300-square-foot duplex, with five bedrooms and two and a half baths, that they bought for $60,000 in 1973.

"With these new buildings, it's all about who has the best view, and too much 'can you top this?' " she said.

Yet at least some people who are buying new condos plan on living in them full time and are just as die-hard about Lincoln Square as the old guard like Mrs. Simon.

Last September, Justin Marcus, who runs a staffing company in Manhattan, paid $2.73 million for a 1,500-square-foot condo with two bedrooms and two and half baths on the 23rd floor of 15 Central Park West, currently a mishmash of cranes and scaffolding.

Mr. Marcus, who is single, said his second bedroom would become a rehearsal space — he plays both piano and guitar — and when his second CD comes out next January, he hopes to hold the release party at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, the theater in the Time Warner Center where he attends jazz performances.

"There used to be a concentration of musicians in the East Village and West Village, but they all left for Brooklyn or Queens," Mr. Marcus said. "This is one of the few places left in New York that retains its musical heritage."


What You'll Find


Lincoln Square's most memorable buildings may be the co-ops with multiple towers along Central Park West. The neighborhood's other defining architectural style can be found on the side streets: four-story brownstones, whose twisting stoops and rampart facades resemble fairy-tale forts.

Yet new buildings are never far away in Lincoln Square. At Columbus Circle, sales recently closed on the last of the Time Warner Center's 200 units. Along the Hudson, residents have moved into 120 Riverside Boulevard, the seventh and final building in the complex developed by Donald Trump.

At 15 Central Park West, 60 percent of the 199 units have been spoken for. They range from one-bedrooms to full floors, priced from $2 million to $45 million. Sales of apartments on the lower floors of the 43-story building won't close until the spring of 2007, said Richard Wallgren, the sales director.

The 20-story Hudson, at 225 West 60th Street, between West End and Amsterdam Avenues, has 80 units, starting at $625,000 for one-bedrooms. Fifty-five percent have been sold, though buyers can't move in until this summer, said Samantha Behringer, the sales manager.

On the same block is 10 West End Avenue, which is expected to be completed in about a year. It will have 173 apartments, ranging from small one-bedrooms up to four-bedrooms, priced from $750,000 to $4.5 million.

Next door, at 555 West 59th Street, the foundation is being completed for the Element, which will have 198 apartments and 35 stories, along with a basketball court and three pools. Its one- to four-bedrooms are $750,000 to $6.5 million.

Closer to the river, the 32-story Avery, at 100 Riverside Boulevard, is also at the foundation stage. Gary Barnett, the president of the Extell Development Company, the project's developer, said that 35 percent of its one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, priced from $850,000 to $3 million, have been sold.

"Even a year ago, people wanted prewar character and charm and all the old moldings," said Barry Rudnick, a vice president of the Corcoran Group who has been selling apartments in Lincoln Square for four years. "Now it's all about service and luxury and new construction."


What You'll Pay


When all the new condominiums come to market, Mr. Rudnick said, they may push prices down. But for now, prices for both condos and co-ops seem to be holding their own, he said. Prices are about the same no matter the type of ownership. The condos tend to have a little more space and higher quality finishes, but the co-ops are in older sought-after buildings. The two factors tend to equalize prices.

The listing price for a 500-square-foot studio in Lincoln Square would typically be $400,000, Mr. Rudnick said, while a 750-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bath unit might be listed at $800,000.

With two-bedrooms, there's greater range in price, Mr. Rudnick said. While a typical Lincoln Square 1,300-square-foot two-bedroom might cost $1.75 million, he recently sold a 1,450-square-foot two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 220 Riverside Boulevard for $2.45 million. It went for its asking price, he said, because it was on the 44th floor and had great views.

Rentals make up about half the market in Lincoln Square, said Josephine Vinci, a sales associate at Citi Habitats. The most in-demand rentals, she said, are in brownstones; one-bedrooms start at $2,600 a month, and two-bedrooms at $4,000.

In Lincoln Square's newer high-rises, studios start at $2,300 a month, one-bedrooms at $3,200 and two-bedrooms at $5,000, Ms. Vinci said.

Demand for condos, as opposed to co-ops, seems to be growing in lockstep with the wave of construction in the neighborhood. Condos require a lower down payment and are easier to sublet, two of the factors that are winning favor among buyers.

Gregory Heym, the chief economist at Brown Harris Stevens, said that in the first quarter of 2006, 70 percent of all units sold in Lincoln Square were condos. The median sales price was $972,000, a 43 percent increase over the same quarter a year earlier but in line with other highly desirable addresses elsewhere in the city.

"You don't have the action at the high end of the market that you had a year ago," Mr. Heym said, referring to the Time Warner Center. "But the whole market has shifted upward."


What to Do


Whatever the city offers, so does Lincoln Square. And then some.

Two spectacular parks — Central and Riverside South — form the neighborhood's bookends. And the median malls along Broadway, planted with fresh beds of red tulips, end like an exclamation point at the refurbished Columbus Circle.

There, on a recent weekday afternoon, a lunchtime crowd of political activists, teenage skateboarders and office workers reading books gathered around the tall monument at the circle's center.

For those who can't afford Lincoln Center's indoor offerings, there are free outdoor shows in the warmer months. At Pier One in Riverside Park South, a seasonal restaurant is set up in summer, along with a screen for outdoor movies.

And for the fit and dexterous, there are two indoor rock-climbing walls, one in the Harmony Atrium, at Broadway and 62nd Street, and the other at Recreation Center 59, at 533 West 59th Street.

The Shops at Columbus Circle offer three floors of stores like J. Crew, Tumi and L'Occitane. Trendier wear can be found along Columbus Avenue at boutiques like Betsey Johnson, Theory and Lucky.


The Schools


Some of the city's best public high schools are in Lincoln Square. Fiorello H. La Guardia, at 100 Amsterdam Avenue (65th Street), is strong in the arts and offers a pre-conservatory program. In 2004, 77.2 percent of its seniors went to four-year colleges.

On the SAT reasoning tests in 2004, La Guardia students had an average verbal score of 536 and an average math score of 534, compared with 444 verbal and 472 math for the city.

Another well-regarded high school is Beacon, at 227 West 61st Street. In 2004, seniors' average SAT scores were 506 verbal and 502 math; 70.7 percent went to four-year colleges.

Some of the city's top private schools — among them, Collegiate, Calhoun, Dwight and Trinity — are in the neighborhood, or close to it. Annual tuitions are steep. At Trinity, for example, high-school students will pay $29,770 for the next school year.


The History


The land along the Hudson River south of Riverside Park was once home to a bustling, smoke-belching industrial area. New York Central trains clacked down the piers with loads of grain, milk and vegetables.

At Pier D, at the foot of 67th Street, a rusting hulk is all that's left of a warehouse that burned down in 1971. When a breeze blows through, its metal ribs clang like industrial-size wind chimes.


What We Like


Because the developers worked so closely with neighborhood residents in planning them, the massive new buildings seem to fit in, giving Lincoln Square a pleasant mix of old and new.


Going Forward


The new buildings seem designed to give their residents little reason to go out, and this could compromise the neighborhood's friendly feel and vibrant street life.


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Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[krulltime]

The Lower East Side, Manhattan:


Two Bridges: Development spills into bitty, gritty nabe
Could the Two Bridges area be the last frontier for Lower East Side gentrification?


http://www.therealdeal.net//issues/APRIL_2006/images/1143732183.jpg
Jacob Goldman, owner of LoHo Realty,
in front of Co-op Village, which sparked
gentrification in the area when units
went market-rate.


By Emma Johnson
April 2006 Issue

In the real estate haven that has been New York in the past decade, it is oft lamented that Manhattan is void of undiscovered areas -- nothing left to gentrify, no deals to be had.

This may be true, but the nugget of the Lower East Side coined by the media as "Two Bridges" has piqued the interest of brokers who say the area encompassed by Grand Street on the north, Bowery on the west, and the East River to the east and south, is benefiting from overspill from hip, bordering neighborhoods.

The momentum behind this development is strong enough that Two Bridges has weathered the softening market thanks to being part of the larger-than-life force that is the Lower East Side, according to brokers.

"The market here is still extremely hot -- I believe it is the hottest market in sense of excitement of the neighborhood," said Jacob Goldman, owner of LoHo Realty, which specializes in the areas to the south and east of Houston Street. But Goldman claims he hadn't even heard the term "Two Bridges" before the New York Post interviewed him for a recent story on the area.

While MenuPages, the New York restaurant Web site, lists 85 establishments under "Chinatown/ Two Bridges," for example, not everyone is convinced that the area is as booming as some reports would suggest. Just as it will take quite a while, if ever, before Hell's Kitchen becomes Clinton, the Two Bridges sobriquet may not catch on, despite the efforts of the real estate industry and media.

"'Two Bridges' hasn't really hit the lexicon on the street," said Rob Gross, a senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman who specializes in the Lower East Side. "Demographically, it's kind of the way the Lower East Side was five to eight years ago -- there's not a lot of big parcels, a lot of tenement buildings, and not a lot of opportunity for tons of development. There's not a lot of loft buildings."

While change is indeed slow, there is an undercurrent of gentrification. When the 4,500 units of Co-Op Village became available in 2000, the area caught some new attention and the standard process of "every building being bought and redone, tenements being torn down and big buildings being erected" is now under way, Goldman said.

Glenn Schiller with the Corcoran Group recently sold what he calls a "rare piece of property" -- a 2,300-square-foot floor-through loft condo on Grand Street between Essex and Ludlow for $1.8 million. In Soho or Nolita -- both once-disparaged neighborhoods that have enjoyed their respective moments in the real estate headlines -- that apartment would have gone for $1 million more, he said.

Some notable new projects in the area include the Two Bridges Condos at 48 Canal Street, with units from $660,000 to $1.6 million with ubiquitous stainless steel kitchens, open layouts, and other amenities that appeal to the young, affluent buyer. A condo development at 142 Henry Street has units listed at $535,000 to $1.8 million.

The Forward Building that formerly housed the Yiddish socialist newspaper at 175 East Broadway is another project. It is comprised of 29 luxury units priced at $575,000 to $5.5 million and scheduled for May or June completion. Michael Bolla, exclusive broker for the property, said that half the condos are already sold -- but not to the demographic project principals predicted.

"I expected it to be geared to young, cool, hip single people, but that's not what happened," Bolla said. "It's mostly families from the West Village and Greenwich, Conn."

The main attraction with these buyers is the strong nearby public schools, Bolla said, especially Shuang Wen PS 184M, which produces 10-year-olds fluent in Mandarin and English. Other area amenities include nearby subway stops on the J/M and F/V lines and the nearby, newly renovated Seward Park and East River promenade. The city is also in negotiations with Basketball City, which hopes to move its Chelsea courts and event center to a 64,000 square-foot warehouse at Pier 36 just north of Manhattan Bridge.

While he is not convinced that Two Bridges is yet a significantly hip location, Rob Gross is sure it will see its day. "Will Two Bridges become the way Chelsea was?" he said. "Demographically, before Chelsea became the gayest zip code, it was a Hispanic neighborhood and all brownstones. That is the beauty of New York."


Copyright © 2003-2005 The Real Deal.

[krulltime]

The Lower East Side, Manhattan:


How Low Can You Go?


By Matt Gross
May 8, 2006 issue of New York Magazine

Not so long ago, you’d have done anything to get away from the Lower–Lower East Side. Now you’ll do anything to come back. The French bistros and avant-garde boutiques that spilled across Houston Street from the East Village have crossed Delancey and creep right up to the borders of Chinatown. Hip-hop brunch joints sit peacefully cheek by jowl with slick-floored fishmongers. Million-dollar lofts peer down at one-buck-dumpling shops. And a 25-block zone once occupied mainly by Chinese meat markets and the odd yarmulke emporium has become the most intriguing neighborhood in Manhattan.


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1. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
108 Orchard St., at Delancey St. 212-431-0233

The ultimate repository of local history runs tours through the restored homes of the German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants who lived here more than a century ago. The museum’s coolest project is right up to date: “Folk Songs for the Five Points,” at tenement.org/folksongs, lets you create a neighborhood soundtrack by mixing sound samples.


2. Blue Moon Hotel
100 Orchard St., nr. Delancey St. 212-533-9080

From the outside, the neighborhood’s first boutique hotel looks like a tenement. But the 22 rooms ($275 to $875 per night), named for bygone celebs like Tommy Dorsey and Al Jolson, look like ghetto grottoes gone upscale, with ceiling fans and wrought-iron beds. An immigrant-themed restaurant, Sweet Dreams, is expected to open by early autumn.


3. Congee Village
100 Allen St., nr. Delancey St.

212-941-1818 This Cantonese hot spot has earned acclaim for its namesake rice porridge, which is best with roast duck and meatballs (classic pork and preserved egg is a favorite, too). Book a private room, bring a dozen friends, and order the house-special chicken. Karaoke is optional.


4. Il Laboratorio del Gelato
95 Orchard St., nr. Broome St.

212-343-9922 A spring expansion will mean the city’s best frozen treats come in twenty flavors, including brand-new blends such as Cheddar cheese and wasabi.


5. Recollections
90 Orchard St., nr. Broome St.

212-387-0341 When you want your million-dollar loft to look like a nineteenth-century hovel, stop at the Tenement Museum’s store for chandeliers, old wallpaper, and enameled cast-iron stoves.


6. Kehila Kedosha Janina
280 Broome St., nr. Allen St.

212-431-1619 Delve into the fascinating history of the 2,000-year-old Greek-Jewish heritage at this untouched synagogue; see particularly the large collection of alephs, hand-painted birth certificates unique to the Romaniotes sect.


7. Bo Bo Poultry Market
287 Broome St., nr. Eldridge St. 212-274-0130

There’s nothing like a freshly slaughtered bird for dinner. These poultry perfectionists will provide you with, say, a $12 pair of partridges from their farms upstate.


8. Milk & Honey
134 Eldridge St., nr. Delancey St.

Disguised as a tailor’s shop, Sasha Petraske’s semi-secret ode to the cocktail bars of yore requires a reservation. It’s worth it: The throwback cocktails are the best in the city, and the leather banquettes are plush enough to make you think you’re in The Sting.


9. Happy Ending
302 Broome St., nr. Forsyth St. 212-334-9676

The slickest ex-brothel turned trendy bar in the area. Upcoming guests at Amanda Stern’s acclaimed reading series include Arthur Bradford, Lydia Davis, and Sigrid Nunez.


10. Deadly Dragon Sound
102B Forsyth St., nr. Broome St. 646-613-0139

Looking for an obscure ska band on 45? Or just the latest dancehall hits from Kingston? You’ll find both—probably on vinyl—at this tiny storefront devoted to all things reggae.


11. Fontana’s
105 Eldridge St., nr. Grand St. 212-334-6740

A cavernous bar for guys’ guys—with paintings of Elvis, Clint, and breasts— owned by the four women behind the East Village’s 85A. The newly opened basement hosts local bands.


12. Dumpling House
118A Eldridge St., nr. Broome St. 212-625-8008

It’s a scientific fact: Dumpling House has the best fried pork dumplings in Manhattan. What science has yet to explain, however, is how such flavor-dense little packets can cost just $1 for five.


13. Manpolo International Trading Corp.
301 Grand St., nr. Allen St.; 212-966-0289

Good fortune is on sale here in the form of lacquered altars and statues of Chinese gods. Luck doesn’t come cheap, however: An eighteen-inch Guangong, the red-faced warrior god, can easily top $200.


14. Hello Sari
261 Broome St., at Orchard St. 212-274-0791

All your subcontinental fashion needs fulfilled, from Pakistani beaded sandals ($25) to glowing silk saris ($95), which, if you’re not quite ready to dress like a Delhi bride, look great draped across a sofa.


15. 88 Orchard
88 Orchard St., at Broome St. 212-228-8880

Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and the Jewish owners of this sun-drenched corner café certainly got lucky when they opened three years ago: It’s always filled with customers sipping coffee, surfing the Net, and playing board games.


16. Barrio Chino
253 Broome St., nr. Orchard St. 212-228-6710

Yummily authentic tacos and high-end tequilas downed at a friendly communal table in a room watched over by enormous vintage Chinese ancestor portraits. Weekend nights get crowded, so come after work for a michelada (beer mixed with assorted sauces) and some fresh-made guacamole.


17. Babycakes NYC
248 Broome St., nr. Ludlow St. 212-677-5047

If your belly says no to gluten, nuts, refined sugar, dairy, and eggs, stop here for cupcakes so good you’ll forget they’re vegan.


18. Guss’ Pickles
87 Orchard St., nr. Broome St. 516-569-0909

Brined cukes, marinated ’shrooms, and barrels of kraut, from people who know from pickles (the business is about 90 years old).


19. Little Giant
85 Orchard St., nr. Broome St. 212-226-5047

An Ikea dining room hosts seasonal New American dishes with playful names like Beet Box (roasted beets with Humboldt Fog cheese, $10) and Babys Got Bass (wild striped bass with clams, lentils, bacon, and aïoli, $25). The Swine of the Week is $22.


20. El Bocadito
79 Orchard St., nr. Broome St. 212-343-3331

A new Mexican tapas joint serving “little bites”—e.g., taquitos—to the spillover crowd from Barrio Chino.


21. Forward
72 Orchard St., nr. Grand St.

646-264-3233 The shelves at this incubator for fashion designers currently feature lush, sexy lingerie from Martha Colón.


22. East Side Company Bar
49 Essex St., at Grand St. 212-614-7408

Another cocktail nest from Sasha Petraske (see Milk & Honey) but less exclusive. Huddle up in a booth, order a delicious Pimm’s Cup, and watch the candlelight play off the pressed-tin roof.


23. Kossar’s Bialys
367 Grand St., nr. Essex St. 877-424-2597

New York isn’t exactly packed with bialy stockers. But even in a town with 1,000 of them, Kossar’s light, bready, onion-smeared renditions would be the best.


24. Doughnut Plant
379 Grand St., at Norfolk St. 212-505-3700

Forget Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and your local cart. These superb sugar-caked rings of fried dough come in offbeat flavors like vanilla bean and strawberry cake.


25. Orchard
47 Orchard St., nr Hester St. 212-219-1061

It’s hard to categorize the collective behind this gallery space. And that’s kind of the point: Take the current show, “Vera,” which mixes Jason Simon’s film of a woman talking about her passion for shopping with one-off karaoke and video art nights.


26. Girls Love Shoes
85 Hester St., nr. Orchard St. 917-250-3268

Paradise for lovers of vintage footwear. There are 1,000 pairs for sale (a Maud Frizon tiger-print pump is $150), and 1,000 more for rent at this store run by Zia Ziprin, whose great-grandfather started a yeshiva on East Broadway and whose beatnik mother opened a vintage store nearby in the sixties.


27. The Sweet Life
63 Hester St., at Ludlow St. 800-692-6887

Sugar aficionados get hives just looking at the buckets and buckets of honey-glazed pecans, giant swirl lollipops, Pez dispensers, halvah, and Turkish delight in the window.


28. Brown
61 Hester St., at Ludlow St. 212-477-2427

The epicenter of LES life below Grand Street serves remarkably fresh salads, baked eggs, and sandwiches (try the mortadella-and-Garrotxa on ciabatta) to local hipsters, who linger over rich espressos and Wallpaper*. Next door is Orange, a grocery, and across the street is Green, the catering wing.


29. A NY Thing
51 Hester St., nr. Essex St. 212-777-0919

Everything a skateboarder needs—baggy clothes, LPs, stickers, and ’tude—except actual skateboards.


30. Classic Coffee Shop
56 Hester St., nr. Ludlow St. 917-685-3306

“Classic” is right—with Rocky Marciano photos on the wall and post-bebop jazz on the stereo, Carmine Morales’s tidy hole-in-the-wall is just the place for a tuna melt and an egg cream.


31. 48 Hester
48 Hester St., nr. Essex St. 212-473-3496

This minuscule boutique carries Trovata, Rag & Bone, sass & bide, and Nobody jeans—the same brands at owner Denise Williamson’s Mercer Street showroom. Now in: Williamson’s own women’s line, Franck.


32. The Main Squeeze
19 Essex St., nr. Hester St. 212-614-3109

Walter Kuehr’s squeezebox emporium—he offers his own line of accordions and lessons in how to play them—looks like a relic of the 1890s, even though it opened in 1996.


33. Organic Avenue
23 Ludlow St., nr. Hester St., second floor; 212-334-4593

A treasure trove of materials for natural living: wild jungle peanuts, cruelty-free silks, and a hemp Brazilian bikini.


34. Les Enfants Terribles
37 Canal St., nr. Ludlow St. 212-777-7518

An exquisitely designed French-African restaurant (worn leather banquettes, gold leaf ceiling) that’s hybrid in every sense. By day, locals munch on merguez sandwiches; by night, it’s a sexy multiculti scene. Try the Ivorian sliced-steak korhogofefemougou (a mouthful in more ways than one).


35. Clandestino
35 Canal St., nr. Ludlow St. 212-475-5505

A gloriously simple French-owned bar that opened in early February with the kind of stealth that usually produces La Esquina–level buzz. Expect it to be mobbed by . . . oh, right about now.


36. Happy Joy Restaurant
25 Canal St., nr. Ludlow St. 212-388-0264

Everyone from families to construction workers loves the friendly waiters and very tasty Chinese-Malaysian food here. Eggy tofu is house-made; kuey teow noodles a filling standby; curried skate wing a sour-spicy marvel.


37. Good World Bar & Grill
3 Orchard St., at Canal St. 212-925-9975

The pioneer. In 1999, Annika Sundvik converted a sketchy barbershop (i.e., brothel) into a wood-floored bar and Swedish restaurant. Then the world discovered Good World’s long beer list, house cocktails (the Berzerker: aquavit, Absolut Citron, ginger ale, dry vermouth, and a cucumber slice), and Scandinavian staples. Now weekends are uncomfortably crowded; Sundays with a pint of Hoegaarden in the rear courtyard, however, remain perfect.


38. Super Taste
26 Eldridge St., nr. Canal St. 212-625-1198

In northern China, hand-pulled noodles are a common streetside snack, but they’ve yet to penetrate New York foodie brains. Order No. 2 on the menu—noodles in spicy beef broth, $4—and feel your consciousness rise, along with your body temperature.


39. Cup & Saucer
89 Canal St., nr. Eldridge St. 212-925-3298

This is the kind of ancient lunch counter that restaurateurs spend millions to re-create.


Real Estate

Most Lower East Side buildings are tenements in need of renovation, which means you just might find a one-bedroom rental for less than $1,000 (it helps to speak Chinese). Rare loft conversions are still a relative bargain.


40. 50 Orchard Street

This Christmas, the sixteen two-bedroom condos in this new luxury development will sell in the $1.5 million to low $3 million range. For that, you get Bosch appliances, Italian cabinetry, and a communal roof deck. Through Larry Michaels at Douglas Elliman, 212-891-7072.


41. 345 Grand Street

“The only cast-iron building in the Lower East Side,” claims Corcoran’s Glenn E. Schiller (212-941-2561). Three of its six units sold for less than $2 million—a million less than a few blocks west in Soho.


42. 173–175 East Broadway

The landmarked home of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward newspaper went condo a few years ago, but its units are only now coming on the market, for $575,000 to $4.5 million. Through Michael Bolla at 212-334-4855.


43. 118 Forsyth Street

From the outside, you’d never suspect this building is full of pristine 2,300-square-foot co-ops for $1.6 million (they went for far less two years back). Call Jeffrey Stockwell at 646-613-2715.


44. 79 Delancey Street

Renovated about three years ago, this former bank—the first Jewish financial institution in the city, according to Misrahi Realty’s Chris Crane (212-475-6660)—has rare vacancies for big-windowed apartments that range from $1,900 to $3,000.


Copyright © 2006, New York Magazine Holdings LLC.

[krulltime]

Hell's Kitchen (Clinton), Manhattan:


HELL'S HISTORY


By MAX GROSS
May 4, 2006

"Hell hath no limits," declared Christopher Marlowe's Mephistopheles.
But Hell's Kitchen is limited from 36th Street up to 59th Street and from Eighth Avenue westward.

According to James Trager's "The New York Chronology," the neighborhood's name came about in 1882, when a newspaper reporter called a particularly decrepit tenement "Hell's Kitchen" - but the description sounded right for the neighborhood as a whole, which had long been dogged by gang warfare and lawlessness.

According to another version of the story, the name came when a rookie cop said to his veteran partner, "This place is hell itself." No, the veteran replied, "Hell's a mild climate. This is hell's kitchen."

The neighborhood was born 30 years earlier, when the Hudson River Railroad opened along 11th Avenue in 1851 and mostly Irish immigrants began putting up shanties.

"Here they raised pigs and goats, scavenged for food and firewood, hired out as day laborers, and found jobs in the industrialized areas," writes Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace in "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898."

During the 1860s and '70s, African-Americans moved in because the neighborhood was within walking distance to the longshoreman and service jobs that were open to them, but the neighborhood remained heavily Irish and saw clashes between Protestants and Catholics - with a particularly bloody dustup in the summer of 1871.

When New York's Irish-American population finally surpassed its German-American population in the 1890s, one of its greatest concentrations was in Hell's Kitchen.

During the 1930s, the neighborhood's worst tenements were finally torn down and the elevated train - which was noisy and blocked out most of the natural light - was dismantled. In the 1950s, much of the neighborhood was renamed Clinton, in honor of former mayor and governor DeWitt Clinton.

Respectability had definitely arrived by 1989 when 1 Worldwide Plaza, a $550 million complex of offices and condos, opened at 880 Eighth Ave. (Those are 1989 dollars, remember.) Since then, everything has only heated up in Hell's Kitchen.

"Where hell is," Mephistopholes added, "there must we ever be."


HELL YEAH!
MIDTOWN WEST SIZZLES AS FLASHY NEW CONDOS AND RENTALS TURN UP THE HEAT WEST OF EIGHTH AVENUE


By ADAM BONISLAWSKI

May 4, 2006 -- Go West, young man!" New York newspaperman Horace Greeley wasn't talking about the Manhattan real-estate market when he offered that famous advice, but given the current rate of development along the city's occidental edge, he could have been.

With a new crop of buildings popping up along Ninth, 10th and 11th avenues in Midtown, Gotham is undergoing its own sort of westward expansion. Instead of log cabins along the Mississippi, though, we've got high-rises over the Hudson. And that's not corn they're growing - those are luxury condos.

Area resident Karl Miller has seen change sweep over the neighborhood since he moved to the Strand building on West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue three years ago.

"It's really in a big redevelopment cycle," he says. "That's why I bought here three years ago. I was on the Upper West Side, which is a beautiful area, but it was pretty much done with building new buildings."

And, in fact, Miller just purchased a new studio in one of the buildings that's been giving the neighborhood much of its buzz - the much ballyhooed Atelier.

A joint project from the Moinian Group and MacFarlane Partners, the 46-story, 478-unit condo development has drawn notice with amenities like a sun deck and sky-lit indoor pool and a sleek Costas Kondylis design inspired by the many generations of ocean liners that have docked just across the way at the Hudson River piers. With units ranging from studios to two-bedrooms, apartments in the building begin around $600,000 and top out at $1.5 million - which, to Miller's mind, was too good a deal to pass up.

"I really wasn't even looking to move," he says of his decision to head to Atelier, "but I just really liked the look of the building - the lobby, the basketball courts. It just looked great. I just thought it was a great opportunity."

A couple blocks away at the Orion building at 350 W. 42nd St., Long Island resident Michael Moloney experienced a similar case of love at first sight. Moloney and his wife had been looking for months for a place in the city to use as a pied-…-terre.

"We were all over the place," he says, "uptown, downtown. We looked for a good eight to 10 weeks."

Then, while on the West Side looking at another building, Moloney's broker suggested they swing by the Orion. Taken with features like the 551-unit development's pool, spa, gym, sun deck and housekeeping and concierge services, Moloney pulled the trigger on a two-bedroom right then and there.

"We put a deposit on it that day," he says. "It was exactly what we were looking for."

In addition to the building itself, Moloney was sold on the neighborhood - in particular its curious mix of quiet and commotion.

"We were looking for a place that had activities - shows, restaurants, things like that - but that wasn't right on Broadway. We figured we'd look on the outskirts of areas that were going to be up-and-coming.

"This is a developing area. I see it being revitalized."

His eyes don't lie. In addition to Atelier and the Orion, a host of other buildings are going up in the area. A block west of the Orion, a 800-plus-unit condo/rental development from Twining Property, Related Companies and MacFarlane Partners is slated to rise at 440 W. 42nd St. Down the way at 650 W. 42nd St., Silverstein Properties' One River Place already stands - its 921 rental units rising 40 stories above the Hudson - and there are plans for another 53-story condo development, Two River Place, next door.

Plus, as Moinian Group CEO Joseph Moinian notes, a 900-unit mixed rental-condo building is planned to go up next to Atelier within the next four years. Add to this the developments from the early 2000s like the Ivy Tower rental building at 350 W. 42nd St. and the Zebra rentals at 420 W. 42nd St., and you've got an area where construction has been going gangbusters.

"What we saw in the late '90s and the first few years after the millennium was an influx of rental construction - large buildings with high-wealth, professional individuals that started to settle and get comfortable there," says Corcoran Sunshine Marketing managing director Daniel Cordeiro, describing the neighborhood's progression. "So, with that, now there's a huge condominium demand from people who have either lived there before or have been exposed to it socially."

Much of the activity has centered around the 42nd Street corridor, but there's plenty of action to be found moving northward as well. And whether you call the area Hell's Kitchen, Clinton or Midtown West, people are flocking to it.

Greg Fraser moved to the neighborhood from Philadelphia this March, taking a studio in the new 149-unit Clinton West building at West 47th and 10th Avenue. Thus far, he's found the convenience of Midtown to be key.

"There are great restaurants in the area, a number of parks," he says. "And I can walk to Penn Station, I can walk to Central Park and I can walk to my office - you can't do much better than that."

And unlike much of Manhattan, there are many brand-new apartments for renters along with all the new condos.

At West 52nd and 10th, the Dermot Co. is putting up a four-building, 300-unit rental complex called the Mosaic. The project, which will contain studios and one- and two-bedrooms renting for $2,000 and up, is an environmentally friendly, or "green," development, constructed in accordance with environmental building standards set by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A few blocks north at 57th and 11th stands another "green" building, the Helena - a 580-unit rental development built by the Durst Organization and Rose Associates.

The allure of the area is "your urban, traditional New York experience with lots of smaller retail use and a thriving restaurant and arts scene," says Daniel Kaplan, principal with FXFOWLE, the architect for both developments.

"It's so much different between 57th and 42nd Street than it was five years ago," says Dermot Co. principal Stephen Benjamin. "This is really the last piece of development that hasn't been completed - that 10th, 11th, 12th avenue area over by the river."

As Atelier buyer Miller says: "This area seems to be getting really built up now. It seems to be the new up-and-coming hot spot."


Copyright 2006 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[pianoman11686]

New York's Newest Suburb

BY GABRIELLE BIRKNER - Staff Reporter of the Sun

June 12, 2006

URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/34220

Welcome to "TriBurBia."

That's what the former artists enclave known as TriBeCa is now called by the young families rapidly putting down roots in the neighborhood.

Baby buggies crowd recently lonely sidewalks, nursery schools are fielding a record number of applications, and a slew of new businesses catering to the under-5 set are capitalizing on TriBeCa's transformation into family-land.

Less than five years ago, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Triangle Below Canal just north of the World Trade Center was uninhabitable. Lower Manhattan's future looked so bleak that a state agency gave away $500 a month for up to two years to people willing to move downtown.

These days, $500 won't put a dent in the rent. The neighborhood now boasts the city's priciest apartments and is establishing itself as New York's most family-friendly neighborhood amid the proliferation of converted residential lofts.

"Our secret is out," a 39-year-old TriBeCa resident, Karie Parker Davidson, said. "There used to be nobody on the sidewalks, and you knew absolutely everyone in the neighborhood. Now, there are tons of strollers, but chances are you still know everyone." Ms. Parker Davidson, an attorney who moved with her husband to the neighborhood in 1991, has two daughters, ages 4 and 6.

"It's starting to feel a little crowded," Ms. Parker Davidson said. "The economics are different; the demographics are different. People here have tried to maintain that downtown, artsy feel, but you can't have an edgy, artistic neighborhood without artists."

Still, it is the enclave's perceived intimacy and the stellar reputation of Public School 234 that convinced a father of 5- and 2-year-old boys, Daniel Gluck, to head downtown.

"You go into a store, and say, 'Hi Bill' or 'Hi Mary,'" Mr.Gluck, 38, the founder of the Museum of Sex, said. "It's not that it feels just like the suburbs, but there is a sense of community that you don't get on the Upper East Side, or even the Upper West Side."

U.S. Census data from 2000 shows fewer than 35,000 Manhattan residents lived below Canal Street. While toxic fumes and debris forced some area residents from their homes for weeks and months after September 11, Lower Manhattan's population has since soared past 50,000, according to the chairwoman of the area's Community Board 8, Julie Menin.

The influx of families is breeding a new generation of schools and family friendly businesses, and many more are anticipated as six new luxury condominiums open in the next few years.

A 23-year TriBeCa resident who is a local history columnist, Oliver Allen, said he never would have predicted TriBeCa's fashionable popularity and abundant wealth. Mr. Allen writes about neighborhood history for the Tribeca Trib and is the author of the 1999 book "Tales of Old Tribeca: An illustrated history of New York'sTriangle Below Canal Street."

"When we moved to the area, we thought it would always be a little unusual, a little peculiar, not upscale in any way," he said. "Boy were we fooled."

A ranking from Forbes magazine shows median home sales topping $1.8 million and $1.6 million in TriBeCa's 10013 and 10007 zip codes. The high prices aren't an impediment to young families enjoying inheritances, Wall Street salaries, and real estate riches.

"Even with all the money that's coming down here, the people have made a conscious choice to get away from some of the stuff going on uptown - the social ambitiousness," an Upper East Side native who moved to TriBeCa in November 2001, Catherine Greenman, said. "They want a tighter sense of community. It is in danger of getting more crowded but, hopefully, that feeling and that intention will remain."

While social ambitions may dissipate south of Canal Street, preschool competition only heats up in a neighborhood with few options. Ms. Greenman, a 39-year-old writer and mother of two sons, ages 4 and 2, said she was asked to write three recommendations for would-be students of TriBeCa preschools.

Neighborhood growth has forced P.S. 234, which is now building an annex, to operate at more than 120% capacity, closing a computer lab to accommodate the overflow and shutting its prekindergarten program.

The increasingly competitive atmosphere for preschool is a relatively new phenomenon in the neighborhood, the founder and head of Washington Market School, Ronnie Moskowitz, said.

"It became more of a concerted effort about five years ago," Ms. Moskowitz said, reflecting on the 30 years since she opened a school in her TriBeCa loft. Washington Market now serves more than 300 students in two neighborhood locations.

With the classes full at the neighborhood's existing preschools, the Montessori School of Manhattan opened three years ago with 22 students. This fall, the Beach Street nursery school will reach its cap of 250 students. It is turning away 90% of applicants, the head of school, Bridie Gauthier, said.

"I don't see it dying down anytime soon," she said, predicting that the neighborhood's population would continue to grow for at least another 15 years. To meet that demand, Ms. Gauthier said the school - where annual tuition ranges from $10,000 to $20,000 - plans a second Lower Manhattan location in September 2007.

For older children, the for-profit Claremont Preparatory School opened on Broad Street last year. Enrollment at the school is expected to double to 120 students next fall, the incoming headmaster, Irwin Shlachter, said.

Another yardstick of TriBeCa's baby boom is the influx of young family-friendly businesses. An indoor activities center for young children and their parents, "miniMasters," opened in April with classes including motherbaby Pilates, art, ballet, and Suzuki-method violin and piano lessons. Parents can get manicures, pedicures, and massages while their children play.

"It's a wonderful place to hang out with other mothers," a TriBeCa resident with a 2-year-old daughter, Stacy Cadolini, said. "It's a great networking environment."

Ms. Cadolini said an indoor play space is a delightful departure from the crowded Washington Market Park along the West Side Highway. "It's so busy all the time," she said. "You can't go there during certain hours because it's so crowded."

The neighborhood's demographic shift also means earlier crowds at Roc, the Duane Street Italian restaurant that Ms. Cadolini and her husband, Rocco, own. "At first everyone was single, and now it seems they've all gotten married and had children," she said.

Families are the core clientele of the Soda Shop, an old-fashioned milkshake and sandwich shop that opened last fall on Chambers Street. "The number of pregnant women you see - it's unbelievable," an owner of the Soda Shop, Craig Bero, said. "It's a real community down here."

Mr. Bero said he hopes the Soda Shop will be a first-date place for TriBeCa's youngsters when they hit their teens. For now, he's creating a tree house-themed room for children's birthday parties that will include a cupcake bar, a pinball machine, and a bevy of vintage toys.

"Living here - it's almost as if you bought a house in a new, family-friendly development in the suburbs," the owner of TriBeCa Girls clothing store, Bryn Asen, said. "There are not a lot of single people, and there aren't many older people." Ms. Asen and her husband, Robert, opened the store ago on Duane Street to serve the proliferation of young "TriBurBans."

While it's a sure boon for business, the rapid growth is met with ambivalence among old-timers who want to preserve TriBeCa as a lightly populated haven. The neighborhood's crowded Food Emporium grocery store will soon compete with a Whole Foods market slated to open alongside a Barnes & Noble bookstore at the base of a 420-unit condominium complex on Warren Street.

A TriBeCa resident since 2000, Isabel Rose, said the neighborhood "is heaven if you have kids."

"There's a total absence, right now, of pretension, of showiness, of gaudiness that's associated with uptown living," Ms. Rose, who is in her late 30s and has a 4-year-old daughter, said. "Outside the preschools here, you don't have the pileup of Town Cars that you might see in front of the 92nd Street Y."

She said she hopes the neighborhood can strike a balance between development and preservation. "I'm hoping we won't end up with three more Starbucks and a Victoria's Secret - the shops that have turned the Upper West Side into a mall," said Ms. Rose, author of the 2005 novel, "The J.A.P. Chronicles." "I hope that TriBeCa gets the amenities it needs while maintaining its individualistic spirit. I do hope it's not spoiled."

© 2006 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC. All rights reserved.

[clubBR]

what neighborhoods have rent for less than $1000 rent/month for a 1 bedroom apt.?
-Excluding the ghetto
an area that maintains its distance from manhattan (to keep prices low) but having ample transportation and its own commercial strip? Looking in Queens, Staten Island, or Manhattan itself.

[krulltime]

Washington Heights, Manhattan:


New Winds at an Island Outpost


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/04/nyregion/domi600.jpg
Inside Los Guarinos bodega in Washington Heights.


By MANNY FERNANDEZ
March 4, 2007

STANDING behind the cramped counter of Los Guarinos, his bodega in Washington Heights, Joel Olivo deals not in big money but in small change. Jolly Ranchers candies, at a nickel apiece, are among his biggest sellers. Los Guarinos also sells cold beer and cigarettes, but on most days it is sweetness that prevails there. Neighborhood children ask for chocolate bars, and an arcade game in the corner fills the bodega with an electronic lullaby.

In Mr. Olivo’s establishment, in a modest storefront on Amsterdam Avenue near 161st Street, gambling is discouraged. Yet there is a running bet in the store that is a sign of changing times in this neighborhood: How many years will it take for Dominicans, who have dominated Washington Heights for decades, to become the minority there, and for whites to become the new majority?

Some of Mr. Olivo’s customers and friends say five years. Others predict seven. “I say 10 years,” Mr. Olivo said.

This is not your ordinary gentrification story. Washington Heights, the densely developed square mile that extends from 155th Street to roughly Dyckman Street, and from river to river, is to Dominicans what Harlem has been to blacks: a cultural capital with deep symbolic meaning. But over the past few years, this neighborhood of five- and six-story prewar apartment buildings has grown wealthier, hipper and better educated.

As the neighborhood has changed, a growing number of its Dominicans have moved to University Heights, Morris Heights and other neighborhoods in the west Bronx; some have left the city altogether. The wager at Los Guarinos is a lighthearted take not only on this exodus, but also on the questions it raises about the future of Washington Heights as a working-class Dominican stronghold.

The Dominican migration, powered by rising rents and other costs, is scattering families and friends who lived in the neighborhood for generations. This reshuffling is also fueling an uptown real estate boom, widening the gap between rich and poor, and realigning Dominican political power in the city. The shifts have even inspired an Off Broadway musical.

Mr. Olivo is confident about his prediction as to the neighborhood’s future. “I know I’ll win,” he said, “because everyone is moving.” But he does not believe that he will be around to collect. “The rent,” he explained, “will kick me out.”

•

Washington Heights has welcomed immigrants for a century. The Irish arrived in the early 1900s. European Jews, among them the family of Henry Kissinger, flocked there to escape the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, around the time that affluent African-Americans like the jazz musician Count Basie migrated up from Harlem. By the 1950s and 1960s, so many Greeks lived in Washington Heights that the neighborhood was known as the Astoria of Manhattan. Even as that label gained currency, Cubans and Puerto Ricans were beginning to move in.

The ’80s and the ’90s, however, belonged to the Dominicans.

Bremilde Ramos, a 29-year-old waitress with dark hair and a bright smile, remembers the summers: old men playing dominoes on tables on the sidewalk, the packed streets transformed into playgrounds. She also remembers the scary times, like the day in 1999 when a man was shot and killed inside her building on West 162nd Street. And she remembers that one apartment operated as a makeshift brothel.

Yet Ms. Ramos, who, like thousands of her fellow Dominicans, immigrated to Washington Heights with her family as a child, also recalls the vibrancy amid the grime. “You felt like you were in your own,” she said. “This was your own little country, you know, so many Hispanics were around.”

New York has many Hispanic enclaves, but only in Washington Heights did the size, density and visibility of the Latino population create a kind of sixth borough. From this high perch, visitors often wonder if they have accidentally stumbled into the 31st province of the Dominican Republic.

Those visitors can pass a barbershop on 181st Street and see a customer who happens to be the nephew of Joaquín Balaguer, a former president of the Dominican Republic. They can find not only Dominican merchants, but also Dominican doctors and Dominican lawyers. The red, white and blue Dominican flag flies from fire escapes, streetlights, even Pepsi trucks.

One morning in 2004, the local streets erupted with noisy political debate as thousands of voters cast their ballots for president. But the focus was not on Bush and Kerry. It was on Mejía and Fernández, candidates for the Dominican presidency. The vote represented the first time that Dominicans living abroad could vote in a Dominican presidential election.


‘Rich Folks and Hipsters’


The recent transformation of Washington Heights is reflected not only on the streets but also on the stage. “In the Heights,” a charming little musical that opened last month at 37 Arts, on West 37th Street near 10th Avenue, offers a snapshot of a neighborhood in flux. “When this whole city is rich folks and hipsters,” a bodega owner wonders, “who’s going to miss this raggedy little business?” The owner of a hair salon announces that she is moving her shop to the Bronx, where rents are cheaper.

When another character learns that the bodega is shutting for good, he screams: “This is the end of an era!” The line is intended as a joke, but seven miles north of the theater, in the shops and restaurants of Washington Heights, the words resonate less cheerfully.

Signs of change, many small but telling, fill the streets. You can still get a crispy chicken empanada for $1 at 181st Street and Audubon Avenue, where Jose Castillo has been selling them from a pushcart for nearly a decade, but you can also buy an $8 goat cheese tartine a half-mile away at In Vino Veritas, on St. Nicholas Avenue. While some tenants still pay $600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, others pay triple that.

In a sense, the neighborhood is becoming two neighborhoods, even down to its name. Old-timers call it the Heights; newcomers, particularly those who log onto www.washington-heights.us, refer to Washington Heights and its northern neighbor Inwood as WaHI, in a kind of SoHo-speak.

The corner of 181st Street and Audubon Avenue still bustles noon to night with flashes of rapid-fire Spanish conversations and bursts of merengue blaring from passing cars. But the signs of change are increasingly visible. New residents can enjoy live jazz Thursday nights at Plum Pomidor on Broadway. They can visit the Starbucks on 181st Street. At the elegant Hispaniola restaurant a few doors down from Starbucks, they can dine on miso butterfish with steamed rice for $28.

Ms. Ramos, the waitress, sees fewer Dominican mom-and-pop stores and more chain stores. Mr. Olivo can now count among his Dominican customers six people who moved to the Bronx. And when Ms. Ramos visits her mother’s building on 162nd Street, she notices more non-Hispanic white faces. Her best friend, who used to live on the same floor, has moved to the Bronx. Others have migrated to Florida.

“The neighborhood was one way, and now you look and you don’t know anybody,” Ms. Ramos said. “Everybody’s gone.”

A new set of census-based numbers, prepared by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, illustrates the neighborhood’s gradual change, while offering signs that the Dominican presence remains strong.

From 1990 to 2000, the Dominican population in Washington Heights and Inwood soared, from about 88,000 to nearly 117,000. But in the following five years their numbers dropped slightly, to fewer than 113,000. During those same five years, the total number of Latinos in the area also fell, from about 165,000 to 155,000, while the number of non-Hispanic whites increased from fewer than 29,000 to more than 30,000.

Laird Bergad, the center’s director, described the decrease of Dominicans as statistically insignificant, possibly a reflection of a small drop in the area’s overall population. Dominicans, in fact, increased as a percentage of the total population in Washington Heights and Inwood, from 43 percent in 1990 to 53 percent in 2005.

What the census figures do clearly show, however, is a sharp decline in the number of foreign-born Dominicans in the area. In 1990, 89 percent of Dominicans in Washington Heights and Inwood between 15 and 44 years old had been born in the Dominican Republic. Ten years later, that figure was down to 78 percent. In 2005, it was 67 percent.

“This is unmistakable evidence that immigration has slowed,” Professor Bergad said, pointing out that this trend casts a shadow on one of the most important roles of Washington Heights — as Dominicans’ main portal into New York. However, with the area buffeted by that shift and by the influx of wealthier residents and the migration of Dominicans to the Bronx and elsewhere, it is hard to surmise what the future face of Washington Heights will be.

These trends come vividly to life in the experiences of Ms. Ramos. Nearly two years ago, she moved to the South Bronx with her boyfriend and her 8-year-old son. She would have preferred to stay in Washington Heights, but her new home, a two-bedroom brick town house at Boston Road and Third Avenue, cost only $416,000. Half a mile from the building where her mother still lives, a three-bedroom condo was recently on the market for $1 million.

Ms. Ramos likes her new home. The neighborhood is calm, and there’s a bus stop just two blocks away. But she misses her old place in the Heights, especially the way it used to be. “It’s very, very quiet,” she said of her old building now. “People just pass by you and you don’t even notice them because they keep to themselves.”


Bilingual Karaoke


Not everyone sees the changes in Washington Heights as a threat to its Dominican identity.

One person who is confident that the neighborhood will remain a Dominican stronghold for decades to come is Josephine Infante, executive director of the Hunts Point Economic Development Corporation in the Bronx. Although a growing number of Dominicans live in her borough, she notes that they are spread out, and that there is no concentration of Dominican stores, restaurants and hair salons.

“That’s why everyone goes to Washington Heights,” Ms. Infante said. “There’s an aroma. There’s something there that’s very special.”

Politically speaking, too, Dominicans in the Bronx are barely visible. Even though the Dominican population, at 213,000, is not too distant from the Puerto Rican population of 300,000, the borough has no elected Dominican officials.

“You have this kind of Puerto Rican political machine right now in the Bronx that’s pretty formidable,” said Angelo Falcón, president and founder of the National Institute for Latino Policy, a New York-based research and advocacy group.

But in the opinion of Adriano Espaillat, who has represented Washington Heights since he was elected the first Dominican member of the State Assembly in 1996, the Dominican political base in the neighborhood remains strong despite the exodus to the Bronx. In the 2005 Democratic primary, for instance, the turnout among registered Democrats in the average election district citywide was 15 percent; in Washington Heights it was roughly 24 percent.

“Our voting power in the Heights is very strong compared to some of the other emerging communities,” Mr. Espaillat said.

In income, however, Washington Heights looks very different from how it once looked. In 2005, the median household income for non-Hispanic whites in Washington Heights was $56,300. For Dominicans, it was just $32,800. In that same year, 35 percent of non-Hispanic white households earned $75,000 to $200,000, compared with just 12 percent of Dominican households.

“The old question of class is still present,” Professor Bergad said, “and nothing highlights that better than this question of income distribution.”

Perhaps surprisingly, these disparities do not appear to be stirring tensions between Dominicans and whites. The sidewalk menu at L’Fonda restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, for example, which used to be entirely in Spanish, now lists some items in Spanish (“salcocho”) on one side and in English on the other side (“Dominican-style soup”). At Coogan’s, a restaurant and bar on Broadway at 169th Street, Tuesday and Saturday nights feature bilingual karaoke.

Coogan’s, in fact, has become something of a bridge between the two sides. Owned by a pair of gregarious Irish-Americans, David Hunt and Peter Walsh, the bar is a gathering spot for politicians and even sponsors an annual race called the Salsa, Blues and Shamrocks 5K Run, which this year kicks off, rain or shine, at 9 this morning.


Battling the Landlords


But good will doesn’t extend to every corner of the neighborhood, especially when most of its 200,000 residents are renters and relations between tenants and landlords are increasingly strained.

Raysa Castillo, a lawyer who represents many Washington Heights tenants in housing court, says, as do many housing activists and community leaders, that some landlords make cosmetic improvements to their buildings to justify rent increases, then try to evict those unable to pay. The advocates also say some landlords falsely accuse tenants of violating leases, or drive out tenants by letting their apartments deteriorate. In response, Roberta Bernstein, president of the Small Property Owners of New York, an advocacy group, said that building owners who go to the trouble and expense of taking tenants to court often do so for legitimate reasons. “If they’re dragging tenants into court, it’s because they’re not paying rent,” said Mrs. Bernstein, whose group includes a number of Washington Heights landlords. “I won’t deny that there’s some bad owners, but there’s also some bad tenants.”

Nevertheless, Ms. Castillo finds the broad housing picture, typical of modern gentrification, to be disheartening. “We are experiencing something totally different than what was experienced by the Greeks, Irish, Cubans and Puerto Ricans who were here,” she said. “The majority of our folks are not leaving because they’re doing better. The majority are leaving because they cannot afford rent.”

In 2004, for instance, more than 15,000 eviction notices were filed in housing court for tenants in Washington Heights and its northern and southern neighbors, Inwood and Hamilton Heights, said Mr. Espaillat, the assemblyman. The next year, he said, the number climbed to more than 19,000.

Ms. Castillo, who lives on Cabrini Boulevard at 187th Street, has seen such economic struggles firsthand. The buildings in the few blocks around her home were once full of blue-collar Dominicans, she said, but many of those neighbors have left in search of cheaper housing. As for the Dominican families who remain, she said she knew precisely who they are and where they live.

How could she know all those names and locations? Because she can count those who remain on one hand. Five.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/04/nyregion/domi2650.jpg
The window of Jossy's Photo Studio.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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Preaching the Gospel of Real Estate

by Dana Rubinstein | April 16, 2008

http://observer.cast.advomatic.com/files/imagecache/vertical/files/HillsideAve-CanterosArch.jpg

A Washington Heights church has divined the gospel of real estate, selling a portion of its land to a developer, who, in turn, will help build a new church three times the size of the old, dilapidated one.

Of course, the developer gets something out of this, too – in this case, the land on which to build a 16-story residential high rise with 75 units; 20 percent of which will be affordable housing.

Rocky Mountain Development LLC is now in contract to buy the land from Rocky Mount Baptist Church in Washington Heights for approximately $6 million. That’s a 4,286 percent appreciation since 1980, when the church bought the spot for $140,000.

“We had no idea our church was worth that kind of money,” said Rev. Eugene Hudson in a statement. “So when the surveyor told me the news, I was elated, ecstatic, and almost speechless…I really thanked the Lord for that. He must want us to continue to do our good works.”

As part of the terms of the contract, the developers will replace the existing 5,000-square-foot church with a 15,000-square-foot house of worship on the
same site, at 37-41 Hillside Avenue.

Even better, the new housing could prove a fertile ground for new congregants.

Construction should be completed in 2010.

Copyright 2008 The New York Observer.

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Streetscapes | Second Avenue at Eighth Street

1880s Features, Unveiled Again

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/17/realestate/17scap-600.jpg
Left: Byron Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Right: Ruby Washington/The New York Times

ENDURING GIFTS The German Dispensary and adjacent library on Second Avenue near East Eighth Street, in 1899, left, and as they look today, right, were founded by Anna Ottendorfer and her husband, Oswald.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: August 15, 2008

FOR most of the last half-century, the striking Victorian interior of the German Dispensary, built in 1884 at 137 Second Avenue, near East Eighth Street, was neglected and forlorn. Now, the rich red-brick-and-terra-cotta building has a new owner, and work is under way on uncovering its unusual decoration from 50 years of entombment.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/15/realestate/17scap.1-190.jpg Kings Notable New Yorkers/Office for Metropolitan History
The Ottendorfers were philanthropists and owned the influential German- American newspaper New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung in the 19th century.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/15/realestate/17scap.2-500.jpgRuby Washington/The New York Times
The sculptures on the dispensary’s exterior include portrait busts of medical and scientific pioneers.

Like the branch library next door, the Second Avenue building of the German Dispensary was the gift of Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer, who ran the German newspaper New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung. That journal had great influence in Little Germany, on the Lower East Side around First and Second Avenues below 14th Street. The 1886 edition of Appleton’s Dictionary of New York described an area in which “lager-beer shops are numerous, and nearly all the signs are of German names.”

The dispensary had been founded in 1857 and evolved into what is now Lenox Hill Hospital, at 77th Street and Park Avenue.

In the mid-19th century, charitable institutions flourished and dispensaries met the needs of walk-in patients who did not have regular doctors.

There were hospitals, orphanages and similar institutions for various nationalities and religions, among them Norwegians, French, Swiss, Italians, Jews, Presbyterians and Baptists.

Of dispensaries, New York had about a dozen, including the Good-Samaritan, DeMilt, Northeastern, Northern, Harlem (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo), Trinity Church and Eclectic Dispensaries. The Germans had a strong presence, and more than one dedicated facility in the area: just a few blocks away, at 78 Seventh Street, there was one called the German Poliklinik.

Mrs. Ottendorfer was particularly interested in the Second Avenue project and picked the architect herself: William Schickel, who trained in Germany and came to the United States in the 1870s. He worked for Richard Morris Hunt before embarking on his own career, eventually becoming the top designer for the city’s Germans.

Mrs. Ottendorfer’s gift opened in 1884. Though well received by the German community, it did not win over a critic for the Real Estate Record & Guide, who described an “entirely commonplace” building in a “Germanized renaissance” style, and singled out the porch as “very unschooled and uncouth.” But the writer, who was unidentified, did praise the “charm and precision of the color” of the terra cotta.

The three-story building, practically incandescent in color, carries on its portico deeply modeled portrait busts of medical and scientific pioneers like Hippocrates, who gave his name to the medical oath, and Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Just visible in the recesses is the name Löher, most likely a reference to Alois Loeher, a well-known sculptor of the period.

The frieze of busts at the top of the building is harder to see, but looks to be by the same hand: William Harvey, English physiologist; Carl von Linne (also known as Carl Linnaeus), Swedish botanist; Alexander von Humboldt, German scientist; Antoine Lavoisier, French chemist; and Christoph Hufeland, German physician. Photographs of some of the sculptures are posted at http://gammablog.com/tag/stuyvesant-polyclinic (http://gammablog.com/tag/stuyvesant-polyclinic)/.

This was an early period for terra cotta, and there is a fresh innocence to the vigorous, deep carving, quite different from such work in later years, which often looked routine.

The 1888 Charity Directory said the German Dispensary had treated 28,000 patients in the prior year.

By 1905 the dispensary had moved out to a new building on the Upper East Side and sold its old building to the German Poliklinik. Both institutions changed their names during World War I, the Poliklinik to Stuyvesant Polyclinic.

By the 1960s the Germans had been replaced by a younger, quite different generation. Dr. Arnold Bernstein, the institution’s chief psychologist, told The New York Times in 1961 that he treated actors, poets, painters and writers, for up to $1.50 per visit. Most of “these infantile, immature personalities,” the doctor said, have “a very sincere desire to do something useful and creative.”

In more recent years — until its sale last year — the old dispensary building was part of Cabrini Medical Center. Although hospitals are notoriously hard on historic architecture, the interior of the Schickel building was remarkably intact, if run-down, with intricate stairway ironwork and door enframements, red marble wainscoting and a highly colored tile floor. Views of these are posted at http://curbed.com (http://curbed.com/) (search the site for Stuyvesant Polyclinic).

Now the architect David Mayerfeld is working on an alteration for a future occupant, which he describes only as “a think-tank sort of thing, that works on business problems.”

He plans to strip the paint from the intricate ironwork stairway railings and columns, and will have to add a sprinkler system throughout to retain the open stair hall. He says that removing half a century of dropped ceilings and tacked-on flooring has been a process of discovery, as bits of tile, tin ceiling and other finishes suddenly appear.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

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Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

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Living In | Manhattanville

At Harlem’s Heart, an Enigmatic Neighborhood

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/17/realestate/17living-600.jpg Andrew Henderson/The New York Times
WITH PARKING Fairway, tucked under the viaduct at 131st Street, is one attraction of Manhattanville. These days, some residents are disquieted by Columbia University’s plans to absorb a chunk of the area into its campus. More Photos > (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/14/realestate/20080817LIVINGIN_index.html)

By DEBORAH BALDWIN
Published: August 15, 2008

STEP off the elevated subway at the center of Manhattanville and you may wonder if there’s really a there there. The view from the station above 125th Street and Broadway can be disorienting: no little shops and bodegas to say, “This is it.” What you see instead are warehouses, bus depots and factories, as well as unmarked towers and a crosshatch of diagonal streets more reminiscent of the West Village. Yet there’s something slightly magical about the way hills rise up around the area. A recent group exhibition of photographs dedicated to Manhattanville characterized its haunting mix of low-lying back streets, vaulted overpasses, vintage churches and riverfront as “strange, unresolved or unsettling.”

Multimedia

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No wonder few people agree on its future — or even, for that matter, whether it exists in the first place. “I’ve considered the whole area Harlem (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo),” said Sarah Martin, who has lived in the Grant Houses complex in Manhattanville since 1957, voicing the dismissive sentiment of some longtime residents.

Others say you hear the name these days mainly because it’s attached to the controversial plan by Columbia University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) to transform 17 acres of Manhattanville into an extended campus.

But there is a there there, insists Eric K. Washington, the author of “Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem.”

“It’s not a neighborhood that you walk through and all of a sudden you’ve stepped into a Jane Austen (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/jane_austen/index.html?inline=nyt-per) novel,” Mr. Washington said. “But it does have a quality of intrigue. It seems to whisper to you, ‘Boy, have I got stories.’ ”

He described how it was incorporated as a village in 1806, straddling two thoroughfares now known as Broadway and 125th, its streets laid out old-style, pregrid. Some east-west streets still hold onto names like Tiemann Place — “a real cabbie-stumper,” said Mr. Washington, who lived on it for 20 years.

The 2000 census counted roughly 39,000 residents, 51 percent Hispanic or Latino (of any race), 32 percent non-Hispanic black and 10 percent white.

Many more people simply pass through, to shop at the sprawling Fairway supermarket on West 131st, line up with the crowds at Dinosaur-Bar-B-Que on 12th Avenue, and rubberneck at the film crews that set up under the arches of the Riverside Drive overpass.

With more warehouses than town houses, it’s an area that real estate agents like to redraw as part of higher-profile neighborhoods, as if tugging on the corners of a Google map. Though upscale condominiums occasionally come onto the market, the pickings are slim, according to Sidney Whelan, a sales associate at Halstead Property.

You can hardly blame people for trying to live there, though. West Harlem Piers Park opened this summer near Fairway; there’s a bike path along the river and a strip of hot new watering holes just up 12th Avenue; and the Henry Hudson Parkway is right there, offering a quick route upstate. And where else would a doll factory face an auto-body shop, or a renovated commercial space called the Mink Building — rich people’s furs used to summer there — sit opposite a live poultry shop?


WHAT YOU’LL FIND
For an area so small — 122nd to 136th Streets, from the Hudson River to St. Nicholas and Manhattan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo) Avenues — Manhattanville covers a lot of psychogeographical ground. West 125th, home to the Cotton Club, feels like Harlem, while the southwest corner is oriented toward Riverside Park, where “you can stand at the top of the hill and see the George Washington Bridge,” said Linda Mahoney, who lives on Tiemann Place.

Farther north, on Broadway, you pick up a Dominican flavor. “It’s always been polyglot, unlike Harlem,” Mr. Washington said. “It forces you to rethink where you’re visiting — it’s a bit more complex.”

Today’s multiethnic mosaic includes Latinos who don’t speak Spanish and Middle Easterners who do, said Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, a member of the local community board who has lived on West 136th since 1964. Holding it together, he says, is not only tolerance but also the residual glue that brought the community together in the 1990s to fight a common enemy: the drug lords who ruled northern Manhattanville’s streets.

By 2005, the dealers retreated indoors, he said. He credits not only a police crackdown but also newcomers determined to make the area their home. One of them was Judith Matloff, who lives a few blocks north of Manhattanville and has written a pungent memoir, “Home Girl,” about her family’s 2000 purchase of a dilapidated house on a block then ruled by Dominican dealers.

Ms. Matloff paused during a recent walk around the area to stare at movers unloading a mattress — a once-popular way to transfer cocaine, she noted. Then she rallied, heading toward Broadway and its signs of a gradual upswing. “Ray’s Wines and Liquors is having wine tastings,” she said wryly. “Gallo tastings — behind bulletproof glass.”

Critics of Columbia’s plans say these signs of revitalization seem natural and organic, in contrast to the university’s buy-and-hold approach. “Even before a shovel has been dropped in the ground, the expansion has caused disruption and a sense of impending loss,” said Tom DeMott of the Coalition to Preserve Community.

Robert Kasdin, Columbia’s senior executive vice president, argued that rather than disrupt the area, redevelopment would improve its infrastructure. He said the university had taken steps to help preserve and develop housing.

There isn’t a vast stock right now; apart from plentiful student and public housing, inventory is negligible. But for those who qualify, the public housing comes in the form of “H.D.F.C. co-ops,” referring to the Housing Development Fund Corporation — some in stately prewar buildings.

Created after the landlord flight of the 1970s, when tenants bought their buildings from the city, these co-ops have buyer income restrictions and caps on sale prices.

Christa Myers, who lives in an H.D.F.C. building near Convent Avenue and 129th Street and is buying a two-bedroom apartment there, said she was drawn to the building because it was on a quiet block in “a neighborhood that is getting nicer and nicer.”

“I will say, having been raised in Harlem and seeing gentrification, I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Myers said. “I’m an alumna of Columbia, and I love my alma mater,” but the growth will take place “at the expense of some people.”


WHAT YOU’LL PAY
A condo in a former warehouse on St. Nicholas Avenue near West 123rd recently sold for more than $1 million. Such properties are relatively rare.

The going price for co-ops is about $700 a square foot, said Patty LaRocco, a Prudential Douglas Elliman senior vice president.

Bellmarc Realty is offering a 1,000-square-foot two-bedroom at 501 West 122nd at $750,000, and Willie Kathryn Suggs, the well-known Harlem broker, valued an apartment she will be listing on Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson, at $800 a square foot.

For those who qualify and do not mind purchase and sales curbs, H.D.F.C. co-ops often go for less than $100,000. (See nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/developers/til.shtml (http://nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/developers/til.shtml).)

Renters should expect to pay up to $2,500 a month for a two-bedroom two-bath apartment, and $1,900 to $2,100 for a one-bedroom, Mr. Whelan said.


THE SCHOOLS
At the Mott Hall School, serving Grades 4 through 8, 93.9 percent of eighth graders showed proficiency in English and 98 percent in math, versus 43 percent and 60 percent citywide. At Kipp Infinity Charter School, serving Grades 5 through 7, 98.5 percent of the seventh graders showed proficiency in English, and 100 percent in math. At the Kipp Star College Prep School, serving Grades 5 through 8, 54 percent of the eighth graders showed proficiency in English, 95.3 percent in math.

The High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, which admits by test only, reported 2007 SAT averages of 576 in reading, 627 in math and 551 in writing, versus 441, 462 and 433 citywide.


WHAT TO DO
West Harlem Piers Park extends from West 125th to 132nd Street.
Fairway opened on West 131st Street in 1995. When asked why there, the owner, Howard Glickberg, said, “There aren’t many places in Manhattan where you can have 40,000 square feet of selling area and a parking lot also.” How true. Don’t miss the meat section, which fills an entire refrigerated room.

Just north on 12th Avenue are the Hudson River Cafe at West 133rd Street and a restaurant row at West 135th.


THE COMMUTE
Midtown is a quick subway ride from the 1, 2 and 3 stop at 125th and Broadway. Switch to the express at 96th; you’ll get there in 15 minutes.


THE HISTORY
In the early 1800s, Manhattanville was a port village with a crooked main drag called Bloomingdale Road. In the early 1900s, Riverside Drive Viaduct went up, along with a subway line held aloft by Eiffel Tower-like arches, and the village became part of the city. The New York Times bemoaned the changes. “Quaint Landmarks in Manhattanville Passing Away for Modern Improvements,” read a headline in 1912.

[URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/realestate/17livi.html?pagewanted=1&ref=realestate

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Streetscapes | 532-538 Madison Avenue

Four Modest Neighbors and How They Fared

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/24/realestate/24scap-600.jpg Left: Culver Pictures. Right: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
THINGS CHANGE The quartet of high-stoop brownstones built in 1870 at the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and 54th Street — shown in 1914, left, and today, right — was in a fashionable area for a while, but commercial neighbors started to intrude.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: August 22, 2008

IN a city swamped by development, how bad are the chances for four little buildings on a prime Madison Avenue corner in Midtown? Well, maybe not all that grim, despite the big “for sale” sign on one, 534 Madison Avenue, built in 1870 as one of a quartet of brownstones at the northwest corner of 54th Street.


In 1870, John Sares, a builder, put up four high-stoop brownstone houses on that site, as development began to wash over the area. The houses cost $10,000 each to build; they were ostensibly designed by Mortimer C. Merritt, but they followed the tried-and-true formula for such structures so closely that the amount of designing they required is questionable.

The group faced Madison Avenue, which was emerging as a fashionable address. Nevertheless, Mr. Sares, like almost every other developer, built in the usual style of the day, even as it was generally derided. In 1869, for instance, The Real Estate Record and Guide bemoaned the city’s “same never-ending high stoops and gloomy brownstone fronts.”

The arrival of the Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 58th Streets in the 1880s cast a reflected glamour on Madison, but the Vanderbilts proved to be a transitory presence. After 1900, shops, hotels and crowds began to force householders north of 59th Street, and the four brownstones at Madison and 54th had a less idyllic setting.

Still, in 1910 the family of Washington E. Connor, a stockbroker, inhabited the corner building, No. 532, along with seven servants. It was around that time that rules against sidewalk encroachments got tighter — at least on the avenues, where automobiles needed more room — and stoops, window bays and other projections were stripped away.

The disturbance and cost of these alterations caused an instant migration of families; their houses were converted to shops and apartments for residents of much more modest means.

In 1928, a society woman, Sybil Sellar, opened a gown shop in the old Connor house, “a little jewel box,” she told The New York Times, with the walls and ceiling done in gold.

In 1930, the census taker recorded, at No. 538, the decorator Rose Cumming, 42. Born to an Australian sheep rancher, she lived in the brownstone with her sister Dorothy, 30, who had been a prominent silent film actress until 1929 but did not make the transition to talkies (perhaps because of her Australian accent).

In 1936, the Park Curiosity Shop took over No. 536, and the architects Charles N. and Selig Whinston redesigned the exterior “after the fashion of an old London curiosity shop,” according to The New York Times. Old photographs show slate peaked roofs and extensive half-timbering on the facade, although only its pointed roof gables remain.

In 1957, the restaurant chain Chock Full o’Nuts bought the former Connor house and built in its stead the existing trim, modernist seven-story building of swimming-pool blue brick and plate glass. This little gem was designed by Horace Ginsbern, one of the few architects practicing in the era to cut against the grain of absolute simplicity. In the 1950s, a time of humorless white and buff brick, his choice of blue was unusual.

Since 1980, the brownstone character of East Midtown, once quite evident, has become as a sand grain among boulders — 40-plus-story boulders, like the building at 520 Madison Avenue built in 1981 on the southwest corner of 54th. Its splayed lower floors make it look like an elephant’s foot. That wave of colossi all but wiped out the dinged-up little brownstones with oddball stores and funny walk-up apartments that once typified the area.

But, even much altered, the four little buildings on the 54th Street corner still capture some of the flavor of the older neighborhood — back when it was still a neighborhood.

The most exotic is No. 534, with the venerable Persian Shop, run by the Terzis family for decades. In the 1960s, the shop window was filled with intriguing artifacts like jewelry with secret compartments, intricate metalwork and mysteriously named “poison rings.” But although the shop still has its old-fashioned air and the original 1940s-era black glass storefront, Andrew Terzis says his stock is mostly modern jewelry now. “I have to focus on what sells,” he said.

The Terzis building has a “for sale” sign over the door; the asking price is $20 million. According to Mr. Terzis, “there’s been a lot of interest, but I can’t really discuss it now.”

So how has this little outpost of four small buildings survived? Well, the footprint of their entire site — 70 feet by 100 feet — is modest. The broker for 534 Madison Avenue is Paul Massey, president of Massey Knakal Realty Services, and he says the zoning for the site would theoretically allow a 10- or 15-story building. But difficulties with the small lot size make that improbable.

And it is even more improbable that four different owners would agree to sell, even over time. Evans Cyprus, who owns No. 536, the old Park Curiosity Shop building, says he likes Burger Heaven, the venerable lunch spot he owns at the address, right where it is. “Yeah,” he said, “people have made offers, but where can I get another place for a restaurant in Midtown?”

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/realestate/24scap.html?ref=realestate

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

45 Grove Street

The Many Lives of a Village Dowager

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: October 17, 2008

EVEN among the oddball buildings of the West Village, 45 Grove Street defies all typology: it is an 1871 apartment building created from an 1830 mansion.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/19/realestate/19streetscapes_190.jpg New York Historical Society
TALE OF SURVIVAL The structure at 45 Grove Street in the West Village was built in 1830 as a single-family home.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/16/realestate/19streetscapes2_190.jpg G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
The building, at top in 1905 and today, has retained much of its Federal style and original character, including black marble fireplaces, below, and hardwood doors.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/16/realestate/19streetscapes3_650.jpgG. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/10/16/realestate/19streetscapes4_650.jpgG. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

A new owner is now uncovering the multilayered history of this remarkable structure, just off Bleecker Street, which has ties to both John Wilkes Booth and Hart Crane.

The house was built by Samuel Whittemore, a well-to-do manufacturer, and the census of 1830 records nine members of the Whittemore family, as well as two “free colored persons,” living there.

Though it now has four floors, it began life as a two-story structure. The surviving Federal-style lintels on the second floor windows and the rich, molded door surround are of that period. It is not clear whether the house was originally free-standing, but it is now sandwiched in between other structures.

Whittemore sold the house in 1851, and seven years later The New York Times carried an advertisement calling it “Whittemore House” and extolling it as a “first-class boarding house.”

Samuel K. Chester, an actor, lived there around the beginning of 1865. According to testimony from Chester published in The Times in May 1865, John Wilkes Booth had gone there to try to persuade Chester to join a “conspiracy to take over the government” and kidnap President Abraham Lincoln (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincoln/index.html?inline=nyt-per), but Chester declined. Booth assassinated the president in April.

Through the twists and turns of history, 45 Grove became the “Lincoln Home” for destitute soldiers and sailors later that year.

In 1871, Elisha Bloomer, a hatter, retained the architect Benjamin G. Wells for a most unusual alteration, adding two stories and converting the old Whittemore residence into an apartment house.

Instead of completely Victorianizing the structure, Wells duplicated the Federal-style lintels on the upper two floors, and carefully retained most of the interior details, at least on the first floor.

He also enlarged the windows on the first floor, perhaps for store or office use. The tenants in 1890 included a metals dealer and a barber, but in the 1910s the Village underwent a bohemian transformation.

In 1923, the writer Hart Crane lived on the second floor, struggling to eke out a living, and the 1930 census showed the building filled with artistic types, like the Russian-born Zelda Dorfman, a 24-year-old theatrical manager.

In 1937, as the Department of Buildings required the upgrading of old apartment houses, the owners of 45 Grove requested permission to retain the hardwood doors to the apartments on the first floor, “as these doors are highly ornamental.” They described the house as “one of the landmarks in the Greenwich Village section.” The department denied the request, asserting that metal doors were required. But the old wooden doors are still in place.

Somehow, 45 Grove has escaped both demolition and restoration; it has long had the slightly ruined quality that has almost vanished from the rest of the Village: loose wires hanging down from the fire escapes, and tin coverings over the main-floor windows’ wood trim dented and askew.

Inside, crusted paint swamps the old moldings, but the spectacular plasterwork may still leave a visitor gaping: long intact runs of intricately worked bead, reel, rosette and banded-reed decoration on the ceiling, and lovely three-part Federal over-door treatments, with swags in the center.

Just inside the front door is a sculpture niche from the Whittemore period, framed by deeply veined marble.

But there is Victoriana, too: a Minton-type tile floor in the vestibule and heavy molded doors on the outside.

An unusually delicate door assembly at the top of the stairs at the rear is peculiar for its out-of-the-way placement. It has an intricate fanlight at the top, fluted columns on the sides, and a carved or molded decorative meander, rosette and similar details. It appears to have been moved; if it was the original front door, Bloomer was either thrifty about using salvage or appreciative of the piece’s architectural value.

One tenant, Beverly Maher, a guitar instructor, has an apartment that is little changed, with the same detailing as in the lobby. In addition, she has two remarkable black marble fireplaces, one with Ionic columns, the other with an iron frieze of the Last Supper — perhaps these are from the 1871 renovation.

Grove Equities, a partnership, bought 45 Grove Street, which has 15 residential units and two commercial units, earlier this year, and Daniel Lavian, one of the partners, said that they didn’t quite realize what they had acquired.

They have uncovered the ground floor front window woodwork of 1871 — tinned up for at least several decades — and uncovered a crazy quilt of decayed columns, brackets and cornices.

“Our first plan was to just do the doorways,” he said, sounding like any renovator swamped by circumstance, “but then we saw all the intricate detail work, and we’re starting to see our numbers going up.”

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/realestate/19scap.html?ref=realestate

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

A Tiny Enclave’s Changing Persona

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/02/realestate/02scap-600.jpg
Left, New York City Municipal Archives; Right, John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
1940 At left, a view of Sutton Square overlooking the East River. The square's town houses are in the center of the photo. Originally brownstones, most had been rebuilt in the 1920s. MODERN DAY Houses on Sutton Square today, at right, are worth $10 million and up, and ownership often is veiled behind various corporate names.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: October 31, 2008

IF few people have heard of the East River enclave Sutton Place, then even fewer know about its tiny adjunct, Sutton Square, a set of six houses at the foot of East 58th Street. Rebuilt in the 1920s from a moldy set of 1880s brownstones, these town houses share a sweeping common garden with the houses on Sutton Place. Now an architectural question mark from the 1970s appears poised for resolution.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/multimedia/icons/video_icon.gif Video: Neighbors on the Neighborhood (http://gallery.me.com/jmmantel/100222) (Video Courtesy of John Marshall Mantel)


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/02/realestate/02scap-2-650.jpg
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Most of the brownstones in the riverfront block between 57th and 58th Streets on what was then Avenue A faced the avenue, but seven faced 58th Street before it dead-ended at the East River. The seven were 502 through 514 East 58th Street, by present numbering 4 through 16 Sutton Square.

At the beginning, these high-stoop brownstones were occupied by prosperous businessmen. In 1890, Albert Ludorff, who had a bottling business on 10th Avenue, lived at 508 East 58th (now part of 8 Sutton Square). But the row had a brush with bohemianism — the Ashcan painter Robert Henri lived at 512 East 58th Street (now 14 Sutton Square) in 1901.

In 1920, the real estate company Webb & Knapp bought the 57th to 58th Street block and worked out a plan to completely remake it and sell off the lots. A 50-year covenant created a large common garden out of the backyards; required that kitchens and laundries face the street, not the garden; and established an architectural review process for the expected new facades. The developers renamed this part of 58th Street Sutton Square.

The house at No. 4 Sutton Square was made over in 1921 for Henry Sprague, an inventor. The architect he hired designed a simple brick front with a large second-floor triple window topped by an exquisite oval arch. It was removed last month.

Next door was one of the most ingenious houses in New York or, rather, pair of houses. Joseph Chamberlain, a law professor, and his brother-in-law Edgar Stillman, a physician, together bought three of the old brownstones on the former East 58th Street, and their architect, Murphy & Dana, made the three into two: Nos. 6 and 8 Sutton Square. The architects employed the simple detailing by which old money tends to distinguish itself, reusing brick from the old building “so that an agreeable texture has been preserved,” according to The Architectural Record in 1922.

On the inside the architects made the buildings interlocking, to stagger the widths of the rooms. Thus No. 8 has, on its second floor, a music room 31 feet wide — but the flanking library of No. 6 is only 15 feet wide.

In the 1930 census the value of Chamberlain’s house was listed as $100,000.

Because Nos. 6 and 8 Sutton Square were made from three houses, there is no No. 10. Next door at No. 12 lived Dr. Kenneth Taylor, who had run military hospitals in Paris during World War I. He was the first to renovate on the square, in 1920; Delano & Aldrich designed him an elegant brick and limestone house in the neo-Georgian style.

At No. 14, Foster Kennedy, a doctor who had worked with the shell-shocked in World War I, left his old brownstone pretty much as is. The last house in the row, 16 Sutton Square, was purchased by Lillie Havemeyer, who also made few changes to the exterior.

As time went on, this little enclave changed gradually. In 1940, work on the East River Drive required Mrs. Havemeyer to move out while her house was demolished and rebuilt. Aristotle Onassis lived at 16 Sutton Square around 1950.

In 1963, the Sutton Square owners renewed the 1920 covenant for another 50 years, and in 1973 the investor Neil McConnell, owner of the adjacent Chamberlain and Taylor houses (Nos. 8 and 12), combined them on the inside. Current floor plans are posted on curbed.com (http://curbed.com/).

On the outside, his architect, Page Cross, created an unsettling hybrid.

He left the upper two stories of No. 8 intact, so it still matched its twin at No. 6 on those floors. But Mr. Cross rebuilt the plain brick lower floors of No. 8 to match the neo-Georgian Taylor house at No. 12, resulting in a kind of architectural puzzle.

Houses on Sutton Square are now worth $10 million and up, and ownership is veiled behind various corporate names. It appears that Michael Jeffries, the president of Abercrombie & Fitch, owns the Sprague house at No. 4 Sutton Square, and that Yue-Sai Kan, a television star in China, owns No. 6.

Bonnard Holdings recently bought Neil McConnell’s old houses, the conjoined pair at 8-12 Sutton Square; the Real Deal reports that the purchase occurred this year for $30 million. Gregory Hayes, a Connecticut (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/connecticut/?inline=nyt-geo) lawyer listed as president of Bonnard, would not describe pending work.

But Evan Blum, the founder of Irreplaceable Artifacts, says that he was asked to bid on salvage in the building, and that he is offering some of the exterior stonework in the new arrivals department at demolitiondepot.com (http://demolitiondepot.com/).

The plans show a more symmetrical, harmonious house, Mr. Blum said.

That would involve a major change to one or both buildings, promising an interesting time to come on Sutton Square.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/realestate/02scap.html?ref=realestate

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Streetscapes | 1 Park Avenue

History Lessons by the Numbers

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/09/realestate/09scap-600.jpg Office for Metropolitan History
TWO NO. 1'S The Hansel-and-Gretel Gothic-style cottage on the corner of 34th Street, left, was the first to use the address No. 1 Park Avenue in the 1800s. The building was boarded up in 1953, right, and that same year was replaced with an apartment building, now known as 7 Park Avenue.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: November 7, 2008

REUBEN ROSE-REDWOOD has made a specialty of studying the street layout of New York and has now tackled a subject essentially ignored: how buildings in New York and elsewhere were numbered.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/07/realestate/09scap-2-500.jpgChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
The current No. 1 Park Avenue is at 32nd Street.

An assistant professor at Texas A&M University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/texas_a_and_m_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org), he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to the subject, going back to the British imposition of numbering in the 1770s to keep better tabs on the civilian population during the occupation of the city.

He also chronicles how directory publishers were the biggest backers of house numbering, often doing it themselves, and how the city established Fifth Avenue in 1838 as the dividing line between east and west numbering on the side streets.

House numbering is not just a bureaucratic footnote in the life of the city. One of Dr. Rose-Redwood’s cases is that of Martha Bacon, who in the 1920s fought a tenacious battle out of her peculiar Gothic house at 34th and Park Avenue — until the 1 in her No. 1 Park Avenue was taken away from her.

Park Avenue came into existence in the 1850s when the city built a landscaped mall over a deep railroad cut that ran through Murray Hill along Fourth Avenue.

The new Park Avenue designation began at the first of the malls, at 34th Street.

The broad boulevard attracted development, and in 1857, Margaret Ten Eyck built a Hansel-and-Gretel Gothic-style cottage at the northeast corner of 34th and Park. She appears to have been the wife of Peter Ten Eyck, a doctor who used the address 65 East 34th Street. At that point, street numbering on either side of Park Avenue was not yet firmly established.

In 1860, Mrs. Ten Eyck sold the house to Charles W. Kearney, a Washington Street paper dealer listed in the city directory at “E 34 c Fourth,” c being the abbreviation for corner. Later it was occupied by Augustus Berrian, a shipwright, who used the address 101 East 34th, and in the 1880s by Edward Keyes, a doctor and the first owner to use the address No. 1 Park Avenue.

In 1897 Martha and Robert Bacon, a partner at J. P. Morgan & Company, bought the house. The New York Times described it in 1905 as “embedded in vines” and looking “more the residence of an artist than of a millionaire financier.” The 1910 census found the Bacons there with four children and three servants, but Mr. Bacon died in 1919, and in 1920 the new widow was in the house all alone, except for nine servants.

In 1923, Henry Mandel, a developer, bought the east side of Fourth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets, operating in the name of the “One Park Avenue Corporation.” He successfully lobbied the Board of Aldermen to extend Park Avenue to 32nd Street, which gave his building Mrs. Bacon’s number.

She joined with the Murray Hill and the Fifth Avenue Associations in petitioning the aldermen to rescind the name change, which they did by a vote of 62 to 3. But Mayor John F. Hylan vetoed the bill.

Mrs. Bacon continued her fight, and in January 1927, The Park Avenue Social Bulletin called the name change a “glaring piece of class legislation.” That November, the appellate division of the state Supreme Court struck down the change. Mr. Mandel’s new No. 1 Park Avenue was thus left with the humdrum 461-477 Fourth Avenue.

The court scorned the politics behind the change, noting that the number had been taken away for no real public purpose, but because the new corporation coveted it. Park Avenue, the court said, was named for the park in the middle, and there was no park south of 34th.

But in 1928, the developers again took the case to court, and this time Mrs. Bacon lost. An editorial in The New York Times decried the decision, saying it ran against “common decency and respect for ordinary human rights.” It endorsed a proposal to call the disputed section Park Avenue South, and suggested that a “graceful act” by the developer would be to adopt that address. But no such grace was forthcoming.

Mrs. Bacon surrendered, changing her listing in the Social Register to “Park Avenue at 34th.” A further indignity came in 1930, when an 18-story apartment house went up, surrounding her corner plot. She died 10 years later, at age 80.

A 1953 photo shows the Bacon residence boarded up like a dust bowl farmhouse. That year the gingerbread survivor was replaced with an apartment building, now known as 7 Park Avenue.

Park Avenue South came into being in 1959, but the name change would not have satisfied Mrs. Bacon: Park Avenue South begins at 32nd Street. She would have winced as she passed her nemesis, with her old address, One Park Avenue, carved over the doorway.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/realestate/09scape.html?ref=realestate

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Streetscapes | West End Avenue

Homage to the Humdrum

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/21/realestate/23scapes-600.jpg
Photographs from The Museum of the City of New York except left; Librado Romero/The New York Times

ARCHITECTURAL STANDOUTS Much of West End Avenue is lined with post-1910 apartment buildings, including, left to right, No. 565, at the corner of 87th Street; the Umbria, at 82nd Street; No. 640, at 91st Street; and the Dallieu, at the corner of 101st Street.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)
Published: November 21, 2008

A NEIGHBORHOOD coalition, the West End Preservation Society, has proposed the designation of the entire stretch of West End Avenue from 70th to 107th Street as a historic district, with the support of the preservation group Landmark West.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/21/realestate/23scapes-3-650.jpgLibrado Romero/The New York Times
The building has a distinctive drive-through entrance.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/21/realestate/23scapes-2-650.jpgLibrado Romero/The New York Times
The 1913 Cleburne building, at 924 West End, rises at the northeast corner of 105th Street.

This comfortable boulevard, which epitomizes the West Side’s easygoing character, is lined with mostly humdrum apartment buildings of the 1910s and 1920s, but a handful stand well above the architectural mean.

West End evolved into an apartment street after 1910, when the first tall apartment buildings went up, mostly replacing the roomy brownstones that had sprung up in the 1880s. By the end of the 1920s, only isolated corners remained unimproved, and in a 1931 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Christopher Morley called West End “incomparably the most agreeable and convenient” of New York’s large streets, in part because of its unexceptional architecture, “just even bulks of masonry,” as he put it.

The avenue in the 70s is notable at 75th Street for Neville & Bagge’s richly colored Esplanade of 1916, a very competent urban palazzo, its warm orange brick facade richly festooned with balconies and relief sculpture. At 78th Street comes the rear of the magnificent Apthorp apartments, really a Broadway building.

The architect George F. Pelham Jr. struck an unusual note of modernism at the southwest corner of 80th. Built in 1936, the interior of 411 West End marked a departure from the apartments of the 1910s and 1920s: stepped-down living rooms, glass-enclosed tubs and highly colored tile bathrooms.

The bulk of the facade is typical of its period. It is the stainless steel icicle-like trim at the upper floors that makes it amusing to look at.

At the northwest corner of 82nd Street stands West End’s most architecturally singular apartment building, the Umbria, built in 1911 by Harry Schiff and designed by D. Everett Waid in light brick and terra cotta.

As with most of its cohort, Schiff gave the Umbria all the bells and whistles: wall safes, filtered water, cedar closets, a mail chute and central vacuum cleaning. The apartments, from 7 to 12 rooms, rented for $200 to $375 per month.

Another Depression-era apartment building stands out at 87th Street, the only full-blown Art Deco work on the avenue. Designed in 1936 for the developer Mose Goodman by H. I. Feldman, 565 West End had apartments as small as three rooms, marking a new era for the avenue, which had hitherto been mostly family-style. The striped orange and black brickwork on the first floor gives it a luscious chromatic presence.

A sleeper building is 640 West End, at the northeast corner of 91st, designed in 1912 by the veteran West Side architect Ralph Townsend for a syndicate of which he was a member. Its simple Renaissance styling and large windows in broad wall surfaces give it a dignity beyond the usual shoebox peppered with rectangular holes. This repose seems a minor touch until you see how few other architects achieved it, although it should be noted that Townsend had only two apartments per floor to work in.

The Dallieu, at the southeast corner of 101st Street, is one of George and Edward Blum’s exceptional designs, built for the Tishman family in 1913. It has lost its original windows, rich cornice and, recently, its intricate lobby doors — each disappearance a little tragedy — but its recessed brick joints and hypnotic patterns of masonry and terra-cotta decoration still make it one of the great apartment buildings of the West Side.

The Dallieu, like its brethren, served the prosperous — brokers, diamond importers and wholesalers. Of the 45 families recorded there by the 1920 census taker, 39 had live-in cooks.

The Blums’ frequent competitor, Gaetano Ajello, got a plum commission from the Paterno brothers, with his triplet 885-895-905 West End Avenue, flanking 103rd Street and built between 1913 and 1917. These are competent individually but imposing as a group, a comprehensive effort rare for New York.

The 1913 Cleburne, 924 West End, rises at the northeast corner of 105th. It is also by Harry Schiff, here working with Schwartz & Gross. The exterior and the lobby have an Arts and Crafts character, but what is most interesting is the great drive-through entrance, on the 105th Street side.

Does West End itself rise to historic-district quality? On the East Side, the certifiably famous Park Avenue has been included in historic districts only incidentally, and most of its length above 78th Street is unregulated.

Central Park South is not designated, nor the Grand Concourse. Perhaps the greatest claim to prominence West End Avenue can offer is that it is, as Mr. Morley said, supremely “discreet and undemonstrative.” If it becomes a historic district, it will perhaps be because it makes no fuss better than any other comparable street in New York.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/realestate/23stre.html?scp=1&sq=WEst%20End%20Avenue%20&st=cse

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Merry]

January 11, 2009
New York by the Numbers

Neighborhoods, Up Close and Personal

By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html?inline=nyt-per)

EVEN if the latest economic slump stunts the explosion of New York’s population before the end of the decade, you can count on the fact that the city’s proverbial changing neighborhoods will keep changing.

Detailed census figures released last month and analyzed for The New York Times by Andrew Beveridge, chairman of the sociology department at Queens College (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/q/queens_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org), reveal just how vividly many neighborhoods have changed since 2000.

Through 2007, more whites moved to Harlem.

More young children live in Lower Manhattan, the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side.

In Flatbush, 40 percent fewer residents lacked a high school diploma in 2007 than in 2000.

The rich got richer: In 2000, the richest neighborhood was the Upper East Side; in 2007, it was the bottom tip of Manhattan. The poorest, both years, was the South Bronx, which got even poorer.

The Rockaways registered the biggest percentage gain in population. Coney Island had the biggest loss.

The number of blacks in southern Staten Island grew by half; Elmhurst lost 1 in 3. Asians recorded the greatest gains in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and Hispanics in Bay Ridge.

Among people who don’t speak English at home, the Upper East Side lost the largest share, while southern Staten Island gained the most.

The accompanying graphic (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/14/nyregion/thecity/20090111_thecity_census.html) shows other highlights of how each neighborhood has changed since 2000. The districts correspond to the community districts created by law in 1975; a few are combined because the data were released by the Census Bureau (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/census_bureau/index.html?inline=nyt-org) for areas of at least 100,000 in population. All percentages have been rounded off to the nearest whole number.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/11/nyregion/thecity/11map.large.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/nyregion/thecity/11intr.html

[Merry]

Room for the new, and the ‘creaky charm’ in Hudson Square

By Josh Rogers

Hudson Square is a neighborhood of contrasts. Bordered by a state highway and one of the most congested streets in the city, it’s also home to Holland Tunnel entrances, making it difficult for pedestrians to navigate. Yet it is increasingly becoming the choice destination of creative and new media firms.

Workers and residents often cite the lack of retail as a neighborhood drawback, yet it is also home to a diverse mix of small restaurants.

City Winery, a high end music venue and wine making club, opened in the neighborhood last year, but no-frills concert spaces like Jazz Gallery, S.O.B.’s and Don Hill’s are still able to carry on at a time when similar spaces in other Downtown neighborhoods have closed.

Ellen Baer, president of the new Hudson Square Business Improvement District, said she thinks there will always be room for the small shops and less expensive music spaces because of the mix of small and medium size retail spots.

“We are every bit as interested in the venues with the creaky chairs,” Baer said in an interview last week. “That is part of the charm of this neighborhood. We’ve got City Winery and we’ve got the Jazz Gallery.”

The local music scene has caught the attention of the College Music Journal, a nationally-based series which schedules concerts around New York City. C.M.J. began highlighting a neighborhood last year, directing its members to Lower East Side restaurants and other businesses with passes. At the end of next month, Hudson Square will be the featured neighborhood for the festival.

And the neighborhood also got a pharmacy two months ago. Even more noteworthy, Baer believes Hudson Square Pharmacy is the first store to use the neighborhood name.

“We wanted to make a mark in the new neighborhood, be a landmark, a pillar,” said Al Solman, owner of the drug and convenience store at Hudson and King Sts.

Solman also owns King’s Pharmacy in Tribeca and said he is glad he has more space to stock additional food and other items on Hudson St. because demand is high in the Square. Recently he solved a crisis at CBS Radio when a frantic ad employee came down in a desperate search for a Rubik’s Cube. “She said you make our dreams come true,” Solman said.

Baer said “if a store in 2009 thinks that having Soho as their designation is valuable, I’m hoping that by 2010 and 2011, they’ll think having Hudson Square has value to them. I understand that it’s a business… Yeah, I’d like to see those stores say Hudson Square, but I also understand it is incumbent on us to make that a valuable designation.”



http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_335/colorpers.jpg

The Hudson Square BID is beginning to work on ways
to solve the neighborhood’s traffic problems including
the area around the Holland Tunnel.



Once the center of the city’s printing district, the neighborhood has a mix of offices (many owned by Trinity Church), converted condos and small hotels. Baer said officially there are only a few hundred people living in the neighborhood but she knows that there are many people quietly living in buildings that are not zoned for residential uses and is quite certain the real number is much higher.

The neighborhood is home to architectural and creative companies, many media firms including Newsweek, WNYC Radio and Community Media, owners of The Villager and Downtown Express. Large firms like Edelman public relations and Corbis photography have also moved into the neighborhood. Development projects have slowed as they have throughout the city but work continues on the skyscraper being built by Donald Trump and partners. Though it is situated at Spring and Varick Sts., the condo-hotel will be called Trump Soho.

Baer and many say one of the biggest problems is traffic, and she admits one of the first steps to beginning to solve it will be a Band-Aid approach. Actually it’s much less an admission than it is the name for the first phase of the plan.

“The Band-Aid approach is: let’s just improve enforcement,” she said. “Let’s get some people out on the street who can communicate with one another about how traffic is being routed and moved.”

She said one of the BID’s duties is to work with all of the parties in charge of traffic — the First Precinct, the N.Y.P.D.’s traffic division, the Port Authority, which controls the tunnel, and the state and city Departments of Transportation.

Longer term, she and her staff of three will be working on things like improving the streetscape. Hudson Square’s side streets have many loading docks and blank street walls, making it uninviting to walk east or west. Baer noticed that often workers and residents on Hudson St. are not aware of stores on Varick Ss., and vice versa, and she thinks improving the look of the streets and sidewalks will begin to change that.

The BID will also be hiring a traffic consultant to develop new ideas and sift through existing proposals to improve the safety.

“I have 4 million ideas [that have been suggested] but I’m not a traffic expert,” she said. She said there will be many public meetings with Community Board 2 and others as the ideas are developed.

The BID will be able to sell bonds to help finance projects to change street patterns and perhaps add more plaza space, and will also look for federal transportation and environmental funds as well.

Baer is also beginning an effort to promote “sustainability” throughout the neighborhood. She says it’s a word that is used so much it is losing its meaning, but the effort will extend beyond green policies and will also encourage philanthropic initiatives — the sort of things that attract new firms and youn employees to an area.

“Whatever that new new thing is,” she said, “I hope it finds a home at Hudson Square.”

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_335/roomforthenew.html


Some older articles about Hudson Square:

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_231/hudsonsquare/inkisnotdry.html

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_282/hudsonsquare.html

Map from the Downtown Express article above:

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_282/hudsonss.gif

[Merry]

Living In | Hudson Heights

An Aerie Straight Out of the Deco Era

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/18/realestate/18livi_600.jpg
HEIGHTS IS RIGHT The George Washington Bridge as seen from Castle Village, a five-building co-op complex
described as an “anchor” of a neighborhood with a distinct architectural appearance

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Castle Village

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Castle Village wall collapse 2005

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Hudson View Gardens

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Corner of 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue

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Cloisters

More Photos > (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/15/realestate/1018-livingin-slideshow_index.html)

LOOK down: The names of New York neighborhoods are not carved into the sidewalk. As an area begins to gentrify, a new label often pops up to match the rising property values. A southern piece of Harlem was recently rebranded SoHa, and Park Slope, Brooklyn, keeps creeping south into territory once known as Sunset Park.

Usually, these nicknames are the invention of brokers trying to sell the area’s new feel. But in Hudson Heights, which makes up the northwest corner of Washington Heights, a community group founded in 1993 to fight neighborhood decline claims the credit.

“The Hudson Heights Owners Coalition, H.H.O.C., came up with it,” said Simone Song, a principal broker at Simone Song Properties, “though the real estate brokers got blamed for it.”

Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, the owners group president, said, “We didn’t set out to change the name of the neighborhood, but we were careful in how we selected the name of the organization.” To try to give their neighborhood a boost, members lobbied city officials, invested in area parks, and organized events.

“It’s a phony name,” countered Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of Columbia University’s historic preservation program. “It was Fort Washington — that’s the historic name of the neighborhood.”

Whatever you want to call it, this microneighborhood has always had a look and feel that set it apart from the larger area in which it nestles. For one thing, there’s the architecture. The area was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, later than the rest of Washington Heights, so it has a significant concentration of Art Deco buildings.

The cultural makeup of Hudson Heights sets it apart as well. The larger neighborhood has an enormous concentration of Dominicans, while Hudson Heights is more diverse. According to figures from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, just over half of the population of Washington Heights and Inwood is Dominican; 62.9 percent are Hispanic.

Hudson Heights had an influx of Dominicans, Mr. Dolkart said, “but it didn’t become as heavily Dominican as areas to the south and to the east.”
According to him, the 1980s brought another wave to the area: “what I call refugees of the Upper West Side and Park Slope. Prices were relatively low compared to other areas in Manhattan.”

Though real estate prices have gone way up in the last 20 years, a dollar still takes you much further in Hudson Heights than it does downtown.
Steven Benini and his wife, Ana Rodriguez, who rented in Hudson Heights for 10 years, bought a two-bedroom last winter. He declined to say how much they had paid; these days, two-bedrooms generally start at $400,000.

“We can actually get eight people at our dining room table,” Mr. Benini said. “That’s not something you can normally do with a Manhattan apartment. And quite frankly, farther downtown, we would not have been able to afford it.”

This affordability pulls in a lot of young families with children — the neighborhood is full of strollers and toddlers — but it also attracts retirees.
Frank Garcia and his wife, Clare, both grew up in Washington Heights. After spending more than 35 years in New Jersey raising a family and three years in a rental at Peter Cooper Village, they’ve just moved back, settling in a one-bedroom co-op on West 190th Street, which they bought for $425,000.

Mr. Garcia cited the affordability as a factor in their return, but another is the area’s dynamism. It has always been a neighborhood of immigrants, he pointed out, so it’s always changing. Mr. Garcia, who is of Puerto Rican descent, and Mrs. Garcia, who is of Irish origin, say they also appreciate the diversity. “It’s New York,” was how she put it.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Geographically, Hudson Heights is set apart. The Hudson to the west is as clear a barrier as one could find, and Fort Tryon Park — home to the Cloisters — caps off the northern edge. The eastern boundary is more contentious, though most often it is said to be west of Broadway. And while many people consider the southern tip to be at the George Washington Bridge on 181st Street, others suggest that the neighborhood now stretches down to J. Hood Wright Park at 173rd Street.

The area feels more residential than most of Manhattan. The only commercial stretches are on 187th Street, which has small shops, and 181st, which in addition to local stores has chains, like the Starbucks on Fort Washington Avenue.

“It’s not as relentlessly urban as other parts of Manhattan,” said Alexis Higgins, who has lived in the area for five years. “I would even say this neighborhood is like the semi-burbs.”

Ms. Higgins, along with her husband, Scott, and their 2-year-old son, lives in Castle Village on Cabrini Boulevard, a five-building complex overlooking the river. They have a two-bedroom one-bath co-op, which they bought in 2005.

Built in the 1930s for renters, the five X-shaped towers went co-op in 1986. Along with Hudson View Gardens, a 1920s Tudor co-op complex across the street, they are among the largest buildings around.
“Architecturally, they’re great,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They’re anchors of the neighborhood.”

Castle Village received a lot of attention in May 2005, when part of a 75-foot-high retaining wall below the complex collapsed onto the West Side Highway.

According to Gerald Fingerhut, the president of the co-op board, repairs cost $26 million. The co-op is still involved in litigation — with parties ranging from insurance brokers to engineers — to recoup a portion of the costs.

But Castle Village is also known for something else: children. When Ms. Higgins, who is pregnant with her second child, told her old obstetrician that she now lived in Castle Village, she said, “Oh, you live in kid village.”

The complex has private gardens, but there are public parks throughout Hudson Heights. In addition to Fort Tryon and J. Hood Wright Parks, there is Bennett Park, on 185th Street between Fort Washington and Pinehurst Avenues. According to the Department of Parks and Recreation, its small patch of grass and playground is the highest point of land on the island of Manhattan, clocking in at 265.05 feet above sea level.

WHAT TO DO

There are restaurants and bars, but not many. Neighborhood life revolves around the parks, but there are also community events open to the public.
“Aside from the baby brigade, myself included,” Ms. Higgins said, “there are a ton of artists and creative people. It’s not going to become a cultural wasteland with that kind of demographic.”

There is a monthly chamber music series called Concerts in the Heights, and classical music at Our Saviour’s Atonement Lutheran Church. There is a film club and a speed-walking group, which marches through Fort Tryon Park three times a week.

There is an annual Harvest Festival in Bennett Park and, in the summer, an Uptown Arts Stroll, with visual and performing arts. Fort Tryon also hosts the city’s annual Medieval Festival.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Much of the housing stock in Washington Heights is rental, and there are rentals available in Hudson Heights as well. A one-bedroom runs about $1,200 to $1,700 per month.

But another factor that distinguishes Hudson from Washington Heights is the abundance of owner-occupied housing, most of it in co-ops.

According to brokers like Ms. Song of Simone Song Properties and Gus Perry of Stein-Perry Real Estate, one-bedrooms run from $260,000 to $400,000 and two-bedrooms from $400,000 to $650,000. Apartments in Castle Village, which has doormen, large gardens and sweeping views of the Hudson and the Palisades, can be a bit more.

“Like every other neighborhood in the city, we’ve been affected,” Mr. Perry said of the last year’s decline in real estate values. “But we’re probably less affected than other neighborhoods.” He estimates that prices have come down 5 to 10 percent.

THE SCHOOLS

At the combined elementary and middle school known as No. 187 Hudson Cliffs, on Cabrini Boulevard, 70.7 percent of fourth graders met state standards in English and 88.2 percent in math. Of eighth graders, 72.6 percent satisfied requirements in English and 88.4 percent in math.
The closest public high school is Gregorio Luperon Prep, on 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Its SAT averages last year were 340 in reading, 370 in math and 347 in writing, versus 435, 459 and 432 citywide.

THE COMMUTE

The A train runs through Hudson Heights, traveling express from 125th to 59th Street, and reaching Midtown in about 25 minutes.

THE HISTORY

The 1930s brought in a flood of Central European Jews. One famous son is the statesman Henry Kissinger, whose family settled in Hudson Heights after fleeing Germany in 1938.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/realestate/18livi.html?_r=1

[brianac]

Note. Photographs from the slide show in this article have been posted to the New York in Black and White thread HERE (http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=316149&postcount=172)


Streetscapes | Broadway from 26th to 31st Street

A Hip Replacement for a Down-at-the-Heels ’Hood

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Left, Office for Metropolitan History; Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Businesses like Poland Spring, shown about 1910 and now, reflected the fading of the area as a destination for out-of-towners.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CHRISTOPHER GRAY&inline=nyt-per)

Published: February 10, 2010

BY day it’s the Canal Street of Midtown, a blurry tumble of frantic shop fronts in an epic half-mile panorama, Perfume-Hairpieces-Jewelry-Sweatshirts-Sunglasses. But by night the stretch of Broadway from 26th to 31st Street, between the Shake Shack and Herald Square, gives a foretaste of what promises to be a hip new hotel center.

Multimedia

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An Aging Hotel Row (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/14/realestate/20100214-scapes.html?ref=realestate)

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The 1904 Breslin Hotel, at Broadway and 29th, is now the Ace Hotel. Several old nearby hotels are also being spruced up.

This section of Broadway got its big break in the 1870s, as a new entertainment district coalesced north of Madison Square, bringing hotels and restaurants. The marble-fronted Grand Hotel, at the southeast corner of 31st Street, opened in 1868, followed in 1871 by the gangly 300-room Gilsey Hotel, at the northeast corner of 29th.

The Gilsey is today described as Second Empire for its colossal mansard roof, but The Real Estate Record and Guide called it Palladian in 1870. As much steamboat as hotel, it is a giant tooting spectacle of cast iron painted to look like stone, with cornices, columns, pediments and other details cascading down to the angle it makes with Broadway.

In 1895 Alfred Zucker designed the entrancing temple-topped Baudouine Building, at 28th Street, with escutcheons of anthemions topped by lion’s heads over many of its windows.

The double-height temple space is so unusual that it must have been designed for a particular tenant, perhaps the Baudouine family, which had offices at that address. The crisp, unorthodox handling is typical of Mr. Zucker’s distinctive work.

More big structures came after 1900, like the Johnston Building at 28th and Broadway, now under renovation as the NoMad Hotel. Designed by Schickel & Ditmars, it has an all-limestone facade, unusual for what appears to be a typical commercial building. In its current state, the temporary Broadway entrance presents a palimpsest of architectural debris. The mid-20th-century dropped ceiling in the lobby has been pulled down, revealing peeled paint, bare steel beams, carved plasterwork and an octopus of tangled electrical conduits and downlights.

One block north, James H. Breslin’s eponymous hotel went up in 1904, its high-style French Renaissance brick and terra cotta showing up the old-fashioned Gilsey Hotel, previously operated by Mr. Breslin.

By this time, Broadway below Herald Square was off the beaten track for entertainment and hotels, although Louis Abernathy, 6, and his brother Temple, 10, chose the Breslin as the finish line for their journey to New York from Oklahoma in 1910, 60 days on horseback, unescorted.

The high life quickly faded. Theaters like Weber’s, Wallack’s and Proctor’s still operated on this stretch, but were gradually edged out by railroad offices, manicurists, hatmakers and dentists. Poland Spring took over 1180 Broadway around 1910.

The Gilsey and other older buildings were reconstructed as lofts and commercial space. The year the Abernathy boys rode into town, James T. Lee, a grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/jacqueline_kennedy_onassis/index.html?inline=nyt-per), had just finished a 17-story loft building next to the Breslin. The architects, Rouse & Goldstone, gave it a classical design and the name Centvrian Bvilding, Roman-style, carved into the frieze.

The educated tone of the Centurian was not sustained, and there was little later construction of note. But in 1959 the architects Telchin & Campanella made a bizarre modernization of buildings at the northeast corner of Broadway and 27th. Their comical assemblage of supersized maroon and black stripes separated by vertical metal strips looks like a weird packing case, perhaps the one the building came in.

At night you can still see the old garment and manufacturing firms in the upper floors. At 27th Street, a five-story building has dirty windows, stacks of fabrics, towers of boxes, and falling ceiling tiles, all evocative of the old-economy New York of the mid-20th century.

Now this little strip verges on transition. The Breslin is now the Ace Hotel, a project of GFI Development. The lobby of the Ace is a mix of old and new: salvaged paneling, hip metal tables, an oddball display of stuffed birds. You might call this post-preservation style, a later generation of old-building renovation, which treats vintage elements with an ironic insouciance, not veneration.

The old paneling, taken from another location, is mounted on a steel armature projecting out from the wall, so visitors know that it is fake, which itself defies fakery. The huge columns were originally faux-painted as Italian marble. Now they are plain white, and ringed by simple circles of pipe, with schoolhouse-style light fixtures attached.

On a recent evening there were about 85 people in the lobby, average age 30, two-thirds of whom were typing away on laptops, BlackBerrys and other keypads. One guy was reading a book, and a woman who at first appeared to be lost in thought was instead listening to an iPod, its earbud hidden by her hair.

The NoMad should be completed next year, and another hotel, the Flatiron on 27th Street, is scheduled to open its doors this spring. So at the moment, the Ace has for company Lola Trading, X-Tensions hair products, the synergistic Perfume and Digital Inc., and a dwindling cohort of manufacturers on upper floors, a particularly unusual hybrid even in the miscellany of New York streets.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/realestate/14streets.html

Copyright 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[stewartrama]

NoMad has so much potential. The neighborhood is chock full of gorgeous old gems that could be spruced up and converted into new hotels and apartments. it is close to midtown and downtown, and has great transportation...Thats why I hope they preserve the old buildings, as opposed to knocking them down and building crap like Eventi... I think in 10 years this neighborhood will be completely gentrified.

[Merry]

A Time Capsule Invaded

By JAKE MOONEY

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slide show (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/28/realestate/20100328living_ss.html?ref=realestate)

VISIT NoLIta early enough on a weekday, before all the boutiques stir to life at 11 or even noon, and you might feel as if you had traveled back in time 75 years. Weathered walk-up tenement buildings cast shadows over the side streets; homeless men trudge through on their way to the Bowery; pizza shop workers settle in for a day at the ovens.

But even in its quiet moments, there are signs that this neighborhood, framed by Houston, Lafayette and Kenmare Streets and the Bowery, is now something very different. A woman strolling past St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral does so in Chanel flats; a trash pile on Prince Street includes a white leather handbag in like-new condition.

And about those tenement buildings: Many are expensive to live in, when they are available at all.

Andrew Anderson, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said recently that only around two dozen units were for sale in the neighborhood. Prices reflect that scarcity. When people are dead set on being in NoLIta, Mr. Anderson said, “I think what ends up happening, most of the time, is they buy right outside the neighborhood.”

He was in that position himself once and now lives on East Fourth Street, to the north. “You end up living within arm’s reach of NoLIta,” he said. “I still eat dinner there every night.”

The allure is clear. The 16-square-block neighborhood of approximately 4,500 people, whose name is an elision of “north of Little Italy,” is quieter and homier than nearby SoHo, though its businesses and nightlife scene draw the same well-heeled crowd. Residents prize its central-downtown location and are fiercely protective of what remains of its Old New York atmosphere.

In some cases, their ire finds an outlet in the name. Bob Gormley, the district manager of Community Board 2, which represents the area, recalled a conversation with one resident: “She said, ‘You know, there are people who’ve lived here a long time who get really angry when you mention the name NoLIta, because that’s really a concoction of the real estate industry.’ ”

“Some of the old-timers,” he added, “they still like to say that they live in Little Italy.”

But old and new residents alike, Mr. Gormley said, have been united in their resistance to new bars — and even some restaurants serving beer and wine. As in several other downtown neighborhoods, he said, new liquor licenses and the related issues of noise and crowding are of great concern.

In 2007, residents thwarted the opening of a burlesque club on Kenmare Street. Just this year, they blocked the arrival of a Shake Shack burger joint that had been proposed, with a takeout window and a rooftop terrace, for Prince Street.

“Sometimes the neighborhood feels like it’s beyond the saturation point, and where is it going to end?” Mr. Gormley said. “When you have so many places and it’s such a small area, it kind of gets people on edge.”

This worry is, of course, a form of love.

Debra Zimmerman, who has lived in a rent-stabilized building on Prince Street for 32 years and who helped lead opposition to the Shake Shack, recalled renting her apartment for $175 a month when there was a chicken slaughterhouse across the street, then spending decades getting to know the neighborhood’s people and its odd quirks.

“It’s a really special little corner of New York,” said Ms. Zimmerman, who runs a nonprofit group for women who are filmmakers. “I’ve watched kids grow up in the neighborhood. There’s old Italian women, there’s young hipsters, there’s the Dominicans in bodegas, there’s all the bridge-and-tunnel people who come to eat in Delicatessen.”

There are also, she said, people like her, who are involved in the arts and who may have sought to live in SoHo years ago but found plenty of appeal in the neighborhood next door. Ms. Zimmerman’s office is at Grand Street and Broadway; her previous one was at Lafayette and Spring Streets.
“I am the quintessential ‘Don’t go above 14th Street’ person,” she said. “I don’t go above Houston and I don’t go below Canal. If you live here, why not?”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The Bowery and Lafayette Street are the heavily trafficked eastern and western boundaries, with taller buildings, wider sidewalks and more cars. But inside the neighborhood, Prince and Spring Streets are the main commercial strips; smaller shops and restaurants are found on the ground floors of five- and six-story tenements on Mulberry, Mott and Elizabeth Streets.

On a recent morning, several storefronts on those streets appeared empty or soon to be. Mike Bennett, who owns a commercial and residential building on Mulberry, said commercial rents were down as much as 35 percent, though that also could be said of other Manhattan neighborhoods.

Despite the turnover, he said, the area remains popular.

“You can see on the weekend people walking around with their New York maps,” Mr. Bennett said. “It’s a lot like the Lower East Side — people are really interested in these little spots that have kind of become New York landmarks.”

That includes vestiges of Italian-American culture sprinkled here and there, like the Parisi Bakery on Mott Street and Albanese Meats and Poultry on Elizabeth. More notoriously, the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Mulberry Street, long known for its association with John Gotti, is now a shoe store.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Co-op apartments in NoLIta sell for at least $800 to $1,000 per square foot, and as much as $1,200 per square foot in especially high-quality buildings, said Darren Kearns, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group.

“It’s just rare to find anything for sale,” Mr. Kearns said. “Most of those buildings never turn over. When something does come up, it still demands really good prices per square foot.”

Condominiums are even pricier. Mr. Anderson, at Prudential Douglas Elliman, said units could be had for $1,200 per square foot but added that in rare new construction, like a highly regarded brick building at 211 Elizabeth Street, prices were $2,000 per square foot or higher. One-bedrooms there are on the market for $1.5 million to $2.4 million, depending on their size, he said.

Still, Mr. Kearns said, most of the buildings on Mulberry, Mott and Elizabeth, like tenement buildings in the nearby East Village, are rentals. As many as 25 percent of those, he said, are rent-stabilized or rent controlled.

As for the rentals, listings on Craigslist begin just over $2,000 a month for basic one-bedrooms — less for the occasional studio — though prices for nicer units are much higher. Mr. Kearns cited a building on Mulberry Street where loft-style apartments were renting for $4 per square foot; he also said he had recently handled a 2,200-square-foot penthouse duplex on Mulberry in the same building that rented for $9,250 per month.

WHAT TO DO

The area is a hub for tiny fashion-forward boutiques — shoes, wedding dresses, jewelry, baby clothes and more — and for restaurants, Italian and otherwise. Café Habana, at Prince and Elizabeth, is a favorite, crowded for dinner and brunch, and there are many fancier places, as well as two of the city’s more historic (if congested) pizza places: Lombardi’s and Ray’s.

The Feast of San Gennaro, a decades-old Little Italy street fair, runs for 10 days every September on Mulberry Street. The festivities draw crowds and plenty of complaints from neighbors.

NoLIta is short on green space, but Lieutenant Petrosino Square, a 0.3-acre sliver of land with a few benches between Centre and Lafayette Streets, was expanded and newly landscaped last year.

THE SCHOOLS

All elementary students are zoned to attend Public School 130, a few blocks south of the area on Baxter Street. The school, which serves more than 1,000 students from prekindergarten through fifth grade, received an A on its most recent city progress report, with 92.4 percent of students meeting standards in English and 98.9 percent in math.

Middle School 131, outside the area on Hester Street, also got an A, with 62.4 percent proficient in English and 84.9 percent in math.

THE COMMUTE

The 6 train stops at Spring and Lafayette Streets, on the western edge of the area, and the Broadway-Lafayette station, at the northwest corner, is served by the B, D, F and V lines. The R and W trains, at Prince Street in SoHo, and the J and M trains, at the Bowery by Delancey Street, are also within walking distance.

THE HISTORY

Traditionally considered a part of Little Italy, the area got its name in the 1990s, as signs of Italian culture faded. Italians had first settled there in the late decades of the 1800s and predominated through most of the 20th century.

St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, framed by Prince, Mott and Mulberry Streets, was built between 1809 and 1815, and served as the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York until 1879, when St. Patrick’s Cathedral took over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/realestate/28Living.html

[Merry]

Beauty and Variety vs. Crowds and Costs

By JEFF VANDAM

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The intersection of Charles Street and West Fourth Street

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Near Hudson Street, the enclave of Grove Court with its private, gated courtyard is tucked back on Grove Street

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Patchin Place, off of 10th Street

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Charles Street townhouses

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Gay Street

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Jefferson Market Garden on Greenwich Street

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Bleecker Street

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St. Vincent’s Hospital

LIVING in the West Village has its tradeoffs, just like living anywhere else. On the minus side, there are the tourist buses inching through the neighborhood each day, the near-farcical property prices, the creep of luxury stores up Bleecker Street, the 3 a.m. spillover from bars.

But on the plus side?

“This block that I live on is one of the most beautiful in the city, actually,” said Albert Bennett, who has been a resident of the same house on Morton Street for 55 years. “It’s the best place in the world to live.”

For Mr. Bennett and thousands of others who populate the West Village’s oddly angled street grid, there is a lot to love in the restored 1800s town houses, the ironclad community spirit and the multiplicity of choice in shopping and dining. So much to love, in fact, that residents overlook certain things, as did Howard and Jessica Jamner last year when they spent their first night at One Jackson Square, a new building on Greenwich Avenue. That night happened to be Halloween.

“It’s 2 in the morning and we’re looking outside, and it’s utter gridlock,” said Mr. Jamner, who along with his wife is retired. “There’s 20,000 people just in our view outside the building. Jessica turns to me and goes, ‘Do you think it’s going to be like this every night?’ ”

It isn’t, of course. Most nights, a stroll down Waverly Place or Charles Street is more serene architectural tour than raucous bar crawl. But the option for either is always there, and the variety of choices in the neighborhood is just what attracted Ben Rubinstein and Cheryl Goldwasser, a couple in their 20s who got engaged on the Christopher Street Pier last November.

The housing stock, even at an upper-middle-income level, can be “distressing” in its spareness, Mr. Rubinstein said. The couple rent a 500-square-foot one-bedroom on Christopher Street for $2,700 a month — though they got one free month this year — their second in the neighborhood. And film crews may stop them on the sidewalk to keep them from walking through scenes in production. But the restaurants, the quiet walks, the creative buzz and the waterfront pathways a few blocks away overwhelmingly make up for any drawbacks.

“The fact is, you take the tradeoffs,” Mr. Rubinstein said. “It comes with the territory. I’d rather live in an interesting place.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

As evidenced by requests for directions from camera-toting tourists, Manhattan’s straightforward grid of avenues and streets meets defeat in the West Village. But newcomers should rest assured that a place where West Fourth and West 10th Streets intersect eventually begins to make sense.

“One does learn, somehow,” said Mr. Bennett, the Morton Street resident, who also heads his block association. “It’s osmosis.”

Adding up the tracts between the Far West Village, on the other side of Hudson Street, and the Avenue of the Americas, 2000 census data found that it has 24,110 residents (though that number will probably change after this year’s count). It is a population packed mostly into a varied collection of 19th-century town houses, though apartment buildings do occasionally show up, especially at the neighborhood’s edges.

Hudson Street, Seventh Avenue and Avenue of the Americas are all commercial strips, though there is commerce on those curving interior streets as well. Bleecker Street moves from Murray’s Cheese and Faicco’s Pork Store, near Avenue of the Americas, to Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren heading north toward Hudson, a transition that irks those who desire more local businesses. West Fourth Street has its own shops, as do Carmine and many others.

Nearly all of the northern half of the neighborhood, and much of the southern, is governed by the regulations of the Greenwich Village Historic District, one of the city’s first, dating to the 1960s. Today, an extension to the district is being considered; the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission said a vote should occur this summer. Residents are watching closely.

“It is zealously defended,” said David Gruber, the president of the Carmine Street Block Association, speaking of the neighborhood’s historic character. “It’s the legacy we have to pass on to the next generation.”

This protection means new construction is mostly unheard of, yet the One Jackson Square building, named for the small park it overlooks, recently welcomed its first residents. And near the neighborhood’s southern border, a new development called the Townhomes of Downing Street is under construction.

One issue that brought residents together in protest recently is St. Vincent’s Hospital, which closed its doors on April 30. An urgent-care facility is to open on its site, but residents say the subtraction of the hospital and all of its services represents a major loss for the neighborhood.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The story of property in the West Village is one of inventory, or the lack thereof. From a recent analysis of the market, Mike Lubin, a vice president of Brown Harris Stevens, found that there were just two apartments of two bedrooms or more in full-service buildings for under $3 million, and only eight town houses under $7 million.

“You always hear about little inventory,” Mr. Lubin said, “but when you assign a real number to it, it’s shocking. I can’t tell you how many times we have buyers and there’s literally nothing to show them.”

The resulting effect on prices is evident. Town houses in good condition typically fall within the range of $2,000 to $2,800 per square foot, said Jill Bane, a director of sales at Leslie J. Garfield & Company, pointing out that this was still lower than the $3,500 levels in 2007 and 2008, before the financial crisis.

“It’s not sky-high like it was in 2007,” said Alex Nicholas, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, “but there are certainly strong numbers.”

Ms. Bane sold a house on Bank Street in December for $8.995 million; the house had 5,960 square feet of space and was in need of renovation, she said. Mr. Nicholas sold the Edna St. Vincent Millay house on Bedford Street, known as “the narrowest house in New York” for its nine-and-a-half-foot width, this past winter for $2.175 million. The square footage was about 1,200, he said.

The neighborhood has fewer condominiums than co-ops, Mr. Lubin said, adding that with many cost $1,000 to $2,000 a square foot, depending on size and degree of renovation.

Since One Jackson Square entered the market in summer 2007, 25 of 30 units have sold, said David Penick, a vice president of Hines, the company that developed the property. Sales have ranged from $1.7 million, for a one-bedroom with 1,200 square feet, to $8 million for a full-floor apartment with a large terrace and 2,700 square feet .

One-bedroom rentals in the neighborhood typically cost $2,500 to $3,500 a month, Mr. Lubin said. Two-bedrooms start around $3,000, but the climb can be steep from there.

THE SCHOOLS

The West Village is stocked with schools, both public and private. At Public School 41 on West 11th Street last year, 98.1 percent of students met standards in math, 95.4 percent in English.

Some students are zoned to attend Junior High School 104, the Simon Baruch School, on East 21st. Last year, 86.2 percent of students met standards in math, 76.8 percent in English.

Last year at City-as-School, a public high school on Clarkson Street, SAT averages were 491 in reading, 471 in math and 465 in writing, versus 435, 432 and 439 statewide.
Private schools include the City and Country School on West 13th, and St. Luke’s School on Hudson.

WHAT TO DO

Aside from untold numbers of shopping and dining options, there are plenty of neighborly activities like the Charles Street Spring Planting, which just took place last weekend; residents are advised to look to bulletin boards for others. For recreation-seekers without memberships to the area’s multiple gyms, the Hudson River and its well-traveled waterside trails are a short walk away.

THE COMMUTE

Residents are never far from a subway that can quickly get them to Midtown or the financial district. They can choose from any of the lines along 14th Street, including the A, C, E and L at Eighth Avenue, the 1, 2 and 3 at Seventh Avenue, and the F, V and L (and the PATH train) at Avenue of the Americas. The 1 train also stops at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue; the B, D, F, V, A, C and E all stop at West Fourth Street and Avenue of the Americas. Finally, the 1 train has a stop at Houston and Varick Streets.

THE HISTORY

Once a marsh, then farmland, the West Village and environs really only took off as a neighborhood when disease beset the city in the early 19th century. Those who came in search of a place free of cholera and yellow fever decided to build houses and open stores.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/realestate/09living.html

[Merry]

NoHo

By C. J. HUGHES

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40 Bond Street

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88 Bleecker Street

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Great Jones Street

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Bleecker Street

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ON New York’s streets, finding a comfortable place to sit outdoors usually requires ordering something off a menu. While busy sidewalks may offer many delights, they are known to be short on free benches.

But there are many inviting exceptions to this rule in NoHo, a small former manufacturing hub in downtown Manhattan that makes up in style what it lacks in size.

Street furniture, in the form of four metal seats welded in place, beckons on a shaded stretch of Bleecker Street, near Mott, and somebody has also graciously provided a pair of wooden benches a few blocks away, by Broadway. Weathered benches face one another on Bond Street, too, so visitors can kick back, perhaps, after touring the many home-furnishings shops.

When Jonathan Kenyon arrived in New York from London in 2003, perches like this were ideal for contemplating the seemingly unhurried pace of life, particularly after cocktail-fueled evenings nearby in the East Village, where Mr. Kenyon rented a two-bedroom. “I would sit and have a smoke and watch the world go by,” he said, “and I would dream about living here.”

Last year those dreams came true. Mr. Kenyon, who runs a design studio, and his partner, Tory Clarke, paid $1.66 million for a 2,400-square-foot NoHo loft. People-watching now takes place from up above, through windows that reveal quaint studies in contrast, like cars bumping down stone-surfaced roads past shiny metal condominiums.

For Mr. Kenyon, NoHo’s chief appeal is an artistic pedigree strikingly evident even in passing. A huge plywood copy of part of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco hangs on a corner of Lafayette Street; gleaming golden figurines dance on a building’s fire escape; a giant origami-like mural soars above a Gristedes on West Third Street.

The artist population has fallen in recent years, but even so, buildings like Mr. Kenyon’s co-op still teem with them. His neighbors include a painter, a sculptor and a filmmaker. Mr. Kenyon himself makes silk-screen prints.

Technically speaking, living in NoHo more or less requires being an artist, under the terms of a 1976 zoning amendment. Although it left the 20-block area mostly zoned for manufacturing, the amendment was passed to benefit early colonists already camped out in NoHo’s cavernous spaces as commercial tenants were vacating.

Today New York rarely enforces the artist-in-residence rule. And most co-ops look the other way, according to residents and city officials, as long as buyers sign a waiver acknowledging they’re breaking the law.

Some argue that the rule should be scrapped, because the makeup of the neighborhood has radically changed anyway — with artistic types having given way to bankers.

There are even artists who would pull the plug on the special zoning. Stan Reis, a photographer, believes that doing so would not only generate diversity but also help achieve fairer market values. His own loft has 2,900 square feet, nine north-facing windows and maple floors. In 1974, it cost $25,000, he says; today it could sell for 100 times that.

“I used to say, ‘A million four and I’m out the door,’ and then it became two million, and now I’m not taking three,” Mr. Reis said. “This neighborhood has constantly improved.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Shaped like a tooth, NoHo is bordered by Mercer Street and the Bowery, from East Ninth to East Houston Street, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which declared most of the area a 125-building historic district.

Many of those antiques are Romanesque, with brick of varying tones and huge arched windows. And they’re comparatively short, allowing a sense of airiness, much as when Bucky Wunderlick surveyed the scene in Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel “Great Jones Street.”

NoHo’s buildings then were “half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived by light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south,” in Bucky’s view.

Traces of NoHo’s workaday past remain, like the “Jos. Scott TKGN Corp. Stables” lettering in a cornice on Great Jones Street. But many factories have been lovingly converted, like the former tent company at 10 Bleecker Street, which is now a 22-unit co-op, and 250 Mercer Street, whose 277 apartments were fashioned from joined commercial buildings above Dojo restaurant.

At the same time, NoHo has splashily added condos, which have been met with varying degrees of approval. Some, for instance, criticize the wavy glass facade at 445 Lafayette Street, a Related Companies development on Astor Place, by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, for being out of context.

But 40 Bond Street, developed by Ian Schrager and designed by Herzog and de Meuron, has won raves from established neighbors who might be expected to object to avant-garde construction. Most approve of its finish, which resembles the foil used to wrap holiday wine.

Its block has become a stop on architectural star maps: there is No. 25, a nine-unit building with a chipped limestone finish, by BKSK Architects, and No. 48, a 17-unit structure by Deborah Berke and Partners Architects, whose windows slant outward.

The anchor of the block is No. 54, a white cast-iron former bank, whose three upstairs apartments are on the market starting at $4.5 million. “We started with something that had a very hard life and brought it back,” said Adam Gordon, its developer, who predicts more of the same now that the landmarks commission has effectively banned demolitions.

The rental stock used to be made up of lofts that lacked final certificates of occupancy. These days things have evolved somewhat, one example being 2 Cooper, a 15-story luxury rental building with a weathered brick skin. Of its 144 units, 35 percent have been leased since May. Studios start at $2,925 a month.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

In late June there were 58 listings on the market, at an average asking price of $3 million. They ranged from a studio for $299,000 at 88 Bleecker Street — a rare postwar co-op — to the entire fourth floor of 25 Bond, with four fireplaces and a balcony, for $19.5 million.

But prices and activity have trended downward over the last few years, and more sharply than in similar Manhattan neighborhoods. At the market’s peak in 2007, for example, there were 116 sales for an average of $2.7 million, according to data prepared by the Corcoran Group. That year was led by the $18.03 million sale of the 10th-floor condo at 794 Broadway, known as the Dandy, though there were also 24 sales at 77 Bleecker Street, a more modest block-through 242-unit co-op.

In 2009, 21 units sold, for an average of $1.37 million. That works out to a 50 percent price drop — about twice what other desirable neighborhoods experienced. That year, the biggest deal was $3.55 million for a three-bedroom condo at 21 Astor, which is above a Starbucks.

WHAT TO DO

Audiophiles enjoy Other Music, whose displays include shrink-wrapped vinyl albums, like the Velvet Underground and Nico’s “banana” record ($18.99) and the National’s Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers ($17.95).

Dashwood Books, a basement-level shop, is dedicated to photography.

NoHo Star, which has thrived in a former publishing plant since 1985, offers a lively brunch. From a cart outside, you can buy balsamic-infused ice cream.

THE SCHOOLS

The high-performing Public School 41 on West 11th Street has an enrollment of about 750 from kindergarten through Grade 5. On state exams last year, 100 percent of fourth-graders met standards in math, 96 percent in reading.

At Simon Baruch Middle School, 81 percent of eighth-graders met standards in math, 79 percent in reading.

Washington Irving High School, just outside the area, has almost 1,400 students. It has a 33 percent dropout rate. SAT averages last year were 386 in math, 386 in reading and 376 in writing, versus 502, 485 and 478 statewide.

THE COMMUTE
NoHo is well served by subways. The N and R trains stop at Eighth Street, while the B, D, F and M trains are available at Broadway-Lafayette, along with a connection to the downtown No. 6 train (which also stops at Astor Place). A connecting passageway is being built as part of a $94 million station renovation to allow access to the uptown No. 6.

THE HISTORY

In many ways, the high-end housing takes NoHo back to its 1830s roots, when Bond Street with its rows of town houses was a prestigious address. The area has few green spaces today; it once had Vauxhall Gardens, near the site of Joe’s Pub. “Couples strolled along gravel paths among shrubs and flowers and classical statuary,” writes Mary Knapp, the historian at the Merchant’s House Museum, in a forthcoming book, “An Old Merchant’s House: Life in a Nineteenth-Century New York City Home, 1835-65.” The museum, on East Fourth Street, is a relic of that era.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/realestate/11living.html

[Merry]

Hudson Square

By JAKE MOONEY

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Patrons outside the Ear Inn, in a 19th-century house on Spring Street that once belonged to a tobacco trader and is one of the city’s oldest bars.
The area feels “really New York,” as one denizen put it.
That definition encompasses a good bit of commercial space and not much shopping.

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THE compact area known as Hudson Square — and also known, at times, as West SoHo and the South Village — is nestled among three of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan: the West Village, TriBeCa and SoHo. As luxury condominiums take root in this once overwhelmingly commercial sector, it is establishing a presence.

“It feels very artistic, it’s really New York — you know you’re in New York and yet it’s got this small-town feel to it,” said Ellen Baer, president of the Hudson Square Connection, a business improvement district. “There’s a real sense that there’s something happening here, and something very modern.”

Largely at the southern end of the five-by-seven-block neighborhood — bounded by Houston and Canal Streets on the Far West Side — new residential buildings at 505 Greenwich Street, 255 Hudson Street and 330 Spring Street, among others, have attracted well-heeled residents including several famous actors. Open-floored commercial buildings in the area, a former printing hub still mostly zoned for commerce, are increasingly home to media and advertising companies.

Some residents of those new buildings value privacy, and the neighborhood, while busy during the workday, has far less foot traffic than SoHo. Of course, that does mean fewer options for buying daily necessities and groceries. But Wilbur Gonzalez, a Prudential Douglas Elliman managing director who lives there, says the quiet makes it “much nicer on the weekends.”

A towering dose of busier SoHo just arrived this year in the form of the Trump SoHo, a 46-story hotel-and-condominium development controversial for its size. Sales of the condo units started out slow, and a group of buyers accused the building’s backers in a lawsuit of inflating early sales figures. But the building is still there, across Varick Street from a Manhattan Mini Storage building. The hotel part of it opened for business in April.

In many ways, Andrew Azoulay recalls, the life that he and his wife, Karen, used to have on Charlton Street in Hudson Square was ideal. Their building was full of young families with children, and they saw the neighborhood’s location as nearly ideal. In short, it was the kind of place where you can settle down, which they did, buying a loft for $1.7 million and having a daughter. They joined hundreds who have moved in over the last few years.

But for all the area’s charms, the Azoulays decided to decamp for TriBeCa in January, selling the loft for $2.4 million despite their fondness for Hudson Square. Their reason: a large city sanitation garage going up at the western end of Spring Street, to the unease of many.

Planning goes on despite objections. A lawsuit was dismissed in January. Bob Gormley, district manager of Community Board 2, which represents the area, says the board is scheduled next month to hear a presentation on a salt shed to be housed on the new site. Space there is also allocated for fuel storage tanks and — most galling to neighbors — a truck garage.

Phil Mouquinho, the owner of the nearby Italian restaurant P. J. Charlton and a leading opponent of the facility, says it sends a mixed message.

“On the one hand, the mayor’s saying, ‘Bring us your children, bring us your family, right next to this wonderful Hudson River Park,’ ” Mr. Mouquinho said. “And then he goes and approves the building of this mammoth, Stalin-era type of building.”

Others are guardedly optimistic. “I think if it’s done reasonably well, it’s not going to be the neighborhood-killer that people think it’s going to be,” said Tobi Bergman, a community board member.

Still, Mr. Azoulay, who is 42 and works in the children’s clothing business, said the facility was the main reason his family left. “Just even the concept of it was just way too much to handle,” he said.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

“Hudson Square” has started to edge out “South Village” and “West SoHo”; it has the backing of the community board, the business improvement district, and Trinity Real Estate, the property-management arm of Trinity Church, which owns about 40 percent of the square footage in the area.

A thornier problem, Mr. Bergman said, is the fact that most of the neighborhood is still zoned for manufacturing, which makes more new residential construction difficult. He isn’t the only resident who would like to see that changed, especially since the current zoning does allow hotels. (Besides the Trump SoHo, there is a Hampton Inn on Watts Street, and in the fall a Courtyard by Marriott is to open on Varick Street.)

“I think people would hate to see new development limited to hotels,” Mr. Bergman said. “I think the need is to maintain the basic character but to allow people to build reasonable-sized apartments in the vacant areas.”

In the nearer term, Hudson Square Connection is planning a series of streetscape improvements aimed at making the area’s wide sidewalks more inviting and de-emphasizing the presence of the Holland Tunnel entrance. Short-term efforts, Ms. Baer said, will very likely include tree-plantings and storm-water and traffic management. A long-term plan is in the works, to go into effect over the next few years.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Mr. Gonzalez of Elliman sees condominiums in doorman buildings — the bulk of new construction in recent years — as a relatively good buy on a per-square-foot basis.
“I think that we’re getting from $1,100 to $1,200 to $1,250 here, as opposed to central SoHo where they’re $1,250 to $1,500,” he said. “So, that’s a good 10 to 20 percent discount.”

In practice, according to sales data, that has amounted to one-bedroom units in luxury buildings selling for $900,000 to $1.1 million, and two-bedrooms from $1.2 million and $1.8 million.

Then there is the Urban Glass House, the Philip Johnson-designed condo building at 330 Spring Street — next to the proposed sanitation garage. Some potential buyers are troubled, said James Attard, an associate broker at the firm Tabak Is TriBeCa, which is selling a unit in the building. His opinion is that the city’s renderings make the facility look visually attractive, and besides, not all units face that direction.

Still, the unit his firm is selling has had its price lowered.

“Originally we put it in at a much higher price, and at the time there were a lot of people interested in a much lower number,” Mr. Attard said. “Now, that much lower number, today, would have been very close to the asking price.”

WHAT TO DO

The neighborhood has little green space, though there is a small wedge-shaped plot of trees and benches on Spring Street at the Avenue of the Americas. Hudson River Park, just beyond the neighborhood to the west, has biking and running paths, picnic areas and a dog run. Pier 40, the park’s largest pier, is accessible from West Houston Street, and features baseball and soccer fields and kayaking.

Live music sites include the Jazz Gallery, on Hudson Street, and the City Winery, which also provides facilities for members to make and bottle their own wines. The Ear Inn, in an 1817 house on Spring Street that once belonged to a tobacco trader named James Brown, is one of the city’s oldest bars, claiming continuous operation since the late 19th century.

THE SCHOOLS

Public Schools 3 and 41, both to the north in Greenwich Village, both received A’s on their city progress reports. At No. 3, 91.6 percent scored at or above grade level in English, 96 percent in math. At No. 41, 94.8 were found proficient in English and 97.8 in math.
Junior High 104 on East 21st Street draws its nearly 1,000 students from a wide swath including Hudson Square. It scored a B on its most recent city report card, with 82.5 percent found proficient in English, 85.1 percent in math.

Public high schools in the general area include the Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School and the NYC iSchool, both at 131 Avenue of the Americas. In 2009, averages at Chelsea Career were 405 in reading, 408 in math and 407 in writing.

The iSchool is new and did not have any test-takers. At the Unity Center for Urban Technologies, just to the south on Avenue of the Americas, averages were 371 in reading, 391 in math and 389 in writing. State averages were 435, 432 and 439.

THE COMMUTE

The No. 1 train runs under Varick Street, stopping at the area’s northern end, at West Houston Street, and south end, at Canal Street. The C and E trains run under the Avenue of the Americas, the eastern boundary, stopping at Spring and Canal Streets. Canal is also served by the A train. West Street has eight lanes of traffic heading north and south along the West Side. Drivers headed for New Jersey are already directly adjacent to the Holland Tunnel.

THE HISTORY

The land now known as Hudson Square, part of a 1705 land grant from Queen Anne of England to Trinity Church, was later the site of a thriving market district, according to the group Friends of Hudson Square. Tenements began replacing single-family homes in the mid-19th century, and commercial and manufacturing buildings soon followed. The Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District, at the northeast corner, is home to a collection of Greek Revival and Federal-style houses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/realestate/22living.html?_r=1

[Merry]

Living In | The Meatpacking District

The Corner of High Life and High Line

By JAKE MOONEY

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WILLIAM PHILLIPS owned Phillips-O’Shansky Meats on Gansevoort Street for decades starting in the early 20th century. He was a sharp-eyed man, his grandson Jonathan Phillips said, but he would never have imagined the meatpacking district as a place where people would want to live, let alone pay a premium to do so.

“He would have laughed,” said Jonathan Phillips, a senior vice president of Halstead Property. “He actually won his butcher shop in a game of cards.”

The transactions are weightier these days. One of Mr. Phillips’s listings is a town house on Horatio Street, just south of the district, with an asking price of $8.5 million. There are cheaper places to live in the area, to be sure — and there are even a few meat businesses. But as the neighborhood has transformed into a late-night destination, residential sections nearby have attracted new people who want to be around all the fun, and who have the financial means to put themselves there.

The meatpacking district proper — a tiny trapezoid framed by Gansevoort Street, West 14th Street, Hudson Street and the West Side Piers — is not zoned for residences and no longer has many illegal lofts. Most people who want to experience the district, then, move to adjacent streets in the West Village like Horatio or Jane, or just over the northern border in West Chelsea.

Sterling Kenan, a 31-year-old interior decorator who has been renting on Jane Street since May, said her border location was ideal, near restaurants like Pastis and Paradou but not too close to the area’s nightclubs.

“There’s all that excitement up there, and then there’s the quiet West Village just south of me,” she said.

Thomas and Pauline Nakios, who own the women’s clothing line Lilla P, do manage to live inside the district. Though they do so “precariously,” in a mostly commercial building, Mr. Nakios said, they have been there since 2002. (The couple were reluctant to say how much rent they pay, but monthly rents in the area range from $2,800, for a studio, to $6,000 or more for a top-floor two-bedroom like the Nakioses’.)

Mr. Nakios fondly remembered his early days in the neighborhood, when the meat industry was fading and the social scene less mainstream and more eclectic. In those days, he said, the 24-hour French diner Florent on Gansevoort was a favorite of artists, clubbers and night owls of all sorts. It closed in 2008 when its rent got too high, and lately, Mr. Nakios said, the neighborhood’s feel is more retail-oriented and corporate.

Not that the couple find this a bad thing: next spring they are planning to open a Lilla P store in a West 14th Street space that once housed a meat business. Also, Mr. Nakios said, the 2009 opening of the High Line (http://www.thehighline.org/) elevated park, which has an entrance on Gansevoort, has had a democratizing effect.

“I think early on you kind of got a fashionista, style-only crowd coming to the neighborhood,” he said, “but now with the High Line you’re getting all walks of life.”
The Nakioses, meanwhile, are looking for a new place, and have made an offer on a condominium on the eastern border of the district.

If all goes as planned and they stay, they will be part of a mix in the area that Jonathan Phillips describes as still varied: fashion people, club people, people who value old New York history, and “people who have at least a certain portion of their life in Europe.”

He also sees many more of the very young. “I’ve noticed a lot of people there with small children,” Mr. Phillips said, “which is a much different thing than 10 years ago.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The neighborhood was accorded landmark status in 2003 (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/nyregion/blood-on-the-street-and-it-s-chic-landmark-status-for-a-meatpacking-district.html?scp=3&sq=meatpacking%20district%20landmark&st=cse), and the height limitations that come with that designation keep its buildings much shorter than immediately surrounding ones. The exceptions are two tall and relatively new hotels: the Gansevoort, at the eastern edge, and the Standard, straddling the High Line to the west.

Most streets are paved with Belgian blocks, and many old market buildings have distinctive sheet-metal awnings. The blocks to the south in the West Village are a combination of town houses and converted industrial buildings that now house rentals and co-ops.

Many residents of these buildings have become fed up with garbage and noise from the district’s nightclubs, and the attendant taxi and foot traffic, said Bob Gormley, the district manager of Community Board 2, which represents the area.

“We get calls all the time about the late-night activity,” he said. “And actually, as far as complaints go, we seem to be getting some concerns about brunch parties being kind of loud.”

In fact, Mr. Gormley said, on a recent Sunday stroll he happened on one such brunch event that he mistook at first for a rock concert. “I haven’t heard anything that loud since I was in Studio 54 30 years ago,” he said. Though the neighborhood’s reputation back then was dicier, he added, “the meatpackers and the prostitutes were quiet.”

The board’s chairwoman, Jo Hamilton, who has lived on Jane Street for 16 years, recalled the area as “this wonderful, fine mix, 24 hours, kind of cool at all times with different populations coming in.” Now, she said, “it has been taken over by the clubs.”

For the most part, she finds residents keeping their distance from the clubs at night.

“This is a problem that’s common, to any neighborhood that gets chosen by whoever chooses it to become a hot spot for nightlife,” Ms. Hamilton added. She called the neighborhood’s historic buildings remarkable, and predicted that the club era would pass. In particular, she said, the opening of the High Line, as well as the planned construction of a Whitney Museum offshoot next to the line beginning next year, should provide a stabilizing influence.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Mr. Phillips of Halstead says buyers are looking at a range with a low end of $450,000, for a studio, and a high of $20 million for a penthouse. Town houses like those on Horatio Street can command $1,200 to $1,300 per square foot, $2,000 if they are in a desirable spot — near the High Line, for example.

Nick Gavin, a senior associate at the Corcoran Group, offered two recent examples of representative prices. One was a three-bedroom at 345 West 13th Street that he listed at $4.195 million. The other was a one-bedroom at 321 West 13th Street, priced at $1.1 million, for which he represented a potential buyer. In both cases, Mr. Gavin said, the owners received multiple offers above their asking prices within weeks.

Mr. Gavin, who said he helped the actor Mickey Rourke rent a 5,000-square-foot loft off West 14th last year, described inventory in the area as low and demand as still high.

“If you’re paying a premium,” he said, “you want to be able to walk out your door and say, ‘O.K., I want to go to Spice Market for dinner,’ or ‘I want to go to Jeffrey’s to do some shopping.’ ”

WHAT TO DO

The High Line is the area’s newest and best-known recreational attraction. Ms. Kenan, the interior decorator, says she likes to stroll through during the week; it is crowded on weekends. Farther west, Hudson River Park (http://www.hudsonriverpark.org/index.asp) has jogging and biking paths.

And, as befits an area with “meat” in the name, dining options are myriad. The Standard Grill, under the High Line on Washington Street, has a thriving outdoor dining scene.

THE SCHOOLS

Primary students in the neighborhood — including the blocks immediately surrounding the meatpacking district — are zoned to attend Public School 3, on Hudson Street, or 41, on West 11th Street. Both received A’s on recent city progress reports. At No. 3, 91.6 percent of students met standards in English, 96 percent in math. At No. 41, percentages were 94.8 in English and 97.8 in math.

Middle school students are zoned for Junior High School 104 on East 21st Street, which the city also gave an A. In recent tests, 82.5 percent were proficient in English, 85.1 percent in math.

Two high school options, to the north of the neighborhood, are the Manhattan Business Academy and the Humanities Preparatory Academy. They share the West 18th Street site that until 2004 housed Bayard Rustin High School.

The business academy started in 2009, so scores are not available. At the humanities academy in 2009, SAT averages were 420 in reading, 388 in math and 410 in writing, versus 435, 432 and 439 statewide.

THE COMMUTE

The nearest subway stop, just past the neighborhood’s eastern border, is at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street. A, C, E and L trains stop there.

The city recently added a bike lane on Ninth Avenue; that and other streetscape improvements, intended to calm traffic, have made the district more pedestrian-friendly.

THE HISTORY

Heavy industry, including a granite works and an iron foundry, constituted the earliest development, according to the city’s historic designation report.

An open-air farmers’ market, eventually called the Gansevoort Market, thrived in the neighborhood beginning in the 1880s, offering vegetables, oysters, fish and meat.
It was after World War II that meat and poultry businesses began to predominate. Their decline, in the 1980s, coincided with the ascendancy of nightclubs mostly serving a gay clientele.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/realestate/03living.html?ref=realestate

[Merry]

Battery Park City Rolling On

By SHELLY BANJO

While the real-estate market stalled across most of New York City during the financial crisis, building at Battery Park City went full steam ahead, turning the once-blighted downtown into a suburban mecca for stroller-pushing parents and Wall Street executives.

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Over the past 10 years, nine residential buildings with 2,435 units have been built as part of a 40-year master plan developed through the state's Battery Park City Authority. While hundreds of area residents were displaced during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and many didn't return, a mix of temporarily reduced rents, government subsidies and rebuilding funds helped to restore the neighborhood.

More recently, the influx of new development and overall downturn have caused apartment prices to drop in Battery Park. The median sales price in the neighborhood dropped 17% to $1 million in the third quarter from a year earlier, according to the Real Estate Board of New York.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. began to move into the neighborhood in a big way in 2005, leasing land to build a new headquarters, a luxury hotel and three Danny Meyer restaurants, including a Shake Shack location.

Now there are virtually no remaining empty lots left to develop in Battery Park City, largely built on top of landfill from the excavated from the World Trade Center site in the 1960s. The area now is home to a gaggle of activist families who in the past year managed to persuade the city to install a new library branch and a kindergarten through eighth grade public school.

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"The plan is almost completed but our job here is not done," says Gayle Horwitz, who took over as president of the Battery Park City Authority this week. "We're closing the chapter as a real-estate developer and opening a new one to make sure we maintain this neighborhood for the future."

On Battery Park's last two developable sites, Milstein Properties is constructing two more residential buildings that are set to be finished in 2011—the 32-story Liberty Luxe and 22-story Liberty Green buildings. In between the two buildings will be the 52,000-square-foot Battery Park City community center. The center will contain a 25-yard Olympic pool and fitness center, a 156-seat theater, classrooms and public space that will new located next to existing ball fields.

Nearby, Brookfield Office Properties' World Financial Center will undergo renovations to fully integrate the complex into the city street grid as the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and transportation center continues. Plans could include removing the large marble staircase in its Winter Garden indoor plaza and making way for a food and retail concourse. Developers are still in talks with the community board and city.

Gourmet grocery store Battery Place Market opened this month inside the Visionaire, the Albanese Organization's residential condominium at 70 Little West St. There are already two Gristedes Supermarkets and a Whole Foods Market nearby.

Busy on the northern end of the neighborhood is Goldman Sachs, which in 2009 moved its headquarters into its new 43-floor, 2.1-million-square-foot building at 200 West St. The project cost $2.1 billion.
That has stimulated residential sales. "Every week we get a number of prospective buyers from Goldman Sachs," says John Tashjian, a principal of Centurion Real Estate Partners, which took over the Riverhouse condominiums this year and has sold more than 85% of the building.

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Goldman Sachs also has announced plans to revamp the entertainment and hotel complex next door to its building—turning the current Embassy Suites into a luxury Conrad Hotel and adding three Danny Meyer establishments.

"The neighborhood offers families the experience of raising kids in the suburbs while giving them everything the city has to offer but the only thing missing was restaurants," Mr. Tashjian says.

It's no secret that families run this neighborhood. Stroller brigades march along the parks and streets. Community board meetings are typically packed and nearly every new residential building includes a children's playroom.

"Once people move here, they never leave so they're very involved with the community," says Jessica Weitzman, a vice president at Corcoran Group who lives in the neighborhood.

In September, PS/IS 276 opened on Battery Place, after busloads of parents went to Albany to urge officials to turn what was supposed to be a women's museum into a school.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303362404575580221587212954.html?m od=rss_newyork_real_estate

[Merry]

Hudson Sq. taps high-powered makeover team

Seven firms led by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects will put a greener, prettier Hudson Square on the map; reclaiming for pedestrians streets built to handle heavy truck traffic.

By Amanda Fung

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In its ongoing effort to become a handsome, bustling, 24-7 neighborhood—and to leave its gritty industrial past behind—Hudson Square will pretty itself up a bit. The lower Manhattan neighborhood's Business Improvement District, known officially as Hudson Square Connection, said Friday that it has selected a team of seven firms to design streetscapes that would better reflect the area's creative character.

The effort will be led by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, which was picked from 23 teams that responded to a request for proposals issued in July. The BID was seeking a group to develop a comprehensive streetscape improvement plan for what was once the city's printing district and is bounded by West Houston Street on the north, Canal Street on the south, Sixth Avenue on the east and Greenwich Street on the west.

“It was a tough choice,” said Ellen Baer, president of the Hudson Square Connection.

“This team got it. They have a really good understanding of the technical stuff as well as design and the local knowledge and ability to get things done while retaining a global perspective.”

The selected team will have until the end of next year to draw up specific plans and a vision for the neighborhood, which has become home to a number of media and creative firms, including CBS Radio and Horizon Media. The area is known for its early 20th century art deco buildings, many of which housed printing companies. These properties are now modern loft-like office buildings.

Since it is still in early stages, details of the plan have yet to be fleshed out, but the goal is clear: to make Hudson Square a destination open from all different directions and neighborhoods (TriBeca, Chinatown and SoHo are all nearby), while balancing the pressures of car traffic in the area with increasing foot traffic, according to Signe Nielsen, principal at Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. The design will also support the growing number of residents and tourists in the area.

“Everything is on the table,” said Ms. Baer, adding that they will work closely with the city and the Department of Transportation in formulating a plan. For instance, the neighborhood has wide streets because it was constructed for truck deliveries and “we want to reclaim that space for pedestrians,” she said. “There are very few places where people can sit and enjoy lunch here. We want to create those oases and green spaces.”

“Our team is excited about this,” said Ms. Nielsen. “Our goal is to put Hudson Square on the map.”

Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects worked on the pedestrian and landscape improvements in Hudson River Park. The firm is also currently working to make the temporary Broadway pedestrian plaza in Times Square permanent, as well as on improvements to the 125th Street corridor in Harlem.

For the Hudson Square project, Mathews Nielsen has teamed up with Rogers Marvel Architects, industrial designer Billings Jackson Design, design/engineering firm ARUP, graphic designer Open, Mercator Land Surveying and consultant VJ Associates.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20101119/REAL_ESTATE/101119829

[Merry]

Grit, Glam and Green, in One Vibrant Package

By JAKE MOONEY

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87 St. Mark's Place

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NISHA KEWALRAMANI, 34, moved with her parents to the East Side of Manhattan when she was 8 months old, and has enjoyed jumping around the city, exploring different neighborhoods, ever since. Since March, though, she has found herself roaming less. It’s not that she’s tired of New York. On the contrary, she said recently, it’s that after a lifetime, she has finally settled in a neighborhood she does not want to leave.

The neighborhood is the East Village, not all that far south of Ms. Kewalramani’s last apartment, at 49th Street and First Avenue, but a world apart in character. Specifically, she is on Avenue B facing Tompkins Square Park, a 10.5-acre green space that has provided shelter and comfort to an array of East Villagers from its spot at the heart of the neighborhood.

That group has included homeless people and drug users who took over large parts of the park in the late 1980s, more than once clashing with the police. But it also includes people like Ms. Kewalramani, a yoga teacher who paid $1.2 million for her 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom in Christodora House, a 16-story condominium at 143 Avenue B.

Loyalists say one of the best things about the park and its environs is that they can comfortably accommodate such a broad spectrum of residents.

Ms. Kewalramani’s home studio faces the park, which provides a wide view and open sky, as well as a refuge she traverses every day. “It’s kind of like a meditation for me,” she said. “Walking through the park to come home and walking through the park to go out and start my day has been one of my greatest blessings of living in 143.”

Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3 and an East Village resident since 1970, said the park had attained a state of relative quiet, aside from complaints about the handful of “very loud” concerts it hosts throughout the year.

“There’s no issues there,” Ms. Stetzer said. “We have a big playground that was renovated very, very recently. It’s very nice. The park is well used. We have a rat problem, but so does a lot of the rest of New York City.”

Speaking as a resident rather than as a district manager, she described something bittersweet about having witnessed the slow gentrification of the park. The playgrounds — there are actually three — are shinier and more colorful than when she used to take her son there in the late ’70s and early ’80s. But, she said, they loved the park then, too, and that era had its advantages.

“It was a much stronger, much closer community then,” Ms. Stetzer said. “Everyone knew everyone, and they weren’t necessarily people like you.”

In a neighborhood known for its activism, she added, people used to meet one another at conferences for one cause or another, or while handing out petitions on tenants’ rights.
“Nowadays, if someone’s giving out something,” she said, “it’s for a sale.”

Still, she said, the Sunday morning Greenmarket at Avenue A and East Seventh Street is a popular gathering place, as is the park’s dog run, near its northeast corner. And many of the newer people, though they do have more money, are nonetheless there because they appreciate the community.

Alex Clark, an owner of the Ost Café on East 12th Street who moved to East 11th Street in 2009, said that the park retained some of its grittiness, but that residents tended to give one another room to live. There is one thing, he said, that everyone has in common.
“I think everyone who lives here realizes at some point that they, at least in their eyes, live in the best neighborhood,” Mr. Clark said.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The Christodora, where Ms. Kewalramani lives, has had a colorful history: Built in the late ’20s as a settlement house for low-income families, it was empty for years, and then in the ’60s served as an unofficial community center. By the late 1980s, after its conversion to condominiums, it became a target as the “Die, yuppie scum” building — a phrase that gained currency during the Tompkins Square Park rioting.

Christodora residents, many of whom were involved in neighborhood activism, have long considered such taunts unfair, even as high-priced sales in the building continue to make news.

Most buildings in the area are shorter than the 16-story Christodora. Five-story tenements, fire escapes crisscrossing their facades, dominate the side streets. Condos are still rarer than co-ops, said Emma Hamilton Malina, a senior associate broker at the Corcoran Group who lived in the neighborhood for almost eight years.

It can be hard to discern the relative priciness of such buildings, which look much the same from the outside as they did 50 years ago. A glimpse of a high-end track bike in an apartment window or an Eames desk chair in a storefront office, may indicate a lavish interior. Still, Ms. Malina said the nature of the area’s housing stock, especially the absence of buildings with elevators, has kept prices diverse.

“If it’s a fifth-floor walk-up,” she said, “it’s never going to be a million-dollar property. So you do kind of have something for everyone.”

The main retail corridors near the park, A, B and C and First Avenues, are distinctive for their relative lack of chain stores, a result of neighborhood campaigns to preserve small businesses. These avenues, to the chagrin of many residents, can get loud: They are lined with bars and restaurants, and the community board has begun restricting the issuance of liquor licenses in some areas to cut down on noisy late-night foot traffic.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Ms. Malina of Corcoran said a typical price for a one-bedroom walk-up co-op unit near the park cost about $600,000. Two-bedrooms, which are rarer, trade at “a serious premium,” she said. So do units in the Christodora, as Ms. Malina would know: She and her husband were the previous owners of Ms. Kewalramani’s apartment. The last four apartments there, she said, have sold for around $1,200 a square foot.

In the rest of the area near the park, Ms. Malina said, prices are more like $900 to $1,000 per square foot, though there are some relatively inexpensive small units on the market, like a pair of ground-floor studios for $350,000 and $250,000.

Craigslist indicates that rental prices vary widely, with studio units near the park renting for around $1,700 a month, two-bedrooms for more than $2,500 and three-bedrooms for close to $4,000. Ms. Stetzer, at the community board, also notes that there is public housing on East 12th Street and subsidized housing around the neighborhood, though the supply is dwindling.

That, she said, explains many longtime residents’ nostalgia for the days when the area was rougher and less sought-after. “There were certainly a lot of bad things happening,” she said, “but we could afford to live here.”

THE COMMUTE

Few subway lines pass near the park; the closest is the L train, at 14th Street and First Avenue, and the N, R and 6 trains all make stops a few long blocks to the west. Travel time to Midtown is around half an hour. Some residents don’t mind the relative insularity, arguing that it makes the neighborhood more close-knit. There are alternatives: The city recently installed bike lanes on First and Second Avenues.

WHAT TO DO

Residents can choose among a seemingly endless supply of cafes, restaurants and bars. The block of St. Mark’s Place just west of the park has restaurants specializing in sushi, vegan food, crepes, Thai, hot dogs, hummus and dumplings, among others. There is also an Irish pub and a tattoo parlor.

The neighborhood abounds in community gardens, often on vacant lots. Civic activism remains a popular pastime; the East Village Community Coalition is the most prominent group. Neighborhood campaigns in recent years included one to preserve St. Brigid’s Church, on Avenue B, that proved successful. Another, to stave off developers at a former public school and community center on East Ninth Street, remains unresolved.

THE SCHOOLS

The public elementary school closest to the park is No. 64, at Sixth Street and Avenue B. It scored a C on its most recent city progress report, with 26.5 percent of tested students found proficient in English, 44.7 percent in math. Public School 19, on First Avenue, also scored a C; 34.1 percent were proficient in English, 56.8 percent in math.

The Tompkins Square Middle School, in the same building as No. 64, received an A, with 57.3 percent of students proficient in English, 72.8 percent in math. The East Side Community School on East 11th Street, which serves Grades 6 through 12, got an A for its middle school, with 33 percent of students proficient in English and 60.8 in math. Its high school also scored an A. In 2009 its SAT averages were 395 in reading, 406 in math and 390 in writing, versus 435, 432 and 439 statewide.

THE HISTORY

According to the Encyclopedia of New York City, Tompkins Square Park and the surrounding neighborhood was once owned by Daniel D. Tompkins, a governor of New York who was vice president under James Monroe. The city acquired the land, then a swamp, in 1834, and landscaped and graded it. As far back as 1857, it was the site of protests about jobs and the economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/realestate/21living.html

[Merry]

The Name Evokes Dawn for a Reason

By GREGORY BEYER

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Carl Schurz statue

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Morningside Drive

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FOR decades, in spite of supporters who argued to the contrary, Morningside Park was saddled with a dangerous reputation: a haven for drug addicts, a no man’s land separating the ivy privilege of Columbia University, literally lofty on its perch, from the valley of Harlem below. Columbia students knew to avoid it. Lucy Martin-Gianino, an agent with the Corcoran Group who has sold homes along Morningside Drive, recalled crossing the park as a girl. “I thought, ‘This is the end of me,’ because it was dangerous territory.”

The city accorded Morningside Park landmark status only in 2008, long after it anointed other parks from the design team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — Central Park in 1974 and Riverside Park in 1980, for example.

“It’s absolutely picturesque beyond any description,” said Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, whose Upper Manhattan district includes the park. “But for many years it was not treated with the same deference as other Olmsted parks, partly because of where it was.”

A narrow 30-acre expanse on a steep cliff of Manhattan schist, the park is named for its sunrise views. Standing on the western ridge, near Columbia University, you are about even with the middle floors of Harlem buildings.

Today there is evidence that decades of community activism have paid off. Signs of vitality include a dog run; a renovated playground; and, in the spring, the pleasing cracks of softball bats. A 25-foot sequoia, donated by a nursery in Portland, Ore., anchors a grove of pines near West 112th Street. And since 2005, at the behest of the group Friends of Morningside Park, a co-operative called Community Markets has run a seasonal market at 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue, said Jacquie Connors, the Friends president.

On exiting their apartments, those who live along the eastern edge of the park have a view of a distant waterfall; it pools into a pond on the site where Columbia planned to build a gymnasium in 1968, until protests halted construction.

Developers are realizing the golden opportunity of parkside living. “The good news-bad news is, there’s so much gentrification happening,” said Ms. Martin-Gianino, the Corcoran agent.

Even so, advocates have occasionally been frustrated by the slow pace of progress. The northern tip of the park, near 123rd Street, is fenced off; the city parks department stores equipment there. A department spokesman cites plans to improve nearby entrances, pathways and plantings, as well as to renovate a playground. But Brad Taylor, who heads Community Board 9’s parks committee, expressed concern that budget cuts could delay such efforts. “We’re a little wary about it,” he said.

Mr. Taylor, an architect, has for two years lived at 54 Morningside Drive, overlooking the park on 116th Street. He paid nearly $1 million for his three-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath apartment, which he shares with his wife and two children. For 18 years before his move, he lived on Amsterdam Avenue.

“The park is so aptly named — Morningside,” he said. “You’ve got these spectacular sunrises every morning that come up over Harlem. You can be on the second floor or third floor and you feel like you’re on the 15th.”

Cami Anderson and her partner, Jared Robinson, were both drawn by the area’s diversity and culture. In July 2009 they rented a two-bedroom two-bath place on Manhattan Avenue near 118th Street for $3,300 a month. “We hang around here a lot,” said Ms. Anderson, who works in education. “Some people come up here to get more space and then get on the subway. Not us.”

Last year the couple’s first child arrived. Given their proximity to Frederick Douglass Boulevard — and his statue at the northwest corner of Central Park — they named their son Sampson Douglass Anderson Robinson.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The park is bounded to the north by 123rd Street, to the south by 110th Street, to the west by Morningside Drive and to the east by Manhattan Avenue and Morningside Avenue. A mix of apartments, Columbia-owned buildings and institutions line Morningside Drive, the park’s lofty western edge. Among the institutions are the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, St. Luke’s Hospital and the pillared Church of Notre Dame, a Catholic church built in 1911. The apartment buildings are popular among Columbia faculty.

Terraces along Morningside Drive allow spectacular views of the park and Harlem.

Morningside Avenue and Manhattan Avenue, along the eastern side, are dominated by town houses. Even though Morningside Avenue is very close to Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the feeling is more residential, said Beatrice Sibblies, the developer of 88 Morningside, a 73-unit condo tower now under construction on Morningside at 121st Street. “It’s a street that feels like a brownstone block, because of the low scale and because of the park.”

Ms. Sibblies’s building will have a gym, a media room and a roof deck with private cabanas. At 12 stories, it will be the tallest on the park’s east side. When completed — in February, according to the sales agent — 88 Morningside will join another sentrylike structure, Avalon Morningside Park, the 20-story rental tower at 110th Street and Morningside Drive. Completed in 2008, it occupies the same huge block as St. John the Divine and glassily guards the park’s southwest corner. Although Manhattan’s various neighborhood boundaries are impossible to etch in stone, even the most flexible observer might raise an eyebrow at Avalon Morningside’s telephone greeting, which describes “a luxury apartment community located in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.”

David Bernhardt, the building’s general manager, said the depiction was more conceptual than geographical. “I think when you advertise as Harlem, you are setting a different expectation for price, and I think this community and our specific locale is geared more toward the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights.”

As for the area around Morningside and Manhattan Avenues, it seems a place apart from the massive retail corridor of 125th Street and iconic Harlem establishments to the north, like the Apollo Theater and Sylvia’s.

“I call it a suburb of Harlem,” said Amanda Jhones, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman. The sense that these blocks are at once a part of greater Harlem and distinct from it, Ms. Jhones said, is helped by the street names: Morningside Avenue, for example, runs only from 113th to 125th Streets, a tiny stretch compared with city avenues that thread through dozens of neighborhoods.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Prices have decreased 20 to 25 percent since 2009, said Ms. Jhones of Elliman. A three-family town house along Manhattan or Morningside Avenue near 110th can range from $1.3 million to $1.5 million, while a four-family might run $1.75 million to $1.95 million and up, she said. Shells and houses requiring gut renovation can be found around 120th Street, for $550,000 to $950,000.

At 88 Morningside, 19 apartments are currently on the market, said Felicia de Chabris, the building’s sales agent, who works for Halstead Property. One-bedrooms start at $375,000, two-bedrooms at $595,000 and three-bedrooms at $775,000.

Rentals at Avalon Morningside Park start at $2,700, for a studio, $3,300 for a one-bedroom and $4,800 for a two-bedroom, Mr. Bernhardt said.

WHAT TO DO

While Morningside and Manhattan Avenues are residential, in recent years the blocks along Frederick Douglass Boulevard immediately north of 110th Street have sprouted new businesses and destinations. The stretch of Frederick Douglass between 113th and 114th Streets, for example, includes: Bier International, which opened last August and bills itself as Harlem’s first beer garden; Society Cafe, a popular spot for group brunches or a solitary Ethiopian coffee; and 67 Orange Street, a speakeasy-style bar serving $13 cocktails.

West of Morningside Drive, along Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, restaurants and bars are plentiful, as well as shops catering to a Columbia-dominated population. One of these is the Hungarian Pastry Shop, on Amsterdam at 111th Street. The farmers’ market, at 110th and Manhattan Avenue, is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays from May through December.

THE SCHOOLS

Elementary schools nearby include Public School 125 Ralph Bunche, on 123rd Street near Morningside Avenue, for kindergarten through Grade 5. Last year it received a B on its city progress report; 15.6 percent of fourth graders met standards in English, 35 percent in math, versus 45.6 and 58.4 citywide.

Among nearby middle schools is Columbia Secondary, on the same site as Bunche, serving Grades 6 through 9. Last year the school received a C on its progress report, with 79.8 percent of eighth graders meeting standards in English, 96.7 percent in math, versus 37.5 and 46.3 citywide.

Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, on West 114th Street, serves Grades 6 through 12. SAT averages last year were 376 in reading, 373 in math and 371 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

THE COMMUTE

The B and C subways stop near Morningside Park, at 110th and Central Park West and 116th and Eighth Avenue. Commuting to Midtown takes about 20 minutes. Buses include the 3, along Manhattan Avenue, and the 4, along 110th Street and Central Park North.

THE HISTORY

The city rejected Olmsted and Vaux’s initial design proposal, in 1873, only to hire them 14 years later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/realestate/09living.html

[Merry]

An Identity Dyed in the Wool

By C. J. HUGHES

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A PLEASING cityscape appears in the wraparound windows of Elizabeth Penberthy’s 11th-floor loft apartment in the garment district on the West Side of Manhattan: pointed buildings; glassy buildings; the Hudson River.

But the most pleasing part to Ms. Penberthy, especially at night, is the most offbeat: the neon sign of the New Yorker Hotel just a few rooftops away, the ruby letters sizzling.
Evoking Edward Hopper paintings or pulp detective novels, electric signs like these cast an evocative glow across many of the district’s 28 blocks.

Some alert drivers to parking garages, where fans wearing foam fingers whoop after Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. Another tells where to gamble on horses on Seventh Avenue, though that sign, on a closed Off-Track Betting parlor, has been reduced to “Off Tra.”

Pink hearts announce adult-themed entertainment; in this way the area’s seedier past lives on, if drastically downsized in recent years. But the vintage vibe is what appeals to Ms. Penberthy, an executive with a sportswear company who began her career in the fashion industry nearby.

“The area is really just a throwback to an earlier time,” she said.

Prices, too, can seem to have arrived via time machine. In 2010, her 3,000-square-foot unit, which has two bedrooms and two baths, cost $2.315 million, or about $770 a square foot, which is at least 20 percent lower than the price for a comparably airy space in, say, SoHo, according to brokers.

With 6,000 people living in an area of about half a square mile, according to the American Community Survey figures released by the Census Bureau in December, it remains largely industrial. But the fact that people live throughout marks a shift from the mid-20th century, when residents, many in the fashion business, lived closer to the edges of the district than its heart.

One of these is Myra Mann, a retired fashion buyer. In 1960 she moved to a building on 34th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, surrounded by high-rises; she says that cluster of buildings was then home to many in her field.

The rent on her first apartment there was $52 a month. She now owns a two-bedroom, from two combined units, at the same address. The apartment cost her a total of $248,000 — she bought the first unit in 1984 and the second in 2004 — though it might fetch $800,000 today, she guesses. Living and working in the same part of town for five decades has left Ms. Mann acutely aware of how much it has changed. Transvestite prostitutes “wearing eight-foot platform shoes” by the Lincoln Tunnel exit ramps are long gone, she says. She also recently noticed that a factory once run by a client that churned out blouses has now become a residence.

But on balance, she said, what is remarkable about the garment district is how little, fundamentally, it has succumbed to the tsunami of gentrification that has swept other parts of the city.

“They are always talking about huge changes to the area, but I just don’t see it,” said Ms. Mann, explaining that grocery stores are still lacking. But proximity to a manufacturing zone does have benefits: namely, the hush that falls after everybody punches out.

At nights and on weekends, “you could throw a cannonball down 34th Street,” Ms. Mann joked, “and you wouldn’t hit anything.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

It is clear that fewer clothes are being made in Manhattan these days. Even by the turn of this century, manufacturing and showroom jobs in the 10018 ZIP code had fallen to 77,191, from a high of 206,225 in 1960, according to Labor Department statistics.

But the spirit of the garment industry still pervades the place (strongly enough that an aficionado of local history, Mike Kaback, offers a specialized tour). Signs for beads, lace and thread echo vivid window displays, like the wall of ribbons at M & J Trimming on Avenue of the Americas and 38th Street.

Sidewalk medallions honor designers like Halston and Perry Ellis. And on a recent afternoon, at 39th Street and Seventh Avenue, it seemed almost like a fashion statement to find an orphan glove left on the statue of the garment worker at his sewing machine.

Exact boundaries are open to interpretation. A generous definition could have them stretch south to the Fashion Institute of Technology on West 27th Street, or over to Fifth Avenue, which is where the business improvement district puts it.

Its proper name, too, is debatable. The business improvement district prefers Fashion Center, while others use Clinton, Hell’s Kitchen — and even, like the Wyndham Garden Hotel on West 36th Street, “Times Square South.”

That hotel and more than a dozen others, cheek-by-jowl on blocks like West 40th Street, are the result of the 2005 rezoning of nearby Hudson Yards, which allowed high-rises to go up on the sites of dormant factories and parking lots.

Others that have taken advantage of the zoning are the Townsend, a 206-unit rental from Lalezarian Developers on West 37th Street, and Emerald Green, a 569-unit rental from Glenwood on West 38th Street; both opened last year.

Excavation is also under way on a second Glenwood tower, Crystal Green, which is to deliver 200 units on West 39th Street. And pair of new rental towers from TF Cornerstone face each other on 37th Street and 10th Avenue.

Galerie, a 12-story project from Assa Properties that is supposed to feature 92 condos and 87 hotel rooms at 39th Street and Ninth Avenue, doesn’t seem to have moved much beyond the theoretical stage. The number on the fence around the lot for its sales office was disconnected, but a spokeswoman declared the building to be on track.

The signature building is the brick and terra cotta factory type, with a wide arched door on the ground level and a top that tapers upward, courtesy of graceful setbacks, like a wedding cake. Most of those that became co-ops did so before 1987, when a zoning law passed to keep jobs in the area made it more difficult to convert them. Battles persist about how best to use those spaces.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

As befits its workhorse status, the garment district does not have a huge amount of inventory, so it can be hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions from past sales data, as the samples are usually small. But prices seem strong, despite the struggle in surrounding areas to return to prerecession levels.

In 2010, 28 co-ops and condos sold, at an average of $1.01 million. By contrast, in 2007, at the height of the market, 31 co-ops and condos sold, but the average was just $870,000.

Prices seemed to have been buoyed last year by a flurry of activity at 100 West 39th Street, the condo known as Bryant Park Tower. At the corner of the Avenue of the Americas, above a Marriott, and offering free laundry service, the high-rise had 16 of the year’s sales.

For those who are seduced by Manhattan’s westward creep, the garment district can’t be beat, says Peter Browne, a Stribling & Associates broker who has sold there for three decades. “Businesses keep on moving in this direction,” Mr. Browne said, “and they will go to Hudson Yards, too, when it’s built. And people are looking to live close to work.”

In terms of rentals, the newer buildings have studios for around $2,000 — for instance Hudson Crossing, a red brick Equity Residential property on Ninth Avenue. At the Townsend recently, a one-bedroom was listed for $3,555 a month. Worn older tenements, some with bas-reliefs on their brownstone facades, are usually cheaper.

WHAT TO DO

In last few years, the neighborhood has cemented its identity as a theater district. Soon to join the long-resident Abingdon Theater Company, housed in a former Con Ed substation on West 36th Street, will be a new performance arts complex at 450 West 37th Street.

In March, a classical music recording studio is to open in the building, formerly known as 37 Arts, alongside the Jerome Robbins Theater, which stages plays, dance performances and films across multiple floors.

Remnants of an Italian enclave survive on Ninth Avenue, where small food shops offer spices, fresh fish and cupcakes. Esposito’s Meat Shop sells fresh mozzarella for $4.98 a pound.

Even the newer restaurants in the area have a retro feel. The “Steak, Fish, Spaghetti, Cocktails” promised on the Cooper’s Tavern window is a menu that a Raymond Carver hero might relish.

THE SCHOOLS

Public grade schools are nonexistent; one nearby is Public School 5, on West 45th Street, for prekindergarten through Grade 5. It received a B on its city progress report last year.
Clinton School for Writers and Artists, a middle school with 275 enrolled, occupies a temporary home on West 33rd Street, awaiting completion of a new facility near Union Square. The city gave it an A last year.

One nearby high school is Humanities Preparatory Academy, on West 18th Street, which received a B rating. SAT averages last year were 433 in reading, 405 in math and 417 in writing, versus 484, 499 and 478 statewide.

THE COMMUTE

The A, C and E run under Eighth Avenue, and the 1, 2 and 3 under Seventh. The N, R and Q trace Broadway; the F, B, D and M follow Avenue of the Americas. All stop at 34th and 42nd Streets; with creative maneuvering, one can exit deeper in the neighborhood. Buses include the 7, 11, 16, 20 and 34.

THE HISTORY

Bickford’s, a defunct automat-style chain, once had an outpost at 488 Eighth Avenue. During the Depression, union members used a slingshot to break its windows after it hired nonunion glaziers, according to The New York Times. Today, Bickford’s cursive logo survives by its roofline, next to a pawn shop with the traditional three golden globes hanging outside.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/realestate/16living.html

[Merry]

Flatiron District Evolves Into Pricey Choice

By JOSEPH DE AVILA

The Flatiron District's most famous landmark is, of course, the 22-story Beaux-Arts building from which the neighborhood derived its name. The structure, built in 1902, was originally named the Fuller Building, after the construction icon George A. Fuller. But the nickname Flatiron suited the triangle-shaped structure, and the building came to define the neighborhood.

The Flatiron District—located between Union Square and 28th Street and boarded by Sixth and Park avenues—has only been a residential area for about the past 30 years.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AS536A_NYOPE_G_20110114191508.jpg
Madison Square Park

During the late 1850s, Broadway was becoming a popular retail corridor, and Sixth Avenue was gaining its reputation as Fashion Row. By the end of the First World War, most of the department stores fled uptown, and were replaced with manufacturing facilities and office spaces.

The 1980s brought a revival to the neighborhood as more people along with restaurants and retailers began moving in. Still, parts of the neighborhood remained rough around the edges: Union Square was better known for its crime rather than its farmer's market and artistic marketplace. More recently, the area has attracted publishing, advertising and tech companies.

Now the neighborhood is one the priciest in the city. Of the 155 residences currently listed on real-estate site StreetEasy.com, the median asking price is $1.825 million. The median square price per foot is $1,356. To the south in Greenwich Village the median price per foot is $1,045 and in Chelsea to the west it is $1,103, according to StreetEasy.
A number of national retail shops lining Broadway and Fifth and Sixth avenues have been attracted to the well-heeled residents of the neighborhood.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AS544_NYOPEN_G_20110114164434.jpg
Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street

The Flatiron District is also developing a reputation as a food destination. Last year, Mario Batali opened Eataly, his collection of gourmet Italian restaurants and markets, on Fifth Avenue. Also in the neighborhood is Craft, run by Tom Colicchio, a judge on Bravo's "Top Chef" series.

There haven't been very many new residential buildings added to the neighborhood. Many of the area's Art Deco buildings built between 1906 and 1929 have been converted into residential co-ops and condos, said Francis Lacoste Riggs of Prudential Douglas Elliman. Some of the buildings resembling large Parisian-style buildings previously were used as commercial spaces and hotels, he said.

One such building is the Grand Madison on Fifth Avenue. The 13-story Renaissance Revival structure opened in 1906 has served as a warehouse, a hotel and a sales showroom. In 2006, it was converted into condominiums with 195 units. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment there is on the market for $2.45 million.

In the southern portion of the neighborhood near Union Square, much of the housing stock is comprised of large condos and co-op buildings built around the 1960s, said James Curnin of the Parker Realty. The 380-unit Parker Gramercy on 15th Street was built during the mid-1960s as a rental building. During the 1980s, it was converted into co-ops. A two-bedroom, 1½-bathroom apartment is currently on sale there for $895,000.

Schools: Flatiron's schools are in District 2. It includes Ballet Tech, which is a specialized public school that admits students throughout the city based on talent for classical ballet. There is also the high school Manhattan Village Academy and Baruch College Campus High School.

In 2009, 92.6% of District 2 students in grades three through eight received a proficient score on the math exam, and 85.8% of students received a proficient score on the English Language Arts exam. In 2006, the results were 78.5% for math and 73.8% for reading.

Private schools in the neighborhood include Xavier High School, a Jesuit Catholic school. There is also the preschool Your Kids Our Kids and in nearby Gramercy there is the Epiphany School, which runs from nursery school to the eighth grade.

Parks: The six-acre Madison Square Park has been used as public space since 1686 and became a formal park in 1847. The first and second Madison Square Gardens were located near the park during the late 1800s. The Flatiron Building is also nearby. During the summer months, the park hosts a children's concert series. There are also gardens, playgrounds, a dog run and free WiFi.

Also in the south side of the neighborhood is Union Square Park, which measures about seven acres. It opened in 1839 and landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central and Prospect parks, later redesigned Union Square to allow for larger gatherings. More recently, the north and east plazas, 16th Street transverse and its playground underwent renovations. Work continues on the pavilion building.

New York's largest green market takes place in the park every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. There is also a dog run.

The birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt, the only U.S. president born in New York City, is at 28 E. 20th St. The original building has been demolished but it was rebuilt and is now a national historic site.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AS502A_OPEN__G_20110114184813.jpg

Entertainment: Flatiron is home to the Daryl Roth Theatre, a performing arts space where the show "Fuerza Bruta" is performed. Vineyard Theatre features off-Broadway productions. The Institute of Culinary Education, which offers recreational classes, is also in the neighborhood.

Shopping: Numerous national chain stores in the area like Banana Republic, the Container Store, Levi's and H&M. Fishs Eddy has inexpensive glassware, china and kitchen products. Idlewild Books has an extensive collection of travel and foreign language books. There is also a Whole Foods nearby.

Dining: The neighborhood offers a diverse selection of dining options. Eleven Madison Park serves new American cuisine, Petite Abeille serves Belgian fare and Sala One Nine is a tapas bar. Burger fans often wait more than an hour for a bit to eat at the original Shake Shack located in Madison Square Park.

There is also the neighborhood mainstay Mesa Grill, which Bobby Flay opened up almost two decades ago. Or grab a cocktail at Raines Law Room.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959104576081850837316410.html?m od=rss_newyork_real_estate

[brianac]

Streetscapes | Readers’ Questions

A Bit of Moscow on the Hudson?

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/christopher_gray/index.html?inline=nyt-per)

Published: February 3, 2011

Q. Who designed the 1930s District Health Center, at Ninth Avenue and 28th Street? It’s the fenestration that I have most liked, with its interplay of single and affiliated units. It’s an undersung work, and to me it curiously echoes an early Soviet modernist building in Moscow, Nikolai Ladovsky and Sergei Chernishev’s Lenin Institute (now State Socio-Political Library) of 1925-27. ... Joseph Masheck, Manhattan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/06/realestate/street-3/street-3-popup.jpgMuseum of the City of New York
A Ninth Avenue entrance in 1937. Could the design have been influenced by a building in Moscow?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/06/realestate/street-2/street-2-popup.jpg
The District Health Center at Ninth Avenue and 28th Street, in 1940.


A. Good thing Joe McCarthy never heard about this! “Mr. Mayor, in my hands I have a list, a list of communistic-inspired architecture right under your nose. ...”

However, this chunky light-brick-and-polished-granite structure was designed in 1935 by Carl F. Grieshaber and Will Rice Amon, neither of whom had any ascertainable communist leanings. Both had high-end training, including M.I.T. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and Les Écoles d’Art Americaines de Fontainebleau.

Grieshaber worked for Carrère & Hastings in the 1890s, and then at Delano & Aldrich for 30 years, becoming partner. Amon came to Delano & Aldrich about 1922.

The two men went out — or perhaps were put out — on their own after the crash, in that brave new world.

Their partnership continued through the 1930s, although the District Health Center appears to be their major commission. It was part of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s New Deal-financed program for health centers, broadly interpreted to include playrooms, auditoriums and social service offices.

A plan published in 1940 shows a network of cubicles on the main floor for dentistry, maternity, TB and venereal disease clinics. (The author remembers, in his distant and impecunious youth, two of those.)

A search of the Avery Architectural Library index to periodicals yields very little in American journals about Soviet architecture, and it is unclear how Grieshaber and Amon would have known of the building in Moscow.

Nikolai Ladovsky was an avant-garde architect, a leader of the rationalist movement, and no fan of the heavy classical styling favored by Stalin. Sergei Chernishev was chief architect for Moscow from 1934 to 1941, and continued in high positions until the end of his life in 1963. Comrade Ladovsky, however, died in 1941 under mysterious circumstances.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/realestate/06streets.html?ref=realestate

[Merry]

Trinity says it’s time for residential in Hudson Square

By Lincoln Anderson

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_407/residnets.jpg

A map showing the area Trinity is proposing rezoning to allow residential use.
The rezoning would also add height caps for new construction.

Calling Hudson Square’s zoning “outmoded,” Trinity Real Estate wants to rezone a major portion of the district to allow residential use.

With the change, Trinity expects 3,000 to 3,500 new residential apartments over ten years would be added to the neighborhood — not counting the district’s few existing legal residential units.

The plan’s centerpiece is a new, 429-foot-tall, residential tower at Duarte Square, on property owned by Trinity. Helping alleviate local school overcrowding, a 420-seat, K-to-5 public school would be included in the tower’s base. Trinity would build out the school’s raw space for the Department of Education.

Currently, residential use and schools are not allowed in Hudson Square’s M1-6 (manufacturing zoned) district. Neither are cultural uses currently permitted.

Tonight, Thursday, Trinity Real Estate will present the rezoning concept plan to Community Board 2’s Land Use and Business Development Committee. Three days earlier, Trinity gave The Villager an exclusive advance presentation.

Trinity officials who showed the plan asked not to be quoted by name in this article.
In short, Trinity feels there’s “a strong desire” for some residential use in the district.
In addition, Trinity is seeking height caps for new construction in Hudson Square. The caps are being described as “a modest downzoning.”

Along wide streets, like Canal, Hudson and Varick and Sixth Ave., there would be a height cap of 320 feet, or 32 stories. For commercial use, the maximum floor area ratio, or F.A.R. (which determines how much square footage can be built.) would be 10, with current bonuses for including public plazas and arcades eliminated.

On these wide streets, residential F.A.R. would be 9, which would get a bump up to 12 F.A.R. with the inclusion of 20 percent affordable housing.

Currently, the whole district’s F.A.R. ranges from 10 to 12. Plus, there’s no height limit — which is how the Trump Soho condo-hotel could be built to 490 feet, equivalent to 49 stories, by acquiring air rights from adjacent buildings and using a plaza bonus.

On narrow streets, like Greenwich and Spring Sts., and other east-west streets, the height cap would be 185 feet, about 18 stories, and on mid blocks the F.A.R. would be lowered from the current 10 to 6.5, but could rise to 8.5 with affordable housing included.

On Broome and Watts Sts., however, the F.A.R. would be even lower, 5.4, but could rise to 7.2 with the affordable-housing bonus. The height cap would be about 12 stories.

The tower Trinity hopes to build at Duarte Square — at the wide-streets intersection of Canal and Varick Sts. and Sixth Ave. — at 429 feet would be taller than other new construction. The public school in it would occupy four stories and be 100,000 square feet, and would not count toward the project’s F.A.R. Trinity would build out the school’s core and shell — and then give the space to the city for free — and rent free, for perpetuity.

Trinity is also obligated to build a park on part of the property at Duarte Square as part of the development.

A prime concern of Trinity is to preserve the jobs of current commercial tenants. Under the scheme, existing buildings of more than 50,000 square feet could not be residentially converted. If a commercial building of more than 50,000 square feet were demolished, then there would have to be a “1-to-1 replacement” in the new building — meaning it would have to have at least 50,000 square feet of commercial space. Buildings less than 50,000 square feet could be residentially converted, and the expectation is that many would be. According to Trinity, under the rezoning, about 90 percent of the existing square footage in the neighborhood would be preserved as is.

Also, under the proposed change, new nightclubs would not be allowed to open in Hudson Square. Big-box stores would be banned, as well, with an exception for supermarkets.
Bounded by Sixth Ave. on the east, the Hudson River on the west, Houston St. on the north and Canal St. on the south, Hudson Square was formerly known as the Printing District. Located west of Soho and north of Tribeca, it lacks both those neighborhoods’ renowned cachet. Yet, in recent years, as new businesses have moved into the area, Hudson Square increasingly has become an energetic and hip, media and creative hub. Foot traffic — at least during the day — has shot up.

Trinity Real Estate wants to increase, not only residential occupancy, but also retail in Hudson Square. Right now, the neighborhood turns quiet with empty streets at night and on weekends. Lunch options are few. Trinity would like to make it a “24-hour community.” Residential use would increase foot traffic, helping sustain retail. However, luring chain-store-type or high-end retailers is definitely not the goal.

Specifically, Trinity is seeking a rezoning for the area north of Canal St., east of Sixth Ave. and Varick St. over to Hudson St. and then across Spring St. over to Greenwich St. and up to Houston St.

Trinity is, unquestionably, the area’s major stakeholder; it owns 40 percent of the neighborhood’s built space and closer to 50 percent if the land Trinity leases to others is included. (The Saatchi & Saatchi building, at 375 Hudson St., for example, is on Trinity property but is owned by Tishman Speyer.)

Meanwhile, Hudson Square’s retail vacancy rate, 30 percent, is very high, despite having one of the lowest retail rents in Manhattan. Other areas, like the World Trade Center and the Hudson Yards, have commercial subsidies, but Hudson Square does not. As a result, property owners are turning to hotels — a number of nondescript ones having recently popped up in the neighborhood, along with the towering new Trump Soho condo-hotel at Spring and Varick Sts. Yet, hotels generate a lot of traffic, which is a concern of Trinity Real Estate.

In addition, Trinity had a bad experience with a hotel project on one of its own properties: The planned Viceroy hotel, to be built atop the gutted shell of a warehouse at 330 Hudson St., never panned out. At great expense, Trinity itself had to seal up the vacant shell.

And SEIU is reportedly having trouble finding a buyer for its former union headquarters building at Sixth Ave. and Grand St. Without residential use, converting the building into another hotel might be the only option.

Under the proposed rezoning, a special permit would be needed for new hotels with more than 100 rooms.

Trinity doesn’t want to attract so-called destination retail — like Soho’s glitzy boutiques and the large stores lining Broadway. Rather, Trinity hopes to attract small and mid-sized retailers and restaurants — mainly to service its own commercial tenants and the increased number of residential tenants that would populate the neighborhood due to the rezoning.

Currently, Hudson Square’s residential occupancy is about 4 percent. With a rezoning allowing residential use, Trinity hopes to boost this figure to 25 percent. Two mixed-use neighborhoods that Trinity sees as comparable to Hudson Square, Park Ave. South and the Flatiron District, have residential rates of 38 percent and 29 percent, respectively.

All of Trinity’s profits go to support Trinity Church as well as Trinity’s charitable mission throughout the city, focused on neighborhoods like Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Harlem, the South Bronx and the Upper West Side. Except for its actual church building, Trinity pays property taxes on all its real estate holdings.


http://www.thevillager.com/villager_407/trinitysays.html

[Stroika]

Under the scheme, existing buildings of more than 50,000 square feet could not be residentially converted. If a commercial building of more than 50,000 square feet were demolished, then there would have to be a “1-to-1 replacement” in the new building — meaning it would have to have at least 50,000 square feet of commercial space. Buildings less than 50,000 square feet could be residentially converted, and the expectation is that many would be. According to Trinity, under the rezoning, about 90 percent of the existing square footage in the neighborhood would be preserved as is.

I don't understand the logic here. Why won't they be able to convert large buildings to residential? This just seems like an invitation to needlessly demolish beautiful old prewar commercial buildings in order to then build hideous, cheap alucobond-and-prefab residential, no? What is the sense in needlessly saying that large buildings would have to be demo'ed rather than converted to residential?


Also, under the proposed change, new nightclubs would not be allowed to open in Hudson Square.

And what's with the continuing attempts to strangle fun in Manhattan? Is there any place safe those who want to party on a weekend night (i.e., a large proportion of Manhattan residents and visitors)?

[lofter1]

Young marrieds with little children, dreaming of their early years in the quiet suburbs (that they ran from as soon as possible).

Go figure.

[brianac]

Community Looks to Preserve Women's Prison in Chelsea


February 23, 2011 4:54pm


Reports Gov. Cuomo may shutter a prison in Chelsea are sparking a mix of hopes and fears.




http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2011_02_R6404_Bayview_Prison_Chelsea _Reax_223_HOLD_4_PIX.jpg



http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2011_02_R1392_Bayview_Prison_Chelsea _Reax_223_HOLD_4_PIX.jpg


http://s3.amazonaws.com/sfb111/story_xlimage_2011_02_R2903_Bayview_Prison_Chelsea _Reax_223_HOLD_4_PIX.jpg

By Tara Kyle

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer


CHELSEA — Rreports that Gov. Andrew Cuomo may shutter a prison in Chelsea are sparking a mix of hopes and fears on the West side.


The Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium security women's prison located on West 20th Street and Eleventh Avenue, is one of three prisons in the city that Cuomo is considering closing, sources told the New York Post (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/lockdown_hutdown_9TFntzkOc6M1sg37V7It5K). The others are Lincoln Correctional Facility on West 110th St. and Fulton Correctional Facility in the Bronx.


The facility, constructed in 1931 as the Seaman's House YMCA, carries a rich history — for 30 years, it offered beds for the night to merchant sailors, World War II veterans and Coast Guardsmen. But it does not possess landmarks status, a point that has some neighborhood leaders concerned the cash-strapped state might sell it to the highest bidder.


"It's a handsome building," said Edward Kirkland, co-chair of Community Board 4's landmarks committee, citing the structure's brick and stone façade and maritime motifs. "God knows what they could put on top of it."


Now, taking Bayview to the Landmarks Preservation Commission was one of the CB4 committee's "class A priorities," according to Kirkland.


Save Chelsea co-president Lesley Doyel, who recalled childhood walks with her mother to donate books to the Y, wrote in an e-mail that she worried the prison, located on prime real estate across from Chelsea Piers, could turn into another mega-development.


"The current trends in West Chelsea, and the proposed addition of many stories to the Chelsea Market building (http://www.dnainfo.com/20110214/chelsea-hells-kitchen/chelsea-market-may-be-growing-up) would seem to be cause for concern and vigilance," Doyel wrote.


The site already hosts one preservation battle — four decades ago, painter Knox Martin put a huge pink and red mural on the prison's south side. But development across the street on Jean Nouvel's artsy, luxury condo development (http://nouvelchelsea.com/architecture.php) now mostly obstructs views of the mural, which Martin said Tuesday had been his "way of imparting the greatest dignity to a women's prison."


The worst case scenario, in the view of neighborhood leaders, would be either total demolition of the structure, or sale to a luxury developer who would alter the exterior.


But some said that if the prison did close, there could be at least one potential benefit for the community.


Both Doyel and Joe Restuccia, chair of CB4's health, housing and human services committee, both brought up the possibility of converting at least part of the building into affordable housing units.


While Restuccia praised Bayview as a very quiet, "very good neighbor," that provided valuable work release programs, he noted that the facility's size could hold several hundred housing units.


"If there is a closure, and it's unavoidable," he said, "we should look at it as an opportunity."



Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110223/chelsea-hells-kitchen/community-looks-preserve-womens-prison-chelsea#ixzz1ErQYUP2R

[Merry]

^ A very handsome example of Art Deco. It should be landmarked.

[Merry]

A very tiny, skinny "neighborhood" :).



Southern Pride, of a Kind

By JAKE MOONEY

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/27/realestate/LIVING/LIVING-articleLarge.jpg
The bustle is evident in this view north from the median at 17th Street and Park Avenue South.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/27/realestate/27living-map/27living-map-popup.jpg

WHEN Jennifer Aziz told her father she was thinking of buying an apartment on East 29th Street near Park Avenue South, he was worried. As Ms. Aziz recalls it, his concern went beyond the standard fatherly protectiveness. As a rug dealer, he had owned a store decades ago in the commercial district south of Midtown Manhattan, which he remembered as it had been then: drably commercial, dead at night and a little seedy.

Fortunately for Aziz family harmony, her father was reassured when he came for a look around.

The area is livelier than ever, and in recent years Park Avenue South in particular — the stretch between East 17th and East 32nd Streets — has experienced a wave of residential construction and, hence, lots of new foot traffic.

Long a poor relation of the “real” Park Avenue to the north, and later an emerging bargain district, the area has come into its own as a distinct place to live and socialize.

With that emergence have come higher housing prices. Ms. Aziz, 32, who is a nursery school teacher, closed on her one-bedroom apartment this month. Although she declined to say how much she paid, data compiled by StreetEasy.com indicate that similar units in the building, at 39 East 29th Street, have sold recently for $1,400 to $1,500 a square foot, or more than $1.1 million. Farther downtown, agents say, units in recent condominium developments like 240 and 260 Park Avenue South are closer to $1,700 per square foot and up.

The street has always had a certain appeal, even in worse times: “Locationwise,” Ms. Aziz said, “it’s perfect to get anywhere. You’re not far from any neighborhood. Never a cab ride that’s more than $10.”

But now there is less reason to leave. The Gansevoort Park Avenue hotel, an offshoot of the meatpacking district hot spot, opened across East 29th Street from Ms. Aziz’s building in November, and a string of prosaic but essential neighborhood services have fallen into place. Among them, said Jennifer Brown, executive director of the Flatiron 23rd Street Partnership, are child-care facilities like Appleseeds and the New York Kids’ Club, and several gyms.

Ms. Brown says her group, a business improvement district oriented toward commercial development, applauds the avenue’s growing residential character. The changes, she said, have helped make the avenue into a functioning live/work neighborhood, allowing residents to walk to jobs at companies like New York Life Insurance, Credit Suisse and Grey advertising.

“We’ve really found that more residents in the neighborhood have only helped us in terms of what we’re trying to do,” she said, adding that more people meant more customers for an increasingly diverse array of businesses.

Some of those are trendy restaurants and bars that, like the Ace Hotel on East 29th Street a few blocks to the west, are experiencing a bit of a moment.

“You’re really drawing a very young, hip crowd,” said Richard Steinberg, an executive managing director of the Warburg Realty Partnership.

“The same crowd that would normally go down to the meatpacking district or TriBeCa, is now staying in Midtown Manhattan because it’s so much more convenient.”

Beyond trendiness, the area’s housing stock, much of it former office or commercial space, also has much to offer. Kimberly Lyn Pressman, a vice president of the Corcoran Group, said Park Avenue South drew people seeking a certain kind of dwelling.

“They want high ceilings, they want voluminous rooms, they want oversized windows,” Ms. Pressman said, “and because of the history of the neighborhood and when these buildings were built, the apartments have a lot of these factors.”

Ms. Aziz, who will be living in a new unit, said her personal history with the avenue — stemming in part from her father’s old store — made it feel like home. If anything, she said, she might get frustrated as the warm weather draws bigger crowds to the Gansevoort’s rooftop bar.

But she added: “I actually don’t mind. I prefer a lively neighborhood to a quiet, dark street.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The liveliest stretch of the avenue — and the best-established residentially — is below East 23rd Street. Larger buildings include the 259-unit 280 Park Avenue South, which was built in the 1980s, and 260 Park Avenue South, the former United Federation of Teachers headquarters, which opened as condominiums in 2006 with 86 apartments.

Frances Katzen, a managing director of Prudential Douglas Elliman, described the conversion of the teachers’ building as a milestone in establishing the avenue as a residential area, and said sales there had continued even through the economic slowdown.

“This is now a destination location,” she said. “It’s not a sort of fringe neighborhood trying to emerge. It’s arrived. It has its own cachet.”

The blocks above East 23rd, agents said, have generally lagged behind in value, linked in many minds with unromantic Midtown. Yet that association is loose. “You ask 10 different people and you’ll get 10 different answers about where Midtown starts,” said Ms. Pressman, the Corcoran broker.

In any case, those blocks in the upper 20s have lately gained in allure, thanks in part to new restaurants and hotels. Paul Zweben, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said the biggest changes had happened a couple of blocks to the west, where the Ace Hotel, with its Stumptown coffee shop and restaurants by the chef April Bloomfield, opened in 2009.

“I think they’re completely changing that entire section of Broadway over, and it’s basically rolling onto Park Avenue,” Mr. Zweben said, adding that, as in TriBeCa in the 1990s, “I’ve seen neighborhoods change because of food.”

He predicts that the upper blocks of Park Avenue South will continue their metamorphosis as more eating and drinking establishments come to surround the Gansevoort, which has the makings of a neighborhood hub. Indeed, Mr. Zweben said, the hotel seems to have developed into a scene already. Asked what types of hanging out, exactly, go on there, he replied, “I’m not cool enough, so I don’t know.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Ms. Pressman says East 23rd Street is a still a line of demarcation when it comes to price.

Between 19th and 20th Streets, the 54-unit 240 Park Avenue South, designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates Architects, is one of the area’s more desirable buildings, she said. Prices there were around $1,700 a square foot when the building opened, and have since settled around $1,600 a square foot. For units of all kinds on the avenue, she said, average prices below 23rd Street exceed $1,100 a square foot. By contrast, averages per square foot above 23rd Street are under $800. There are, of course, exceptions and outliers on both sides, Ms. Pressman said. One reason for the disparity, she added, is that most of Park Avenue South’s recent luxury condo developments have been built toward the avenue’s southern end.

Ms. Katzen says prices on the lower part of the avenue remain high in part because of scant inventory in the avenue’s more popular blocks. “There’s a lack of really good-quality product right now,” she said, “so there seems to be a lot of pent-up aggression.”

By way of example, she cited a unit she had been marketing as a rental in 260 Park Avenue South, the Teachers’ Federation building, a two-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath unit advertised for $8,700 a month. “We didn’t even have time to rent it,” she said, “because we sold it within a week.” The asking price had been $2.25 million, and the unit sold for $2.15 million, she said.

Rentals, then, can be hard to find, but according to StreetEasy, one-bedroom units in the avenue’s condo buildings tend to rent for $4,000 and up. Two-bedroom units typically start at $6,500. In both cases, depending on the building, prices can be much higher.

WHAT TO DO

The avenue passes within a block of Madison Square Park, to the west, and the private Gramercy Park, to the east. To the south is Union Square, where the Greenmarket now operates all day on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. There are dozens of restaurants on the avenue and on the surrounding blocks; two established favorites are the Gramercy Tavern, on East 20th Street, and BLT Prime, on East 22nd.

THE COMMUTE

The 6 train makes local stops under the avenue at 23rd and 28th, as well as just north of Park Avenue South’s boundaries at 33rd Street. The latter is also an express stop for the 4 and 5 trains. To the south, the N, Q, R and L are accessible from Union Square.

THE SCHOOLS

Primary students south of 25th Street attend Public School 40, on East 19th Street. The school got an A on its most recent city progress report; 83.9 percent were proficient in English, 86.4 percent in math. North of 25th, students are zoned for P.S. 116 on 33rd Street. That school got a B on its progress report; 75.6 percent were proficient in English, 86.6 percent in math.

The nearest middle school is Junior High School 104, on East 21st Street. It scored a B on its progress report, with 58.7 percent proficient in English and 68.5 percent in math.
Baruch College Campus High School, just west of the avenue on East 25th Street, has a little over 400 students. In 2010, SAT averages were 523 in reading, 583 in math and 528 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

THE HISTORY

The New York and Harlem Railroad began running under the avenue in the 1830s, when the line beginning at Prince Street was extended northward. Though the northern blocks of Park Avenue first got their name in 1860, Park Avenue South was still known as Fourth Avenue until 1959, when the city renamed it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/realestate/27living.html?_r=1&ref=realestate

[Merry]

Tasting the Sweetness in Hamilton Heights

By JOSEPH DE AVILA

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View up West 147th Street.

Upper Manhattan's Hamilton Heights derives its name from its most famous early inhabitant, Alexander Hamilton, who bought land in the area in 1799. At that time most of Upper Manhattan was still rural, and it wasn't till the 1880s that the neighborhood's stately townhomes began to be built for well-to-do white residents.

By 1919, the northern section of Hamilton Heights was beginning to be referred to as Sugar Hill, where "life is sweet." The area rose to fame during the 1930s when a wave of black professionals moved in. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the novelist Ralph Ellison and jazz legends such as Charlie Parker all called the neighborhood home around this time.

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The neighborhood, which lies in the western portion of Harlem just south of Washington Heights, hit rough patches in the decades following. During the 1980s, many residents fled as crime surged in surrounding parts of Harlem.

"Nobody wanted to live here," said Willie Kathryn Suggs, a broker who has lived in Hamilton Heights since 1985.

Crime in the area never reached the levels seen in other parts of Harlem, Ms. Suggs said, but it did make property cheap. She bought her office in the neighborhood at the time for about $50,000, she said.

Now the townhomes of Hamilton Heights, many of which are in a landmarked historical district, are the properties that are in most demand, Ms. Suggs said.

Of the 84 residences currently listed for sale on real-estate site StreetEasy.com, the median asking price is $537,000. The median price a square foot is $458. In Central Harlem, it is $571 a square foot, and in neighboring Washington Heights, it is $427, according to StreetEasy.

On West 147th Street, there is a four-story townhouse built in 1901 that was renovated five years ago. The stoop was rebuilt, the antique doors and railings were restored and new windows were installed.

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The rust-colored townhome, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, measures 3,200 square feet, is currently on the market for $2 million.

On Convent Avenue there is a two-family townhouse on the market for $1.21 million, listed by Ms. Suggs. It's one of a row of 10 limestone townhomes built around the turn of the century. It has five original fireplaces, original window and door moldings and a private garden. There are six bedrooms and five bathrooms in the four-story home.

Unlike other areas of Harlem, there wasn't much available land for new development in recent years. But a handful of new condo buildings have been constructed.

On West 136th Street, Gold Development built a six-floor, 29-unit condo building in 2006. That sold out in four months, said Romy Goldman, founder and president of Gold Development.

On Edgecombe Avenue, Gold Development built a 12-unit, six-floor condo building in 2009 called Hamilton Lofts.

Each unit has its own floor with elevators that open up directly in each condo. There is one unit left there listed at $624,000.

One of the neighborhood's drawbacks is a lack of retail outlets. There are several banks and pharmacies in the area, but for many other types of retail needs, residents have to travel down to 125th Street. Sit-down restaurants are also far and few between.

Schools: Hamilton Heights' public schools are in District 6. They include A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, Hamilton Heights School and New Heights Academy Charter School.

Other schools in the district include P.S. 325 and Twenty-First Century Academy for Community Leadership.

In 2010, 43% of District 6 students in grades three through eight received a proficient score on the math exam, and 29.4% of students received a proficient score on the English Language Arts exam. In 2006, the results were 44.8% for math and 37.8% for reading.

Private schools in the neighborhood include Our Lady of Lourdes School, which runs from nursery school through eight grade, and Dorothy Day Early Childhood Center.

Parks: St. Nicholas Park, measuring about 23 acres, is one of three large parks in Hamilton Heights or adjacent to it. A portion of the St. Nicholas Park was the site of where George Washington fought during the battle of Harlem Heights in 1776.

The park was later designed by landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr. and was constructed in 1906. Now it has areas for barbecuing, basketball and handball courts, playgrounds and dog runs.

On the banks of the Hudson River is Riverbank State Park, which has indoor and outdoor facilities spread over 28 acres. It has an ice rink, gymnasium, tennis courts and an Olympic-size pool. There are also basketball courts, a softball field and a football and soccer field.

Nearby is Jackie Robinson Park, which was originally called Colonial Park and was renamed for the Brooklyn Dodger legend in 1978. The park, which measures about 13 acres, has baseball fields, basketball courts, playgrounds, and pools.

Entertainment: Hamilton Heights is home to Harlem Stage at City College. The arts organization features music, dance theater and cinema.

Also in Hamilton Heights is the Dance Theater of Harlem, which offers training and also hosts performances.

Shopping: Just outside the neighborhood on Frederick Douglass Boulevard is Hue-Man Bookstore and Café, which hosts several readings.

Also on Frederick Douglass Boulevard is the bike shop MODSquad Cycles.

To the south of Hamilton Heights on 125th Street is Harlem's main shopping strip with shops such as H&M, Marshalls and others.

Dining: Just south of Hamilton Heights is Pisticci, which serves Italian cuisine. Marcus Samuelsson of "Top Chef" fame recently opened the comfort-food restaurant Red Rooster on nearby Lenox Avenue.

And for chicken and waffles and other soul-food dishes, there is Amy Ruth's on 116th Street.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166481747831532.html?m od=WSJ_NY_RealEstate_LEFTTopStories

[Merry]

That row of brownstones is to die for <sigh>.


‘The Suburbs of Manhattan’

By JAKE MOONEY

slide show (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/10/realestate/20110410liv_ss.html?ref=realestate#1)

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78th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues

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Apthorp

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120 West 78th Street (the building in the center)

WHEN Paul Kahn was growing up on the Upper West Side in the 1980s, he recalled recently, it was pleasant and livable but a neighborhood that might seem surprising in hindsight. There were some blocks his parents didn’t let him walk on; many children, himself included, went to private school; and his Little League, which drew from both the Upper West Side and Harlem, still felt uncrowded.

He has been away from the area a while — he and his wife, Star, now live in a studio on 14th Street in the East Village. But they are expecting a baby next month and are hoping to move to a two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive before then. (A contract, for $600,000 to $700,000, has been signed, and they are awaiting co-op board approval.)

Their anticipated new home in the West 70s evokes the Upper West Side of Mr. Kahn’s youth in many ways, with Central Park on one side, Riverside Park on the other, and blocks of brownstones and prewar apartments in between. But given its new status as one of the most desirable parts of Manhattan it is different, too: New buildings are taller; storefronts are brighter and often occupied by retail chains. Notably, there are far more children.

That, Ms. Kahn said, is part of the appeal. “I consider the Upper West Side to be the suburbs of Manhattan,” she said. “If you want to stay in Manhattan and you’re considering having a baby, access to the park is such a benefit.”

At the same time, their building, between 71st and 72nd Streets, is near the Beacon Theater, where Ms. Kahn, a set designer, sometimes works. And the corner of 72nd and Broadway has as much bustle as Union Square, she said, adding, “That’s why I live in Manhattan.”

Mel Wymore, the chairman of Community Board 7, which represents all the Upper West Side, said that in addition to encompassing some of the costliest real estate in the city, along Central Park West, the West 70s had gained buildings, among them condominium construction on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The growth has buttressed values, even in a down market, but Mr. Wymore said it had also brought challenges. Small businesses like dry cleaners and hardware stores have struggled amid chain stores and banks, he said, and schools are crowded.

One recent controversy, over the wattage of a new Duane Reade sign above 72nd and Broadway, is illustrative. Mr. Wymore, who lives at 70th and Columbus, said the board and city government had had little success getting it dimmed. “It’s, in not the greatest way, symbolic of the national chains moving in,” he said.

Still, Mr. Wymore pointed out, such issues take nothing away from offerings like the American Museum of Natural History, the New-York Historical Society, a lively restaurant scene, a thriving retail strip on Columbus Avenue, and of course Central Park.

Leslie Pastor, a new resident, said she had been drawn by the express subway service at 72nd Street. Ms. Pastor, 34, moved from Connecticut early this year into a one-bedroom on West 75th Street. She did not say how much she had paid, but similar units in her building cost $500,000 to $600,000. She described being pleasantly surprised by people’s friendliness.

And, while the area is certainly no nightlife nexus, she said she had found several places to meet friends. Besides, busier areas are always accessible by subway, while the particular appeal of her neighborhood is distinctive.

“There are so many little treasures to find,” Ms. Pastor said.

As a West 70s resident charmed by her surroundings she has company. Sherry Matays, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group who lives in the low 70s, said that on a recent visit to Paris, her mind had wandered home.

“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is tantamount to where I live,’ ” she said.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The housing stock is diverse, if almost all pricey. Central Park West is home to exclusive buildings like the Dakota and the San Remo. Many side streets are lined with brownstones, notably the blocks near the natural history museum, between Columbus and Central Park West in the high 70s. And there is new construction: a rental at 200 West 72nd that also has a new Trader Joe’s and the brightly lit Duane Reade, and condos farther up Broadway.

Jonathan Charnas, the broker at the Fox Residential Group who sold the Kahns their place, says West End Avenue and Riverside Drive tend to be relatively quiet because commercial traffic is prohibited. Mr. Charnas, who lives in the Kahns’ building, remarked on the change in demographics in 34 years.

“Because of the subway system and access to the financial district,” he said, “we have attracted a lot of people of means to the Upper West Side.” Also, “you see many, many more baby carriages, many more pregnant women.”

Mr. Charnas, 67, said that although the area was safer and had big new stores like Trader Joe’s and Barney’s Co-op, he missed some of the small antique stores that have closed, and one particular Viennese bakery.

Some small retail has held out, though, particularly on Columbus, where a business improvement district was inaugurated in 1999 to combat vacancies. Barbara Adler, its executive director, said it had installed tree guards and planted flowers, and had lobbied the city for more significant changes. Today, she said, storefronts are nearly all full and pedestrians numerous.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The multiplicity of housing types makes generalizations difficult, Mr. Charnas said, adding: “Buildings differ so much from each other. A lot of the buildings don’t have doormen. A lot of the buildings do have doormen. There are brownstones, there are low-rises, there are mid-rises.”

Other agents agreed, but they did offer some price generalizations. On Central Park West, “if you’re on a very high floor facing Central Park, we’re in the stratosphere,” said Ms. Matays of Corcoran.

That, she added, can mean upwards of $4,000 a square foot in a co-op. Prime co-op buildings off the park cost more than $1,000 a square foot, she said, adding that comparable condos, which are relatively rare in the neighborhood but include distinguished addresses like the Ansonia and the Apthorp, are generally about 15 percent more expensive.

Yair Tavivian, head of the Tavivian Sporn Group at Prudential Douglas Elliman, says a new condo building at 78th Street and Broadway is selling for well over $2,000 a foot, while units in other condo buildings are in the $1,000-to-$1,200-a-square-foot range.

Over all, two- and three-bedroom units are in especially high demand, because of the area’s appeal to families. Mr. Tavivian said one recent sale, a two-bedroom condo on West End and 71st, was on the market for three weeks, then sold just below asking price, which was $1.3 million. In that time, he recalled, it had 200 showings.

“If you have a good product, which has unique features and it’s priced right,” Mr. Tavivian said, “if it’s not selling in two or three weeks there’s something wrong with the broker.”

Rental prices vary. Luxury buildings, like 200 West 72nd, charge $14,000 a month and up for two-bedrooms. There are cheaper options: One-bedrooms are available on Craigslist for around $2,000, two-bedrooms around $3,000.

THE SCHOOLS

Some students above 72nd are zoned for Public School 87, on 78th, where 77.8 percent of tested students recently met standards in English, 77.9 percent in math. Two blocks south of 72nd, at Public School 199, 84.5 percent met standards in English, 85.9 percent in math.

To accommodate long waiting lists at both schools, last year the city opened P.S. 452, on 77th. It shares a building with Junior High School 44, which is being phased out for poor performance. Also in the building are the Anderson School, for gifted students from kindergarten through eighth grade, and the West Prep Academy, a middle school. There are no public high schools in the 70s.

But the Upper West Side is also home to many private schools. Among them are the Calhoun School, on West End Avenue in the 70s, and the Collegiate School for boys, on West 78th.

WHAT TO DO

In an area flanked by Central and Riverside Parks, “there’s no neglected avenue,” Mr. Tavivian said. The natural history museum, between entral Park West and Columbus, is one of the most popular in the country.

Surrounding it is Theodore Roosevelt Park, the site on Sundays of a farmers’ market at 79th Street. Across the avenue at 77th, also Sundays, is a popular flea market. And of course, markets like Fairway and Citarella, in the mid-70s, draw a wide range of shoppers, as does Zabar’s, just outside the neighborhood a little north of 80th.

THE COMMUTE

Subway service includes the B and C local trains, which stop at Central Park West and 72nd; also, the 1 local stops on Broadway at 72nd and 79th, and the 2 and 3 express trains stop at 72nd.

THE HISTORY

In the 17th century, Dutch and Flemish settlers first called the area now known as the Upper West Side Bloemendaal, or “flowering valley,” according the Encyclopedia of New York City. Among villages in the area in the 1800s was Harsenville, near today’s 71st Street.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/realestate/10living.html

[Merry]

Sort of Cool, Not Yet Hot

By CHRISTIAN L. WRIGHT

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/05/08/realestate/SUB-block-3/SUB-block-3-articleLarge.jpg The old made new again sets the mood of Ninth Avenue at West 14th Street.

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POOR Ninth Avenue. You could dismiss the stretch from West 14th to West 23rd Street as the northern hinterlands of the greater meatpacking district. Or you could pity it, there in the shadow of 10th, the glamorous sister avenue whose profile has been transformed by famous art galleries, starred restaurants and the coursing aorta that is the High Line.

But no need to disparage in any way: These blocks in West Chelsea form a self-contained little quarter, with a thriving life all their own.

You can feel that life when you cross 14th Street, heading north. After a few steps there’s a sensation not unlike leaving the city and getting that first whiff of air as the sky gets bigger.

A little after 3 o’clock on a recent Thursday afternoon, a yellow school bus came along toward Ninth on 21st Street with its lights flashing. And there were some teenagers, jaywalking in bunches and talking loudly. Residents were out in their cashmere sweaters walking dogs — a schnauzer, two greyhounds, a funny Jack Russell and a very old pug.

The wooden benches in front of Knickerbocker Meatmarket were full. And a small crowd gathered inside Billy’s, the pastel bakery that does a good business in cupcakes.

And yet, Ninth Avenue is hardly small-town. A big housing project sits directly across from a swank hotel; the nightclub Buddakan is not far from the Simple Kitchen, a restaurant that uses produce from its own farm in Connecticut. There’s an Anthropologie on the northwest corner of 15th Street in the Chelsea Market, looking out onto the bustle at Prince Lumber, the lumberyard on the southwest corner.

This length of Ninth Avenue is almost an urban village, with a kind of Kate Moss style: mixing old and new, high and low, cosmopolitan and wholesome.

“It has the best of everything,” said David Davis, who lives in the Porter House at Ninth Avenue and 15th Street and is the managing principal of the architect and design firm Rottet Studio. “The noise when the bars let out is kind of overwhelming.” But on a summer day, he said, “when you step out of your building and people are taking salsa lessons in the triangle in the street, it’s why you live in New York City.”

This patch of Chelsea, some of it in a historic district, has an off-the-beaten-path quality. Maybe that’s why it’s amusing to see a couple of Italians, befuddled and referring to a map, as a cyclist pedals past in the bike lane that has rearranged traffic on the southbound avenue. Between the check-cashing place and Klee, a brasserie where there’s an Iron Chef in the kitchen, this neighborhood continues to evolve.

The Maritime Hotel, 363 West 16th Street, built in 1966 as the headquarters for the National Maritime Union, opened in the summer of 2003, when Ninth Avenue, according to the strapping young general manager, James Palmer, was full of “weird shops and a skanky liquor store.” The hotel has a low-key professional clientele, from the fields of art, fashion, film and TV.

The Apple Store moved into the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street in 2007, anchoring — or anointing — the southern end of the corridor. And in December, Google bought 76 Ninth Avenue (a k a 111 Eighth Avenue), the former Port Authority of New York Commerce Building. Built in 1932, it takes up an entire city block, contains about three million square feet of space, and has a helipad on the roof. Sale price: $1.9 billion.

Somehow, the area manages to support large and small. The arrival of Le Pain Quotidien does not mean the independent pioneers, like the narrow, neighborly Hudson City Antiques (No. 150), are going anywhere.

When the conversion of a 1905 warehouse into the Porter House (No. 66) was completed by SHoP Architects in 2003, the building was a bellwether for the emerging minidistrict. The warehouse was given a black addition with a fabricated zinc panel system for the exterior, creating a “unique interface between the original Renaissance Revival facade and the new addition,” according to the firm.

The addition sprouts up above the brown and white cow hanging outside the Old Homestead (No. 56), a classic steakhouse that opened in 1868. The 20 units sold quickly, and there hasn’t been much turnover. But recently Mr. Davis listed his one-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath fifth-floor apartment, with 11-foot ceilings and original arched windows, for $1.7 million. (He’s not leaving the neighborhood. He’s just in need of more space.)

“You can’t touch anything like it in Chelsea for that,” said Caryl Berenato, a vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who has lived in the area since the 1980s.
Indeed, it is a coveted part of town. The town houses that line some side streets as you head north are old and elegant; the low-slung buildings along the avenue with preserved glass-pane- and wood-frame storefronts are more Main Street than boulevard; and the little row of old houses, anchored by the red brick Federal that takes up the northwest corner of 21st Street, is a surprise. Look up, above Le Grainne Cafe’s sidewalk tables, to see the white-framed windows. Now owned by a lawyer, this house is evidence of original Chelsea, circa 1831.

Another splendid artifact lies just across the street. The family that founded Chelsea left its apple orchard to the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1817, with the stipulation that the church build a seminary. As a result, the brick General Theological Seminary takes up the length of Ninth Avenue to 10th, from 20th to 21st Street.

Financial hardship forced the seminary to develop the Desmond Tutu Center, a hotel and conference center, at the western end. It also had to sell a ’60s-era building at the eastern end, which was torn down for what became the Chelsea Enclave, a 53-unit condominium developed by the Brodsky Organization. According to the Corcoran Group, the condominium at 177 Ninth Avenue was sold out as of March. (A unit sold in February for $2,452,174, to a financial analyst, and another in March for $3,225,000, to the director of an art gallery.)

But there will be others. In December, the seminary faced a debt of $41 million and negotiated to sell several more structures within its compound, including the West Building (completed in 1836), which sits opposite the Chapel of the Good Shepherd (consecrated in 1888), to the Brodsky Organization for further condominium development.

For now, though, the seminary grounds are open to the public. Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., you can enter on 21st Street, leave a photo ID with the clerk, and gain access to a remarkably peaceful sanctuary. It’s like a tiny slice of Oxford University, complete with bell tower and tennis court. The quadrangle frames what the seminary calls the Close. And amid its well-maintained expanses of grass, tufts of daffodils in bloom, and couple of 150-year-old American elm trees stretching overhead, the sounds of the city almost disappear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/realestate/08block.html

[Merry]

The Land of the $800 Stroller

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

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ON Sept. 11, 2001, TriBeCa, the Lower Manhattan loft district two blocks north of the World Trade Center, shook. Much of the neighborhood saw one if not both hijacked airliners fly into the twin towers. Residents watched aghast as bodies and then the buildings themselves crashed to earth. Clouds of ash descended on the streets as if in some macabre snowstorm.

“After 9/11 there was a sense of paralysis in the neighborhood — of ‘Oh, my God, what has happened, and will it happen again, and is it safe to live here?’ ” recalled Barrie Mandel, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group who has lived and sold real estate in TriBeCa since the 1980s. But within a year, Ms. Mandel said, “with leadership from The Tribeca Trib,” the newspaper that has long helped make a community out of the neighborhood, “most people decided, one person at a time, ‘Yes, it could happen again,’ but they decided to stay and help merchants reopen their businesses, and help the neighborhood come back and revive.”

Revive it did, and long before the killing last week of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, an act that has helped bring the neighborhood a kind of closure. Just four months shy of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, TriBeCa is thriving. Far from fleeing this district of high-ceilinged converted warehouses and picturesque Belgian-block streets, people have been moving to it in droves. Between 2000 and 2009 the population of the 75-block neighborhood swelled by more than a third, to 14,190, census data show.

Residents are richer now, too, with a median household income of $136,000, nearly one-fifth higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than a decade ago.

“When we look back at the rebuilding efforts, it’s a real testimony to our community’s ability to persevere,” said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of Community Board 1. “We’ve been able to build many new schools, parks, playgrounds, ball fields and community centers.”

It is families, lots of them, that have driven growth. TriBeCa has added an average of more than 100 families a year since 2000, accelerating its decades-long shift from an off-the-grid artists’ enclave to the Land of the $800 Stroller.

Nicole Rosenthal Hartnett, a children’s portrait photographer, has had a foot in each of these TriBeCas. In 1999, she bought a loft on White Street as both home and studio. Soon she met Michael Hartnett, an English banker who lived down the street, on a blind date arranged by his real estate broker. The couple were married two years later.

“I’m an artist, and he was one of those new bankers moving into the neighborhood,” she said. “It was the two worlds meeting. He was my first suit.”

After a stint in London, during which Ms. Hartnett had a baby boy and became pregnant with a second one, the couple returned to TriBeCa in 2004, paying $2.75 million for a two-bedroom two-bath co-op loft on Hudson Street, in a converted Beaux Arts office building.

The 3,000-square-foot apartment was large enough for Ms. Hartnett’s photography as well as her family. “This loft is an old-school open space,” she said, “so I can still drop down a roll of paper and have a studio.”

Shortly after moving in, she found herself immersed in the casual, family-friendly atmosphere for which TriBeCa is known. In London she had felt isolated and lonely. But in her TriBeCa building she soon met an artist, Christine Sciulli, who had two boys around the same ages as her own. Ms. Sciulli introduced her to other mothers, most of them creative professionals, and before long the women had formed a “mama group” they called the Supper Club. Once a week for more than six years they met at one another’s lofts while their children charged around.

“You’d end up with 20 kids, easily, running around your house — all boys — and your house would get trashed,” she said. But the friendships forged among the women were so strong that even after the children drifted apart, their mothers have continued to meet for a weekly craft-night gathering they call the Henhouse.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

TriBeCa, an acronym for Triangle Below Canal Street, charms the eye at every turn. A vigorous campaign led to the designation of much of it as four historic districts in the early 1990s, and a southern extension of the protected streetscape area was added in 2002. Thus the neighborhood retains much of the unified architectural feel of the commercial and manufacturing district it once was.

For residents this means lofts with soaring windows and vast floor plates, sometimes punctuated with cast-iron columns. For pedestrians it means gracious marble and cast-iron Italianate commercial palaces on and near TriBeCa’s eastern boundary of Broadway, and stout red-brick warehouses with Romanesque Revival-style arches nearer its western border of West Street and the Hudson River.

The southern boundary, which the community board puts at Murray Street, received a high-rise infusion of residential luxury in 2006 with the opening of 101 Warren Street, often called a downtown Time Warner Center. The Whole Foods in the base of the 35-story building has also provided a gleaming emporium of designer food to an area previously short of supermarkets.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Lofts are king, and the buildings where they are found fall into two broad categories: co-ops, typically converted in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and condos, most either developed during the wave of conversions that began in the 1990s or built from scratch.
Co-op prices have taken a hit since the financial crisis of 2008, falling to an average $1.8 million this year from the market’s peak of $2.3 million three years ago, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

Condos, by contrast, cost even more than before: an average $2.8 million, up from $2.6 million in 2008. Among the condos is a small subset of superluxury buildings like 101 Warren Street and 7 Hubert Street, brokers said. Ms. Mandel, the Corcoran executive, said that units in such buildings had been selling for $1,600 to $2,600 per square foot. Two Federal-style houses are on the market, with asking prices of $5.25 million and $6.5 million.

Ruth Hardinger, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that 176 properties were for sale, mostly condos, and 80 for rent. A two-bedroom two-bath unit costs $4,800 to $13,500 a month.

WHAT TO DO

Pier 25, public parkland jutting into the river near North Moore Street, began a phased reopening last November after a renovation. The new playground and synthetic turf field are attracting lots of visitors, and the rest of the pier’s facilities, including a climbing wall and mini-golf course, are to open soon. But for some who recall this new pier’s funky predecessor, with its hamburger stand and its mini-golf course made by an artist and children out of recycled garbage, there lingers the sense that something homegrown and unique to TriBeCa has been scrubbed away.

“It’s lost its organic feel,” said Ms. Hardinger, who has lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s. “And in its place it has swings and toys that are industrially produced.”

Bob Townley, a mainstay of the old pier who will run programming on the new one, noted that it will serve far more people than its forebear did. “People love the pier,” he said.

“Old-timers like myself may have a harder time learning to love it, but it’s important to realize that the Hudson River Park Trust took older elements and replicated them; it’s the old elements revitalized.”

THE SCHOOLS
School crowding in Lower Manhattan has roused residents and their representatives. Their feistiness has yielded results. By September 2012, the city plans to open the third new primary school in four years.

Students who live west of Church Street are zoned for Public School 234 on Greenwich Street, which received a B on its most recent city progress report. But the school has been oversubscribed; some children in this zone have gone elsewhere.

Public School 397 will move into the base of the new Frank Gehry tower on Spruce Street in September. It will serve kindergarten through second grade this year, expanding one grade per year until it reaches eighth grade.

Intermediate School 289 on Warren Street is one option for Grades 6 through 8; it received a B on its report.

The selective Stuyvesant High School is on Chambers Street. SAT averages last year were 674 in reading, 735 in math and 678 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

Last month, the city said that in the fall of 2012, some residents would be expected to send their children to school outside the community board boundaries. Ms. Menin, the board chief, said she would fight any such plan.

THE COMMUTE

The financial district is within walking distance. The 1, 2 and 3 subway lines run along the West Side. The 4, 5 and 6 take riders up and down the East Side.

THE HISTORY

Several of TriBeCa’s finest 19th-century commercial buildings stand around Duane Park, a serene triangle bought by the city from Trinity Church for $5 in 1795, according to “The Texture of Tribeca,” by Andrew Scott Dolkart, published by the Tribeca Community Association in 1989.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/realestate/08living.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

[Merry]

Naturalist Perched Here

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

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Riverside Drive

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Boricua College

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790 Riverside Drive

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800 Riverside Drive

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ONE can imagine how John James Audubon, the renowned naturalist and illustrator of “Birds of America,” might have reacted to the idea: his own name, being used to promote the very development that would transform the rambling woodlands of his beloved Washington Heights estate into a densely populated urban district. But that is precisely what happened, according to Matthew Spady, a longtime resident and magpie collector of historical facts about the area.

In 1841, shortly after the publication of “Birds,” Audubon bought 14 acres north of 155th Street, which at that point existed only as a line on a map. There, at the base of a hill overlooking the Hudson River, he built a green-shuttered white clapboard house with a parlor he used as his painting room. When he died in the house a decade later, he left his family land-poor. To make ends meet, his widow, Lucy, began selling off parcels of the estate, which came for the first time to be called Audubon Park.

“The Audubon name had sold books,” Mr. Spady said, and now it would sell real estate.
It is doing so again. Residents revived the name Audubon Park, which had been in disuse for nearly a century, during their decade-long campaign to win city landmark protection for their tranquil, architecturally cohesive enclave. And ever since the creation in 2009 of the Audubon Park Historic District (http://www.audubonparkny.com/), brokers have found the historic designation an effective lure uptown.
“It gives people that extra level of comfort to be able to say, ‘I’m moving into one of the city’s newest historic districts,’ ” said Sandy Edry, a senior associate salesperson for Citi Habitats, who handles sales for two of the three prewar buildings converted into condominiums in the district in the last five years.

Historic character was a draw for Jane VanLare, a lawyer, and her husband, Jordan, who studies nearby at Columbia University’s medical school. The couple, who met a decade ago as members of the Harvard ballroom dance team, paid $755,000 last year for a four-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath unit with a maid’s room in the Riviera, a Renaissance Revival co-op with a marble lobby.

The sixth-floor apartment, which overlooks a church and the stately edifices of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, retained its gracious proportions but cried out for a renovation.

“It’s an opportunity to combine the traditional, beautiful architecture with the modern amenities we wanted,” Ms. VanLare said. While taking care to restore original French doors, the couple’s workers are installing central air-conditioning that will be controlled by a home automation system, as will the lights, window treatments, heated bathroom floors and audio-video equipment.
The kitchen, complete with “wine cave,” will connect to a library that the two plan to use as a family room, with a built-in projector and movie screen.

All told, the work will cost about $500,000, which the VanLares consider a savvy investment, far more so than if they had stayed on the Upper West Side, where they previously rented. “We were looking for a neighborhood with good potential for growth,” Ms. VanLare said, predicting that Columbia’s northward expansion would increase demand in her new neighborhood. “By moving uptown you get so much more space, but you still have the benefits of Manhattan: the great transportation, the shows, the restaurants of New York City (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo).”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Just north of the serene, green grounds of the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, a tributary of Riverside Drive breaks off from the main drive’s north-south straightaway at 155th Street and makes a sinuous, almost furtive turn inland. As it curves uphill and uptown past residents combing their dogs or playing guitar on park benches, tall prewar apartment houses with eclectic limestone and terra-cotta detailing rise up on either side, giving the area the feel of a secret enclave. On high ground at 157th Street looms the great prow of the triangular, nine-story Grinnell co-op, the Renaissance Revival-style grande dame looking as if she might at any moment sail down the drive’s curve and into the Hudson.

A lushly planted oval, shaded by London plane trees, stands in the center of Audubon Park’s part of Riverside Drive. It is tended by neighbors from the Riverside Oval Association, who last fall planted 1,000 bulbs. “I live for it all winter, to see the fruits of our late-October labors,” said Vivian Ducat, a co-chairwoman of the group, which hosts a party for Audubon in the oval in April.

Most of Audubon Park, which runs from 155th to 158th Streets west of Broadway, is a visually consistent streetscape of apartment houses built from 1905 to 1932. The landmarks designation report lavishes a nearly Audubon-worthy level of attention on the architectural plumage of the Beaux Arts and Renaissance Revival buildings. Census data for Audubon Park and the three contiguous blocks to the east show the population in 2009 was 58 percent Hispanic or Latino, 29 percent African-American, and 8 percent white.

The area has come a long way since the early 1990s, when drug-related shootings plagued Washington Heights. Crime rates in the 33rd Precinct (http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/precincts/precinct_033.shtml) have plunged in every major category since 1995, police data show.

Officer Steve Api of the 33rd Precinct said Broadway was a crime dividing line. The police are very rarely called to Audubon Park, he said, but “the east side of Broadway between 155th and 158th Streets has a bad prescription-drug problem.”

Residents said the streets generally felt safe. “I’m never afraid to walk around at night,” said Frank Poindexter, who takes his King Charles spaniel, Parker, for long strolls.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The Riviera and Grinnell co-ops, both of which are celebrating centennials, are the queens of Audubon Park. Their apartments have high ceilings and prewar details, and some have river views.

Nine units sold in the Riviera in the last year, said Bruce Robertson, a senior associate broker with the Corcoran Group, who lives in the Grinnell. Three-bedroom two-bath units cost $670,000 to $720,000. A renovated four-bedroom two-bath in the Grinnell recently sold for $999,000. “Co-ops are selling faster than a year ago,” Mr. Robertson said.

Five prewar apartment houses have been converted into condos in the area in the past five years, three on Riverside Drive below 158th Street, and two above, just outside Audubon Park. Mr. Edry of Citi Habitats said that 801 Riverside Drive was one sale shy of the 50 percent mark, while 35 percent of units had sold at 807 Riverside. One-bedrooms have been selling in those buildings for about $300,000, he added.

The rental price for a gut-renovated two-bedroom condo in the area is around $2,250 a month.

WHAT TO DO

Broadway is a lively, sometimes litter-strewn commercial corridor, where old men hawk tube socks and Spanish-language radio stations blare from cellphone stores. “I love how Hispanic it is, and all the salsa that blares out,” said Sue Woodman, an English journalist who moved into a prewar rental building opposite Trinity Cemetery last year. “It just seems much more fun than Starbucks and CVS.”

But for Ms. Woodman, the greatest cultural revelation was the Hispanic Society of America Museum and Library at Audubon Terrace, the Italian Renaissance-style museum complex at 155th Street and Broadway. In 30 years living on the Upper West Side, Ms. Woodman had never visited the Hispanic Society. When she first walked through its column-flanked door, her jaw dropped.

“It’s just Goyas, and Velázquez paintings hidden back there,” she exclaimed. “They’re just there, and you walk in there anytime you want.”

“The World Outside Our Windows,” an exhibit of photographs taken from apartments in the Grinnell, will be on view June 26 and July 17, from 2 to 5 p.m., at 800 Riverside Drive.

A virtual walking tour of Audubon Park is at audubonparkny.com (http://audubonparkny.com/). For a multimedia centennial celebration of the Riviera apartment house, go to 790rsd100.org/index.html (http://790rsd100.org/index.html).

THE SCHOOLS

Primary students are zoned for Public School 28 on West 155th Street, which serves prekindergarten through fifth grade; it got an A on its most recent city progress report. Thirty-one percent of third graders met state proficiency standards in English, 38 percent in math. Grades 6 through 8 are taught in two schools that share a building on West 164th Street: Middle School 326, which earned an A on its report, and M.S. 328, which got a B.

Some children attend the selective Bronx High School of Science. SAT averages last year were 632 in reading, 685 in math, and 643 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

THE COMMUTE

The No. 1 train stops at 157th Street and Broadway. Midtown is about half an hour away at rush hour; the financial district takes 45 minutes.

THE HISTORY

Riverside Drive’s winding inland course between 155th and 158th Streets was the result of political maneuvering by the Grinnell family, who by 1897 owned most of Audubon Park and worked with other property owners to have the boulevard run past their front door to increase their property values, Mr. Spady said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/realestate/naturalist-perched-here-living-inaudubon-park.html?_r=1&src=tptw

[Merry]

Feel Free to Use the Name, at Least

By JAKE MOONEY

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36 Gramercy Park East

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East 19th Street

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Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/14/realestate/20110814_Living_Gramercy.html?ref=realestate)

PASSERS-BY peeking through the iron fence into the two-acre 19th-century gem known as Gramercy Park may find plenty to tantalize: statues ringed with landscaping, elaborate birdhouses and pathways invitingly empty of other New Yorkers. Polite-but-firm signs just inside the gates make clear what kind of rowdiness is not allowed: dog-walking and stepping on the grass, among other things.

Something else that isn’t allowed: the entry of passers-by — at least, if uninvited. Gramercy Park is one of the city’s two privately owned parks. Accessible only via key, mainly to people living just adjacent, the park is therefore off-limits even to most residents of the neighborhood that shares its name. So the view through the fence is the only kind that most visitors ever have.

The neighborhood, though, is doing just fine without its keys. Residents say it offers more to do than ever, as well as a central, walkable situation near public transport and entertainment districts like Union Square and Greenwich Village. And though proximity isn’t the same as access, the park’s quiet presence in the neighborhood’s midst lends the surrounding blocks a certain hominess.
“It actually has a huge role, because it’s such a physical presence that it sets the tone for the area,” said Mark Thompson, the chairman of Community Board 6, which represents the neighborhood. “It’s such a beautiful piece of property that everything else focuses on it, and it makes everything else nice.”

The larger neighborhood stretches well beyond the park, north to East 23rd Street and west to Park Avenue South. The southern boundary is less neat: perhaps East 17th Street and maybe as far south as East 14th Street. To the east, some residents make the case that Gramercy Park’s influence stretches beyond the traditional border of Third Avenue and closer to Second.
All of these blocks, residents say, are more affordable, relatively, than park blocks. The mostly co-op buildings in this outer periphery have recently drawn a younger crowd that gives an understated area new liveliness.

One younger resident, newly arrived, is Jessica Schnurr, who bought a unit at 211 East 18th Street — between Second and Third Avenues — with her husband, Tim, in February and moved in this summer after a long renovation. The couple, who both have jobs in Midtown, paid $830,000 for their two-bedroom one-bath unit, she said.

Ms. Schnurr, who is 29, also said the 10-block move from their previous place, in a more crowded and less homey area that was part of Murray Hill, made a world of difference.

“I think this is more of a grown-up neighborhood, and someplace that I could see myself living for a long time,” she said. Irving Place, the six-block north-to-south street that dead-ends at the park, has long been a favorite stretch, with its outdoor restaurant tables and sparse traffic. “It kind of feels like it could be a street in even maybe a smaller town,” Ms. Schnurr said.

At the same time, she said, there is plenty of excitement in Union Square and beyond. Gramercy Park offers the chance to be a part of that excitement, or to remove oneself from it.

Nancy Van Bourgondien, the Corcoran senior vice president who sold the Schnurrs their apartment, said that, beautiful as the park is, it has little direct effect on most residents’ daily existence. The neighborhood’s nearness to many other areas, she argued, is more important.

“It’s easy entree into the East Village, it’s easy entree into the Village and it’s easy entree into Chelsea,” she said. “And if you live in Gramercy you probably go to all of those places in your everyday life.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

A city historic district surrounds the park and extends southward, down to 18th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. The most ornate buildings face the park; 36 Gramercy Park East, with two knight-in-armor statues out front, was once home to the actor John Barrymore. Thirty-four Gramercy Park East, on the same block, is where the comedian Jimmy Fallon lives.

The Gramercy Park Hotel, recently renovated by the hotelier Ian Schrager, is a sleek presence to the north, while mansions on the southern perimeter house the National Arts Club and the Players (http://www.theplayersnyc.org/members/), a social club designed by Stanford White. At Gramercy Park South and Irving Place, the Zeckendorf family is converting a former Salvation Army women’s residence into a luxury condominium tower, with one unit per floor.

The blocks farther from the park — like 19th between Third Avenue and Irving — have a mix of town houses and co-op buildings. Closer to the park, they tend to be prewar; newer buildings are common along Third Avenue, said Elaine Mayers, a senior vice president of Citi Habitats who lives in the area.

The busiest commercial streets are Park Avenue South, with its string of large restaurants, and Third Avenue, which has traditionally had small retail like dry cleaners and hardware stores. More recently, the stretch has drawn bars and small restaurants, some louder than residents would like.

“Some of them have matured over time,” said Mr. Thompson, at the community board, but he added that some planned establishments had been denied liquor licenses at the outset, so “were actually not allowed to open.”

Some potential residents searching in the neighborhood will not consider a place without park access, said Jessica Huff, a managing director of Olshan Realty. What happens next may surprise them.

“You can’t believe how many times in the last 15 years I’ve heard people say, ‘You know, I only used it twice,’ ” Ms. Huff said.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Park units, the most prized, typically start in the $700,000 range for a one-bedroom and go up from there, depending on condition and building amenities, Ms. Huff said. Two-bedrooms, she said, are much more sought-after and scarce.

“The cheapest two-bedroom on the park would be about $1 million,” she said, “in the least exclusive building, needs work, not great view.”

Even a distance from the park, Ms. Mayers said, two-bedrooms routinely sell for $1.3 million or more and one-bedrooms often exceed $800,000. Still, the farther-flung blocks offer a relative discount: Ms. Huff said an alcove studio that might cost $400,000 to $500,000 on the park would be more like $300,000 or $400,000 away from it.

The biggest frustration in the area, brokers said, is a lack of inventory.

“People really want to live here,” Ms. Mayers said. “When I get a two-bedroom listing it just flies.”

Rentals, too, are relatively scarce. According to Streeteasy.com, one-bedrooms start at roughly $2,500 a month and can cost as much as $4,000. The handful of two-bedroom rentals start around $4,500 and quickly reach the $10,000-a-month range.

Around the park, Ms. Huff said, there is a hierarchy. Units with views of the park, she said, are more prized than those without. Then there are the units with a view and a terrace.
For one of those to come on the market, she said, “somebody’s going to have to die.”

THE COMMUTE

The 6 local train stops at 23rd Street and Park Avenue South, and at Union Square, which also has the 4, 5, N, Q, R and L trains. Buses run north on Park Avenue South, south on Second Avenue, both ways on Third, and cross-town on 23rd and 14th Streets.

WHAT TO DO
Activities permitted inside Gramercy Park include reading on benches and strolling the tidy pathways. For those without keys, there is Union Square Park, southwest of the neighborhood, and Stuyvesant Square, southeast.

Dining options abound, from the 71 Irving Place coffee bar to Pete’s Tavern, the venerable watering hole across the street that once hosted O. Henry. Another place of note is Maialino, Danny Meyer’s Roman trattoria in the Gramercy Park Hotel.

Irving Plaza, at Irving Place and East 15th Street, offers live music.

THE SCHOOLS

Primary students are zoned for Public School 40, on 19th Street between First and Second. The school got an A on its most recent progress report, with 83.9 percent of tested students proficient in English, 86.4 percent in math.

Junior High School 104, on East 21st Street, scored a B on its report, with 58.7 percent proficient in English and 68.5 percent proficient in math.

Among the public high schools in the neighborhood is the School of the Future on East 22nd Street, which has 655 students in Grades 6 through 12. SAT averages last year were 475 in reading, 488 in math and 466 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

Friends Seminary, a private Quaker school on 16th Street between Second and Third Avenues, has been operating since 1786.

THE HISTORY

“Gramercy” is an Anglicization of the Dutch name Krom Moerasje, which means “little crooked swamp,” according to the Encyclopedia of New York City. In 1831 Samuel Ruggles, a property owner, drained the swamp, created the park and sold surrounding lots. Irving Place, once a stretch of Lexington Avenue, was renamed in 1833 for Washington Irving, who often visited.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/realestate/feel-free-to-use-the-name-at-least-living-aroundgramercy-park.html

[mariab]

Just beautiful. That last one makes you want to just go to sleep on the front steps.




“The cheapest two-bedroom on the park would be about $1 million,” she said, “in the least exclusive building, needs work, not great view.”

A handyman special for a cool mil? I'll take it.



"little crooked swamp"? Wow. Never knew.

[Merry]

With All Its Contrasts, It Needed an Alias

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

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A weekend street fair on 8th Avenue

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Silver Towers on 42nd Street between 11th and 12th Avenues

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Oasis garden at 52nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues

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NOT long ago, a Midwestern couple arrived at 48th Street near Ninth Avenue to inspect the $399,000 co-op that their 20-something son wanted them to help buy. After looking over the place, a railroad one-bedroom in a tenement walk-up, the mother looked quizzically at the agent, Donald Kemper, and said, “Now tell me, am I in Hell’s Kitchen, or am I in Clinton?” Mr. Kemper, a Prudential Douglas Elliman vice president who lives in the area, replied, “It depends which one you’re more comfortable with.”

Mr. Kemper’s answer was both sly and accurate, because both names — one rough-and-tumble, the other resolutely respectable — are used by the local community board to define the same area west of Eighth Avenue, from 59th Street to the mid-30s. Hell’s Kitchen, the identity favored by longtime residents, dates to the 1800s, when the neighborhood began its century-plus run as a hotbed of gang violence and squalor. The name Clinton was introduced in 1959 in an attempt to distance the area from that notoriety, which was well deserved as late as the 1980s.

But a funny thing happened on the way to gentrification. As memories of street crime have receded, and as luxury developments have risen, the name Hell’s Kitchen has acquired a kind of gritty cachet. Trendy restaurants on Ninth Avenue incorporate “HK” or “Hell’s Kitchen” into their names, and some developments use Hell’s Kitchen’s perceived edginess as a sales tool. “You don’t need a weather report to remind you: Hell’s Kitchen is sizzling,” declares the site for the 505, a sleek condominium on 47th Street. By contrast, marketing for the Thorndale, a condo conversion of a 1905 carriage house on 45th Street, describes the area as Clinton.

“Hell’s Kitchen has developed over the last 20 years into an equal partner with Clinton,” Mr. Kemper said. “If I’m more affluent and have a family, I’m looking for Clinton, but if I’m a young, hip 20-something buyer coming up from Chelsea or somewhere else, I want to live in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Regardless of what anyone calls it, Victoria Rowan, a writing coach who rents a one-bedroom on 55th Street and Eighth Avenue, loves where she lives. “The creative nerve of the city is very much right here,” she said. “It’s not what I would call a stable neighborhood, but it’s an exciting neighborhood.”

Ms. Rowan moved to the area in 2004 because she wanted proximity to her writing clients, as well as a living room big enough for 10-person workshops. Her 900-square-foot apartment, which costs $2,925 a month, satisfies both needs. “I’m right in the middle of publishing here,” she said. “I live a couple blocks from the Hearst Building and a couple blocks from Random House.”

For her, the integration of the arts into the area’s daily life offers a marvelous perk. Sometimes she walks to 55th Street and Ninth Avenue with her toy poodle, Victor Hugo, to watch the dancers through the windows of the building that houses the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Or she strolls to Broadway shows or to Theater Row on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue, a collection of small spaces whose opening in 1978 gave the area a big push.

Hell’s Kitchen’s proximity to the theater district has long attracted show people. During the Academy Awards broadcast this year, many theater folk — Ms. Rowan’s neighbors — assembled in her building’s lobby after a fire broke out in the health food store on the ground floor. “There was the seamstress who did the costumes for ‘Mary Poppins,’ and guys wearing ‘Guys and Dolls’ varsity jackets,” Ms. Rowan recalled. “And all these people were worrying about how the fire ruined Oscar Night, not about whether all their worldly possessions would go up in smoke.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The change in the northern part of Hell’s Kitchen in the last two decades has brought in wealthier residents with more education, census data show. From 1990 to 2009, median income (in 2009 dollars) rose to $66,371 from $48,025; the proportion with at least a college degree climbed to 64 percent from 44.

The area remains racially diverse. Among the 45,134 counted as residents in 2009, the proportion of whites held steady at 61 percent; the share of Asians nearly doubled, to 13 percent, and the Hispanic population dipped to 19 percent from 25. The proportion of African-Americans dropped a bit, to 6 percent.

Also, since 1990, the share of residents who never married climbed to 62 percent from 54, while the proportion of households with children fell below 9 percent, more than a point.

The streetscape, too, is markedly changed. Forty-Second Street from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson has become a corridor of gleaming residential towers, whose rentals and condos often offer jaw-dropping river or city views. One, an imposing 63-story black-glass monolith on the south side of 42nd Street between 10th and Dyer Avenues, is called MiMA. According to its developer, the Related Companies, this acronym stands for the Middle of Manhattan; according to the cheeky real estate blog Curbed.com, it stands for the Magical Island of Many Amenities.

Eighth Avenue, too, has high-rises. The InterContinental Hotel opened last year on 44th Street; the spiffy Shake Shack restaurant on its ground floor makes for quite a contrast with the sex shops next door. Two blocks up, the 43-story Platinum condo is billed as New York’s “signature power residence.”

The more intimate scale of the tenement-and-brownstone side streets, where many low- and middle-income people live, is largely protected above 42nd Street by the Special Clinton District, whose zoning generally restricts building heights to seven stories, or 66 feet. “The neighborhood is a steadfast, hardcore group of individuals who love the low-scale character,” said Elisa Gerontianos, co-chairwoman of Community Board 4’s Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen panel on land use.

Within these limitations, luxury residential has begun pushing west; some even pops up between 10th and 11th. One of the most closely watched is Mercedes House, a zigzagging rental-and-condo complex, whose ground floor has a Mercedes showroom.

Last spring James Dale, an advertising executive, was playing in a gay football league in DeWitt Clinton Park on 53rd Street when he noticed Mercedes House rising across 11th. In May he signed its first lease, trading his fifth-floor walk-up in Chelsea for a $3,250-a-month one-bedroom with river views.

“I wanted a better quality of life,” he said, noting that he plans to use the complex’s outdoor pool when it is built.

Grumbling about the luxury developments is not unusual among longtime residents. “It’s bringing a different kind of person into the neighborhood,” said Heather Holland Wheaton, a writer who tends the community garden on 52nd Street. “People are very transient. They’ll be here for two years and then move to Connecticut.”

Mr. Dale said that a married colleague did indeed plan to move to the suburbs to have children and “be closer to her horse.” But for his part, buying in Hell’s Kitchen is a possibility. “I’ll live there a couple of years and see how the neighborhood evolves,” he said.

WHAT TO DO

Ninth Avenue has sushi, tapas and jägerschnitzel available within a single block. “All our mom-and-pops are now bars,” lamented Kathleen McGee Treat, the chairwoman of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association. “This used to be a neighborhood where if you needed to get your kid a pair of shoes, you could walk over to Mr. Shapiro’s and the child would be fitted for shoes.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The average for a studio condo in Hell’s Kitchen North in the last year was $552,928, said Gary Kahn, a senior vice president of Corcoran; two-bedroom condos averaged $1.56 million.

One-bedroom prewar co-ops averaged $499,550. Walk-up co-ops, typically tenements, sold for $643 a square foot on average. The area is “selling faster the first half of this year than the first half of last year,” said Mr. Kemper of Elliman.

A recent look at Streeteasy.com showed 41 one-bedrooms in new developments or conversions renting for $2,750 to $4,800 per month. Most walk-up studios were listed at $1,600 to $2,400.

THE SCHOOLS

Public schools include the highly regarded No. 212, on 48th Street, which got an A on its most recent progress report, and No. 51, which got a B. Students at Public School 51 are being bused by the city to a site on East 91st Street. A new building is expected to open on West 44th in 2013.

The Professional Performing Arts School on 48th Street includes both middle and high schools. The middle school received an A on its report. SAT averages at the high school in 2010 were 437 in reading, 460 in math, and 432 in writing, versus 439, 462, and 434 citywide.

THE COMMUTE

The 1, A, B, C, D, and E trains stop at Columbus Circle. The A, C, and E trains run down Eighth Avenue.

The M50 crosstown bus runs east on 50th Street and west on 49th. Residents complain that the 42nd Street crosstown bus does not run frequently enough to handle the throngs, said Ms. Treat of the neighborhood association.

THE HISTORY

Theories abound for how the area came to be called Hell’s Kitchen. An 1881 New York Times article used the term to refer to a notorious tenement on 39th Street near Ninth Avenue, observing that “vice in its most repulsive form thrives here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/realestate/a-place-of-contrasts-and-even-an-alias-living-in-hells-kitchen-north.html

[Merry]

There's Not Enough Lenox Hill to Go Around

By JOSEPH DE AVILA

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Lenox Hill stands out among the tony neighborhoods of Manhattan for the stately townhouses that line the side streets from Central Park to Third Avenue. Those single-family mansions are some of the most sought after in the city, and in recent years, sale prices of those homes have defied the economic downturn and continue to climb.

Co-ops are more readily available and make up the bulk of the properties available on the market in Lenox Hill, which is in the southern section of the Upper East Side and runs approximately from East 59th to 72nd streets.

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Barneys

But the co-ops are also tough to get into. The co-op boards in Lenox Hill have earned reputations for being among the most selective in New York City.

The most expensive homes in the neighborhood are found west of Third Avenue, but a number of luxury buildings have also recently begun to open in the eastern portion of Lenox Hill.

Prospective home buyers are drawn by the proximity of Central Park, easy subway access and short walking distance to Midtown, said Susan Greenfield of Brown Harris Stevens. Plus, there is the high-end shopping on Madison Avenue.

"It's really a cosmopolitan city, but this is a cosmopolitan neighborhood," said Ms. Greenfield, who has lived in the neighborhood for about 20 years.

View Interactive (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577060183620965456.html?m od=WSJ_NY_RealEstate_LEFTTopStories#)
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-QT175_OpHous_D_20111125230741.jpg (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577060183620965456.html?m od=WSJ_NY_RealEstate_LEFTTopStories#)

The median asking price for Lenox Hill homes is $1.223 million, or $1,045 a square foot, according to real-estate site StreetEasy. In Carnegie Hill to the north, it is $1,020 a square foot, and in the Upper West Side, it is $999, according to StreetEasy.

In the past decade, many of the townhomes in Lenox Hill were bought up and renovated, said Ms. Greenfield. "It's rare to find a house in Manhattan" that is the size of the single-family homes in Lenox Hill, she said. "The people that buy the townhomes really want the space."

Ms. Greenfield notes that closing prices haven't been hurt by the economic downturn and that in many cases sales prices have gone up since the real-estate boom ended. Closing prices for townhouses in the area have ranged from $8 million to $48 million, according to Ms. Greenfield.

For example, there is a limestone townhouse on 64th Street that sold for $5.7 million in 2002. The 10,000-square-foot home was gut renovated and now has a pool, an elevator and gym. It's now listed for $21.5 million.

Finding a whole townhouse to rent is often just as competitive as buying one. Monthly rents for an entire townhouse in the neighborhood range from $20,000 to $50,000, said Julie Rose of Citi Habitats.

"There is definitely a demand for that style of living," Ms. Rose said. "There are just not a lot of townhomes."

Several large rental apartment buildings in the neighborhood have recently been converted to condos. Among them is Manhattan House, a sprawling housing complex that was originally built in the 1950s at 66th Street and Third Avenue. The modernist structure earned a historic landmark designation from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2007.

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Manhattan House was recently renovated and now features amenities like a concierge service, a yoga studio, entertaining space and a rooftop terrace. Each unit has a washer and dryer, wood-burning fireplaces and balconies. Of the available units, prices range between $1.4 million and $7.365 million.

Another new development in Lenox Hill is the Laurel, a 31-story condo building at 67th Street and First Avenue. The building was finished in 2009 and about 75% of the units are sold or in contract. The building has a gym and training center, a pool, an entertainment room, parking and a concierge service. Asking prices there range between $850,000 and $5.975 million.

Parks: St. Catherine's Park is a small park on First Avenue with basketball courts, running tracks, volleyball courts and playgrounds. Lenox Hill is also near the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park and the Central Park Zoo.

Schools: Lenox Hill public schools are in District 2. They include Manhattan International High School, Talent Unlimited High School and Urban Academy Laboratory High School. Primary school include Robert L. Stevenson and Beekman Hill International.

In 2011, 80.4% of District 2 students in grades three through eight received a proficient score on the math exam, and 67.9% of students received a proficient score on the English Language Arts exam. In 2006, the results were 78.5% for math and 73.8% for reading.

Private high schools in the neighborhood include St. Vincent Ferrer High School, Manhattan High School for Girls and Dominican Academy. There is also the all-boys Browning School with primary- through high-school classes.

Restaurants: Daniel Boulud's flagship restaurant Daniel is in Lenox Hill. Daniel is one of the city's most acclaimed French restaurants and recently received three Michelin stars. There are also several upscale new American restaurants in the neighborhood such as Rouge Tomate and Park Avenue Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Shopping: Madison Avenue is lined with luxury retailers like Barneys, Chanel and Ralph Lauren. There are also several national chain stores like Crate and Barrel and Bed Bath and Beyond.

Entertainment: There are several cultural institutions in Lenox Hill such as the Frick Collection and other museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, are nearby as well. There is the Park Avenue Armory, which is performing arts venue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204630904577060183620965456.html?m od=WSJ_NY_RealEstate_LEFTTopStories

[vanshnookenraggen]

So if Lenox Hill stops at 72nd St, Carnegie Hill starts at 86th, and Yorkville is east of 3rd Ave... what is the area bounded by 5th Ave, 86th St, 3rd Ave, and 72nd St?

[Merry]

^ Upper East Side :) ;).

http://blucloverdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/manhattan_lower3.jpg?w=619&h=868

http://bluclover.com/

[Merry]

Adding Spice in 'NoMad'

By LAURA KUSISTO

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-BI590_BLOCK_G_20111201190427.jpg
Tourists jump up as a friend takes their photo near the Flatiron Building.

After more than a decade of efforts by developers, the charmless triangle at the north of Madison Square Park finally is seeing an influx of cultural and nightlife spots.

Indeed, while many cultural institutions around the city are struggling, the northern end of the Flatiron District is thriving thanks in part to the willingness of landlords in the neighborhood to cut breaks on rent to cultural groups and independent retailers.

"We basically take a long-term interest in the neighborhood as a whole. We're willing with tenants to give them relatively low, fixed rents," said Andrew Zobler, chief executive of Sydell Group and developer of the Ace Hotel and the planned NoMad Hotel, both in the area.

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An art installation on the Flatiron's first floor.

The approach has helped Mr. Zobler attract tenants like Stumptown Coffee Roasters and hip clothing store Opening Ceremony to the Ace Hotel. To offset the lower rent, he takes a percentage of the profits those stores make.

Mr. Zobler is also in talks with Russ and Daughters, a century-old East Village institution, for a space next door to the NoMad Hotel. The deal hasn't closed, he cautioned, but Mr. Zobler notes it is an example of interest in the neighborhood by home-grown New York retailers. The retailer declined to comment.

"Not that many people are reinvesting in that kind of world," said James Buslik, a principal at brokerage Adams & Co., referring to theaters and museums. But north of the Flatiron District, "There's real money because the location is so strong," he said.

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The Museum of Mathematics, which claims to be the only museum in the country of its kind, is planning to move into a former showroom at 11. E. 26th St.

Co-founders Glen Whitney and Cindy Lawrence said they looked for locations in SoHo, Chinatown, Times Square and Bryant Park. "We looked in the Meatpacking District, and by the end of the week the landlord had doubled the rent," Ms. Lawrence said.

In addition to the access to transportation and growing population of families, the proximity to the Flatiron Building offered a quirky bit of symbolism for the new Museum of Mathematics: "It's the most photographed angle in New York," Mr. Whitney, the museum's director, pointed out.

The landlord had originally eyed a restaurant, according to Mr. Buslik, the broker, but struggled to find a restaurant willing to take on the large 18,000-square-foot space.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-QV512_blockP_G_20111201215035.jpg
"How many people are going to build a new restaurant and spend $10 million?" during a recession, he noted.

The museum will join one of the few other museums now in the area, the Museum of Sex on Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, which opened about nine years ago.

For the area lately dubbed "NoMad,"wedged between gentrifying Chelsea to the west and the Flatiron District to the south, it has been a long journey to respectability.

"The district had never gentrified because it was essentially the capital for wholesale or bootleg merchandise. Bootleggers would pay higher rents than anyone else, so it stubbornly remained a counterfeit marketplace," said Mr. Zobler.

While Sixth and Fifth avenues are now dominated by residential high-rises, he hopes to fill the middle ground with restaurants and retailers to service those new residents.

"We see the Broadway corridor as becoming the main shopping street and living room for all of the people that live in the neighborhood," Mr. Zobler said.

That might already be starting to come true, as a number of lively restaurants and bars, such as the Hog Pit, San Rocco, Gstaad, Nuela and, of course, Eataly, have already opened.

Jay Z's 40/40 Club, which for nearly a decade has been one of the lone bars in the immediate area, is also undergoing a multimillion-dollar expansion to 13,500 square feet.

A new 10,000-square-foot theater overseen by former "Saturday Night Live" writer Ali Farahnakian also recently opened at 121 E. 24th St.

The People's Improv Theater moved from a previous location on West 29th Street, where it had been for eight years. The rent for the new place is about $60-per-foot for the street level—about $20 lower than a theater space on Broadway can command.

Still, Mr. Farahnakian notes that despite a sympathetic landlord, it is becoming increasingly difficult for cultural institutions to afford rents in the area. The theater opened a coffee shop and bar to help bring in some extra money.

"Our rent increased four-fold. My Con Ed bill is what my rent was at the old space," he said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833104577072303838288104.html

[Merry]

Ah, to have a few of these <sigh>...

PS: That carpark needs to go :(.


http://www.thehighline.org/sites/files/images/Photo%20by%20Friends%20of%20the%20High%20Line.jpg

HIGH LINE BILLBOARD Q&A with the Curator (http://www.thehighline.org/blog/2011/12/02/high-line-billboard-qa-with-the-curator)

[Merry]

Land of Good Bones and Deep Pockets

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

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Brownstones on 94th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues

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A NEIGHBORHOOD of mansions and bakeries, museums and florists, Carnegie Hill is at once grand and intimate. As pleasantly walkable as any community in New York, its streets offer up vignettes that at times seem almost choreographed. Men sell Christmas trees from the gently sloping porte-cochère of the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street. A high-stepping girls’ track team giggles through agility drills near the Engineers’ Gate to Central Park. Jacketed St. David’s boys and plaid-uniformed Spence girls grapple with planetoid-size burgers at Jackson Hole, as much an institution in these parts as any of the museums housed in Fifth Avenue palaces.

“It’s a real neighborhood, because you’ve got your dry cleaners, your grocery stores, your liquor store, and everything’s within a few blocks,” said Judith Gibbons, a retired teacher who loves to stroll the area with her husband, Francesco Scattone, a hedge fund researcher. “You see the same people, the same dogs, and everyone acknowledges each other, so it doesn’t have that anonymous feeling that lots of places in New York have.”

In 2006, the couple paid $1.3 million for a two-bedroom co-op on East 95th Street to be near Ms. Gibbons’s job at Hunter College High School on 94th. They have since divided their time between the apartment and their house in the Long Island village of Old Field, near Mr. Scattone’s workplace. But as they contemplated his retirement in a few years, they grew eager to buy a house in Carnegie Hill for the long haul.

So last year they paid $7.5 million for a five-story 1893 Romanesque Revival town house on 93rd between Madison and Fifth Avenues. One of six contiguous row houses built by the same developer, theirs had since lost its stoop, which their architect, Brian E. Boyle, plans to replace by replicating a surviving twin from two doors over, right down to its foliate carvings.

Such attention to period architectural detail is common in the area, much of which lies within city historic districts, said Lo van der Valk, president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, a 41-year-old preservation group. Mr. van der Valk said that the generation that settled in Carnegie Hill in the 1950s and raised families there was now dying out or moving out. Many of those moving in are “Wall Street types,” he said. “They hire good architects and do pretty good work.”

The town house that Ms. Gibbons and Mr. Scattone bought had been chopped up into 10 units. The interior has now been gutted, as part of a plan for its reconversion to single-family use. The city has approved the couple’s proposal to remove a 14-foot-deep extension that juts out across half the width of the rear yard, a common feature of old town houses. In its place, they will add an extension that runs the house’s full width, with a glass-roofed “greenhouse” opening onto the garden. On the next three stories, the extension will step back farther from the yard.

“I picture the greenhouse as a place that’s like going outside, but it’s protected from the pests and the noise,” Ms. Gibbons said. “It should be a place where you can put your feet up and read a book.”

Brokers say that this kind of full-width rear addition has become increasingly popular in Carnegie Hill. “They’re maximizing the real estate they bought,” said Cathy Franklin, a director at Brown Harris Stevens, who, like two of her neighbors, put a rear addition on her own 1888 Carnegie Hill town house on 92nd Street. “People are investing a lot of time and money into the renovations of these houses, many of which have not been touched in 40 years.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Carnegie Hill takes its name from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who in 1902 moved into an opulent Beaux Arts-meets-Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. His arrival raised the area’s profile, and more mansions and town houses followed. Today the Carnegie mansion is home to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is undergoing renovations and will reopen in fall 2013. (A sign on the fence explains, “Like many on Fifth Avenue, I’m having a little work done.”)

According to Carnegie Hill Neighbors, the neighborhood extends east from Fifth Avenue up to (but not including) Third Avenue. It is bounded on the south by 86th Street, and on the north by 98th between Fifth and Park Avenues and 96th between Park and Third. The 2010 census counted 20,473 residents.

Park Avenue, with its lavishly planted medians, is an iconic boulevard of mostly prewar apartment houses, typically co-ops. Side streets have striking ensembles of row houses, like the exuberant jumble of oriels, dormers and gables that adorns the six landmark Queen Anne town houses from 146 to 156 East 89th. The five-unit building at No. 146 is on the market for $5,827,900.

The often intimate scale and historic feel of the neighborhood are the special preoccupation of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, which promotes contextual architecture and fights perceived nuisances like the recently defeated proposal for a street-corner newsstand on 86th Street.

“They’ve done a great job of keeping the neighborhood the way it’s been, which is low-rise buildings for the most part,” said Jed Garfield, president of the brokerage Leslie J. Garfield & Company. “Things like that play a huge role in the quality of life, because there’s that much less traffic on the street, and the stores are less crowded.”

New development has been limited in the past five years, even outside of Carnegie Hill’s two historic districts. In a neighborhood where many residents regard lack of change as a virtue, the construction of a large or modern building can be as controversial as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

When several row houses on 93rd Street near Third Avenue were torn down in the last few years and replaced with a seven-story condominium, some neighbors grew alarmed that a similar building might pop up on their own low-rise blocks.

These fears prompted a group of homeowners to press for a new historic district on Hellgate Hill, the block east of Lexington Avenue from 94th to 95th Street, which is dominated on three sides by a group of 1870s neo-Grec row houses. Although some Hellgate Hill owners strongly opposed becoming subject to landmarks regulations, a compromise effort failed. Community Board 8 voted in favor of the proposed historic district, and in October, Carnegie Hill Neighbors and the group of supportive owners sent the city a formal request for designation.

“For a while there were some pointed exchanges,” said William S. Sterns III, president of the Hellgate Hill Householders Association, which did not take a position. “But the process moved on and things quieted down. People like each other, and there’s a pretty nice atmosphere in the neighborhood.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Single-family town houses sold for an average of $10,015,714 this year, said Matthew Pravda, an agent at Leslie J. Garfield. Their price per square foot rose to $1,736 from $1,625 last year, he said, and they took an average of eight and a half months to sell, about a month longer than in 2010.

Three-bedroom co-ops cost an average of $3,383,478 this year, while three-bedroom condos averaged $2,349,167, according to Ms. Franklin of Brown Harris Stevens. A search on Streeteasy (http://streeteasy.com/) showed 191 properties on the market.

WHAT TO DO

The Jewish Museum, the National Academy Museum and School, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum line Fifth Avenue. In an age of vanishing independent bookshops, the tin-ceilinged Corner Bookstore is a neighborhood stalwart on Madison Avenue, where it opened in the 1970s.

THE SCHOOLS

Elementary schools include Public School 77, the Lower Lab School, for “talented and gifted” students, which earned an A on its most recent city progress report. Some public school students attend East Side Middle School on 91st Street, which also scored an A.

Hunter College Elementary, serving kindergarten through sixth grade, and Hunter College High School, for Grades 7 through 12, are on 94th Street. Both are selective, publicly financed schools. SAT averages at the high school this year were 725 in reading, 738 in math, and 744 in writing; citywide last year, they were 436, 460, and 431. (City averages for this year are not yet available.)

Private schools abound. The Trevor Day School, which teaches nursery through Grade 5 at buildings on East 89th and 90th Streets (as well as Grades 6 through 12 on West 88th Street), has broken ground on East 95th Street for a 101,000-square-foot facility. Scheduled to open in fall 2013, it will house Grades 7 through 12. Pamela J. Clarke, the head of school, declined to provide SAT averages. “We don’t emphasize them in school,” she wrote in an e-mail, “and we don’t want to emphasize them by bragging about high scores.”

THE COMMUTE
The No. 6 train, the Lexington local, stops at 96th and 86th Streets. The express No. 4 and 5 trains, which also stop at the crowded 86th Street station, whisk riders to Midtown in minutes and the financial district in about half an hour.

THE HISTORY
According to a report by the Cultural Resource Consulting Group, Hellgate Hill was named after the Hell Gate Brewery, built in 1866 on 92nd and 93rd Streets east of Third Avenue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/realestate/carnegie-hill-living-in-land-of-good-bones-and-deep-pockets.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

[Bingo]

^ Upper East Side :) ;).

http://blucloverdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/manhattan_lower3.jpg?w=619&h=868

http://bluclover.com/

Does anyone actually call it Clinton? What happened to Alphabet City?

[Stroika]

Yeah, there are various neighborhoods/sub-neighborhoods/other appellations also missing -- Kip's Bay, Garment District, Meatpacking District, etc.

I had one co-worker who lived in Hells Kitchen and once called it "Clinton." I believe she got this from the RE agent who found her the place (agents/brokers tend to be the ones who use it, since they apparently think it's harder to get someone to live in a place called Hells Kitchen) ... She was widely mocked for a day or two in the office for repeating this term.

[Merry]

Yorkville attracts families looking for peace and quiet

By Jason Sheftell

http://bestplaces.nydailynews.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/content_main_image/images/2012/01/05/yorkville lead.jpg
(Jeff Bachner)


It’s not exactly convenient, but that’s why it works. East of First Ave. in the 80s and 90s by Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Mansion has become a haven for New Yorkers looking for old-world Manhattan, peace and quiet, and a few dollars shaven off their home price.




Simply put, you can double your space for the same price you’d pay in more established neighborhoods. Those who know it, appreciate it, happy to sacrifice a few extra blocks to pay as low as $1,950 per month for spacious one-bedrooms on 89th St. off East End Ave.




“This is a smart starter neighborhood for people just coming to New York,” says broker Tim Bascom who owns Bascom Real Estate, specializing in the downtown loft scene but finds fair-priced deals all over the city. “Young people love it for the price. They don’t mind walking the extra blocks.”




http://bestplaces.nydailynews.com/sites/default/files/images/york ave.jpg
Townhouses and walkups on the pretty side streets east of York Ave. (Jeff Bachner)




The neighborhood also draws seasoned New Yorkers looking for value. On the buy side, new buildings like Azure, a 34-story tower “condop” on First Ave., has attracted families seeking large homes. A two-bedroom for $1.195 million would cost $2 million-plus on the upper West Side or closer to Central Park. With a brand-new elementary school next door (M.S. 14 was built with funds supplied from a land-lease deal between Azure developers and the Department of Education), parents have only steps to go to drop their children off.

“People don’t realize how easy it is to live in this neighborhood,” says Karen Mansour, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, the group marketing Azure. “They’re surprised by what this neighborhood has.”




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Prewar buildings tower over Carl Schurz Park, a thing of beauty all year round (Jeff Bachner)




Carl Schurz Park




One of Manhattan’s true hidden gems, Carl Schurz Park has twists and turns, curved elevations and plots of grass where even in the wintertime children have baseball catches and practice modern dance. On a cold Thursday, two women in fur coats took photos of Gracie Mansion between leafless branches of an old oak tree while bundled-up locals walked dogs.




As you enter the park on 86th St., a stone archway leads to a circle under several stairwells. In the circle, a statue of *Peter Pan centers what feels like a natural amphitheater. It’s as pretty as Tolkien’s Shire, especially considering the park saw disrepair and peril in the 1970s. It was then that neighborhood residents began reviving the area’s greatest asset.




Today, Carl Schurz Park Conservancy is the oldest community-based volunteer park association in New York City. Working with the Department of Parks, it ensures through private funds that the park is maintained. It also throws one of the city’s top outdoor art festivals every fall — the Gracie Square Art Show. Lining the park, prewar buildings loom like architectural giants. It’s a beautiful sight.




http://bestplaces.nydailynews.com/sites/default/files/images/azure 2.jpg
The view from the Azure, a 34-story condop on 90th St. (Jeanne Noonan)




What the residents say




Rico Williams moved to the neighborhood with his girlfriend less than a year ago after living in several uptown and downtown neighborhoods. They have a two-bedroom with a dining area and large kitchen off York Ave. Born and raised in New York City, Williams knows all about the space-for-neighborhood tradeoff. He has lived in a three-bedroom in Sugar Hill, astudio in the Village, a one-bedroom in Chelsea, and as far north as Inwood.




“As a native New Yorker used to the hustle and bustle, this area was a pleasant surprise,” says Williams, whose apartment rents for above $4,000. “The walk to and from the subway is a nice transition, especially on the way home when it serves as a kind of decompression zone.”




Architect Deborah Berke lives in a maisonette on the south side of Carl Schurz Park. A longtime loft dweller, Berke and her husband raised their daughter in the neighborhood. Their front door is a few steps from the East River.




“I never thought I would like it up here,” says Berke, born and raised in Douglas Manor, Queens. “Then we started looking, and it was so peaceful and dramatic in spots. There’s an elegance. Over the years, that seeps in, in a very comfortable way.”




http://bestplaces.nydailynews.com/sites/default/files/images/living room.jpg
A living room with views from the Azure (Jeanne Noonan)




A renter’s heaven




Developer Glenwood owns five buildings in the area they call “Gracie Point.” The Andover has a fountain out front. The Brittany has a fitness center with indoor lap pool. One-bedrooms are avilable for around $2,795 and $2,995.




In this neighborhood, calling the number on the many “for rent” signs that line building windows or posted in front of townhouses might be the best way to find an apartment. We saw a $2,600 large one-bedroom in a historic townhouse on E. 87th St. The apartment has arched hallways, a small outdoor space in the back and 10 feet of closet space. Down the street in a walkup building, a call to the “for rent” sign out front found a two-bedroom for $2,750 and a studio for $1,750. Both were gone one week later as this neighborhood trades quickly.




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Glaser’s Bake Shop, opened in 1902, is a remnant from the area’s German roots (Mariela Lombard)




Old-world character




In the early 1900s, Yorkville was considered the city’s largest German neighborhood. Remnants of that past exist around every corner. Established in 1873, St. Joseph’s Parish still has monthly Mass in German. Glaser’s Bake Shop opened in 1902.Owned by descendants of the original owners, the shop serves some of the best home-made pastries in the city.




Richard McIntosh, a television executive, has lived in the neighborhood on and off since graduating from New York University in the mid-1960s. He paid $68 per month for a one-bedroom in 1968. He moved back in the early ‘90s.




“This is still a real neighborhood,” says McIntosh. “It has old churches, neighbors who really care, and not a lot of tourists. The best new thing is the arrival of the Fairway on 86th St. You don’t hear those intrusive Fresh Direct trucks anymore. I like the separation from midtown. Once you’re here, you have what you need.”




Henderson Place, an alley off 86th St. near East End Ave., is the neighborhood’s historic heart. Of the 32 homes built in 1882, 24 survive. With arched roofs, a few turrets, inviting front doors, historic streetlamps and scarlet bricks, the tiny street is a New York City landmark. Gingerbread-type, three-story homes help make it as romantic and surprising a place for a New York City walk as any. A townhouse on the street can cost $4 million.




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Views from the promenade (Jeff Bachner)




The threat




Lately, McIntosh and others worry about a waste management plant that the city plans at the neighborhood’s north end adjacent to where children play at Asphalt Green, an athletic facility. Two local groups are fighting the plant, saying the city needs to look at waste alternatives.




“This will injure the health, safety and welfare of the people who live here,” says Sandra Christie, on the steering committee of Residents for Sane Trane Trash Solutions. “The mayor has this smoking ban, but it’s ok for 500 garbage trucks to idle next to playing children? We don’t think it’s right. This will industrialize a very peaceful residential area. A city should protect its neighborhoods.”



The plant requires approval from the Army Corp of Engineers, looking into impact on the East River eco-system. For now, the neighborhood is safe, still a quiet corner full of well-priced places to live.

http://bestplaces.nydailynews.com/stories/yorkville-attracts-families-looking-peace-and-quiet

[eddhead]

Thanks for the great photos and article on Yorkville. I lived there for about 7 years and really enjoyed it, althought the location was a bit inconvenient in terms of transportation. Still, I miss it. And Glaser's is fantastic!

[Merry]

Glad you enjoyed it, Edd :).

Henderson Place is incredible. Miraculously some of it has survived.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UES/UES101.htm

http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/11/henderson-place-homes-for-persons-of.html

http://images.nymag.com/realestate/vu/2006/125years060410_560.jpg
http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2006/16647/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emilio_guerra/5419525612/


Large images:

http://www.museumplanet.com/tour.php/nyc/gm/9

http://www.museumplanet.com/tour.php/nyc/gm/10

[scumonkey]

Somehow these have escaped me (but not for much longer)...
Thank you Merry!

[Merry]

Ah, excellent, some more SM photo wizardry to come, then?

There's always something left to discover in New York City :).

[mariab]

Love Yorkville. My favorite part of the city. Never thought I could associate 'peace & quiet' with NYC until I walked through there one day.

[Merry]

Green Wedgies

Community tries to carve out open space in Hudson Square.

by Tom Stoelker

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A proposed POPS for a tower in the path of the Gap park. Courtesy Starr Whitehouse

While Village people focus their attention on New York University’s expansion plans and doings at the former St. Vincent’s Hospital, the future of the Hudson Square neighborhood just west of Soho is in the midst of major rezoning. The real estate arm of Trinity Church aims to transform at least 21 blocks of post-industrial Manhattan into a live/work/play zone. But critics say the Trinity plan misses a key element: open space.

Though the neighborhood sits just two blocks from Hudson River Park, it’s effectively cut off from it by a UPS distribution center, St. John’s Center’s production studios, and a controversial sanitation garage. With the riverfront park so close and yet so far, various stakeholders are now advancing ideas to eke out more green space wherever they can.

Most of the proposals call for changes to the Trinity plan, which favors taller buildings near their already proposed SHoP Architects–designed towers at 6th Avenue and Canal Street. The Trinity plan would also revamp Duarte Square, a triangle park that fronts the project. The only other accessible green space in the district is Soho Square.



http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/Hudson-Square-Gapline-01.jpg (http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/Hudson-Square-Gapline-01.jpg)
The four-block area currently (left), with proposed Gap park (right). Courtesy WXY




For the past few months the Hudson Square Connection (HSC) has been brainstorming on streetscape, identity, and infrastructure with a powerhouse collection of firms including Mathews Nielsen, Rogers Marvel, Billings Jackson Design, Arup, and Open. So far HSC has identified the inordinately wide sidewalks as one opportunity for green space and are pushing for more access to Hudson River Park at Spring Street.

Other ideas focus on swapping displaced air rights for green space, an idea triggered by the popular High Line, such as one for a park overlooking the Holland Tunnel.

Recently a study by WXY Architecture was presented to the community board that would allow air rights for buildings to be sold and distributed throughout the neighborhood so as to encourage interconnected green spaces. Instead of placing privately owned public spaces (POPS) next to the new buildings, the plan encourages building owners to assemble plazas together, in this case a series of midblock parks between Hudson and Varick to be called the Hudson Square Gap. As there are only three major real estate players in the area—Trinity, Edison, and Extell—the plan would seem doable as long as Trinity and Edison adapt the plans they already have for the block.

The proposed Hudson Square Gap runs from Henry to Spring Street, where Edison wants to build a midblock tower effectively plugging the proposed gap. That tower would have its own POPS designed by Starr Whitehouse facing Dominick Street, a design dependent on the Port Authority allowing it to encompass an adjoining parking lot that sits above the Holland Tunnel’s entrance and cannot be built upon.

But all roads lead to Trinity, who owns six million square feet and holds the ULURP application. Their plan carries the most weight unless City Planning can be encouraged to think otherwise.


http://www.archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5861