“My block is so quiet,” begins a joke that Moody McCarthy has added to his routine, “if there’s any yelling at night that means Ecuador scored a goal.”
. . .
In case you haven’t been to a comedy show in a while, comedians are still having little luck with the ladies. And living in Astoria isn’t necessarily helping.
Tishman Speyer’s Stuyvesant Town resembles dorm now that leasing agents make it easier to convert one-bedroom apartments into two-bedroom dwellings:
A young, chirpy brunette showed us a model one-bedroom apartment that had a pressurized wall built in the living room so it could comfortably work as a two-bedroom. The unit had recently undergone luxury upgrades such as granite countertops, new appliances, posh lighting fixtures, a renovated bathroom and brand-new air conditioners. Even with the wall, the living room and both bedrooms were considerably larger and nicer than any apartment we had seen through Craigslist. We would have both a trendy East Village address and be surrounded by trees, green lawns, street hockey and basketball courts. It was the perfect surrounding to sit and study or play Wiffle Ball. Stuy Town felt like the college campus that NYU could never deliver.
Alanis Morissette should check out this article because, unless I’m mistaken, it’s basically the textbook definition of “irony”:
Williamsburg is ground zero in the growing scourge of stalled construction that has left the neighborhood littered with 18 vacant lots and rusting steel building frames — more than in all of The Bronx, The Post has learned.
Block after block in the trendy Brooklyn community and a few adjacent streets in Greenpoint have been declared stalled construction sites by the city.
A team of building inspectors found 143 stalled sites around the city. But the cluster of lots in Williamsburg, where development was white-hot just two years ago, is the biggest.
By contrast, The Bronx and Queens each had just 14 stalled construction sites, and Staten Island had 13, city records show.
. . .
Philip DePaolo, who moved from The Bronx to Williamsburg in 1979, said the neighborhood looks like the arson-scarred streets he left behind.
“It looks like I never left,” said DePaolo, comparing his old neighborhood to Williamsburg today.
“The problem we’re having now is that we’re starting to get squatters in these buildings and lots,” said DePaolo. “Blight draws crime, and if you have blocks and blocks of vacant lots with no people, that creates a problem.”
DePaolo pointed to broken construction fencing surrounding some of the sites and piles of blankets and cardboard shacks left behind by homeless squatters who spend nights there.
Officials say they’re working on the problem as a growing number of developers struggle with financing in a slumping housing market.
As if losing Hiram Monserrate wasn’t bad enough, now there’s this:
Rumors have been going around lately that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are making a big move to New York. We heard it for the first time from Nat Hentoff, who told us a few weeks ago that he’d heard it from doormen on his block of west 12th Street in the Village.
. . .
During another visit we talked to a doorman in the neighborhood who said: “Can’t tell you who lives there. I would lose my job. But you know, we doormen know everything that goes on around here. I can tell you the owner won’t be there much because he’ll be filming in LA a lot, and I can tell you he bought the house for his wife, who was in a Broadway show.” The doorman smiled, “But I can’t tell you who it is. I could lose my job.”
. . . then they move in the homeless shelter. Buried lede — at $2700 a month, developers everywhere should be volunteering to convert their bad investments into shelters:
City officials said the condos — which couldn’t attract buyers in the fizzled housing market — are part of an effort to help an “unprecedented” number of homeless families who have ended up on the street because of the tough economy.
Units priced at $350,000
It appears to be the first time a faltering upscale building has found a new purpose as a shelter, said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.
Neighbors were furious the 67-unit building on East New York Ave., where apartments were supposed to sell for $250,000 to $350,000, has been turned into a shelter.
“I’m a hardworking taxpayer, and I don’t think homeless people should be living better than me,” fumed Desmond John, 35, a window salesman who wanted to rent one of the fancy apartments. “They said it’s not for rent. It’s a shelter. I was shocked.”
Luxury brokerage firm HQ Marketing Partners started promoting the condos last summer — with the hook that buyers could custom design the units.
When the market started to tank in the fall — and his gamble on a fringe neighborhood didn’t pay off — developer Avi Shriki said he had to come up with a Plan B.
“When the market went south, we knew we had to do something different,” said Shriki, 44. “With the market being the way it is you have to be creative.”
This spring, Shriki signed a 10-year contract with the Bushwick Economic Development Group to turn the building into a homeless shelter.
Shriki wouldn’t say how much he gets paid — but he said he jumped at the chance to get people in his building.
“At least we still own the building and we are paying our mortgage, so that’s good,” said Shriki. “The outcome is not as bad as some people I know who had to surrender the whole building to the bank.”
City pays $90 a night
The city is paying Bushwick Economic Development Corp. $90 a night for each of the apartments, about $2,700 a month — a figure that also covers social services, housing help and job counseling designed to get families back on their feet.
The developers in similiarly overbuilt Long Island City should take notice — some of these rentals are way under $2700 . . .
That’s it. Just “scoreboard.” We don’t even want to buy something in this stupid city; we just want you to admit that you were wrong all along:
For years, Halstead Property’s Richard Grossman has run a boot camp, teaching agents how to get buyers approved by co-op boards. In it, he presents four hypothetical applicant profiles. The first is a professional — a teacher, perhaps — with an average income but an outsize down payment. The second is a bonus-dependent candidate like a banker, who makes $80,000 and is putting down the minimum, but has a bonus three times his salary. The third, a non–Wall Streeter, earns somewhere in the low six figures and has a small bonus and a standard down payment, and the fourth, a first-time buyer with a good job, relies on relatives to cobble together a decent down payment.
In the past, says Grossman, agents invariably picked the financier as the most board-worthy, thanks to his bonus. At last month’s seminar, however, the answers were unanimous: “Go with the teacher.” And that is a big change. “If you were bidding against someone from Wall Street who had this kind of bonus history, you couldn’t compete. First of all, they were willing to outbid you, and second of all, the sellers were willing to take them over somebody else,” says Gumley Haft Kleier president Michele Kleier. “Bonus used to be the favorite word in everybody’s vocabulary. Now salary is a much more attractive word.” Admits one Upper West Side board member: “We’re definitely cautious across the board now, especially when someone’s touting their bonus.”
Another gentlemen’s club is reborn in the space formerly occupied by Scores:
“It’s like Yankee Stadium,” Antony, a security guard, said over his shoulder, leading the way through the thumping entrance of what used to be the original East Side location of Scores strip club.
Scores lost its battle with the state over its liquor license last year. Since then, the Las Vegas-based empire, Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, has moved in, and last night was their official opening in New York.
Sapphire made sure to bring yards of neon sapphire blue back-lighting, a fluorescent, engraved pompadour-shaped ice-sculpture, plushier (much plush-ier, according to the dancers) leather chairs, new carpeting, a concierge service, and a new chef — Jayson Margulies from Robert’s Steak House at the Penthouse Executive Club.
Antony, like other security guards on Thursday night, wore a dark suit with an aquarium blue skinny-tie.
“Yankee Stadium,” he continued dreamily. “That’s what it’s like with this particular venue. This is the granddaddy of gentleman’s clubs, For years when I was growing up they were called strip bars or something else, some less politically correct kind of word, you know what I mean. But you walk in here and you are called ’sir’ or ‘ma’am,’ and you get the white-glove treatment from the minute you walk in the door. That’s how this franchise does the thing.”
Sapphire’s main room looks largely identical to the old Scores, largely because there were no actual construction renovations done. The layout, too, is similar: bar to the left, mirrored wall and couches on the right, the stage front and center.
There are amateurs:
A Manhattan woman has been arrested for allegedly trying to scam thousands of dollars in fees by placing a bogus ad in a newspaper offering cheap rents in fancy apartments, authorities said yesterday. Raadiya James, 22, is accused of buying an ad in AM New York on Dec. 2 that mimicked an official announcement from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offering cheap apartments on West 57th Street.
In exchange for a $5 application fee, the home-seekers were offered a shot at studios for $538 and two-bedrooms for $823.
Over the next few days, more than 1,000 money orders poured into a post-office box.
But authorities picked up on the alleged scam and when James came to pick up the loot, she was arrested.
And then there are professionals:
“Of course, honey, we’re in a recession,” replied Jackie Sim, the building’s [Avalon Morningside Park, a new 20-story monolith capping Columbus Avenue at 110th Street] leasing agent, when asked whether units had been going more slowly than anticipated. “People are shopping around more.”
. . .
Ms. Sim would call the Avalon a “luxury” building rather than “full-service” — in fact, she did slip up a couple of times — if 20 percent of it didn’t fall under the city’s 80-20 affordable housing guidelines. Developer AvalonBay secured $100 million in tax-exempt bonds to keep 59 units rent-stabilized at “affordable” rates (studios for about $620, $922 for a three-bedroom). Though the apartments aren’t quite as swank — Corian countertops instead of granite, for example — AvalonBay won’t have problems filling them up: HPD was still inundated with applications for the lottery.
“Everyone applied,” said Kelly Garcia, owner of the overstuffed Hardware and Houseware store on 109th and Columbus-including him. “Nobody has said they got in. What I think is they keep it for their own people.”
Nope, I don’t believe it. Except there it is, plain as day on Craig’s List and in the Brooklyn Paper:
Finding a cheap apartment on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg? Priceless. Paying $550 a month to sleep inches from a toilet? A little disgusting.
Nonetheless, just such a humble abode turned up on Tuesday morning on Craigslist — with pictures, no less, of a room that fits little more than a bed, a sink, a shower, a mini-fridge and hotplate and, yes, that toilet, all inches away from each other.
Oh, and one more detail: there are no windows.
“Room is in basement,” the listing reads. “There is no separation between the bedroom and the bathroom.”
What did you expect for $550? A gap of more than six inches from the foot of the bed to the toilet? Are you some kind of Rockefeller?
If not, join the club. The landlord’s housekeeper, who showed the room to The Brooklyn Paper on Tuesday afternoon, said there has been lots of interest in the listing.
“We’ve gotten a lot of e-mails today [to come see the apartment],” she said.
But by sunset, the listing for the “prison chic” unit had been “flagged” by Craigslist for further investigation, possibly because a basement apartment with no windows is illegal.
Illegal or not, there could be another reason why the listing was de-listed. “The apartment has rented,” the landlord claimed when contacted by The Brooklyn Paper on Wednesday.
Oh, that wily Eloise:
Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.
What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an “attic-like space.”
In a $31 million suit, Vavilov says the purchase — which would have represented the second-highest amount for a residential sale in New York City history — was the result of a bait-and-switch scam. Unlike The Plaza hotel of the children’s story “Eloise,” where rooms “embodied the height of elegance and sophistication, the same cannot be said of the penthouses,” said lawyer Y. David Scharf, who filed the suit Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“The disparity between what they were supposed to get and what [developer] El-Ad was planning to deliver to them is outrageous.”
Vavilov’s wife, Russian actress Maryana Tsaregradskaya, “burst into tears” when she first saw the finished unit on June 28.
In other news, some snotnose at the Post thinks 66 is “elderly”:
A group of elderly tenants has won a court order blocking their landlord from installing windows in their rent-stabilized Lincoln Square apartments — even though the windows would give them sweeping, much-coveted views of the park.
“I’m not terribly interested in looking at Central Park or the East Side,” said Ned O’Gorman, one of the four tenants who turned up their nose at the offer.
The poet and his cronies had filed suit to stop their landlord, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, from ripping out the walls in their one-bedroom apartments and replacing them with windows.
“Plaintiffs argue that they would be severely and irreparably damaged by the removal of the wall and by the dust, fumes, noise and vibrations,” Judge Michael Stallman wrote.
He signed off on their bid for a preliminary order barring the landlord from doing work on their apartments, finding the changes were purely cosmetic and not a “necessary repair.”
The landlord’s lawyer, Seth Denenberg, said the window installation between the 22nd and 37th floors was part of a massive rehab of 60 W. 66th St., designed to transform the tower into a “premium building.”
When work is finally completed, the plaintiffs’ four units — all on different floors — will be the only ones without the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The four tenants all said they had good reason to block the construction.
Abraham Cherney is 87 and gets kidney dialysis several times a week.
Former model and dancer Laima Drobavicius has severe allergies, and both said they would “suffer potentially life threatening health consequences” if forced to stay in their apartments during construction.
Donald Stone, 66, said the windows would cost him a wall that’s “now covered by antiques, books and watercolors,” and the construction and sunlight would “endanger his valuable belongings.”
Adam “Jersey City” Sternbergh out-Sternberghs himself:
Until last May, Cloyd and Herbeck were living in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, and they were barely making it. They ate mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. They couldn’t afford to go out with their friends. They wanted a family, but “there was no room in our Brooklyn equation to have kids unless we put them in a closet,” Herbeck says.
Then one night, Herbeck, who’s 30, found herself browsing online listings in Buffalo. (Why Buffalo? She comes from Buffalo. And like many young Buffalonians, she got out as soon as she could.) “We were like, ‘Okay, the prices are great,’” she says. So they looked at some photos. “And we were like, ‘Okay, they’re really nice apartments. They’re really big. And right by the park.’”
And all of a sudden, they found they were staring at a very different what-could-be life: the one they’d be able to have if they were willing to leave New York.
Fortunately there are many spots on community boards and the like; work your way up:
A rent-stabilized apartment in New York is a precious find. Which could explain the indignation that greeted the disclosure that Representative Charles B. Rangel was occupying four of them in the luxurious Lenox Terrace towers in Harlem, where Gov. David A. Paterson also has one.
Throughout the city, the well-connected (or just plain lucky) have been able to snare such prizes and retain them over the years.
But few rental buildings in the city have been as hospitable to public officials, past and present, as the Rudin Management Company’s high rise at 215 East 68th Street, where a shouted, “Good morning, your honor!” could turn every head in the lobby.
A fancy white brick monolith of 608 apartments between Second and Third Avenues, the 33-story structure, built in 1962 — when a seven-room unit went for $615 a month — is home to an unusual concentration of luminaries of the public and private sectors.
Some entered as rent-stabilized tenants; some retain that status, while others are paying deregulated prices, though often below what today’s bloated real estate market could command.
Former Mayor David N. Dinkins lives there, as did a predecessor, John V. Lindsay. Norman Goodman, the New York County clerk, and Burton B. Roberts, former administrative judge of State Supreme Court in the Bronx, are tenants, as are Betty Weinberg Ellerin, former presiding justice of the state’s Appellate Division, First Department, and Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann, administrative judge of the civil branch of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Also Howard Safir, a former police commissioner; Thomas Von Essen, a former fire commissioner; and John Roland, the former WNYW-TV/Channel 5 anchor.
Richard Aurelio, a deputy mayor under Mr. Lindsay, used to live there. So did Andrew P. Beame, a lawyer and grandson of another former mayor, Abraham D. Beame; Hazel N. Dukes, the former president of the Off-Track Betting Corporation who pleaded guilty to embezzlement; and Melvyn Altman, a lawyer who did time for racketeering. Tony Bennett once lived there, and so did the songwriter Sammy Cahn — until, his widow says, they were forced out to make way for a preferred tenant.
In fact, some residents say, there are still so many boldface names on the roster you could practically establish a city government right in the building.
“As you mention it, there are a lot here,” said Justice Roberts, in seeming wonder.
But I guess you have a better view at 15 CPW:
Remember that rumored $90 million listing at 15 Central Park West? It was nothing.
Dolly Lenz, New York City’s most gargantuan real estate agent, broke astounding news at Portofio’s Four Seasons get-together this morning: “There are a few apartments on the market at 15 CPW, a new development on Central Park West, asking somewhere between $80 and $125 million — three different apartments — and one quietly on the market at $150 million,” she said.
Wowzah. Brokers have already made it known that two condos in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed blockbuster building are being offered at $80 and $90 million, so Ms. Lenz’s quote not only means that there’s a third apartment on the market in the building for somewhere between $80 and $125 million, but that there’s a fourth spread whose owner wants $150 million.
That would be more than any single-family residential property in New York City has ever asked for.
See also: Borough of Tenafly, New Jersey 2008 Municipal Budget.
The Mayor is sounding a little defensive:
A war of words erupted yesterday as Mayor Bloomberg reacted angrily to comments made by Sen. Charles Schumer suggesting the city has its priorities wrong in turning Manhattan’s far West Side into a business district.
“The city’s priorities are clear,” the mayor said. “We set the city’s priorities. They don’t come out of Washington, and the city’s priorities are the West Side, getting it going and getting the rail line going there.”
He was reacting to a speech Schumer gave earlier in the day, when he said the city should shift its focus from building office and apartment towers above the MTA rail yards west of 10th Avenue and instead concentrate on constructing a new train station named after the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan.
“I appreciate all the senator’s views on Moynihan Station. His part of the job is to bring us the money,” Bloomberg snipped.
Bloomberg also rejected Schumer’s call to put the Port Authority in charge of building Moynihan Station inside the Farley Post Office building, calling it a “terrible idea” based on the agency’s difficulty rebuilding Ground Zero.
Schumer said he has every right to make suggestions about West Side development, since he’s helped secure more than $100 million from Washington for Moynihan Station.
“It is equally important for a responsible senator to watchdog how that money is spent,” he said.
And some of them might even be your friends:
Living in a top-floor walk-up in New York City is a mixed blessing.
Sure there are those stairs; all those stairs. There is the moment of dread when you look up the stairs and contemplate the trek up, up and up, carrying groceries, children, luggage, furniture, whatever.
But that’s not all there is. In the current real estate market, top-floor walk-ups may well be the best deals. They can also be quiet spaces that are flooded with light and that have open views of the city, especially if they peek out above their surrounding neighbors. In some cases, they also have a deck or terrace that can become an outdoor living room with the twinkling night sky as a backdrop.
. . .
Since 1968, the city has generally required builders to install elevators in all new residential buildings that have five or more stories. But under certain zoning provisions, a five-story building can be built without an elevator.
Brokers say there are some developers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who have gotten approval to build five-story walk-ups by setting the top floor back from the front of the building and by keeping ceiling height under eight feet.
At five stories, “having an elevator would mean pretty significant common charges,” said Roberto Gonzalez, an agent at Bond New York. “Developers will do walk-ups because they want to be competitive, and they want to use as much of the footprint as they can for living space as opposed to an elevator shaft.”
David Kazemi, a vice president at Bond New York, said that walk-ups don’t seem to bother many of the young professionals looking to buy in Williamsburg. “A lot of people prefer it actually because they don’t want the luxury high-rise lifestyle,” he said. “That’s not the point of living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”
. . .
People who live in top-floor walk-ups say they have a variety of coping mechanisms that help them deal with the daily hike up the stairs.
Ms. Stern said she learned very quickly not to focus on the number of steps. She counted and knew the exact number at one point. “But that was discouraging because then I found myself counting every time I went up,” she said. “It was much better when I stayed focused on the mission and the goal of just getting home.”
Big shopping trips to the grocery store are replaced by more frequent and smaller purchases, and heavy items like kitty litter might be put on the Fresh Direct order, along with a generous tip to the delivery man.
Mr. Gonzalez, the Bond agent, recently bought a fifth-floor walk-up for himself in Williamsburg, and he said that he had learned to become more organized to avoid having to run up and down the stairs several times a day to retrieve forgotten items. “Before I leave the house now I have a little saying: ‘Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone,’” he said. “Because if I forget one of them, that’s when I regret the top floor.”
Mr. Nguyen, the owner in Inwood, said the one thing that he takes special care with is the trash and recycling. “I make sure it’s well secured for the trip down because I don’t want it breaking,” he said.
Also, after spending a week personally gutting and renovating the apartment’s kitchen with a friend, he said, “If I’d known what all we had to go through, I’d have probably hired somebody else to do it.”
He and his friend hauled up 15 kitchen cabinets, two 7-foot-tall storage units, countless bags of grout, boxes of tile and piles of new floorboards. “We sort of had to do a lot of maneuvering and we had to shimmy a lot of things around corners on the stairs to make it fit,” he said. “But it’s amazing what you can do with sheer will and determination.”
In case you thought it would be a good thing for the City to control transportation projects, there’s this — Hizzoner paying a little too much attention to the wrong parts of the Power Broker:
Bloomberg said Friday that a week or two ago, developer Jerry Speyer expressed concerns about whether the city would complete the 7 subway line extension critical to the $1 billion project.
“If I were you,” the mayor said he told Speyer, “I would make absolutely, positively sure that we are going to build that subway before I put one dime of my own money in.”
The MTA’s announcement Thursday night that it had canned the Tishman-Speyer deal came without warning to the mayor, City Hall insiders said.
. . .
Neither Bloomberg staffers nor Tishman-Speyer representatives would discuss the outcome of the hour-long talk at Bloomberg’s London apartment Friday.
“The plan isn’t dead by any means,” Bloomberg said before the sitdown. “All these things go though many cycles.
“The No. 7 line is going to get done,” the mayor added, “and it will be so far along before I leave office that nobody’s going to be able to stop it.”
Plans for the site include thousands of units of housing, commercial skyscrapers, a school and parkland.
Oh, well as long as there’s a park — and a school! — Robert Moses would smile, since he popularized the “get as far along as possible and make ‘em take it back down” philosophy of urban planning (recently embraced by Bruce Ratner, among others).
The one-stop shopping and railroading may be dead after all:
Six weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected Tishman Speyer Properties to build a vast complex of office towers, apartment buildings and parks over the railyards on the West Side of Manhattan, the deal has fallen apart.
Gary Dellaverson, the authority’s chief financial officer, said the negotiations foundered Thursday afternoon after Tishman Speyer insisted on changing the terms of the $1 billion development, which both parties had agreed to on March 26.
. . .
. . . critics of the deal said that it should never have been made, especially since the financing for a key element for West Side development, the extension of the No. 7 subway line, had not been resolved. At the same time, plans for the expansion of the nearby Javits Convention Center had collapsed. And given the sour real estate market, critics said the developer was getting an inexpensive development option.
“This deal was unhealthy from the get-go,” said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky. “It never met the needs of the M.T.A.’s capital plan. The 7-line commitments were never sustainable. And in the end, every single West Side project is in various state of collapse.”
But what is perverse is that people who can afford not to spend half their income on rent are probably doing so, too:
Arnold Somrah was spending almost half of his income on the Park Slope apartment he shared with a friend. The 24-year-old finally moved back into his parents’ Ozone Park home.
“You can’t go out. Your Friday and Saturday nights are done,” said Somrah, who was paying $750 a month for his basement room. Samrah is now saving to eventually buy in Florida. “It’s too expensive here.”
Nearly 530,000 renters in the city are spending 50 percent or more of their income on housing, a 14.9 percent jump from 1999, according to data released yesterday by Rep. Anthony Weiner.
“Financial advisors say, ‘You should spend no more than a third of your income on rent’” said Weiner. “That’s sounding more and more like a pipe dream.”
The Bronx is feeling the burden the most, with 32.85 percent of its renters paying half their income on rent in 2006. Manhattan (22.32 percent) had the lowest.
In case you missed the heady days of Wall Street tycoons and an overheated real estate market:
A century later, when Dr. Mitchell Blutt, a modern-day tycoon made rich on Wall Street, wanted a mansion of his own, he found Mr. Carnegie’s neighborhood, now known as Carnegie Hill, not surprisingly plumb out of space.
To solve the problem, Dr. Blutt bought the two town houses directly east of his current home on East 90th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, in order to combine the three Romanesque Revival, four-story town houses into one 17,000-square-foot dwelling. His plans have prompted protest from neighbors, who see an intrusion of a suburban-style “McMansion,” and from preservationists, who fear that they would destroy the character of the landmark-protected buildings.
“It’s an audacious proposal,” said Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, which works to preserve New York’s historic neighborhoods and buildings. “It’s the kind of thing that seems to be extraordinarily conspicuous consumption.”
Even by the extravagant standards set by the real estate forays of this century’s gilded elite, Dr. Blutt’s plan is unusual. Because the combination of brownstones is relatively rare, especially for conversion into a single-family home, it raises a host of questions not easily answered.
Dr. Blutt had proposed a three-story rear-yard addition that would extend some 15 ½ feet beyond the buildings’ original rear walls. He also wanted to add more than 20 feet to the height of the buildings by adding a fifth floor, as well as a concrete bulkhead for a new elevator shaft.
When Dr. Blutt’s architect presented the plans to the Landmarks Preservation Commission last Tuesday, the commission took no formal vote, but some members noted their concern about the proposed fifth floor and the character of the rear-yard addition. The commission told the architect to submit redrawn plans.
Lo van der Valk, president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, said that since the historical preservation movement took hold in the late 1960s, the expansion of dwelling space usually took place by building up and out. For instance, during the 1990s, homeowners scurried to buy neighboring apartments, knocking down walls to scrape out a few hundred extra feet.
But neither Mr. van der Valk nor Mr. Bankoff could recall a single case of a person turning three attached brownstones into one single-family home.
Dr. Blutt paid $12.6 million for both of the neighboring town houses, according to public records, and real estate experts estimate the value of all three together at around $20 million, before any renovations.
A class-action lawsuit against top real-estate broker Brown Harris Stevens alleges the firm discriminated against families that were trying to rent apartments in Brooklyn — because they had kids.
The suit, filed Thursday, is the first class action against a real-estate agency for “assisting and enabling landlords to carry out the discrimination,” said Diane Houk of the Fair Housing Justice Center.
One agent allegedly told Jamie Katz and his wife, Lisa Nocera, “I’ll show you everything available that I think is suitable for kids.”
They first went to Brown Harris Stevens two years ago when they saw a listing for a converted carriage house in Brooklyn Heights.
Nocera was nine months pregnant, and they wanted to leave their tiny Manhattan apartment. But the broker didn’t show it to them, saying “the owners would not rent to people with children because there was an outdoor space,” according to the lawsuit.
The couple remained in Manhattan, but when they looked again last June, with their baby, Bruno, they liked a $2,300-a-month apartment in Park Slope. After filling out an application, a Brown Harris Stevens broker allegedly said the owners wouldn’t rent to anyone with a child because of lead paint.
“I felt bad,” Katz said. “I felt they were preying on our fears as new parents about lead paint.”
The plight of the self-consciously trendy is they’re always a step or two behind:
The promise of learning the cold, hard realities of today’s housing market is what brought more than a dozen skinny-jean-wearing, tattoo-sporting members of Williamsburg’s art and music scene to Hugs bar last month to attend [real estate agent Eve] Levine’s first “Hipster Mortgage Night.”
It’s the latest version of a marketing campaign Levin first began as mere barroom lectures.
“There is so much information people just don’t know,” said Levine, a musician and artist herself who created the event not only as a tool for marketing her own business, but also a means of supplying financial and home buying know-how to a group of people she bluntly describes as “the opposite of Wall Street.”
Members of that group, frankly, agree with that assessment.
“Figuring out how to buy a home in New York City is like climbing Mount Everest,” said Margaret Raimondi, who attended the event with her fiancé, Brad Augustine.
“Hopefully, ‘Hipster Mortgage Night’ will make it more like climbing Mount Rainier,” she added, referring to the much-shorter mountain in Washington State.
Better to decamp to Jackson, Prospect or even Morris Heights than whoring every detail of your life for clicks, according to the person who started it all (by portraying someone who started it all):
Budding Carrie Bradshaws better think about moving to Queens, says “Sex and the City” icon Sarah Jessica Parker.
Manhattan is bracing for another influx of Blahnik-wearing career girls after the film is released May 30. But New York is “a really hard city, and it’s very expensive and it’s not what it used to be,” Parker told me at the Cinema Society and Linda Wells’ screening of her new film, “Smart People.”
“That’s why the outer boroughs are so desirable,” she said. “The outer boroughs are pretty sexy. It’s just a matter of time before they have their own shows.”
Even though Manhattan just gets tweedier, speculating on a dorm strains credulity:
The city can legally deny developer Gregg Singer a permit to build a student dormitory in the East Village on the basis that he does not have an educational institution lined up to use the facility, the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled.
In the ruling yesterday, the court wrote that if the dormitory were completed and no school leased its space, the city would be unnecessarily forced to either allow Mr. Singer to use it for other purposes or require it to be torn down or left vacant. The 7–0 decision overturned a ruling by a lower appellate court.
The long-standing dispute involves the former home of P.S. 64, on East 9th Street between avenues B and C, which Mr. Singer purchased from the city in 1998 for $3.1 million.
Community groups protested the developer’s plans to build a 19-story student dorm on the site, saying it was an attempt to illegally build luxury housing. In 2004, the city’s Department of Buildings rejected Mr. Singer’s application to build the dormitory, saying the building needed to be affiliated with a specific academic institution beforehand. A state court upheld the city’s decision in 2006, but last year an appellate court sided with Mr. Singer. Yesterday’s decision, by the state’s highest court, reversed the 2007 ruling.
Well, it’s a good thing they rushed to tear down all those people’s homes:
The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.
“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”
Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.
The developer did say he was confident about starting construction on a $950 million basketball arena for the Nets by the end of the year. The arena was to be surrounded by the office tower, known as Miss Brooklyn, and three residential buildings in the first phase of the project.
But Mr. Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for the Miss Brooklyn building, and now plans to phase in the residential buildings slowly.
Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.
One way to get public school teachers to live in the community — let them dock their boats at Riverside Park:
Leslie Day flirted, dated, married, raised a family and found her life’s work in Manhattan — or rather, just off its shore.
Born on the Upper West Side, she moved to a 34-foot houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin when she was 30, single and a masseuse. She found her future husband, a biologist, on the 43-foot houseboat next door. After they were wed, they traded up to a 57-foot houseboat, and they raised a son. Now, as empty-nesters, the couple live on a 43-foot cruiser.
Dr. Day, 62, who is now an elementary school teacher, recently wrote “Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City.” When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her book last fall in a ceremony at Gracie Mansion, he reached the part of his script that noted where she lived and ad-libbed a reaction she had heard many times. “Do you really?” he said. “That’s amazing. Thirty-two years and it never sunk or anything like that?”
Since 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, the 79th Street Boat Basin has been an object of fascination off the island of Manhattan, part fishing village, part Monte Carlo and all floating opera all of the time.
The boat basin floats on five main docks on the banks of the Hudson River. For decades, there have been as many as 100 pleasure craft, some pristine, others slovenly — schooners, houseboats, yachts and trawlers — tethered just off the Riverside Park promenade, three blocks from Broadway and Zabar’s.
Critics have called the residents squatters on public property, in a high-end trailer park; even the city government, which owns the docks, has not always been comfortable with the arrangement.
But the boaters call themselves a community with rights like any other. Residents have ranged from millionaires to those between jobs. All seem to embrace self-expression. One man liked wearing a Superman sweatshirt as he bounced on a trampoline on the dock.
Location Scout: 79th Street Boat Basin.
For more on the Carnegie Hall squatters see here.
After being strong-armed out of Greenwich Village, NYU begins to look for other places to colonize:
New York University wants to build a 1-million-square-foot campus on Governors Island, school officials said yesterday.
The NYU plan would call for a mix of student and faculty housing and space for academic programs, officials said. It’s part of a 25-year, 6-million-square-foot expansion plan that also targets other parts of the Big Apple, including Downtown Brooklyn.
“NYU sees the potential of Governors Island as a place where we can grow,” said NYU spokesman John Beckman.
The state-city Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation says the university is a good fit, but the agency has yet to determine when it will seek proposals from prospective tenants.
I suppose it should come as no surprise that in this potentially shrinking housing market no developer wanted to take a chance on building on top of a jail:
An eyebrow-raising plan to build luxury apartments, office space or even a hotel alongside the unpopular Brooklyn House of Detention to make it blend in better with the trendy neighborhood has been scrapped for lack of interest.
The city floated the novel idea this spring as a way to tamp down widespread community outrage over plans to reopen and expand the jail, which has been shuttered since 2003.
But this month, city officials acknowledged the ambitious plan died because developers just didn’t bite.
“We’re disappointed, but we’re not surprised,” said Angela Ferrante, the head of a coalition of local groups fighting the jail reopening. Ferrante attended a Jan. 2 briefing on responses to the city’s Request for Expressions of Interest issued in May.
“It always seemed like a long shot that a developer would want to built right next to a prison,” she added, though luxury condos already have gone up across the street.
Correction Commissioner Martin Horn told advocates at the meeting there was only one response — from a developer who wanted to tear down the existing jail, which wasn’t part of the plan.
Correction officials yesterday said they would still be open to development if a viable proposal was made, but said they are moving ahead with plans to reopen the jail and add a $240 million addition to double its capacity from 749 inmates to 1,469.
Earlier: Just Think How Low The Monthly Maintenance Will Go If We Get Whole Foods As The Tenant!
Location Scout: Brooklyn House of Detention.
Real estate brokers love the weak dollar:
The sidewalks of Manhattan are crammed this month with European tourists on shopping sprees, picking up gifts that cost far less in the United States than they do at home because of the weak dollar. But they are not just crowding into boutiques and department stores. Some are also shopping for condominiums.
“There’s bargains to be had,” said Kerry Miller, a public relations executive who with her husband, Marty, a disc jockey, was working through her Christmas gift list by buying sweaters at Abercrombie & Fitch and makeup at MAC, as well as touring 32 apartments. The Millers, from Malahide, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin, searched for a one-bedroom condo. They made an offer for $700,000 on one apartment in the meatpacking district and are waiting to hear back from the seller.
While natives remain wary about real estate and worry about bonuses and the economic climate, foreign tourists are keeping brokers busy with their eagerness to buy up Manhattan apartments, which many see as investments.
“The exchange rate is like a gift from God for Europeans,” said Danielle Grossenbacher, the broker for Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy who showed the Millers around. “Everybody is feeling they have an opportunity to purchase a piece of Manhattan.”
These buyers are transforming a traditionally slow month for Manhattan real estate brokers at a time when brokers nationwide are struggling to sell homes. This year, Manhattan brokers are waking before dawn to talk by phone with European buyers about amenities and closing costs and working late advising foreign buyers in town on the best places to shop for gadgets and clothes.
. . .
Jonathan Fletcher, who works in information technology, and Aine Marshall, a dentist, came to Manhattan from London to buy a $1 million investment property. Mr. Fletcher, who is considering buying in the financial district, where he believes there is opportunity for appreciation, plans to put down his deposit money first and wait for the dollar to weaken more before paying for the entire apartment. Even if he does not buy an apartment, the savings from shopping in the United States covered the cost of the trip, he said. They spent a total of $8,000 on clothes, a camera and a $5,000 drum set that would have cost about double back home.
The New York City real estate market may be avoiding foreclosures, but it likely leads the country in “maintenance fee defaults”:
Skyrocketing common charges are the last straw for condo and co-op owners barely staying afloat in a volatile housing market, with mortgage rates hitting the roof.
In two Trump buildings alone, seven people were slapped with liens last month for not paying a total of $50,000 in fees.
One Trump condo owner owes more than $19,000 in unpaid maintenance fees, after falling five months behind on common charges.
While some owners struggle because of job losses or skyrocketing flexible-mortgage rates, the surging building fees are not helping matters.
The fees are increasing, management companies say, because it is costing more for water, fuel, utilities and insurance.
“Unquestionably, there have been increased defaults in payment of maintenance charges and common charges. I’ve noticed it since the summer,” said Herbert Cohen, a partner in Stieffel & Cohen in Manhattan, who represents 60 different cooperatives and condominiums.
This month alone, his firm filed nine liens against owners of the condos at 20 West St. in lower Manhattan.
Those outstanding charges range from $1,433 to $9,241.
Though not all missed payments are due to the current economic climate, industry experts say that maintenance-fee delinquency is on the rise as charges continue to climb — which could be a foreboding indicator for an unhealthy housing market.
