The state Parks Department – still strapped for cash – is getting $60 million to build the playground from Juicy Juice, part of a $350 million project by the juice maker to build playgrounds at seven parks across the state.

Some money being spent on our local state park – great news. (Though I assume the News’ sentence construction is wrong and that the playground at ERSP is not going to cost $60 million all on its own. Unless that’s a mighty big train.)

The Times looks at Bloomberg’s development record, and what the legacy of it might be.

‘For good or bad, the rezonings will probably be his most significant development legacy,’ said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, an independent research group. ‘They’ve never got as much attention as the large-scale development projects he was pushing, like the Olympic stadium, but the rezonings are what will ultimately transform a large chunk of the city. Developers will be rebuilding on these for years to come’

Steven Heller at Design Observer hits on a point that I’ve mentioned once or twice before – the ridiculousness of people living in glass houses. Yes, it looks great in the photos, but most people either do not lead a sufficiently minimalist life to carry it off, or they can’t afford the high-end window treatments that covering up such glass excess really requires. (Mies van der Rohe had the right idea at the Seagram Building – everyone gets the same blinds, and they can only be in one of three positions. That doesn’t work with condos.)

Glass living works if you live in a glass tower on the waterfront, but as a replacement for the typical city-scale apartment house, it’s a failure (and to make matters worse, all that glass is an environmental failure as well).

[via Curbed]

Unsurprising news of the millennium – the condo boom was not grounded on solid construction practices. Even less surprising, the craptacular Broadway Arms is a poster child for shoddy construction.

Some highlights from the Times’ grim assessment of construction quality in the 21st Century:

Many of the recently built glass towers are especially prone to temperature issues, because air-conditioning units are too small to combat the punishing summer sun, and heating systems can’t make up for a lack of insulation during the cold months. [So much for green construction.]

The sheer volume of new buildings that went up during the condo construction boom is the main reason for the increase in defective buildings, lawyers and engineers said… ‘It happens in every cycle,’ [attorney Stuart] Saft said. ‘At the beginning of the cycle, workers are underemployed, then suddenly they’re busy, and at the height, there are too many projects and not enough workers. Then what happens is shoddy workmanship, and when you have sponsors running out of money, they start to cut corners.’ [Cutting corners? The raft of building collapses and worker deaths wasn’t a tip off?]

Andrew P. Brucker, a real estate lawyer with the New York law firm of Schechter & Brucker, said that the boom had prompted people with no experience in real estate to start building condos. ‘When the market was hot,’ he said, ‘anybody who had a couple bucks suddenly became a developer, thinking they’d get rich’. [Smells like North Brooklyn.]

At the Brooklyn Lyceum – a solo show of 30 photographs of sites where historic uses have saturated the soils and groundwater with a lasting toxicity.

Seven years after the fact, developer Mendel Brach is out of business. The developer has entered into an agreement with the State Attorney General’s office wherein he will barred from selling apartments in New York State and will pay buyers in the Spencer Street condos $10.9 million to repair “structural defects”. The agreement arose out of Brach’s exploitation of the dormitory exemption to overbuild a 9-story condo project in Bed-Stuy. (Locally, Brach was the original developer of the Finger Building.)

It is up to Mr. Bailey, the residents’ lawyer, to collect the $10.9 million judgment, and the apartment owners still must seek certificates of occupancy from the Department of Buildings… If Mr. Brach satisfies all conditions of the settlement, he can ask to have his real estate security privileges reinstated in five years.

No wonder the residents don’t sound ecstatic over the deal. Sounds like a slap on the wrist, with no guarantee of damages ever being recovered.

Comments gone wild.

The 1980s were supposed to be the Al Franken decade, but the junior Senator from Minnesota is have a pretty good decade right now. Here he is giving a woman from the Hudson Institute a schooling on why we need health care reform.

[via Animal]