Cloying, annoying and just downright obnoxious Williamsburg piece from the Observer (hey! there are a lot of young people here doing crazy young people things!).
They do manage to get a couple of things right without being obnoxious about it, like Aurora and activism. On the latter: “after you’ve been here a while, you may find that some things need improvement”. Complete with solutions from City Council candidate Evan Thies and a plug for NAG.
It seems those grand plans for new parkland in Greenpoint and Williamsburg are a little bit behind schedule. Not surprising, really. Much of Bushwick Inlet is contingent upon acquisition (in a rising real estate market) or eminent domain. The MTA lot on Commercial (which is part of a land swap for both open space and affordable housing) is contingent upon locating comparable space elsewhere for the MTA (when all of the city-owned land in North Brooklyn has already been promised to others). The sludge tank site at Barge Park is contingent upon the relocation of the sludge tank (which is on hold until the city can get new barges to ply Newtown Creek).
Seems like the only thing that is not contingent based is the construction of luxury towers in Williamsburg (which will mean the completion of an esplanade sooner rather than later).
By winning the Giro d’Italia yesterday, Alberto Contador became the first rider to win the Tour de France and the Giro back to back since his fellow Spaniard Miguel Indurain did it 1993 (Indurain did it in the same year; Contador across years).
But the best Grand Tour rider won’t be defending his Tour de France title this year. In whst dhould go down as one of the more boneheaded responses to its ongoing doping scandal, the organizers of the Tour – have dropped Contador’s (new) team from this year’s invitation list.
Big Brown’s owner runs a trucking company in Greenpoint.
Greenpoint condo prices are up 40% over last year? Sounds like not enough data points (7 sales last April vs. 25 this April). The data are even sillier for South Park Slope (3 sales vs. 21 sales).
A former bar colleague makes it big (really, he’s been making it big for years).
Everyone’s favorite Brownstoner commenter gets his day. (And, of course, you can read all the comments here.)
Once Haberman gets over making fun of the train that Manhattanites have never heard of, he has a decent summary of last week’s G train rally. (And its not just Haberman – even David Yassky gets in on the schtick: “You can’t spell ‘neglected’ without G, you can’t spell ‘ignored’ without G”.
(Slightly dated.)
Between September, 2007 and January, 2008, the Department of Buildings audited 662 self-certified plans and found zoning-related objections to 556 of those plans. During the same period, another division of DOB that targets repeat offenders found a similar rate of objections: 171 of 207 plans filed, or 83%. With almost half of all plans that are filed being self-certified, that means that as many as 27,000 of the 61,000 plans filed so far this year could be flawed.
Given the convoluted nature of the City’s zoning and building laws, and the fact that so much of zoning can be open to interpretation and reconsideration, it probably should not come as a surprise that the “experts” get it wrong so often. In all likelihood, the vast majority of the errors are probably not of the nefarious variety, though a good many of them probably do result from an aggressive interpretation of the codes.
Still, the rate of “failure” has always been high under the self-certification program, and is only going up, not down: in a 2001 audit, 59% of the plans reviewed had objections.
Another independent thinking Republican (this one a local) who refuses to be mislead by science.
