Category: Articles
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CB1 Says Yes to Williamsburg Bridge Park
View WBP in a larger map Last night, long after the Domino drama was over, Community Board #1 passed a resolution calling on the City to turn the DOT-operated property underneath the Williamsburg Bridge (in green on the map) into a public park. As I wrote yesterday, this is not a new idea (in fact,…
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Open Space Mitigation
Photo: Bachner for the Daily News One of the biggest adverse impacts of the Domino rezoning is the impact on community-wide open space. As I’ve said before, despite a huge allocation of open space in the project (well above the minimum required by zoning), the project actually reduces the per capita open space rather significantly.…
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Waterfront Preservation
From the Greenpoint Gazette, a Domino spokesperson on the preservation of the Refinery building: No other waterfront development is preserving anything… Ahem. The developer of the Austin, Nichols & Co. warehouse (pdf) is not only preserving a huge industrial building on the waterfront (five blocks from the refinery), they are doing so voluntarily, with historic…
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You Can’t Live There
A long, long time ago I wrote a post about the ridiculous set up at 164 Grand Street. This is a new condo-turned-rental on Grand just off of Bedford (across the street from La Villetta Bakery). At the time, I noted that the building (designed by Scarano Architects) used every play in the book –…
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Domino by the Numbers
The Domino rezoning hits CB1’s Land Use Committee tonight. As a result, I have spent the better part of the past few weeks reading and rereading the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) (and thereby neglecting things like blogs and tweets), trying to get my head around the thing. And after all that, I think I can…
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TGE Loses Latest Appeal
TGE’s dream – denied (again) TransGas Energy System’s latest legal gambit has fallen flat. In a terse decision [pdf], the New York State Court of Appeals has denied TGE’s motion to appeal a prior appellate court ruling. This all goes back to TGE’s 2002 acquisition of rights to the Bayside Fuel Oil site at North…
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Rose Plaza Gets Marty’s Thumbs Up
Marty Markowitz has decided to split the difference on Rose Plaza. He is recommending approval (with modifications) on the basic rezoning of the Certified Lumber site (the change from manufacturing to residential use) and disapproval (with modifications) on the applicant’s special permit applications (to increase the height of some buildings, etc.). Reading between the lines,…
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Broadway Triangle: Stop ‘n’ Go
On Monday, the City Council approved the Broadway Triangle rezoning by a vote of 36 to 10, with 4 abstentions (Gotham Gazette and the Times both have excellent coverage of the vote and the process). The final agreement worked out by the council included an additional 10,000 square feet of public open space (at the…
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11211 Tech Note
I’ve recently upgraded the blogging software that keeps this running, and it has not been without hitches. One of those, I have been informed, is that the site looks worse than ever on Internet Explorer. Since I a) don’t use Windows very often and b) use IE even less often, I hadn’t noticed. But I…
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December Retail Report
232 Bedford Avenue – open for business Not like this is a regular feature, but after seeing the very sudden emergence of retail at the corner of Bedford and North 4th, it got me thinking about all of the retail that has been popping up in the neighborhood. The 232 Bedford Avenue building had been…