Marino Marble is set to develop a 7-story apartment building on Graham between Frost and Richardson. The site – which extends through the center of the block almost to Humboldt – has been stalled since 2010.
7-story Apartment Building Coming to Graham Avenue
Industry is not Manufacturing: Tax Breaks to Set Up Shop in NYC
Tax credits from NY State are helping VICE move to 60,000sf at South 2nd and Kent (and add 525 employees) and Amazon set up a photo studio in a 40,000sf spot at Kent and North 12th (creating over 175 jobs). Both sites are in areas still zoned for manufacturing. Helping the moves are $6.5 million and $2 million in tax credits, respectively.
Watch This Building’s Wall Collapse Onto a Brooklyn Woman
Scary shades of construction booms past. DNA has more info on the collapse, including a quote from the “sad” building engineer.
How NYC’s Decade of Rezoning Changed the City of Industry
Eli Rosenberg, with a long, and very smart look at exactly why the Bushwick Inlet IBZ (and others) are broken:
But the massive redevelopment of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts and the sudden desirability of the area was having a trickle down effect on even the IBZ, a small wedge in the middle of the vast rezoning that had transformed the two formerly industrial neighborhoods. A night market and concert venue had replaced the bakery across the street, with the leasing agents pitching the “central location and existing, vibrant night life scene.” A restaurant with a $125 dollar tasting menu had opened inside the IBZ a few blocks away. And the Wythe Hotel opened in Spring 2012 on the edge of the zone, quickly becoming a “summertime Eden” for a fresh crowd of jetsetters—a beneficiary of the nearly 200 blocks of rezoning the city pushed through in 2005, turning Williamsburg from an industrial neighborhood into a development free-for-all, as gleaming condo towers rose along a waterfront once blanketed by factories.
(A small point – people like to make a big deal about the Bloomberg administration’s 124 rezoning (“nearly 40% of the city’s acreage”), but they forget that many of those rezonings were contextual in nature, and did significantly change allowed uses or increase in any meaningful way the allowable density of development.)
Is This Mindboggling Exoskeletal Hotel Coming To Wythe Ave.?
Yet more proof that the Bushwick Inlet IBZ is broken beyond repair.
Starbucks in Williamsburg – Finally?(!)
After a good 15 years of rumors and fear mongering, is Starbucks finally coming to Williamsburg? If Eater is right, yes.
We’ll see, but for now, outlook good.
Karl Fischer Has Scored a Major Coup in Williamsburg
Matt Chaban discovers 101 Bedford, a rather nice design by Karl Fischer, particularly at street level. A lot of this has to do with materials and scale – neither of which is particularly crazy in this instance. Unlike the last development boom, which gave us Karl Fischer Row on Bayard Street and much worse, this boom is less about glass and funky forms and more about solid, in many cases tasteful designs. 80 Metropolitan may have started the trend, but it has been picked up at 101 Bedford, 50 North 5th and others.
Residents Protest CB4’s ‘Private and Illegal’ Bushwick Rezoning Approval
CB4 continues to try to dig out of its decision to hold a public hearing that the public wasn’t allowed into.
Meanwhile, some CB4 members think that they can build their way to less gentrification:
board member Martha Brown warned that if they voted against the project completely, the developer might still build without providing them the affordable housing they requested… ‘If we vote against this and they don’t work with us, they’ll really come make a Williamsburg’. said Brown
Heroic Williamsburg Condo Owners Reminisce on “Wild West” Days of 2011
Via Gawker, an excerpt from a message board for parents at the Edge:
Believe it it not, two to three years ago when many of us moved into our apartments, we were pioneers and this section of Williamsburg was still the Wild, Wild West. We were surrounded by warehouses, vacant lots, empty retail stores and half-finished/abandoned condo projects.
Believe it or not, some of us can remember when the Edge was a garbage dump (literally), the waterfront was closed off to the community, and people in Williamsburg fought to make the waterfront open to all.
Good times.
Fight the 40-story Towers?
According to their Facebook invitation, ’40 story towers threaten the future of Greenpoint. The community has been shut out of the process. This is your chance to be heard.’
Actually, your chance to be heard was about nine years ago, when the zoning for the 40-story towers (and ton of new residential development in general) started the public review process. A lot of people fought very hard to make the community’s voice heard – we could have used your help back then.