Category: Linked

Things might break around here. Apologies in advance – hopefully all will be right soon enough.

By all accounts, yesterday’s Taste Williamsburg Greenpoint event was a huge success. The event benefitted Northside Town Hall, a joint project of NAG and People’s Firehouse to reopen the former Engine 212 firehouse as a community center. It was a smashing success financially, and it brought a lot of people together.

Alex Prud’homme compares BP’s Gulf oil spill (3.3 million gallons and counting) to Standard Oil’s Greenpoint oil spill (17 to 30 million gallons):

We tend to think of oil spills as dramatic events — a sinking ship, a burning rig. So it’s easy to forget that across the country, hundreds of spills, many left over from a less regulated time, continue to poison groundwater and leak toxic fumes. Instead of letting the Gulf spill divert our attention yet again from slow-moving disasters like Newtown Creek, we should take it as an impetus to address problems much closer to home.

Jose Sucuzhañay was the Ecuadorean immigrant who was killed on a Bushwick Street in December 2008. One of the assailants was convicted of manslaughter on Thursday, and now faces up to 40 years in prison (the jury is still out on the second assailant).

Sucuzhañay was targeted because he Hispanic, because he thought to be gay, or both. Despite this, there was no conviction on hate-crimes charges, which could have carried a life sentence. I disagree with hate-crime legislation, but if it is on the books, this should qualify as a hate crime. When it comes time for sentencing, the judge will hopefully take the aggravating factors into consideration, and give the defendant the full 40-year maximum (which is a better way of handling aggravating hate-crime circumstances anyway).

The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books.

 

But SuperMedia won’t be stopping automatic distribution of the yellow pages, since they make money off of that. Even though the white pages and the yellow pages wind up in the same place.

The Post is reporting that CVS has signed a 20-year lease for 13,000 square feet of retail space at the Edge on Kent Avenue. The asking rent on the space was $55 a foot, which might be reasonable given the business that Duane Reade is doing a block away – $2.5 million in sales over the past three months according to the Post. Luckily for the folks at the Edge, they won’t have to walk that long block for band-aids and ramen noodles.

For those of you holding out for an Apple Store at the site, you shouldn’t be too surprised. This is, after all, the developer who promised us Enrique Norten and gave us Stephen B. Jacobs. (Though promising us an Apple Store and giving us CVS is a far worse trade.)

[Via The Real Deal

WG News + Arts looks at local politics, the Church, developer money and how they all come together at Domino. A long article, but worth reading through to the end.

Though [Omar,] the 27-year-old [“wild-eyed investment banker”] declines to give his last name, because “my bosses don’t know I party,” he’s less circumspect about his love for crossing the river from his Chelsea condo to drop cash in Brooklyn: “I think Williamsburg is the coolest place in the city now. It’s like the Lower East Side, the East Village — but less obvious.”

I think its time to institute reverse congestion pricing.

“It’s deadly,” said Jessie Singer of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that was already studying the fast-moving strip when 28-year-old Web designer Neil Chamberlain was hit last week.

After 3 years, HPD has finally picked a winner for the Greenpoint Hospital affordable housing redevelopment, and it goes to… no one from North Brooklyn. TNS Development – the winning bidder – has done a fair number of projects in NYC, including a 31-unit affordable housing project on Myrtle Avenue in Bed-Stuy and a bunch of other affordable housing projects in Harlem and the Bronx.

(And by “upstate”, the Brooklyn Paper means Westchester County. Mt. Vernon, actually – about as downstate as you can get without being in Yonkers. And their partner construction firm is based out of College Point.)