This is across the river, but worth a look: it’s based on the excellent work my students did in the Spring studio at Columbia.
Not Done Yet!
Tenants Bust Back Into Williamsburg Building After Legal Win
Turns out the legal saga at 172 North 8th Street is not over (and the NY1 report I linked to yesterday didn’t tell the whole story).
The tenants have been thrown out of their homes again, and again by DOB. DOB apparently discovered new damage to the foundation, after having lifted the vacate order issued a year ago.
As for the tenants, they weren’t let back into the building when the vacate order was lifted, they had to force their way back in. And they were prepared to live there without water, electric or gas.
UPDATE: Aaron Short has more on this:
City officials vacated tenants from the four-story N. Eighth Street house once again on Tuesday night after discovering that the corner of the basement had been destabilized and the building was close to collapsing… City contractors worked well into the night to temporarily add several 10-foot-long wooden beams to support the shaky wall, stabilizing the foundation.
A complete nightmare.
Not-Green Buildings NYC: New Domino
New Domino would fit in much better in Los Angeles than it would in Williamsburg.
I guess the green building crowd is buying into Domino’s reduction in parking (to only 1,428 spaces) as a step in the right direction.
UPDATE: The original link was not working for some reason. The article is here (http://bit.ly/dunvaS)
Remembering the General Slocum Disaster
Today marks the 106th anniversary of the General Slocum fire. 1,021 passengers, almost all of them German-Americans from Kleindeutschsland (the East Village and Lower East Side), died as the steamboat burned in the middle of the East River. It was the city’s worst loss of life during the 20th century.
Williamsburg Tenants Win Yearlong Fight For Their Homes
A year after work by the landlord undermined the structural integrity of their building, eight families have moved back into their homes at 172 North 8th Street (Juliet Linderman wrote about their travails last year). Thanks in large measure to Marty Needleman and his crew at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A, who did some heroic work on behalf of the tenants.
Lost City: Goodbye to All That
Brooks of Sheffield has decided to shut down his excellent blog, Lost City. A shame, because his was one of the better written, better researched blogs on ephemeral New York.
And he’s not going out on an optimistic note:
Most of the City is lost after all — the good parts, anyway… It’s like writing a volcano report from Pompei; you know the communiques are going to end sometime.
As it happened, I did a lecture at NYU last week on New York City, its ephemeral nature and its enduring qualities, so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about these issues lately. And while much is certainly lost, I disagree with Brooks’ pessimism. New York is a city that is defined by change and reinvention, and it has gone through an inordinate amount of both over the past 15 or so years. But the alternative could be worse – a city that stagnates is a dead city. That is why I think that all that change and reinvention – cliched as those terms might be in talking about New York – is good. Though it sure could be managed a bit better.
Brooks is leaving the site and almost 3,000 posts intact. If you’ve never read Lost City, I strongly suggest you spend some time with him.
Occupied: 400 Bedford
Judging by the bikes on the balconies, 400 Bedford Avenue, the new building going up right next to the Williamsburg Bridge is now open for business. Pretty impressive, considering they started construction less than 18 months (a year ago the steel was just starting to go up).