With stacks.

With trees.

The issue of parking and traffic is always a problem in New York. If you aren't renting a space for an exhorbitant price, then chances are that you are driving around the block a few dozen times. (Unless you are in the Bronx, then you just park wherever on the street.) But no other borough likes to hoot and holler over traffic more than Brooklyn.

The construction of the Barclays Center is no exception, the Post reports:

An unconventional plan for parking at the new Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn has critics predicting a neighborhood traffic nightmare.

Stack-parking spaces — which use hydraulic lifts to stack anywhere from two to four cars atop one another — are expected to fill roughly half of an 1,100-spot parking lot going up next to the NBA Nets’ arena in Prospect Heights, according to renderings commissioned by project critics based on approved plans.

With nearly a square block— bordered by Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues, and Dean and Pacific streets— designated to be the only on-site event parking lot for many years, the renderings show what many feared: It’s mathematically impossible to fill a state-mandated 1,100 spots there without stacking spaces.

It is important to note that no other New York sports arena uses stack parking and that no tests have ever been conducted to ensure its efficiency (or even plausibility). Wouldn't it just make more sense to design another pretty parking structure?

Atlantic Yards Report points out that were the project not overseen by the state, but instead by the city, like every other project in the five boroughs, this stacked parking arrangement would be almost impossible, there would be far fewer spaces, and they would all be surrounded by trees. Compare the images above for more.

Meanwhile, the Carlton Avenue bridge is being delayed until September, Norman Oder reports, and if it slips past this new, unacknowledged deadline, it could mean havoc for all those stacked cars if they cannot manage to get to arena in the first place. That would be a real sport worth watching, Brooklyn car jockeying.

mewing@observer.com

165 Columbia Heights

Whether it's Armageddon or soaring property values, the Jehovah's Witnesses have decided to get the hell out of Brooklyn, and they are one property closer to cutting all Earthly ties to their home of a century. An adorable carriage house at 165 Columbia Heights was sold for $4.1 million, city records show.

In their listing, Corcoran agents Ellen Newman and Lisa Detwiler choose their words carefully, not over-advertising the home's provenance. "165 Columbia Heights is an example of the premier addresses of the Watchtower's real estate holdings," they write, referring to the group's official name "The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society." Jehovah may be almighty but evoking His name doesn't help on the real estate front.

The home features an enviable 4,172-square-foot layout with four bedrooms and four full baths. A gluttonous master bedroom includes a walk-in-closet and en-suite bath, while the vainglorious garage can hold four cars. The Witnesses were definitely not guilty of acedia (look it up), as the home has all new mechanicals.

The Jehovah's Witnesses, whose world headquarters have been located in Brooklyn Heights for over a century, are moving upstate to the town of Warwick. The group is in the process of selling property in the area worth between $600 million and $1 billion.

The buyers, George and Anita Feiger hail from San Francisco, where, according to the deed, they live in the Buena Vista terrace adjacent to Haight Street.

eknutsen@observer.com

Keep on rolling... for now. (Getty)

It may not be the best weather for cycling, but the Prospect Park West bikelash is heating up again.

On Friday, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes, the cleverly named community group opposing the lane alongside Prospect Park, appealed an August decision in Brooklyn Supreme Court not to hear its legal challenge against the city. The group still contends that the bike lane was an experiment, a trial never completed with community consultation, one that persists without community support—despite widespread polling and surveys to the contrary.

Now add to that the issue that, in the appellants' view, the court dismissed the prior claim by using the experimental timeline when Justice Burt Bunyan ruled that the case could not proceed because the community groups waited too long to file their claim after the lane was installed in the summer of 2011.

“We filed our suit well within the appropriate time frame," attorney Georgia Winston said in a press release. "The lawsuit clock started running only after the Department of Transportation made a final decision to permanently install the lane, in January 2011.  Before that—throughout the summer and fall of 2011—the lane was repeatedly described as a 'trial,' including by the lane’s most fervent supporters."

The group still wants its day in court, and is hoping the Appellate Court will provide it, so that it might perform discovery—something Justice Bunyan forbade repeatedly during the prior case—and thus prove the apparent conspirings of the city, local elected officials and bike zealots. "We still want to have a full hearing on all the issues raised by the DOT’s failure to conduct a proper safety study and collusion with pro-lane advocates," Ms. Winston said.

Update: Michael Murphy, communications director for Transportation Alternatives, points out the timing of the appeal, which coincides almost to the day with the initial suit a year ago, during the doldrums of winter, when local media is almost as slow as traffic on the bike lane.

"It's like complaining about the cost of a school cafeteria in July," Mr. Murphy said. "It's clearly a well-oiled publicity machine they've got going on, but it's become a sad joke at this point.:"

He said the group's appeals has nothing new to it and is "the legal equivalent of 'Nuh uh!'"

Meanwhile, one city official said the appeal had no merit, adding that "We're confident the city will prevail. Again."

Update 2: "We are confident that the trial court's decision in our favor will be upheld on appeal," Mark Muschenheim, a senior counsel in the city's Law Department, said in a statement. "The popular bike path continues to enhance the safety of all who use Prospect Park West."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Not sure which is worse, NYU's plan or these capes. (DNAinfo)

The Village locals are protesting the purple giant yet again. Ever since NYU revealed its massive 2031 expansion plan to celebrate its 200th year as an institution, Villagers have decorated the neighborhood with protests and picket signs. The Zipper building, specifically, has been a target of protest as its construction would relocate the Mercer Street dog park while 20 years worht of construction takes place.

Per usual, the villagers came out in full force on Saturday to protest. But it wasn't just your typical "NYU is destroying the village" protest: there were dogs.

About two hundred of them, the Daily News reports:

The protest march targeted New York University, which landed in the doghouse over a 20-year expansion plan that would replace the Mercer St. pooch paradise with a high-rise building.

About 200 four-legged “Underdogs” — complete with blue and yellow capes — walked with their owners in the protest that ended at Judson Memorial Church.

"This dog run is ground zero for NYU's plan, and we would like to see its relocation stopped," one dogone activist told DNAinfo.

Chanting included a play on the Baha Men's 2000 smash hit "Who let the dogs out?"

Didn't the Village used to be home to creative artists?

mewing@observer.com

Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi in "Live and Let Die"

In the classic 007 flick "Live and Let Die"  Geoffrey Holder plays henchman Baron Samedi, a Voodoo worshiping gangster living in  Lousiana. In reality, however, the actor and acclaimed painter resides in a spacious Soho loft. Figures. Perhaps he has decided to retreat back to the bayou, however, as he has sold the apartment for a Bond-worthy sum, city records show.

Mr. Holder, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, was trained in dance at an early age and appeared in such storied films as Dr. Doolittle as William Shakespeare X, (the leader of Sea-Star Island, home to the Great Pink Sea Snail, if our memory serves us correctly) and Annie as Daddy Warbucks's beloved manservant Punjab. He began to focus on choreography, costume design (for which he won two Tony awards) and painting. In 1995 he married fellow dancer Carmen De Lavallade, who signed the deed in neat cursive script as Mr. Holder's agent, documents show.

According to a listing from Corcoran agent Stephen Brooks, the home was a live-in studio for Mr. Holder. The space spans a full 5,000-square-feet, practically every inch of which is covered in various objects d'art. The loft boasts 14.5' beamed ceilings with six original Corinthian columns throughout the three-bedroom, two-bath pad.

Mr. Holder put the abode on the market in December 2008 for $5.495 million. Several brokers and a few price chops later, the buyer, James Carney paid just $3.6 million for the space.

Artless? (Whole Foods)

The seven-year roller coaster ride that has been Whole Foods' Brooklyn saga may be taking another nose dive. The blissful ride started in 2005, long before Brian Williams had ever heard of Brooklyn. It slowed to a snail's pace in 2007 and then completely halted in 2008 in the midst of the grotesque Gowanus Canal's Superfunding. New York State was nice enough to clean up the property and set Whole Foods back on track in 2010.

The whole ordeal has left us twisted and nauseous from the bureaucratic and communal ups, downs, and loop-de-loops. (Or maybe the toxins are making us nauseous.) Regardless, Whole Foods might be one rubber stamp away from approval, but the Gowanus locals are not succumbing without one last fight.

The Gowanus crowd fears Whole Foods will poison the neighborhood's artistic, DIY heart, Crain's reports:

Some residents and small businesses would like to keep the vacant lot, nestled between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, zoned for small- and medium-scale manufacturing—a dwindling asset they want to protect. A recent report by the Gowanus Institute claims the site could be developed to create three times the 300 retail jobs Whole Foods promises. Armed with this data, the think tank has urged locals to oppose the plan by attending public forums and writing letters to the city's Board of Standards and Appeals, which must rule on the variance.

Several hundred locals have signed an online petition claiming that Whole Foods would "substantially alter the essential manufacturing character of the Gowanus."

As if any other developer would want to build on a Superfund site. Whatever, Gowanus. You can keep your Park Slope Food Coop.

mewing@observer.com

Fixing homes from the bully pulpit. (William Alatriste/City Council)

In between heavy dollops of sentiment, Christine Quinn cemented some specific plans to combat the affordable housing problem and the facilitation of upgrading the City’s landlord maintenance code in her State of the City address last week.

Ms. Quinn outlined how the Housing Preservation and Development Department is extending affordability to 60 years for some of the biggest developments. Affordability agreements currently stand at just the 30-year mark.

How affordability agreements work is, the City provides incentives to developers and in exchange they make units affordable, but the current 30-year watermark is seen as too short in the face of the steady march to urban gentrification and the unceremonious shoving out of decade-long residents. The issue of affordable housing has turned into a weighty one recently, becoming a go-to subject for many would-be Mayoral candidates.

“Sixty years isn’t permanent,” said Ms. Quinn, “but it’s a critical first step”. She is championing a move toward what she called "permanent affordability." She is going to work on correcting what she finds as archaic legislation, which sees veterans' tax exemptions inexplicably linked to how much the City spends on schools. “Is that a classic government kick in the pants, or what?” Ms. Quinn said.

In a speech that was laden with wistful recollections of a New York of days of yore, full of kinship and camaraderie, Ms. Quinn also urged the City to create a new program to help get the some 10,000 homeless families into long-term housing. She wants to prioritize homeless families for NYCHA apartments. “This isn’t just the right thing to do,” said Ms. Quinn, “it’s the fiscally responsible thing to do. The average cost of a rental subsidy for a family of four is $800 a month. To house that same family in a shelter? $3,000.”

The theme of rehousing the homeless offered a nice segue into her next topic: the state of housing maintenance. She criticized landlords at large, and the City’s own NYCHA, for taking “years for repairs that take less than an hour to make.” Ms. Quinn called for modifications to be made to the City’s housing maintenance code that would compel landlords to fix the root cause of building problems, and not just the short-term issue.

“Instead of just fixing water damage, landlords will have to repair the hole in the roof that's causing it,” Ms. Quinn said. “Slumlords will have to spend real money and fix the real problem or we’ll haul them into housing court.” She reiterated her urgency on the timeliness of repairs: “Not in a year. Not in a month. Today”.

"'How will the NYCHA be able to scale to this level of productivity,' you say? Well funnily enough the Council are upping the funding for NYCHA for this year and in doing so creating 175 new jobs."

Yes, before you know Ms. Quinn will have us back to those glory years she speaks of: Kick the can games on every street, suffocating smell of cabbage from every kitchen and the hanging of laundry out every window.

sduffy@observer.com

Gleaming

While everyone whose anyone knows that Robert and Ann Bass are the buyers behind Damon Mezzacappa's home at 834 Fifth, it was unclear until today how madly the billionaire couple wanted the place. After his wife passed away, Mr. Mezzacappa quietly put his massive half-floor apartment in the godly building on the market for $34 million, with all the furniture and furnishings inside. According to city records, however, Mr. and Mrs. Bass paid a full $42 million for the place.

That is just $2 million less than Rupert Murdoch paid for the triplex penthouse. Talk about ultraluxurious. This would have vaulted Mr. Bass' purchase from the seventh most expensive of last year into the fourth spot.

Fortunately, Mr. Bass can handily afford the inflated price, as he is worth $3.6 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. and Ms. Bass list an address on Main Street in Fort Worth as their current address on the deed, proving once and for all that Main Street and Wall Street aren't fundamentally irreconcilable.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mezzacappa lists a Palm Beach address on the deed.

This is not the first big New York buy Mr. Bass. In 2004, he led a takeover of Duane Reade, which he later flipped to Walgreens. His brother Sid also calls both Texas and New York home.

eknutsen@observer.com

Rarefied air. (NY City Lights

As the city collectively recovers from the recession, greenbacks are once more flowing freely for the uber rich, particularly in the real estate market. While apartment prices have stabilized since 2008, "ultraluxury" pads, those costing northwards of $7 million, are selling for record prices.

While moderately priced homes are still working to recover pre-Lehman property values, those lucky few sitting on luxurious, or rather ultraluxurious properties, have found their nest egg suddenly re-secured as the demand for high-end hearths has skyrocketed, according to The Times.

Real estate appraisal guru Jonathan Miller claims he has never seen so large a value disparity between homes on the high and low ends of the market.

Many moderately priced properties sold last year for roughly the same price that they brought from 2006 to 2008. Mr. Miller described a one-bedroom at 360 East 72nd Street as typical. The owners paid $770,000 for it in 2006 and sold it last year for $750,000, about a 2 percent loss. Meanwhile, a four-bedroom at 151 East 58th Street, bought in 2005 for $13 million, sold five years later for $17.75 million, a 36 percent profit.

Sandy Weill is the case and point of this phenomenon: having purchased his home in 2007 for $43.7 million, he sold it late last year for a record-breaking $88 million.

In short, wealthy New Yorkers planning on selling their homes are sitting pretty while the rest of us, well, we're still waiting to see if we qualify for the mortgage bailout.

eknutsen@observer.com

That was Andre Terzibachian's response when The Observer emailed him about 400 Park Avenue South on Friday. A partner at Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, Mr. Terzibachian is responsible for many of the firm's projects in New York, where the Pritzker Prize-winning Frenchman has had a number of surprising successes: the jagged LVMH North American headquarters on 57th Street; the skyline-redefining, outrageously priced One57 now rising a few blocks to the west; and beyond that, abutting the Hudson River, a daring complex of five towers at Riverside South.

All the while, 400 Park Avenue South was in the works the middle of Manhattan as a small-time developer tried, and eventually failed, to get an ambitious project off the ground. (Oddly enough, it is the only of Mr. de Portzamparc's projects not somewhere on 57th Street.) Construction was set to begin after years of development and zoning approvals. Then the recession hit. In December, the site was sold to a partnership of two of the nation's biggest builders, Toll Brothers and Sam Zell's Equity Residential. It was not clear at the time what the fate of this crystalline castle would be, but it turns out Mr. de Portzamparc will be planting another shard in the New York skyline after all.

On February 3, Handel Architects filed a slew of new construction documents for a 42-story residential tower at 400 Park Avenue South with the Department of Buildings. Handel had been the architect of record for de Portzamparc's earlier project (most out-of-town designers must team up with a local firm to file construction documents on its behalf), so it seemed promising that the eagerly anticipated tower would soon rise. David Von Spreckelsen, a senior vice president at Toll and head of its New York office, confirmed that Mr. de Portzamparc was indeed on board for the project. He is still designing the facade, as had originally been planned, a design that has not changed much, for reasons both aesthetic and practical.

The new team did not want a "Joe Blow building," as Mr. Von Spreckelsen put it. But there was also the fact that the previous developers went to so much trouble getting their project designed and then approved by the city. To switch architects and do it all over again would probably have been more expensive than simply adopting Mr. de Portzamparc's progressive designs for the tower at the corner of 28th Street. "If we wanted to abandon that design, we could have actually built something much taller, but it was a sort of pencil building going straight up," Mr. Von Spreckelsen said. "At the end of the day, it was too inefficient, because too much of it would have been taken up by the core. You weren't going to have the living space on the floors."

There will be one small alteration to the design, using a different type of glass that offers greater energy efficiency, a nod to the recently passed green building codes, but otherwise the tower will look almost exactly the same.

Keeping the same architects also meant the project could start almost immediately. "The documents were (almost completely) ready since we were supposed to deposit the building permit a few years ago, so we were able with Handel to get things done rapidly," Mr. Terzibachian wrote in his email. Groundbreaking is set to commence in May, Mr. Von Spreckelsen said, with an expected completion by the end of 2014.

Mr. Von Spreckelsen said Toll Brothers was especially excited about the project because of the unique arrangement it had reached with Equity Residential, whereby the latter is building rentals on the bottom half of the building while the former builds condos on the 20 floors on top. "They're taking the first 22 floors, so our condo units are starting at 250 feet in the air, so every unit has a pretty great view," Mr. Von Spreckelsen said.

And the unique design should appeal not only to those living inside the building.

"It's obviously really going to change the way Park Avenue South looks," Mr. Von Spreckelsen said. "I know that it's one of Christian's favorite buildings he's ever designed, and I know the city administration loves it, so I think it's going to be great for everyone."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The project was cooked up two years ago by the RBH Group, a private developer, who is using investments from the Berggruen Foundation and Goldman Sach’s Urban Investment Group, showing the innercity does pay. In addition to the 200 apartments for teachers, the complex includes two school buildings housing three charter schools and a daycare center, as well as ground floor retail throughout.

Yesterday’s groundbreaking drew a slew of bigwigs, including Governor Chris Christie, Mayor Corey Booker, Lloyd Blankfein and Mr. Meier himself, for whom is was a homecoming of sorts. “I was born in Newark and have vivid memories of visiting my families' business in downtown Newark,” Mr. Meier said. “This is a sort of homecoming for me and an opportunity for me to apply a lifetime of skills learned in the world arena to the revitalization of a major area of the city’s downtown.”

Checking out renderings for the project, The Observer is starting to think we went into the wrong line of work.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Parents say very specific things depending on their Brooklyn district

Brooklyn blog Fucked in Park Slope took a particularly hard stance:

As if we need ANOTHER "Shit _____ Says" video. I actually can't fathom something less funny than Park Slope parents reciting their inane babbling in a quickly-clipped internet video that will for sure not have Juliette Lewis in it (if Buscemi is included, however, I will reconsider this entire post).

Yet despite the sneers, it only took Ms. Fox four days between that NYDN article and the release of her video, which we assume means a lot of new parents in the Slope (or the people annoyed by them) contributed to the marking of "Shit Park Slope Parents Say."

We just hope this won't interfere with our "Shit Carroll Gardens Parents Say" idea, which is completely different and unique from this one.

Nicer than a gold course, non?

Looks like the recession has born some green shoots, after all—for green groupies.

Nonprofit land trusts, who buy up swathes of empty land for preservation purposes, are reaping the benefits of the tumbled real estate market in New York and New Jersey, according to the Journal. Developers are finding themselves in the less than ideal position, of making a reluctant call to a land trust and offering them hundreds of acres, at up to 90 percent discounts.

In New York nearly one million acres have been bought up by land trusts. The national figure of preserved acreage has shot up from 10.9 million in 2005, to 16 million today, according to a census by the Land Trust Alliance.

One, freshly acquired 185-acre plot, in Dutchess County was bought by The Scenic Hudson Land Trust Inc. The site was originally earmarked for a shopping center and some 175 homes by the developer, United Realty Partners and was valued at 10 million, after the crash Scenic Hudson bought it for an eye watering two million. Ouch.

Despite these opportunities that have been afforded to the land trusts, their own downward systems of funding, is hampering their ability to make the most of it. Both Government grants and private donations have been drying up.

"It's a shame,” Kim Elliman, chief executive of the Open Space Institute trust, told the Journal, “because there are so many properties that are now for sale that have long been targets for biologic corridors or land protection or public access for hunters and fishermen".

Those commuters from upstate may not have the convenience of an extra golf course or, god forbid, another Walmart. On the flip side, they may save money and have something prettier to look at.

sduffy@observer.com