Houston

• The West Village is really getting old: the chimney of famous Bedford Street speakeasy Chumley's "separated from the interior wall and collapsed into the bar area." Thankfully, the Department of Buildings promises that demolition is "not being considered at this time." [Curbed]
• The subprime mortgage catastrophe has even hit uber-fancy homes: Palaces from Laguna Beach to Savannah (but, sadly, not Manhattan) will be auctioned off this spring, making for "something of a fire sale in the luxury sector." [Forbes]
• What New York really needs is a green hotel-condo. Luckily, there's one (and it's 61,000 square feet) under construction at 250 Bowery between Prince and Houston. The design firm is "targeting tourists concerned with environmental responsibility as well as aesthetics." Creepy. [Real Deal] - Max Abelson
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A very glam downtown project now has a very glam team to  sell it.    read more »

• The car parking at Soho's 123 Baxter is "hidden from view and lacks human operators." (Lasers steer the cars into spots, or something like that.) Better yet, it's now open to the public instead of the owners of the 24 condo units. [Metropolis]
• The genius firm Architectural Artifacts is selling off (plus disassembling, shipping, and reassembling) the carved limestone entryway from a Westchester estate. And it only costs $135,000.00! [Luxist]
• The attractively-named Solid Waste Management Plan ("'the swamp' in waste-savvy lingo") aims to get 25 percent of NYC's waste out of landfills/trash-burners this year, and 70 percent by 2015. Luckily for us, recylcing is a hoot. [City Limits]
• An artist (with a lot of time and talent on his hands) drew every fire escape in lovely eastern Soho [above]. Click on all his Web site's little boxes if you really like the fiery rustication between Broadway, West Broadway, Houston and Canal. [The Fireladders of Soho, via Gothamist] - Max Abelson
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• Oh me, oh my, how the Bowery has changed! The place you used to avoid at all costs, even in broad sunshine-y daylight like today, will welcome a Whole Foods in March. The fancy-pants grocer is supposed to open its doors at Bowery and Houston on Mar. 29.
[Curbed]
• Residential marketing in New York has always had that certain something--a sense of pizzaz, a sense of adventure. Now, it also has MySpace. Entire buildings are getting their own MySpace pages, complete with sexual orientations and favorite films and TV shows. At least one is trying "to meet serious thrill seekers. Someone who looks for the entertainment in life. Someone who wants to play, for the sake of winning. A heavy need for quality films and that can play pool."
[Gowanus Lounge]
• Brooklyn Heights used to have a much different promenade (see above). Before demolition in 1946, "to make way for the expressway, this arched viaduct, greenhouse and buttressed wall were accessible by the stone stairways that led down from the mansions above to the ferry landing below."
[Brownstoner]
• CNN/Money lists the 10 Richest Americans Ever (whitest list ever!). Though a few people listed have New York City connections (Astor, Vanderbilt, Rensselear), none made his fortune in real estate. Brokers, take note: Railroads and merchant banking--that's where the money is, apparently.
[CNN/Money] - Tom Acitelli
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Public relations executive Juda Engelmayer concedes that he has lost his fight against "Wikiminimalists" to keep LoHo (Lower Houston, a.k.a. the Lower East Side) in Wikipedia.

"I tried to appeal, it won't work," he writes in an e-mail. The LoHo entry is just a shell of itself, linking to a debate over the debate to delete the entry, in which one of the victors explains:

If the "20 articles" were from reliable sources and documented the name as being in wide use, rather than minor passing mentions and blog postings and one article mentioning this as a neologism, and if anything demonstrated that the term has been influential in anything except naming one agency, then the references would have overruled any number of "delete" votes that didn't give a valid policy reason.

All right. Everybody back to work!

- Matthew Schuerman

Italian denim dealer Diesel has leased 1,600 square feet on Lafayette Street to give its 55DSL line a boutique space all its own.

The line was previously relegated to a small section of Diesel's Union Square location.

"The retailer's 55DSL brand is targeting young men and women with a strong sense of fashion and a hip 'downtown' style," said Robert Cohen of the uber-hip retail brokerage Robert K. Futterman & Associates, which coordinated the deal, in a press release.

The new store, located between Houston and Prince streets, is slated to open this spring.

Totally "hip" press release after the jump.  read more »

- Chris Shott

“Hey, don’t walk out with that!” shouted Brian Butterick, general manager of the r  read more »

A seasonal smorgasbord of the latest in high-tech gadgetry, the short-lived Wired Store in Soho, ope  read more »

A seasonal smorgasbord of the latest in high-tech gadgetry, the short-lived Wired Store in Soho, ope  read more »

One more thing on my last post. Someone pointed out to me that Larry Littlefield at Room 8 recently raised the possibility that changing the 421a program might result in a residential real estate glut. But Littlefield thinks it should be an intended consequence. He writes:

There is a lot of stupid money out there. Shouldn't we get some to subsidize our housing, rather than using tax dollars?

Littlefield's proposal? Extend the program for one year, and then cut it off completely. Then:

A huge wave of new units, even huger than that already in the pipeline, would come on the market -- perhaps in a recession. Supply would exceed demand, and rents and sales prices would drop. Investors would lose, but you pay your money and take your chances. That's how Texas is so affordable.

I'm not so sure that creating a Houston-style real estate bust is exactly what Bloomberg had in mind when he proposed this, but I guess it's an idea.

-- Andrew Rice

So, after months of study and discussion, the City Council approved a plan to revise the huge tax break that residential developers receive for building large new developments. The story of the so-called 421a program is the recent history of the city in microcosm. When the program was originally enacted in the 1970s, the city was going bankrupt, the Bronx was burning, and whole neighborhoods were turning into depopulated wastelands. New York basically had to bribe developers to build here. Then the city rebounded. But the program remained. In the 1980s, the Koch administration revised it to create the so-called 80-20 formula within an "exclusionary zone"--basically Manhattan between Houston and 96th Street, except for the East Village--whereby a developer wishing to take advantage of the tax break would have to make 20 percent of his units affordable to low and middle income people. With some adjustments, that's more or less how the program remained until yesterday--or, I should say, will remain until the city's revisions are approved by the state legislature next year.

The reason the program had to change was obvious to anyone who has seen shiny glass buildings rising in, say, Astor Place or Fort Greene. The developers of these buildings, and the owners of the condos within them, were getting incentives worth tens of millions of dollars to build in areas that, because of changed market conditions, really aren't so risky anymore. Furthermore, because these areas are rapidly gentrifying, and poorer people are being pushed out by higher rents, they are desperately in need of affordable housing. Expanding the exclusionary zone to encompass such neighborhoods is a simple, relatively painless way to increase the affordable housing stock. Sure, developers make a bit less money, and maybe a few fewer mammoth apartment towers get built, but maybe that's not a bad thing for these neighborhoods, activists say. Who wants their brownstone block to be swallowed up by development, anyway?  read more »

It seems like everybody wins. But not long ago, for another story I am working on, I was talking to a well-known developer in Brooklyn who raised an interesting point.

• First, the happy news: this weekend the world was finally introduced to Key Magazine, which has a very shiny cover and lots of steamy info on "posh" Houston suburbs, Dubai villas, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Plus, there's a Q&A that begins: "How do I pick the right material for my kitchen countertop?" (NYT Key)
• To commemorate 9/11, The Times gives us a 17,952-word wrap-up of the past half-decade at the the WTC. A choice sentence: "The combination of big money, prime real estate, bottomless grief, artistic ego and dreams of legacy transformed ground zero into a mosh pit." And what does Mayor Bloomberg think? "It is what it is." (New York Times)
• And about Mr. Bloomberg's pet plan for 165,000 new units of affordable housing within seven years: there's a bad break, and that bad break is officially called The Slowdown In The City's Real Estate Market. (Crain's Premium)
• Some fluffy Manhattan news on a non-fluffy day: the Daily News reports on the places that "manipulative New York bachelors" choose for dinner dates: there's Grand Street downtown, Rivington out East, Bond Street in Brooklyn... and the Meatpacking District. When will those bachelors ever learn? (NY Daily News)
- Max Abelson  read more »
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In the Houston Chronicle, Professor Michael Desch makes the argument that Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories save Israeli lives.

Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total number of terrorist attacks declined by almost 40 percent during that same period (from 3888 to 2456), mostly due to the over 50 percent decline of terrorist attacks in Gaza. In 2004, 117 Israeli civilians and security forces personnel died in terrorist attacks. In 2005, the year of the Gaza withdrawal, 45 Israelis died, a decline of more than 50 percent. Withdrawal from the occupied territories makes strategic sense because the vast majority of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel take place there. In 2005, the most recent year for which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports figures, of a total of 2456 total terrorist attacks, less than 8 percent (195) took place inside the Green Line. Judea and Samaria were the site of nearly half of the terrorist attacks in 2005. Despite the recent upsurge in violence, the overall trend is clear: Withdrawal from occupied territory reduces, rather than increases, the terrorist threat to Israel.

APS (who has kindly visited this blog before) nails me, on my Dershowitz and Catholics item, by pointing out that in 1960 John Kennedy was getting hit with innuendo so that's why he went to the Houston ministers.

The Protestant Ministers JFK was addressing actually had conservative social views similar to the Catholic Church... It was the smear of disloyalty and foreign allegiance that was being leveled against the Catholics, just as its now being used to smear the Jews.

OK, fair enough. I still call for more Jewish transparency, and point to the Catholic model.

Look at Sen. Rick Santorum, running for reelection in Pennsylvania. Just about every time he's in the press, people talk about what a devout Catholic he is, because of legitimate fears of religious geeks in politics.

Thus, the second paragraph of a recent story in The Hill calls Santorum, "The dedicated Roman Catholic and fierce opponent of abortion rights.." Or there is this dissection in the Jewish Exponent last week of Santorum's belief system:

Terry G. Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College...said that he considers Santorum to be an "evangelical Catholic," meaning that he is a practicing Roman Catholic but shares the worldview of certain evangelical Christians, including a strongly held belief in the importance of Jewish rule over the Holy Land.

The press will look at Christian evangelicals all day long, what they believe about blah blah blah. And generalize to a farethewell, make them sound like crazies. And maybe they are. But the press will not look for even an instant at Jewish beliefs surrounding the Middle East. The observant Jew David Frum helped to author our current Syria and Iran policy; he was the Bush speechwriter who collaborated on the Axis of Evil speech. In a recent sermon at a Washington synagogue, Frum described America as "this new Israel, this America, this haven and refuge for so many of the persecuted of the world, including Jews." And said that Israel's "neighbors" were "determined to repeat the work of the Nazis."

I would question the accuracy of that statement. I believe there is a religious component to it. I'd never know about it from the press, though. Frum, bless his openness, chose to blog it.

From Scuttling Toward Sanity, by David Brooks, The New York Times, April 6, 2006:

I had a horrifying experience in the House of Representatives last week. The House Immigration Caucus held a press conference so members could compete to see who was the biggest blithering idiot in the group.
"Anybody who votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter, 'A for Amnesty!' " one aspiring idiot thundered.

Or, as his friends call him, Congressman Steve King. Related: Senate OK likely with Bush behind guest-worker bill, by Gebe Martinez and Samantha Levine, The Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2006.

Heirloom One Star 191 Orchard Street (near Houston Street) 212-228-9888 Dress: Casual  read more »

If you wander into Plate NYC during the day, you won’t find a restaurant; you’ll find a  read more »

If you wander into Plate NYC during the day, you won’t find a restaurant; you’ll find a shop and  read more »

Ama, on the western tip of Soho, is nothing like the Old World Italian restaurants that have dominat  read more »

Jill Bradshaw and Antonia Kojuharova, both 25 years old, opened the I Heart boutique in Nolita last  read more »

We don't yet know the precise cause of the blackout, and perhaps we never will.  read more »

The career of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), whose Suprematist abstractions are t  read more »

There's a lot to think about these days, in both a major and a minor key, depending on what you thin  read more »

Lower East Siders Object To New Housing PlanOn July 30, a group of two dozen self-avowed Black Panth  read more »

During the course of this Presidential campaign, voters have been treated to hours of amateur psycho  read more »

Houston: An Intimate PortraitOn the evening of Aug.  read more »

Bloom Booms (Again) After a long time searching, David Bloom seemed to have found a home in the subt  read more »