Columbus Circle
Hearst Closes Quickly on Another Columbus Circle Property
Hearst has added yet one more building to its growing arsenal around Columbus Circle.
The publishing behemoth recently closed on 811 Ninth Avenue for $17.1 million, according to city records. Lightning quick would be appropriate terminology for how rapidly this deal went down: Hearst went to contract and closed on the 21,500-square-foot property on the same day, July 19. read more »
The Afternoon Wrap: Friday
- The Time Warner Center's "expensive sheen" is still glittery, pushing the asking price of neighborhood apartments into posh new levels. S. Jhoanna Robledo has a precise list of Columbus Circle sheen. [New York]
- "Big Old East Village Book Party" sounds like fun, especially to people who live in expensive, but punky downtown apartments. [L Magazine]
- DUMBO has hit that coveted way-over-supersaturation point. First the 'hood popped up in Vanity Fair and Vogue; now it's in Ford Edge ads and Men's Health. [DUMBO NYC]
- Eagle-eye commenters on Brownstoner were right about the Brooklyn birthplace of New York rap uber-legend The Notorious B.I.G.: according to his biography, young Christopher Wallace grew up in "a spacious apartment" on St. James Street. (Photo above, and more at Clinton Hill Blog). [Brooklyn Vegan] - Max Abelson
Brown Bag Protest
Tom Wolfe’s preservationist friends are taking their “Save 2 Columbus Circle” campaign to the street this Thursday. A lunchtime demonstration is planned to take place outside the Center for Architecture, at 536 LaGuardia Place. The Center for Architecture/AIA New York Chapter will be gathering for a private reception in support of the new Museum of Arts and Design. The protest begins at 11:45, and those who attend get fed. So, even if you have no qualms with changes to the building’s modernist facade, the brown bag lunch should be more than enough reason to drop by. And maybe the man in the white suit will make an appearance.
-Michael Calderone read more » The (Topless) Panic In Central Park
But on arrival, there was only a huddle of shirtless old men. Some were on bicycles. Others merely stood around writing slogans on each other's backs... with permanent marker.
The demonstration, one of them explained, was being held in the name of a woman who had taken "her clothes off in protest of the Iraqi war and walked naked in the fountain." She'd been arrested, despite statute 245.01 of the penal code, which gives women the right to go topless, on account of equal rights and all. "It's pretty much a political thing," the man explained. "I'm a troublemaker."
The Transom's eyes had strayed by then, however. There were six boobs in the midst of the sausage fest.
Two of them belonged to Phoenix Feeley, a young 2k5 hippie with American flag shorts on and needles through her nipples. She'd also been arrested for exposing her chest, in a separate incident, and as far as she knew, that was the inspiration for the afternoon's protest. Phoenix wore rollerblades. She laughed sweetly as she explained the various slogans on her chest: "No War," for obvious reasons, and "I Am Art," for quite separate ones. "I think they're beautiful, don't you?" she said, looking over at the shirtless men nearby. "It is a man's right to be topless—topfree—and nobody stops him.... We're here, and we're gonna show that we can be topfree—that we can be on our bikes or on our blades and be part of traffic."
Phoenix's friend Dana, meanwhile, pictured below with her daughter, spoke to reporters and friends as the group prepared for its march around the park. "You can totally tell she was nursed as a child," Phoenix exclaimed as Dana's little girl bounded forth for a hug with arms akimbo.
"Leave people alone, you know? If we can do it, why can't they?" said one male bystander, on break from his job at a nearby bistro. "More fun for me!"
This kind of attitude seemed uncommon, weirdly enough, and to everyone's surprise, reporters from the Daily News appeared to be the only ones taking any pictures.
"I remember when I was in college, and it clearly mattered more to the people with the binoculars than it did it to me," said Chanita Baumhaft, a young fiction writer who sat happily topless on the curb with her boyfriend. "The gawker situation is not too bad."
Indeed, the protestors didn't win an audience until they started moving a little before 3 p.m. "Freeeeedddooooooom!" Phoenix cried, touching off on her rollerblades and overpowering even the massive Dominican Day Parade that was roaring wildly on Central Park West. The women moved swiftly, some of them traveling on their own wheels and others bouncing humbly in rental rickshaws. The men kept up, pedaling furiously with their helmets on and their shirts still absent.
After a few minutes, Phoenix announced that the people who could keep up would go ahead, and the rest would meet back at Columbus Circle after the journey had been made.
"This is amazing," said one teenage boy by the side of the road, as Dana bought an ice cream sandwich for her daughter. "This is better than the internet."
A pair of fully-clothed Texan women riding by in a tour buggy, however, did not find the display so amusing. "We don't have these in Texas, these naked women," one of them said. "I was like, ‘holy shit!' I was thinking that it's illegal!" read more »
Apparently the police thought so too. As we made our way back to 67th and Central Park West to wait for the bikers to make their loop, an officer rolled by in a cruiser and said that he was looking for a protest. Needless to say, The Transom did not snitch.
The rain started to fall just as the girls rolled into Columbus Circle a half hour later, the ink on Phoenix's body starting to run a little, her nipple rings glistening. The protest dispersed as the downpour grew thicker, and before long, naked time was over. It was the best day. — Leon NeyfakhRanks Break at Landmarks Over 2 Columbus Circle
Sherida E. Paulson, former chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (2001-03), wrote an Op Ed in July 30's New York Times on the fate of 2 Columbus Circle, the vaguely Moorish-looking monolith designed by Edward Durrell Stone which is in danger of having its facade ripped off and replaced by a modernistic response to the Time Warner Center.
Ms. Paulson, who refers to Stone's controversial masterpiece in the Op Ed as "the black hole of Columbus Circle," said that " ... preservationists have pressed with new urgency to have the the building designated a landmark. But 2 Columbus Circle simply doesn't qualify. That is the professional judgment of the 19 people, myself included, who have served on the New York Landmarks Commission since 1996."
But--oh damn--one of those 19 people, current L.P.C. commissioner Roberta Brandes Gratz, wrote back to The Times on Aug. 6, saying, "Neither I as an individual commissioner nor the current commission as a whole has rendered a 'professional' judgment on whether there should be a hearing or a designation."
Snap!Adding fuel to the fire was a letter, on the same day, from Beverly Moss Spatt. Who is Ms. Spatt, you ask? Only the chair of the L.P.C. from 1974 to 1978!! She wrote that she "find[s] it difficult to believe that the 19 commission members since 1996 could have reached an absolute consensus that the building is unworthy of even a public hearing to weigh its merits." read more »
"If such overwhelming consensus is indeed the case, where is the public record of this decision? The failure to hold a hearing is a distressing sign of how out of touch the current commission is with the public it serves."
Double snap! - Matthew GraceTwo Months of Waiting Yields Five Hours in Foodie Heaven
Eight Day Week
A Suburban Revolution?
Community Boards
Glass Menagerie
2 Columbus Circle Is Given Hard Look By Schrager's Team
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