Apple

Apple has applied for a building permit at 21 West 34th Street, listing plans for a two-story 19,000-square-foot retail structure on the site, owned by SL Green.

So will this be the next iStore?

Maybe, maybe not.  read more »

 Take a look in the back of your closet and haul out that old laptop running on Windows 95 with less computing power than your Blackberry.

In fact, go ahead and open your sock drawer and take out that first-generation Ipod that stopped working after it went through the rinse cycle in your blue jeans.

All of these electronic devices contain toxics: cadmium, lead and mercury.

According to a 2006 report to the Natural Resources Defense Council by students in Columbia’s M.P.A. Program in Environmental Science and Policy, over 100 million personal computers are tossed away every year and about 500 tons of electronic waste is disposed every week in New York City.

While most toxic waste is regulated by the federal government, small businesses and households are exempt from these rules. Seeing this problem, a number of governments here and in Europe have started to regulate the disposal of electronic waste.

On Feb. 13, the City Council passed its own E-waste bill.

Anthony DePalma writes in The New York Times:

The City Council on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would impose a $100 fine on anyone who throws an old computer, printer or other electronic gadget into the trash. Recycling the electronic waste will become mandatory, and manufacturers will be required to take back their own products as well as those made by companies that have gone out of business….  read more »

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Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has been juggling two things when considering ads like the one that dominated the New York Times home page yesterday: good money from advertisers versus frustrated readers. His decision: to limit those ads to once a month.

Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis writes Media Mob:  read more »

We dropped by the shiny new Apple store at 401 West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District today, the latest fiefdom in the company’s growing retail empire.

The new store, which smelled a whole lot like a new car, sits in a spacious, yellow-brick former home to a Western Beef supermarket, encased with black grid, warehouse-style windows.

At three stories, Apple tells us it set a new height record as the tallest store in Apple’s fleet. (Wow!) The previous record was two stories.

The company seems to be imagining this store—the largest in Manhattan—will appeal more to the local crowd, something that would stand in contrast to the tourist-heavy SoHo and Fifth Avenue stores.  read more »

Above is an image shot about a half-hour ago of The Observer's Eliot Brown inside the new Apple store in the Meatpacking District. We will have more on the opening later.

So that scoop earlier this week about Barneys Co-op and Apple negotiating in Williamsburg for their first Brooklyn outlets? Turns out it's more rumor right now than fact. Retail in the outer-b's rolls that way sometimes.

The Brooklyn Paper investigated the New York Post's earlier story (we got the skinny via Racked). The Post said the retailers were in negotiations to move into retail space in the new Edge condo.

The broker handling such decisions for the Edge told The Brooklyn Paper that such decisions for the condo are "a little premature." Also, he would neither confirm nor deny the negotiations with Apple and Barneys.

Every ritzy Manhattan neighborhood deserves its own place for ogling expensive, shiny MP3 players. The third Manhattan Apple flagship (out of five) will open at a 52,000-square-foot monster on West 14th Street, thus making the Meatpacking District a tiny bit less hateful. [Apple Insider, via Gawker]

The mysterious-sounding Center For an Urban Future predicts Staten Island will suffer "an economic decline and a significant deterioration in its quality of life." Surely, Staten Island-born rap group Wu Tang Clan does not want their old borough to become a “lower-middle-class retirement community.” [N.Y. Mag/D.I.]

Ivanka Trump, Manhattan’s most aesthetically pleasing real-estate mogul, says she has “thirty-three projects under my direct control.” Plus, in an interview accompanying her very stirring new GQ pictorial, she uses the words “cocky” and “shit.” Wowzah! [GQ]