Community Board 10 has found itself between a rock, a hard place and a new luxury building. After overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal to house non-criminal developmentally disabled young adults in one of Harlem's new high-end apartment building, the community board is re-thinking their blanket opposition to "special interest housing," DNAinfo reports. Read More
Last month, The Observer wondered aloud if there was some value to the preservation of New York's ghetto character. If we are saving brownstones, cast-iron lofts and now modernist skyscrapers, why not the urban grit that overtook the city in the 1970s and 1980s. Most preservation is a form of urban theme park, so a little graffiti and some chintzy signs seems appropriate to convey the full sense of New York over the centuries.
This thought experiment was prompted by a liquor store sign that offended the sensibility of its neighbors in Harlem, who sought to transform the section of the hood into a certain Brooklyn enclave. "We want to be Park Slope with charming little stores and become a destination for people," Ruthann Richert told The Times at the time.
Well, the gentrifiers have won out, the paper reports. Read More
Last week, Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio released his list of the city's worst landlords, and now the Daily News has gone inside Manhattan's worst single building, 307 West 153rd Street, and what they find is downright inhumane. Read More
In a transparent effort to combat the bad publicity accrued in the wake of the shopping-cart incident, Harlem's Target store is hellbent on making sure New Yorkers know it truly, deeply, honestly and sincerely cares about the community. A Daily News article , which reads suspiciously like a PR statement, reports that the 117th Street Target is working to have a more "local feel." Read More
And here we thought Harlem fell above Park Slope on the New York City cool spectrum. Read More
The New York Daily News breathlessly reported today that a 14-year-old Harlem teen from a C-rated high school* had pepper sprayed eight other students.
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Vincent Morgan is not happy with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, which is the organization created to allocate $100 million contributed by Columbia University as part of its Manhattanville expansion plan.
“Over the past couple of years, we weren’t very clear, or at least I wasn’t very clear, as to how [it] was going to respond to determining how to best allocate those resources,” Mr. Morgan told The Observer last week. “Flash forward almost two years later ... we’re at a point where we aren’t even anywhere closer to the answers.”
Mr. Morgan, a Democrat running for Congress in the 15th District, which encompasses Harlem and several other neighborhoods in the northernmost reaches of the Upper West Side, has been quite vocal about his concerns with the West Harlem LDC. He told us he first became aware of the West Harlem LDC about five years ago when he was asked, as a graduate of the university, to testify at public hearings about the expansion process. He has remained involved in the expansion ever since through work in local community organizations, and now, as a candidate. Read More
Subversive sculptor Ugo Rondinone is best known in New York for the blasphemous message he scrawled across the New Museum when it opened three years ago. "HELL, YES!" the neon rainbow screamed over the Bowery. Now, Mr. Rondinone is taking a more reverent place on another New York thoroughfare. He has just bought a defunct church on Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Read More
Philanthropist and Prudential Elliman real estate broker Marion Hedges is in critical condition after a vicious prank by two Harlem teens, the Post reports. Ms. Hedges was buying Halloween candy at Target when the pair pushed a shopping cart off a four story ledge, knocking Ms. Hedges to the ground as her young son screamed.
A doctor who happened to be passing by gave Ms. Hedges CPR for a full minute before she became responsive. Rushed to the hospital, Ms. Hedges is currently in a medically induced coma. Read More
While some say Harlem is the city's new housing hotspot, hundreds of empty residential buildings bespeak serious issues still affecting the community, The New York Times reports. While storefronts in the neighborhood are generally bustling, an unsettling number of residences above are boarded up, and have been for decades. Business may be good on the ground floor, but landlords, often times wealthy real estate firms, have forsaken the residential apartments, leaving blighted buildings dotting the neighborhood. Read More
Word has gotten around that Robert Durst purchased a townhouse in Harlem, and, as happens to almost everybody, really, the neighbors are not pleased, the Post reports. The confessed murderer, former cross-dresser and son of one of New York's most powerful real estate developers, will not be welcome with open arms if he does in fact decide to move into the property he recently purchased at 218 Lennox Avenue. Read More
Harlem, you have a new neighbor. Robert Durst, the troubled son of real estate magnate Seymour Durst, has just purchased a three story townhouse at 218 Lennox Avenue, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The five-story townhouse at 218 Lennox Avenue currently features three separate apartments and a beauty salon on the ground floor. We wonder whether Mr. Durst is interested in resurrecting his career as an esthetician. Read More
In a show rivaling the hurricane response, the M.T.A. has cleaned up a good 10-feet of standing water in the Harlem subways yesterday after a century-old water main burst at 106th Street. The main burst around 11:30 a.m. yesterday, and subway service on the A, B, C and D lines was restored at 5:00 a.m. this morning, just in time for the morning rush. Herewith are some photos of the clean-up from M.T.A photographer Patrick Cashin. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
At $60 to power a 100-watt light blub, solar energy isn’t cheap. Neither are the locally grown foods at the weekly farmer’s market. But with the help of some coveted stimulus money, environmentally sustainable living is no longer a luxury for 200 Harlem families. A row of 10 apartment building on West 135th Street have just been transformed by Jonathan Rose Companies, the first such project to benefit from H.U.D.’s Green Retrofit Program. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
Better days are ahead for the Randolph Houses on West 114th Street—not that the 36 tenement buildings in Central Harlem have ever truly known good days.
Built in the 1890s, along with thousands of other substandard cold water flats serving the booming population of European immigrants, the buildings were abandoned amidst white flight. Like so many other unwanted apartments of that generation, they were taken over by the city in the 1970s and turned into public housing. Attempts at upkeep have been made over the years, but the upkeep never really was, well, kept up. The buildings have deteriorated to such a state that only 109 of their 452 units are occupied, but the city cannot afford to fix them.
To finally revive the Randolph Houses, the city’s Housing Authority and Department of Housing Preservation and Development are partnering with a private developer to retrofit the properties into modern, low-income housing. A request for proposals was released last week, and the winning developer will be charged with transforming the buildings into a mix of 140 public housing units and at least 155 affordable housing units. Read More
