By Stephen Jacob Smith 6/18 7:39pm

Housing for All

Inside an Elliott-Chelsea aparrment.

Alms for the Upper Middle Class: Subsidized Apartments Aim at $200K Earners

Standing outside a shiny new red and tan brick building at 401 West 25th Street, indistinguishable from any other late-2000s new construction throughout the West Side, you can catch a glimpse of the future of hou ing if New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates get their way.

A young woman who works in finance and moved into this building from a “real shithole” in the West Village, a computer programmer from South Carolina, a lifelong New Yorker who moved in from the projects a few blocks south, and a gay couple—one a playwright, the other a social worker—with a son, who moved from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.

They all found places in a 22-story middle-income affordable housing development in an increasingly unaffordable Chelsea. The Elliott-Chelsea, developed by Artimus Construction, rose on New York City Housing Authority property with the help of an alphabet soup of government agencies. Some of the 168 units in the  building are typical low-income units, reserved for families earning under $40,000 a year. But the bulk of the complex is set aside for middle-income earners, a group that this cycle’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates is eager to court. Read More

By Peter Sterne 6/18 7:10pm

sad

Hastings.

Michael Hastings Dies In Car Accident

Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings, 33, was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles, the site announced this evening.

Editor in chief Ben Smith released a statement praising Mr. Hastings. “Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians,” Mr. Smith wrote. “He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold.” Read More

By Nina Burleigh 6/18 7:03pm

The Bombshell

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Luxor in Dire Straits Even Without New Terrorist-Tied Governor

Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy took a welcome hit this week with the election of a moderate. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood state in Egypt, taking billions in U.S. aid, promotes ever more extreme theocrats to ranking positions.

No one who has set foot in post-revolutionary Egypt should be surprised that President Mohamed Morsi installed a hard-core Islamist with ties to tourist-murderers as governor of Luxor this past week.

Asaad al-Khayyat is a founding member of Gamaa Islamiya, a terrorist group that killed 58 tourists outside Luxor in 1997. He was also detained by security officials but not charged after the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. (The Brotherhood has also welcomed Mr. Sadat’s actual assassin—on the lam for decades—back into Egypt. Rumor has it that he might even run for office himself.) Read More

By Drew Grant 6/18 6:42pm

Transom

Acme Studios (Photo via Aimee Herring)

The Acme Funhouse

On an unseasonably cold Saturday afternoon, rogue taxidermy diva Divya was setting up scalpels, Borax and a table of colorful items at the prop warehouse-cum-event space Acme Studio in Brooklyn. If it weren’t for the animal heads on the wall, we may have been more disturbed when Divya brought out the day’s “project”: dead mice, ready to be turned into art.

But the strangest plot twist of the day was yet to come: At 6:30 p.m., when most people were still putting the finishing touches on their dead mouse tableaux—a gynecologist named Jerry had created a gruesome/cute doctor mouse who was performing his own internal surgery—the class was ushered out. Acme began to transform into something resembling an old-timey mental institution, complete with working hospital gurneys and what looked to be a genuine gynecologic table. (No word from Jerry on this.) Read More

By Jon Methven 6/18 6:37pm

The Transom

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Unanticipated Bike-Share FAQs

I’ve purchased a bike-share pass, but my bike does not move.
You have to pedal.

Where is the motor?
There is no motor. One of the goals of the bike-share program is to reduce noise and pollution.

Wouldn’t it create jobs if the bike-share program hired employees to pedal clients to their destinations?
You have to pedal yourself. There’s no way around it. Read More

By Una LaMarche 6/18 6:29pm

Mother Superior

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Baby, I’m Amazed: Why Is My Kid Such a Genius All the Time?

I have, for better or worse, the opposite of a stage mother. It’s not that my parents didn’t think I was secretly brilliant as a child—thanks to the educational Disney cartoon Ben and Me, I could recite the Declaration of Independence before I was out of diapers—it’s just they just didn’t seem to care what I became when I grew up, so long as I voted Democrat and understood that my “life partner” was not obligated to have a Y-chromosome.

I only noticed their indifference because my best friend growing up in Chelsea was a child actor who was tragically let go after the Roseanne pilot, reportedly for having a beef with Sara Gilbert. Since I often accompanied him to his auditions, I actually had a few agents approach me to slap my mug on Shrinky Dinks boxes and the like, offers at which my mom just rolled her eyes. This was circa 1983, but I’m sure she’d roll them much harder right now, 30 years later, if she knew that I recently sent photos of her grandson to a Gap casting call.

I KNOW. I swore I’d never be that parent, the one who gazes beatifically at her toddler bashing a rock against a white picket fence and thinks, catalog model! But it’s legitimately hard to not view your kid as exceptional in every way; in my experience, procreating is like donning a pair of person-specific permanent beer goggles.  Read More