At its western end, Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn veers past a strange and uneven terrain: cavernous structures the size of football fields, amorphous masses bulging with rust, roughly 300 acres jutting into a bend in the East River. For years, to most who passed it, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a dreamscape of industrial decay, Read More
At its far western edge, 14th Street is the kind of time-lapsed parable of social transformation that quickens Manhattanites’ pulses. Nights in the meatpacking district, once punctuated by the rhythms of carcasses being loaded into trucks, have become scenes of teetering stilettos and impossibly hip clubs that were over the minute you heard about them. Read More
The long-murmured auguries of demolition on Surf Avenue had all but taken on the air of ritual, each new summer washing up like a predictable reprise–the last last annual send-off of Coney Island As We Knew It.
But the long, protracted standoff between developer Joe Sitt and city officials finally came to an end last Read More
Amid Columbia University’s ongoing border skirmishes–the result of its planned 17-acre expansion northward–even the name of the embattled neighborhood is contested.
Some favor Mahattanville, a moniker harking back to the 19th-century Quaker village that sprang up, as contemporary guidebooks put it, a whole “eight miles from New York.” Others contend the area is simply an Read More
It didn’t cause much of a stir, the pronouncement that the words branded across the front of 36 Cooper Square would have to go. Maybe because the building’s tenant roster now reads more like an assemblage of techies and new-media ecclesiae than old-school publishers, or maybe because the letters themselves, righteous block typeface, had accumulated Read More
A fabled garden, a much-coveted key, the hushed overtones of wealth–Gramercy Park is the Victorian fairy-tale Manhattan can’t quite shrug. As the borough’s sole remaining private park (keys are bestowed to residents of the park’s 39 surrounding townhouses and buildings), its carefully manicured exclusivity has long exerted a mighty pull on the city’s chosen few, Read More
In New York, the skyline sometimes recedes, but it never disappears entirely. Height, like money and power, is among the city’s eternally recurring preoccupations, a kind of suspended totem of commerce, the skyline’s residual tic. The skyline, after all, is not viscerally experienced so much as occasionally glimpsed and secreted away, stowed as eight million Read More
Listen to Your Real Estate! Every New York building has a story—here’s some we told.
If New York is a city of competing utopias, each on a headlong collision course for the next, Bethune Street is the pared-down version-a compressed glimpse into a few grand experiments in urban living, their feverish beginnings and whimpering falters.
Take the former Bell Labs factory, converted in the 1960s into the world’s largest subsidized Read More
The rail yards on Manhattan’s far West Side, like the developers’ dreams and mayoral agendas they inspire, slouch wearily toward the Hudson. For a necropolis of transit systems past (the Hudson River Railroad, the New York Central, the High Line), the Hudson Yards offer up eternal-and seemingly eternally deferred-promise, the heady rush of Read More
