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By Matt Chaban 10/25/12 6:39pm

Scary Stories

Preserving the preservatives. (Jamestown Properties)

Preservation, Kiddie Tech School Earn Council Support for Chelsea Market

For many neighbors of the Chelsea Market, the biggest concern over a massive addition to the market was the shape it would take and thus its impact on the High Line, which the market abuts. Love it or hate it, the High Line had become a major neighborhood amenity, one people did not want to see get any worse with a massive eight-story addition overhanging it.

Developer Jamestown Properties acceded to demands from the City Planning Commission—which oversaw the rezoning that helped preserve the High Line—to rejigger the building, so what kind of concessions could Council Speaker Christine Quinn possibly extract? Especially since she had reportedly waffled on whether or not to beat back the building entirely as she eyes crossing over to the other side of City Hall.

Well, what better way to appease NIMBYs and preservationists than with architectural protections and schools? Read More

By Matt Chaban 9/05/12 12:52pm

Scary Stories

Do the setback! (Studios Architecture)

Good News and Bad News for the High Line as Chelsea Market Expansion Approved by City Planning

Much of the debate around the expansion of the Chelsea Market has centered around not the former Nasbisco factory turned popular shopping center (and subsequent tourist attraction), but the old railroad trestle next to it.

Part of the justification for expanding the market by 25 percent was that, in addition to providing construction jobs and new office space for the city’s booming tech sector, the developer of the project, Jamestown Properties, would pay about $19 million to the High Line, to help fund ongoing maintenance. But there was also great community outcry over the fact that much of the new addition would be built on the 10th Avenue side of Chelsea Market, directly overhanging the High Line.

Earlier today, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project’s expansion, and addressed a few of these concerns. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11:30am

Scary Stories

Nabisco's old Chelsea plant, before the High Line showed up in the early 1930s.

Chelsea Marketing: Expansion Fits With Beloved Building’s Past, But What About Chelsea’s Future?

Walking the High Line can be maddening and miraculous, often all at once. The crowds, the new buildings crowding out the views of the Hudson, all atop a highly manicured railroad trestle. Some park.

Yet it remains one of the best places to take in the city and its people—a big part of the reason the park attracts 3 million visitors a year, 10 times the original estimate, and has generated more than $2 billion in economic development.

The project could be considered one of the most successful real estate initiatives since Park Avenue was built by the Grand Central Railroad. And some day, probably sooner than most people realize, walking the High Line will be not unlike strolling down Park Avenue, with a wall of buildings on either side. And still, it will be the city’s new premier address.

Into this renaissance lumbers the Chelsea Market, the project that in many ways made this transformation possible when it opened two decades ago. Now it wants its share of the action, just like everybody else, planting itself on the High Line. Read More

By Matt Chaban 10/17/11 11:45am

Scary Stories

They've come... for your condo!

Colson Whitehead Unleashes Zombie Plague on Gentrification Plague

Colson Whitehead’s new book, Zone One comes out tomorrow. The world has been overtaken by that cultural virus of the moment, zombies , and the zone in question is Lower Manhattan. It is the job of the protagonist to clear the area of the dead and undead, and many metaphors are obviously implicit: 9/11, the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street.

But it turns out that Mr. Whitehead’s biggest concern appears to be gentrification, as the native New Yorker revealed in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition today. Read More