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What's Old Is New Again

By Stephen Jacob Smith 4/30 5:31pm

What's Old Is New Again

The Trump SoHo: a modern "apartment hotel" with a condo twist.

From the Ansonia to the Trump SoHo: A History of Rule-Bending Residential Hotels

The Trump SoHo, the lone protrusion in an otherwise mid-rise Hudson Square, is one of the most controversial buildings in lower Manhattan—so controversial, in fact, that it helped inspire the neighborhood’s recently-passed rezoning. Built in an industrial and commercial zone, the tower styles itself as a “condo hotel” under a loophole worked out by the Bloomberg administration. While marketed as a condo building, buyers are technically not allowed to stay in their rooms for more than 120 days out of the year, or for more than 29 days out of any 36-day period.

But, as Andrew Berman at the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation pointed out to The Observer, these restrictions are basically unenforceable (the Department of Buildings’s press office didn’t know offhand if anyone’s ever gotten in trouble for violating these provisions, or if they’re even responsible for enforcement), and now Mr. Berman has noticed something strange: the city’s own tax lot data codes the property as ”mixed residential and commercial buildings”—apparently a contravention of the zoning code. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 2/13 5:16pm

What's Old Is New Again

limestone

Real New Yorkers Like Limestone: 135 East 79th Street Draws a Local Crowd

Limestone and classicism have enjoyed something of a revival in new New York construction over the past few years, perhaps spurred by Robert A.M. Stern’s runaway success, 15 Central Park West. But where 15 CPW mixes classic features and materials with clean modernism—Stern’s post-modern influences are still visible in the building’s design, despite its Candela-like appearance—the Brodsky Organization’s 135 East 79th Street, with exteriors and interiors by designer-to-the-starts William Sofield, is all tradition.

It’s also attracting what passes for a very traditional clientele in today’s frothy, foreigner-fueled condo market—not only domestic buyers, but actual New Yorkers. Read More

By Kim Velsey 5/16/12 8:30am

What's Old Is New Again

Hipsters love high/low, right? (angela n., flickr)

It’s Hip to be Square On the Upper East Side, Happening Neighborhood That Isn’t Actually Happening

It’s not like Melanie Malkin ever pictured herself living on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that has, over the past 50 years, all but disappeared from the dreams of the young and the hip.

“I mean, when I first moved up here, I didn’t want to move up here. Never, never, never,” Ms. Malkin said, who grudgingly took a cheap sublet in the neighborhood seven years ago when she was 23 years old and working for MoMA. “Nobody wants to move here. When I tell people I live here, they’re, like, eww.”

But loath as Ms. Malkin was to leave her first apartment on 29th Street, she wasn’t making a lot of money working in the museum world and she found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on 87th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue that cost $775 a month (it’s now $938 a month). In the early days, she kept telling herself that it was convenient and cheap, but then something unexpected happened.

She started to love the Upper East Side. Read More