The saga of Broken Angel House, the hand-crafted Clinton Hill mansion of bizarre angles and strange art, has taken a somewhat odd, though not altogether unexpected twist.
Christopher Wood, the son of artists, house-crafters and erstwhile owners Arthur and Cynthia Wood, has launched a kickstarter campaign to transform the house into a museum, thus staving off the last stages of foreclosure proceedings, Curbed reports. Read More
Over the years, Jonathan Butler has covered countless Brooklyn real estate deals and developments—and by extension, the delights and absurdities of living in the borough—for his blog Brownstoner.
Now, he can finally write about his own. Mr. Butler and his partners have paid $11 million for a former Studebaker Service Station on Dean Street in Crown Heights. They plan to convert the 155,000 square-feet of space into a commercial mixed-use development that will house artists and assorted creative types as well as a food hall—a $30 million project, to which Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group will contribute $25.5 million. BFC Partners, the developer behind Toren, is also involved in the deal, which was first written about in The Journal and then, of course blogged about by Mr. Butler on Brownstoner.
A promising first step—bringing Selldorf Architects on board to design the space, which should be interesting given Selldorf’s success with high/low projects in the past: Manhattan galleries and penthouses, a renovation of the Plaza’s famed Oak Room and designing a Brooklyn recycling plant. Read More
That is what Brooklyn activist Samuel E. Anderson sees resulting from the subway-driven gentrification The Observer explored on Friday. It was a widely debated story, with a number of commenters pointing out that Bushwick really isn’t that far from Manhattan, so there is no reason to assume the (over) development will not be just as swift and brutal as before.
There was a lot of talk about money and power and access, both to capital and transportation. But what they all ignored, excepting Mr. Anderson, who sent us an email, was not just the minorities but the minority artists affected by these changes. This is not exactly new territory, but it is well said—including our emphases—and it speaks to a dark future for minority communities, affordable housing and the art scene as a (w)hole. Read More
Everybody knows the old saw about how artist migrations and subway access help drive gentrification in the city, but we never realized the two were quite so intertwined. Read More
Back in the 1970, a utopia was born in the far West Village. Forget bodies in the sand and tropical drinks melting in your hands, this was a perfectly New York creation, conceived to help starving artists put a roof over their heads.
The Westbeth Artists’ Housing, a colony-esque complex at 55 Bethune Street, Read More
Artists and nostalgists need not fear–the Chelsea will remain a hotel.
Joseph Chetrit is the mysterious buyer taking over the famous flophouse, The Journal reports today, beating out more talked about suitors like Andre Balazs, Ian Schrager and David Edelstein. It appears he has no intention of creating condos, unlike some Read More
The blond painter was wearing a tan jacket. “Honestly,” he said, “everyone making art right now is fucking derivative.”
A man standing at the bar started yelling at the painter. “What happened to realism? What happened to figurative painting?”
“Fuck figurative painting! Fuck realism!” the painter shouted back. “I’m talking about Abstract Expressionism, Read More
For a while, it seemed like Williamsburg was becoming the next Meatpacking District, a formerly industrial neighborhood transformed into a playground for spoiled New York post-grads. But The Times, ever hip to the ways of Brooklyn, declares the area has actually become something worse: the new Park Slope, replete with baby yoga and funky-looking Read More
It was the artists who made modern-day Soho, and it looks like the artists will be the ones to unmake it as well.
The city has begun enforcing a little-known law, at least to those living beyond Soho’s tony cobblestoned confines, that requires these now-multimillion dollar homes to be occupied by actual working artists. You Read More
The Hotel Chelsea has had a long, illustrious, debauched run. From its simple beginnings in the 1880s as an apartment cooperative and the city’s largest building in the heart of what was then the theater district to a bohemian hayday that saw such residents as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Mappelthorpe and Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
