By Kim Velsey 5/30 10:19am

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

The most glorious of views (or at least the most expensive)

“Priceless” Views Of The Park Not Quite Priceless, But Very Expensive Nonetheless

Ever wonder what a Central Park view—that most coveted of coveted features, that most desirable of desirable details—actually translates to in terms of cold, hard cash?

Quite a lot, in fact. Apartments with Central Park views fetch more than twice as much as surrounding apartments, The Wall Street Journal reports. And if you just look at co-ops it’s three times as much!

Forget the waterfront. All New Yorkers care about is tree line, tree line, tree line. Read More

By Kim Velsey 5/16 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

By Kim Velsey 5/07 3:09pm

Manhattan Transfers

The deal that almost was

Huguette Clark Apartment Sale Falls Through After Board Rejects Combo Plan

The two apartments spanning the eighth floor of 907 Fifth Avenue will retain their lost-in-time, Butterfield 8 style for a little while longer. A bid on reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark’s neighboring co-ops was rejected by the board.

A single buyer had planned to combine 8W and 8E, creating a massive full-floor apartment that would have been one of largest floor-through homes on the park, a source familiar with the deal said, but the co-op board nixed the plan to combine the units. Read More

By Kim Velsey 5/01 1:40pm

Flower Power

Rhododendron Mile, ca. 1910 (William Hale Kirk, Museum of the City of New York)

Historic Effort To Bring Rhododendrons Back To Central Park

New York’s streets offer one straight line after another, but in Central Park such direct thoroughfares are vigorously frowned upon. After, all the park is meant to be a leafy oasis from the hustle and bustle of city streets, the consummate garden, which through careful use of design and artifice manages to look more natural than nature itself.

But the park does have two perfectly straight lines, and they have caused the Central Park Conservancy no small amount of worry over the years. In fact, the park’s original designers even feared that the half-mile stretch of East River drive between 85th and 96th Streets might become a favorite spot for horse carriage racing. Egads!

“On the east of the new reservoir, the park is diminished to a mere passage-way for connection, and it will be difficult to obtain an agreeable effect in this part of the design,” Frederick Law Olmsted despaired in 1858. Read More

By Michael Ewing 3/23 1:20pm

Harlem Shuffle

8571977

Who Really Wants to Spend Millions on ‘Central Park North?’

Of course, the view of Central Park from the southern ends are mind-blowing and dream-esque, but have you ever considered the views from the north side of the park?

Apartments with views overlooking the park sell for as much as $88 million and the penthouse at One57 is projected (read: hoping) to be sell for $115 million. But The Times raised an interesting question: What about the residence at the north end? Read More

By Anna Sanders 12/12/11 4:40pm

Media Horse

I'm here to see a man about a horse.

Do the Neighs Have It? Activists Try to Dissuade Tourists from Carriage Rides

The two little blonde girls, each no more than nine, stood next to their parents on the cobblestone sidewalk at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, slouching in the way only bored children can. Moments before, an older woman had come up to the family wielding a flyer emblazoned with the words “DON’T RIDE A HORSE CARRIAGE,” and proceeded to feverishly explain what she viewed as the evils of the industry. During the speech, the girls’ father stared blankly into the intersection. He finally looked down at his daughter and asked, “What do you think about that? You asked earlier…about the horses? How they were treated?” Read More

By Drew Grant 5:03pm

Occupy Wall Street

Igloos and Occupiers

Note to OWS: Please Don't Occupy Central Park With Your Igloos

We are very serious here: The Occupy Wall Street movement’s biggest resource drain right now is trying to keep up the habitation of Zuccotti Park. Whatever message OWS may or may not have had has, in the past week or so, become a secondary concern to just keeping people alive, fed, warm, and un-raped. The media has also switched its attention to the more salacious stories about criminals and crazies slipping in amongst the protesters instead to what people were protesting to begin with.

So you know what wouldn’t help with this issue, now that the winter months are at our heels? Moving people to Central Park and building them igloos to live in, as has been suggested with this weekend’s upcoming Park march as well as the remarks of one entirely delusional person who spoke to Gothamist today. Read More

By The Editors 7/12/11 7:46pm

opinion

Pedestrians Beware

City  Hall’s  obsession  with  bicycles is no secret. Bike lanes have been popping up all over town, to the chagrin of those who see no reason to make the flow of vehicular traffic—and, thus, commerce—any slower than it is already. However, perhaps time and climate change will prove that Mayor Bloomberg’s bikers were visionaries and Read More