The new Columbia campus in Manhattanville has had its share of problems from community protests to eminent domain lawsuits. Now comes the worst incident yet, as a building being demolished by the university collapsed today, trapping three construction workers inside, according to DNAinfo, one of whom died shortly after being pulled from the rubble. Read More
C. Wonder, the preppy apparel and accessories retailer launched last year by designer Tory Burch’s ex husband, Christopher Burch, has signed on for a space at Time Warner Center, according to sources familiar with the deal.
The store, which opened another Manhattan store last October in Soho, will take about half of the roughly 15,000 square feet formerly occupied by the now-defunct bookstore chain Borders on the retail complex’s second floor. Read More
Community Board 10 has found itself between a rock, a hard place and a new luxury building. After overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal to house non-criminal developmentally disabled young adults in one of Harlem’s new high-end apartment building, the community board is re-thinking their blanket opposition to “special interest housing,” DNAinfo reports. Read More
Last month, The Observer wondered aloud if there was some value to the preservation of New York’s ghetto character. If we are saving brownstones, cast-iron lofts and now modernist skyscrapers, why not the urban grit that overtook the city in the 1970s and 1980s. Most preservation is a form of urban theme park, so a little graffiti and some chintzy signs seems appropriate to convey the full sense of New York over the centuries.
This thought experiment was prompted by a liquor store sign that offended the sensibility of its neighbors in Harlem, who sought to transform the section of the hood into a certain Brooklyn enclave. “We want to be Park Slope with charming little stores and become a destination for people,” Ruthann Richert told The Times at the time.
Well, the gentrifiers have won out, the paper reports. Read More
Last week, Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio released his list of the city’s worst landlords, and now the Daily News has gone inside Manhattan’s worst single building, 307 West 153rd Street, and what they find is downright inhumane. Read More
In a transparent effort to combat the bad publicity accrued in the wake of the shopping-cart incident, Harlem’s Target store is hellbent on making sure New Yorkers know it truly, deeply, honestly and sincerely cares about the community. A Daily News article , which reads suspiciously like a PR statement, reports that Read More
And here we thought Harlem fell above Park Slope on the New York City cool spectrum. Read More
The New York Daily News breathlessly reported today that a 14-year-old Harlem teen from a C-rated high school* had pepper sprayed eight other students. Read More
Vincent Morgan is not happy with the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, which is the organization created to allocate $100 million contributed by Columbia University as part of its Manhattanville expansion plan.
“Over the past couple of years, we weren’t very clear, or at least I wasn’t very clear, as to how [it] was going to respond to determining how to best allocate those resources,” Mr. Morgan told The Observer last week. “Flash forward almost two years later … we’re at a point where we aren’t even anywhere closer to the answers.”
Mr. Morgan, a Democrat running for Congress in the 15th District, which encompasses Harlem and several other neighborhoods in the northernmost reaches of the Upper West Side, has been quite vocal about his concerns with the West Harlem LDC. He told us he first became aware of the West Harlem LDC about five years ago when he was asked, as a graduate of the university, to testify at public hearings about the expansion process. He has remained involved in the expansion ever since through work in local community organizations, and now, as a candidate. Read More
Subversive sculptor Ugo Rondinone is best known in New York for the blasphemous message he scrawled across the New Museum when it opened three years ago. “HELL, YES!” the neon rainbow screamed over the Bowery. Now, Mr. Rondinone is taking a more reverent place on another New York thoroughfare. He has just bought a defunct church on Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Read More
