By Stephen Jacob Smith 4/04 3:30pm

Doll Houses

The winning proposal by Monadnock Dev., Actors Fund Housing Dev. Corp. and nARCHITECTS.

More Micro-Apartments! City Seeking Developers For New Sites

New York’s first micro-apartment building hasn’t even broken ground yet, but the city is already planning more. At a luncheon hosted by the Citizens Housing Planning Council today, Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Matthew Wambua announced that new requests for proposals will be issued for more micro-apartment sites.

“We are considering RFPs for two or three micro-unit developments later this year,” a HPD spokesman told The Observer after the event. “We’re in the process of vetting a number of city-owned sites, and RFP guidelines will be tailored to the chosen sites.” Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 3/07 3:11pm

Holy Moses!

Robert Moses may be dead, but the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority lives on.

Finish the Job: Joe Lhota Wants to End Moses’s Triborough Legacy

Joe Lhota, it seems, wants to finish the job that Governor Nelson Rockefeller started. Speaking to the Staten Island Advance last week, the frontrunner laid out the most ambitious transportation proposal yet of the 2013 mayoral race: give New York City back its bridges and tunnels.

“The former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority,” the editorial board wrote, “said that if he were to be elected mayor, he would seek to get full mayoral control of the bridges and tunnels in the city.”

Aside from the untolled East River bridges that belong to the city—the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges—major river crossings between the five boroughs belong to the state, under the guise of the MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Read More

By Matt Chaban 12/06/12 11:21am

Machers

Mr. Flood. (MTA/Flickr)

Joe Lhota Calls Bill Rudin “an Exemplary Leader”

It’s beginning to feel a bit like the letters section of the New York Review of Books around here.

Yesterday morning, The Observer published a post highlighting another outlet’s revelation that developer and civic leader Bill Rudin was somewhat pleased that the Hugh Carey Brooklyn Battery Tunnel had flooded, thereby protecting some of his buildings downtown. (Some experts agree that the tunnels should actually be designed to do exactly that.)

Unexpectedly, Mr. Rudin’s office sent a statement from him to The Observer in the afternoon, speaking generally about the need to plan for the future, but not directly addressing the issue of the tunnel or MTA Chief Joe Lhota, who had told Capital New York, “I wasn’t particularly pleased with the comment.” Now, unbidden, The Observer has received a statement from Mr. Lhota that praises Mr. Rudin. Read More

By Matt Chaban 12/05/12 12:20pm

recovery mode

A good flood? (Getty)

Bill Rudin Is Grateful the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Flooded—and Maybe You Should Be, Too

Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc across the city, including Lower Manhattan, where flooding into tunnels shut down both subway and vehicular traffic for weeks. In a story looking at flooding in the Hugh Carey Brooklyn-Battery tunnel, Dana Rubinstein reveals that none other than developer, macher and civic bigwig Bill Rudin actually welcomed the flooding because it protected some of his harborside buildings. Read More

By Matt Chaban 12/04/12 12:12pm

Planes Trains & Automobiles

Blue steel! (MTA)

Male Model Joe Lhota Sports an H Train Hoody to Support Rockaways Recovery

The “I Survived the Frankenstorm” shirts had already hit street corners and Etsy shops within days of the hurricane battering New York. But here’s some Sandy swag that actually goes toward a good cause. The MTA has created a limited edition line of H train memorabilia, including T-shirts, hoodies, pins and magnets, and all proceeds go to the Graybeards, a Rockaways charity that has been helping out with the superstorm recovery. And who better to model the new line than MTA chief Joe Lhota, hero of the storm. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/08/12 11:28am

recovery mode

Let's eat. (EPA)

The Hurricane Sandy Diet: Joe Lhota, Ray Kelly, Janette Sadik-Khan and Other Leaders Share Their Stormy Snacks

Just before Hurricane Sandy hit, everyone was busy stocking up provisions to weather the maelstrom. Following the storm, there was a scramble to to find more to eat as stores were empty and restaurants closed. This is a city of gourmands, after all. For the city officials who were responsible for guiding the city through the disaster, this was no exception.

While we were compiling our oral history of Hurricane Sandy, Joe Lhota mentioned that even in the worst of the storm, he had managed to keep his daily dietary regimen intact. This got us wondering: what was everybody eating while they scrambled around getting the city ready and helping it recover? Here is what the protectors and providers of the city had on their plates and in their pockets. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/07/12 3:30pm

Planes Trains & Automobiles

Maybe we can raise the fares while nobody's looking? (MTA/Flickr)

Let the MT-Hate Resume: First Fare Hike Hearing Tonight in Brooklyn

Even though it started with a shutdown of service, Hurricane Sandy has probably engendered more love for the MTA then the transit agency has seen at least since the 1960s, before the system went to seed. The subway may well be enjoying more praise than ever in its 108-year history. Unless you live in North Brooklyn, restoration of the transit system came about remarkably fast in a city that had been devastated in every corner. The patience, and the appreciation, has been remarkable for an agency rarely accustomed to either.

But the love-in may well end tonight. That is when the MTA is due to hold its first hearing on the looming fare hikes for all corners of the mass transit system—not just those MetroCards, but also fares on the commuter rail lines and tolls on the bridges and (still flooded) tunnels. The meeting will be held in Brooklyn, at the Marriott at 333 Adams Street starting at 5 p.m. Doors are at 4 p.m., for those who want to get there early to sign up and speak. Another meeting was scheduled for Farmingdale, out on Long Island, but it has been canceled because, you know, they’re still without power.

It will be curious to see how the public reacts at tonight’s hearing. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/07/12 12:15pm

recovery mode

(Photo illustration: Ed Johnson)

The Committee to Save New York: An Oral History of Hurricane Sandy

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York’s top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words.

The Storm

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: I have an app on my iPad that monitors hurricanes on the East Coast. I have always lived on the water. I always watch the app. So when I first got involved in this—it was long before it even hit Jamaica—I knew when it started as a tropical storm, and a hurricane, and a tropical storm, and then a hurricane again.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC Office of Emergency Management: We follow the weather very closely this time of year as it comes off the tip of Africa, or wherever it develops. This particular storm came out of the southwest of the Caribbean. At 11 a.m. on October 22, we saw a tropical depression. At that point it’s just a depression, and you don’t know much about it. By 6 p.m., it was upgraded already to a tropical storm called Sandy. It continued to strengthen during the next day, and we kept track of it as it moved across Jamaica. Read More