There are a lot of hospitals in the area. Could you tell?

Along its most institutional stretch between the East Village and Murray Hill, the condos First Avenue is best known for are medical, not residential. From Bellevue to NYU, it's a place where people want their stays to be as brief as possible.

But with Manhattan's residential market coming roaring back to life, developers are setting their sights on the island's less-developed fringes. New York's first modern micro-apartments are going up on a city-owned site at 335 East 27th Street and Michael Stern's JDS Development is nipping at the heels of Kips Bay, with a two-tower, 800-unit project set to break ground this summer at an old ConEd site at First Avenue between East 35th and 36th Streets.

"The  neighborhood is crying out for something modern and upscale," he told the Wall Street Journal in March.

And now 40 North, a press-shy wealth management firm with offices on the 30th floor of the ultra-prime Solow Building, is plunging straight into the heart of the hospital district. The firm just picked up a $32 million chunk of land on the southeast corner of First Avenue and East 24th Street.

The management firm bought the property, currently a housing a nondescript medical office building from the 1960s at 340 East 24th Street and an adjacent parking lot on the corner, from the International Center for the Disabled, which began searching for a buyer for the property last year.

"It would make an ideal site for a residential condo or rental for young professionals and area workers," a Jones Lang LaSalle broker told the New York Post, "and is also an attractive opportunity for a user or tenant seeking a strategically located facility." The property sits on a cul-de-sac, as 24th Street is broken between First and Second Avenues by a pedestrian plaza.

Given the buyer's background —the Winter family is reportedly an investor in 40 North, and David S. Winter calls himself a "managing principal"—we're guessing that the property is destined for residential development. The two parcels allow for a building of around 110,000 square feet as of right, or 132,000 square feet with an affordable housing bonus. But as the firm did not return a request for comment, we'll have to wait for the Department of Buildings filings to say for sure.

A rendering of one of the sketchy new vagrant magnets going up in Kips Bay.

Kips Bay, the East Side enclave pocked with post-war towers, has been largely protected from many of the changes that have transformed other sections of Manhattan. Neither particularly posh nor particularly gritty, nor particularly beautiful, the neighborhood is known as a good place to raise a family or fade into senescence.

But now the cloistered area is getting an unwelcome shot of vigor in the form of new micro-unit apartments. The local community board is terrified that the diminutive middle-class housing units will draw undesirable elements, bad seeds, transients.

"No matter what anyone says, we're worried that these are going to be SROs that are run as hotels," Toni Carlina, the community board's district manager, told the Wall Street Journal.

Egad!

The fear is totally unfounded—Ms. Carlina confessed as much when he admitted that they believed the apartments would be SROs "no matter what anyone says." Besides size, the micro-apartments will be no different than other studios; they'll have kitchens, bathrooms and be rented out with yearly leases. But the reaction highlights the kind of terror of the new that is prevalent in many New York neighborhoods. (The great bike share controversy is now engulfing whole corners of the city.)

But what makes the micro-apartment situation so interesting is that they're totally designed for yuppies—the kind of people whom even the biggest fuddy-duddys usually love to welcome to the neighborhood. (Families are debatably more desirable, but then, there are always those who will complain about children.)

With rents that start at $914 a month and will probably go well beyond $2,000 for the market-rate units, the micro-apartments will, it seems safe to say, be rented out exclusively to middle- and upper-middle-class tenants. To live there, residents will need to earn at least $36,560 a year  to meet the rule of thumb for New York apartments that a renter's salary should be 40 times the monthly rent.

Indeed, the relatively high costs of the apartments (40 percent of which will be "affordable" and set aside for tenants earning no more than $77,190 a year) has caused some fretting that the wee apartments won't really be affordable at all. Affordable units will go up to $1,873 a month, less than the average Manhattan studio price of $2,000 but hardly a bargain, especially considering that while brand new, they're only 250 to 370 square feet.

Nonetheless, SROs aren't the only thing that locals are worried about. They also fear loitering. And vagrants! According to the Journal: "The community board is also concerned about an eating-and-drinking establishment being allowed in the building, since she said the public plaza that it will be facing has had a problem with vagrancy in the past, and residents worry that if there is a bar or restaurant open late into the night, vagrancy will once again be an issue."

But who isn't terrified of yuppie vagrants? Always sitting out at sidewalk cafes sipping $12 glasses of prosecco, hauling around bags of groceries from Whole Foods, pausing in public plazas to check their iPads.

139 Lexington Avenue still has many of its classical features—for now, at least. (Property Shark)

Dominated by the towers on Second Avenue (rezoned in anticipation of the subway decades ago—speaking of which, how's that coming along?), Kips Bay has never been the coolest neighborhood. But perhaps Rashid Johnson can turn that ho-hum image around: the post-black, as he calls himself, mixed-media artist and his wife, fellow artist Sheree Hovsepian, just bought a townhouse at 139 Lexington Avenue for $3.7 million, according to city records—a healthy discount off the $4.25 million ask.

The four-story brownstone straddles the border of Kips Bay and NoMad, lying in the dead center of another made-up micro-neighborhood: Rose Hill (the seller was listed only as Rose Hill LLC).

The home built in 1901, but is currently decked out with plenty of new name-brand touches—"Bulthaup kitchen, Gaggenau oven and cooktop, SubZero refrigerated drawers," according to the listing description. As currently configured, the home has four bedrooms, along with a playroom/study opening onto a private garden in the basement.

Despite the modern touches, the house still retains its original cornice up top, along with pediments on the second-floor (excuse us—parlour floor, according to the listing) windows. Still, if Mr. Johnson and Ms. Hovsepian want to bring the exterior into the 21st century, they have over 4,500 square feet of additional development rights to play around with.

They could use this extra square footage to add a penthouse addition atop the fourth floor of the existing 3,840-square foot structure, but to maximize the space permitted, they would have to do what a few other property owners on the block have already done and raze the building entirely. The couple would then be free to set loose their full creative fury on the property, as the block has not been claimed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission—well, not yet, at least.

The coveted courtyard. (StreetEasy)

People have been known to fall in love at weddings, but how often do they wind up buying a home because of one?

“The apartment was owned by Alexandra Schlesinger and she was the widow of Arthur Schlesinger. Alexandra was first married to my father before she married Arthur Schlesinger,” Catherine Allan told The Observer over the phone earlier this week. As we were trying to map a mental family tree, the voice continued. “We had gone, in fact, to a family wedding and that’s when we became aware of the apartment.”

Ms. Allan was on the line from her home in Minnesota, where about the nicest executive producer at PBS (already a genial profession) happens to live. As The Observer had reported last week, Ms. Allan and her husband, Tim Grady, purchased Arthur Schlesinger’s writing studio earlier this month.

Ms. Allan had not seen her former step-mother, Alexandra Schlesinger, for several years. “We got reconnected at my brothers wedding. That was the first time I’d seen her in quite a long time,” she said.

Ms. Schlesinger and her historian husband lived in an apartment at 455 East 51^st Street, but the stentorian writer and Kennedy confidant alsi kept another two-bedroom unit in the building that he used as his writing studio. After he died in 2007, Ms. Schlesinger decided to sell the place,  but she only now found buyers in her own extended family.

The apartment was Mr. Schlesinger’s sanctuary, his home not-really-away from home. “He would — I gathered— just walk across the courtyard and go to work,” Ms. Allan said. While the apartment is a full two bedroom, the literary luminary had little space to spare in his writing den. “I guess the apartment was just filled with books," Ms. Allan said. "It was just absolutely filled with books, not only on the bookshelves, but stacked from floor to ceiling. The two bedrooms were basically all books.”

Needless to say, the place needs a little work. “We’re going to renovate the kitchen and the bathroom,” Mr. Grady, a cycling enthusiast and film producer told The Observer. Although a facelift and perhaps a little feng shui are in order, Mr. Grady and Ms. Allan are happy with their new home. “It’s a wonderful prewar apartment and there just not making any more of those, you know,” Mr. Grady explained. “It’s small, coming out of the Midwest and what we’re used to, but it’s a lovely apartment,” he said.

eknutsen@observer.com

Former city landmarks chief and Hunter College President Jennifer Raab wants to sell off the school’s 3.5-acre Kips Bay nursing campus, near the recently sold Peter Cooper Village at 25th Street and the F.D.R. Drive, and build a 16-story building for science and health-professions programs at 67th Street and Second Avenue, closer to its overcrowded main campus on the Upper East Side.

By the end of the year, according to an official at the public college, Hunter will issue a request for expressions of interest in the 25th Street site, a testing of the waters that would give Hunter a sense of how much money it could make from the deal—and by extension, how much the uptown building project will cost taxpayers or donors.

The project rivals some of the development schemes that have been a hallmark of the Bloomberg administration, in complexity and controversy if not in size.

The controversial part comes in because the whopper that Ms. Raab wants to build would displace the 80-year-old Julia Richman Education Complex, a set of six elementary, middle and high schools that have stood at the vanguard of the wildly popular small-schools movement.

Meanwhile, the property swap has inspired a healthy debate on the faculty list-serve. (The Hunter faculty was scheduled to have a meeting on the issue on Nov. 15.) Last month, for example, sociology professor Claus Mueller took a swipe at Ms. Raab, writing: “As with other Hunter College executive decisions lacking in transparency, the Julia Richman Education Complex project raises numerous questions and issues.”

The suspicious attitude towards Ms. Raab goes back to her hiring five years ago, when some professors objected to her lack of experience at educational institutions and her deep political connections. But the Julia Richman proposal has earned her allies as well, particularly among the science faculty. In a response to Mr. Mueller’s comments, Roger Persell, an associate professor of biology, called Ms. Raab’s management style “eccentric” and “difficult,” but he also gave her credit for bringing better science facilities further than anyone else has.

“There are complaints about every president,” Mr. Persell told The Observer in a follow-up interview. “She’s an extremely smart person and is very politically savvy, and she has an insight into the New York City community that none of the other presidents I have been under have had. I attribute the success she has had with this so far to her understanding of larger New York City issues.”

The private developer that bids on the one million square feet of development rights on East 25th Street would have to build a new campus for Julia Richman on the property, according to the city Department of Education’s instructions, and also accommodate the 600 dorm rooms that are currently there, either keeping them on the site or moving them elsewhere.

Many of the complex’s educators, parents, students and neighbors object that even if the new school building were state-of-the-art, the swap would put them in a worse location, obviate millions of dollars of renovations, and ruin an increasingly productive relationship with the community that had formerly called the building “Julia Rikers.”

A few hundred opponents of the school swap, more than half of whom were students, held a rally on Nov. 14 to block it from going through, marching the two blocks from the school complex, at 67th Street and Second Avenue, to the office of Ms. Raab, carrying a scroll that claimed that “thousands and thousands of JREC parents and neighbors” wanted to keep the school complex where it is.

“I think it’s unconscionable,” said Jane Hirschmann, who organized the rally and is the mother of three Julia Richman complex alumni. “We have built up these schools over the last 12 years and forged a really deep connection with the community. We have a list of community groups that have committed to our children’s well-being. We have at least two orchestras and one chorus that use our auditorium. Why would you want to destroy that?”

But the school complex is also just down the street from Hunter’s main campus. Hunter wants to replace it with up to 14 stories of classrooms and labs (and two stories for mechanical equipment) that would consolidate the science labs, now located elsewhere on the main campus, as well as the nursing, nutrition, physical-therapy classrooms and labs that are in Kips Bay.

Ms. Raab had been working on the swap for more than a year before news of it leaked out over the summer, but Hunter has long contemplated an upgraded science facility, and one is included in the City University of New York’s capital plan. The Governor and the State Legislature have already approved a $78 million allocation for Hunter’s planned new science building.

“The net of it will be that all of our science and health professional programs will be located in one new state-of-the-art facility with proximity to main campus,” said Meredith Halpern, a Hunter College spokeswoman. “The nursing students take English and history, and that’s all on the main campus, so they have to spend all of this time shuttling back and forth between the two campuses.”

The six schools at Julia Richman—which house 1,900 lower-, middle- and high-school students, largely draw from outside the neighborhood. The grade school, however, is geared to children whose parents work nearby—at Hunter, among other places—while others serve autistic children, immigrants, and students who transferred out of other schools because they didn’t fit in or had behavioral problems.

The city Department of Education is tentatively in favor of the swap, because it will produce a brand-new school at no cost, but it is still waiting to be convinced that Hunter will secure the money and the land-use approvals to make it all possible, according to Jamie Smarr, the assistant to the deputy chancellor for finance and administration.

“They are at a very preliminary stage. There is not a signed agreement. We have told Hunter, as we have told the community, that if Hunter can prove that the deal is financially feasible—that they can pay for the high school and deliver us a high school at no cost and obtain the land-use approvals—that we would be very interested,” he told The Observer. “What we have said is, this is not about what is going to happen to the school in the present. The question is what is the best facility for JREC for the next 75 years. Is it an 86-year-old building that will continue to have a host of maintenance issues, or is it a brand-new building that can be built to our specifications?”

While the new location would be less convenient by subway—one-third of a mile further away from the nearest station than the 67th Street location—Mr. Smarr said it would be acceptable because it was reachable by bus.

“Our concern, as it is with any new school, is whether we can site a new school on public transportation that is safe,” Mr. Smarr said. “Using that litmus test, the new location is acceptable.”

Mr. Smarr said the city also believed that the new location would have to be rezoned, which requires approval from the Planning Commission and the City Council. The proposed science building on 67th Street, however, could be built as-of-right, according to Ms. Halpern.

The very height of the science tower—even though it would scale down to 75 feet along the side streets—has engendered resentment among some Upper East Siders, who feel that their neighborhood is already a dumping ground for sprawling institutional complexes.

The new building, these residents were told at a community-board meeting this fall, will be used by 15,000 students, and neighbors are afraid they’ll overrun St. Catherine’s Park next-door.

“The neighbors are worried about the impact of a larger institutional presence,” said Lynn Love, a freelance science writer who lives across the street from the Julia Richman complex. “College students, for better or worse—we were all college students once—smoke a lot of cigarettes. They need some place outside where they can smoke, this being New York City, and what the community residents are facing is seeing this shared space cease to exist as such.”

Ann Cook, co-director of the Urban Academy, a 125-student high school housed in Julia Richman and an opponent of the swap, argues that it’s costing Hunter and the taxpayers who support city colleges potentially twice as much to execute the plan this way, rather than building up the Kips Bay campus, since Hunter will have to pay for both a new public-school complex and a new science building.

“The issue of expansion for all city colleges have been an issue,” Ms. Cook told The Observer. “The idea that Hunter, which has ownership of this property, would sell off valuable space—when in the future they will obviously need more space—doesn’t make sense to me.”

Hunter College jumps into real estate
Hunter College is getting into the real-estate business. College President Jennifer Raab wants to sell off the school's 3.5-acre Kips Bay nursing campus, near the recently sold Peter Cooper Village at 25th Street and the F.D.R. Drive, and build a 16-story building for science and health-professions programs at 67th Street and Second Avenue, closer to its overcrowded main campus on the Upper East Side. Go to the story by Matthew Schuerman

Artist's old Soho haunt sells for $9 million
When the 94-year-old painter Buffie Johnson, a stalwart of Abstract Expressionism, died this August, she left behind a three-story loft building at 102 Greene Street. Her estate listed the 8,968-square-foot place with Corcoran vice president Wendy Maitland for $8.5 million, and Ms. Maitland said this week that it's gone to contract for over $9 million. Go to the story by Max Abelson

9:54 p.m.

7 pounds, 8 ounces

Lenox Hill Hospital

When Margit Ragland looked up her firstborn’s pet moniker, Kessie, she found out that it meant “chubby baby” in Ashanti (not just a pop star, but a region in Ghana!). “So far, she’s living up to her nickname,” said Ms. Ragland, 34, a senior health editor at Family Circle; the exclusively breast-fed baby is currently tipping the scale at 10 pounds. Mom, meanwhile, has been rewarding herself with treats from Madison Square Park’s Shake Shack (“we go during off-peak hours”). Kessie inherited her dark locks and long fingers and feet from her father, Gar Ragland, 35, Ms. Ragland’s husband of over two years and a music producer for the Mountain Stage NewSong Festival. “She’s going to be a guitar player or a barefoot water skier,” joked Dad, soon to lose the office in the family’s Kips Bay two-bedroom to their fledgling fashionista. “She has a bigger wardrobe than both of us,” Ms. Ragland said.

Recently, the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club announced that the 50-foot-wide mansion at 4 East 75th would be the location of the organization's next showhouse.

Currently on the market for $55 million, The Observer has been closely tracking this residence--still widely known as the Harkness House--since gossip filtered out last fall that it might hit the luxury market.

Yesterday, more than 20 designers (including Thom Filicia from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) were let in to start the massive overhaul of the 18,000-square-foot townhouse. On April 25, the public will be permitted to stroll through, with the $30 admission fee going to charity.

Currently owned by banker Jaqui Safra, and his film producer girlfirend Jean Doumanian, the house is in need of extensive renovations, according to multiple sources.

Now, we've mentioned showhouse flipping before as a recent Upper East Side trend. But it will be impressive if the price climbs above $55 million,currently the highest price for a Manhattan townhouse.

- Michael Calderone

-Michael Calderone

"For us, sponsorship was few and far between," Mr. Shade said sadly.

None of the big national design-industry suppliers are involved.

"Suffice it to say, lots of us in the show house will reconsider where we shop in the future," Mr. Shade said.

He has been amused, however, by some of the misconceptions about the house. "We've heard everything. One favorite: 'Oh, great! A hip-hop show house!'"

Not at all.

About a year ago, designers submitted plans for how they would do a room in the house. A committee reviewed the designers' sketches. Rooms were assigned. Joan Gibbs, an elegant designer whose office is on Fifth Avenue, decorated the entry hall.

"Like Kips Bay, every decorator and designer here is different. You can't generalize," said Ms. Gibbs. "I wanted to pay tribute to the great African-American furniture makers and artisans who worked in this country in the early 18th century." She included an Empire-style bed made by Thomas Day, "a man of color who had the largest furniture factory in North Carolina in the early 1800's."

The dining room, by Arcadia Inc., pays tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright. Kyle Taylor, perhaps the youngest interior designer at Hush, calls his master bath on the third floor "the Jewel Box." Mr. Taylor, whose client list includes Spike Lee and former New York Knickerbocker Charles Smith, as well as the interiors of Sugar Shack, the Harlem nightclub, specializes in historic restoration. He studied architecture at Columbia University and received his master's in real estate development from Columbia.

"No, no, no. This is not typical of my style," laughed Wilbert Louis Shaw, the veteran interior designer. His décor in the front parlor is an homage to Josephine Baker. "My work is very straight. Austere. But when I think of Miss Baker, I think of feathers, as she lived most of her life in feathers."

Mr. Shaw's room includes pink marabou, banana-colored furniture, Regency chairs covered in white bridal satin, a bust wrapped with a five-foot-high headdress, and curtains trimmed with crystal beads by Kenneth Carter, another of the Hush decorators. Mr. Carter's talents are displayed in the third-floor study.

Mr. Shade has decorated a guest bedroom with furniture inspired by classic African pieces that look quite modern. The walls of his room are lined with a grass cloth and a marble mosaic cork tile much like the pattern of an African basket.

"When you're in design school, you're always the only one. The only African-American sitting there, wondering where the other ones are," said Mr. Shade. "There's got to be more than just me, you figure. And, of course, the shelter magazines don't cover us unless there's a celebrity attached. We're not asking why. We're just saying, 'Here it is.'"

Mr. Shade studied design in California and has worked as an interior decorator for 15 years. He came to New York City about nine years ago. "Soon after I arrived, I hooked up with a really interesting 'colored' design community. I threw out the idea for a show house, and a sort of grass-roots effort evolved," he said.

It was an uphill battle from there, alas. Mr. Shade, who for eight years decorated for an Upper East Side firm specializing in what he calls "the white-bread look" before opening his own design company, began the search for a show house venue and sponsorship about three years ago. With the renovation of houses in Harlem's historic areas booming and property values up about 43 percent, Mr. Shade said, there were houses to choose from, but home owners were suspicious. "What kind of show are you going to put on?" he was asked. The owner of 459 West 141st Street made the house available about six months ago.

Originally, show house organizers hoped to realize about $500,000 for the AIDS center, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization that is the largest provider of AIDS services north of 96th Street. That estimate has been scaled back drastically. Even the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club Decorators Show House, the grandest of show houses, earned just $53,000 its first year, back in 1974, according to Crain's New York Business .

"We're hoping to make it an annual event, and people want to see how it goes the first year," Mr. Shade said. Financial support has come from Carver Federal Savings Bank, Home Savings Bank and Willie Kathryn Suggs Licensed Real Estate. Among the companies who have donated products are Home Depot, Kohler, Gracious Home, Einstein-Moomjy and Irreplaceable Artifacts. Otherwise, show house designers rely on donated products from their favorite suppliers to decorate their rooms.

Unlike Kips Bay, where decorators only resist each other–and that's putting it politely–the camaraderie here was splendid. "There is a black design archive at the Smithsonian Institute, and a number of us have our work there," Mr. Shaw said. "We share sources. One of the things about people of African descent, whether it's cooking, fashion or homes, is we're very innovative. There's lots of innovation in this house." By necessity, or by inclination, "tradition is broken," he said. "Not that we're uniformed, but we take license with our intentions, and that can be very exciting."

Is there an Elsie de Wolfe of African-American interior designers, a grand decorator lady or gentleman?

"Well, yes, but you know who they turn out to be in the African-American community? The lady who makes the curtains or slipcovers over the years," Mr. Shade said. "We can go to school and learn to draw and everything, but it's the ladies who take the problem out of your hands and say, 'No, baby, this is how you do it,' who are so cool. They're the heroes of African-American style."

The Harlem United Show House is open to the public for a donation of $20 through July 3 on weekdays from 10 A.M. to 7 P.M. and from noon to 6 P.M. on Saturday and Sunday. If that's not hip enough, they do have a Web site at www.harlemshowhouse.org.

Quiz time!

1. Dear Socks, Dear Buddy is?

a. The autobiography of Bill Blass, to be published this fall.

b. Hillary Rodham Clinton's next book, of children's letters to the White House pets.

c. Another film about lowlifes, winner of several awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

2. Yves Saint Laurent is retiring from designing ready-to-wear. Who is expected to be his successor?

a. Randolph Duke.

b. Alber Elbaz.

c. Michael Kors.

3. The swells rushed to the Chinese Porcelain Company on Park Avenue recently. What for?

a. An exhibition of Venetian glass.

b. The marathon John Ruskin reading organized by Veronica Hearst.

c. Nan Kempner giving Moroccan cooking classes there.

Answers: (1) b; (2) b; (3) a.