People love the Tenement Museum so much that the museum regularly has to turn visitors away, according to Crain’s. The number of visitors swelled 26%, to 210,000 annually, for the five years ended June 30, 2014, a surge of interest that the museum attributes to the centrality of the immigration debate. Though we suspect that in this new gilded era, some visitors might also be curious to see how the other half lived a century ago.
Because basically, now, it’s the other 75 percent. As The New York Times reports, Manhattan now has the greatest income disparity of any county in the country, with the top 5 percent of households earning $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent. While the city continues to get richer on paper, more than 45 percent of New Yorkers now spend 35 percent or more of their income on rent.
But for that rarefied 5 percent, the Grey Lady looks at what it would be like to live in Union Square “a place to converge and buy kale.” The conclusion? Really nice. And if you’re really lucky, you might have some money left over to visit the famed Union Square farmers’ market.
For the rest of us, or at least the comfortable middle class yuppies among us, there is Fourth Avenue in Park Slope/Gowanus. Curbed has a nice round-up on the new developments rising along “the canyon of mediocrity.”
Brooklyn: it’s not the only place you can buy really fancy food on the street anymore. The Times investigates the growing number of artisanal food fairs popping up around the city, checking out the Garment District’s recent posh, source-conscious food fair. Warning: the wait for Roberta’s pizza booth is as long as the one for the Brooklyn restaurant.
In other news, the cute but tiny West Village loft where once Jackson Pollack lived (and Aaron Burr, too!) is once again on the market, Curbed reports, asking $1.25 million. The one-bedroom has charm in spades, but it seems there are not many people willing to pay that much for 800 square feet.
And Letitia James penned a glowing letter on behalf of a hotel developer just days after taking thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the developer, according to DNAInfo. The letter, written on behalf on developer David Belt, who was heading up the company Macro Seas, urged the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to select Marco Seas and its partner 21C to develop BAM North II. The developer was competing against a number of other proposals to construct a boutique hotel with a contemporary art museum on a Fort Greene site overseen by HPD. The proposal ultimately lost out to Jonathan Rose’s proposal to combine housing—both affordable and market rate—with a cultural space.
