New Architecture in New York City
NewYorkology profiles nine recently constructed buildings in NYC, including Gehry's fantastical ICA Building, and Meier's twin glass apartments that have been home to Nicole Kidman, Vincent Gallo and Martha Stewart - NYC's Newest Important Architecture
Robert De Niro Takes You To Bed
Inside The Hotel on Rivington
Sleep with Celebrities
Robert De Niro Takes You to Bed
Staying in Robert De Niro's Greenwich Hotel in New York City doesn't come cheap, starting at $625 a night. But NewYorkology points us to soft-opening prices that make it worth considering a luxurious night in their brand new decked out rooms, details here.
"You sleepin' with me?"
Inside The Hotel on Rivington
Room With a View on the Dam
Every suite is significantly bigger than our entire NYC apartment...
Suspended
Until Monday, savour this awesome shot by Tangentialism - Williamsburg Bridge at Night
At the time it was constructed, the Williamsburg Bridge was the largest suspension bridge on Earth.
Get your bridge on...
Walking the Brooklyn Bridge
GWB drive by shooting
Manhattan Bridge at night
Sunset over Williamsburg Bridge
Killer shot of the Brooklyn Bridge
Bridges glimmer through beer goggles
A striking bridge in any light
Balancing act
Forget David Blaine's lame tricks, better "street magic" happens every day around New York City. We caught this cool feat at the construction site for the new hotel on Allen Street - a ton of steel is magically moved by a tiny fork lift by balancing 4 large construction workers on the back...
construction stalking
every once in a while the gods of construction open a panel in the walls of a covered site and let us play with the Tonka trucks in our head...
these shots are from the construction of the new Bank of America headquarters on 42nd St between 6th Ave and Broadway. we've been documenting the development...
grand facade
hidden history
demo-licious
Pershing Square's mysterious zoning
NYC can be very tight with commercial zoning. excessive fines are passed out for tables or signs outside that go an inch over the allowed space. but every summer Pershing Square Café, located on the very busy corner of 42nd St. and Park Ave., is allowed to SHUT DOWN and take over a block of Park Avenue and fill it with outside seating for their café. in doing this they block an important south bound Park Ave turn off of one of the busiest streets in the city! this baffles us to no end (adding to the insult, the place is often empty.) does anyone know the story behind this restaurant being allowed to take over a city street?
UPDATE: Venus Williams will be appearing in Pershing Square TODAY at 12:00! playing tennis for a good cause!
slice of construction
heavy new construction has popped up directly next to the development of the hotel at 200 Allen St. assumed it was expansion of the hotel's footprint, but when we stopped by to take photos, the construction supervisor said a new pizza place is going in. it was an informal conversation but he mentioned the name will be "La Sala". and from the looks of the serious construction going on, gutting deep into the walls and at least one story below ground, it's going to be a big place. with all the sucky over-development in the LES, we're keeping our fingers crossed that some good pizza comes in.
Pizza restaurant construction << -- >> Pomeranc's Allen St Hotel
pet store no more
not sure what will be taking over this pet store that's resided on the corner of Houston and Eldridge for over 20 years. as we expected, searching Curbed, we found they scooped a bit of info on the place back in January - and it looks like ANOTHER HOTEL! dam, our heads are spinning with the increasing misery the over-development of our hood has brought. as L.O.C.O. can tell you, it's already out of control and ruining the beauty of one of NY's most historic neighborhoods and the lives of people living here. we can't even keep track of the number of hotels being built in the LES, think it's up to 5. fuck.
Bowery breakdown
many of the East Village's oldest and coolest building were recently demolished to make way for the Avalon Chryistie's additional complex that extends several blocks north of the massive main structure (seen in background.) knowing this beauty was coming down, we snapped a couple shots to remember her by.
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the building (and graf) in the second photo in this post are also gone
Future New York
paper is the perfect collectable for city living. there's tons of great stuff out there to find and it's easy to store. under the bed we've got a box full of interesting postcards, photos and other various scraps of paper collected over the years. inspired by One Man Safari, we took a snap of one of our favorites, a cool old NY postcard (circa 1917) titled: Future New York, "The City of Skyscrapers," New York - that depicts a city packed with skyscrapers, a sky filled with small air craft and trains that run through buildings...
sign of the Times
inside the massive construction site for the new NY Times building...
and here's some info on the architecture and construction:
The new Eighth Avenue tower for The New York Times
NYT, Hearst Headquarters to Spruce Up Eighth Ave.
$320 Million Construction Loan for 52-Story NYTimes Headquarters
(thanks Josef for sneaking inside and sending us the photos!)
NY manholes
manhole covers are one of those things that we get sentimental about. after a life spent in the city, we've stepped on thousands. their bold, gritty, and historic presence are an imagery that screams NYC! call us crazy, but we love those big metal circles. and so does Forgotten NY. their great article on NY Manholes and Coal Shute Covers is packed with excellent photos and fascinating info!
in tribute to Forgotten NY's great article we decided to snap some manhole cover photos. a testimony to the amazing variety and abundance of NY manholes out there, all 9 manhole covers above are from the intersection of Chrystie and Rivington in the LES (each with a different pattern!)
Manhole Tattoo and Exploding Manholes from the Gothamist
demise of the LES: Pomeranc's Allen St. Fuckover begins
the Lower East Side has put up with a lot of crappy gentrification, but this seriously scares us. work has begun on a new hotel Jason Pomeranc is building on Allen St. (between Houston and Stanton)...
we read Curbed religiously to keep an eye on what's being developed in the LES, but had been turning a blind eye to this story. today it smacked us upside the head so we dug in, and what we found is very ugly. the articles below speaks for themselves, but the bottomline is: Jason Pomeranc is determined to change the landscape of our hood. if you care about or live in the LES or EV, these are must reads...
Good News for People Who Love Luxury Boutique Hotels
just when one may have feared the boutique hotel craze had peaked, comes word from Deborah Schoeneman that 60 Thompson owner Jason Pomeranc plans to open two new hotels next year, one at 6 Columbus Circle, and one on the Lower East Side. Of the LES hotel, which will feature 32 luxury condos, plus a spa, swimming pool, and all the other requisite trappings of hell, Pomeranc notes, "Allen Street is an overlooked and neglected frontier."
Pomeranc's Allen Street Hotel: Domination!
Perhaps nothing, though, will change the face of Allen like the proposed new hotel, still unnamed, which will tower over the street and certainly raise objections from those who frequently oppose out-of-scale projects... The hotel is also supposed to have bars, restaurants and an outdoor pool and will have two entrances, one on Orchard Street and the other on Allen, which Michael Pomeranc, the developer, calls a ''boulevard in the raw.''...
Hotels are replacing hipsters on changing Lower East Side
Jason Pomeranc was quoted last July as saying of the Thompson group’s 18-story plus project, “We were presented with the opportunity to not only impact the skyline but to begin creating it.” Whether or not other developers will follow suit in “creating” the Lower East Side skyline remains unknown, but depending on zoning restrictions, the look of the neighborhood could change drastically in the near future
Know Your Hoteliers, Part 4: Jason Pomeranc
it also looks to us like this building may be the real culprit that moved Kush and several other store fronts on Orchard St. a Curbed reader speculated that it was due to an apartment development, but the Allen St hotel demolition looks like it's breaking right through the block. and when we walked around to Orchard, the area that formerly housed Kush is EXACTLY behind the Allen St construction and has been recently boarded up (see Destruction on the LES: Where Will the Hipsters Play? )
big blue dumpster
every once and a while we fall in love with a dumpster...
and Amy from NewYorkology has her own dumpster romance going.
down in the valley
once a clear shot from Midtown all the way to the bottom of the Lower East Side, the view down 2nd Ave is now filled with the Avalon Chrystie's cruise ship-like structure...
renovating backwards
our good friend Janet sent over the note below about an apartment owned by a Victorian collecting maniac and his decked out co-op in Park Slope. crazy stuff. we love this idea... "Every fixture was changed back to something 100 years old."
from our friend... "For those of us who love to collect things. I went to an open house in Windsor Terrace with a friend of mine on Sunday and saw the craziest place I have ever seen – just insane! Here’s a link to it. Victorian furniture, paneling, so much religious stuff and a dozen plus stained glass windows plus a full size stuffed peacock I mean just covering every inch on wall space. Every fixture was changed back to something 100 years old. Seems this man (in his 50’s) has just bought a big (you guessed it!) Victorian House in Maine and is moving. Its way overpriced and when I was there everyone who came thru just freaked! "
we think the place looks amazing. rich, warm and fun, almost hits that our childhood dream of living in a museum.
and it was all yellow
been watching the construction of 195 Bowery out our window for a couple years now. not sure what it means in terms of progress, but the bright yellow walls are visible from anywhere in the area these days. did a little digging around and found these great photos on the cool site ThomasLockeHobbs.com. they really show the building's looming size and it's contrast against the LES architecture and traditional tenements.
also found a listing for a 3 bedroom, 1800 square ft condo in the building for a cool $1.5 mil. - "sweeping views thru walls of windows, private terraces and balconies, magnificent Italian kitchens and sumptuous baths. Set in NYC's most vibrant neighborhood, 195 Bowery raises luxury to a new level downtown."
dam, the hood is changing fast. having lived down here for 18 years, it's a strange and striking juxtaposition watching these very expensive and modern residences invade the area.
(thanks for the note Big O!)
grand facade
since last June we've been photographing various stages of the demolition of the buildings along 42nd St and 43rd St. between 6th Ave and Broadway to make room for the new Bank of America headquarters. including Chashama's old performance space coming down, a construction hottie, and a cool reader submission. this fall we noticed an unusual slow down in the demolition as they began taking one building down literally brick by brick. it was amazing and sad to watch and as they exposed many layers of an old theater on 43rd St. including a grand staircase. we decided to step off our normal 42nd St. path and take a look on the 43rd St. side and discovered this strange style demo was being done to save the facade of NY landmark - Henry Miller's Theater - while the building around it was being torn down. as codeOrange notes "it's a sad thing to see a theater die". NYC's great architecture and history are so frequently demolished to make way for crappy new buildings. but it was good to see this effort to save a small piece the areas great past.
snow be gone
observed this snow removal team moving down 1st Ave this morning. some heavy equiptment is used to bring together several blocks worth of snow piles and haul them off. a nice little operation, and it's good to see NYC's sanitation workers keeping smiles up after 5 days of this mess.
history behind walls
we've been in the same apartment in the LES for over 17 years. but it wasn't until 1996, after over 8 years there, that we discovered the fireplace.
reading The Alienist at the time (a GREAT book by Caleb Carr about a series of child murders in the late 1800's, primarily set in the Lower East Side), and immersed in a part where Carr vividly describes tenement life, we realized "all the apartments had fireplaces back then." noting the section in the center of our wall that jutted out slightly - it hit us!... there's something behind there!!! we quickly started knocking about the wall ... knock, knock, knock, THUNK! there was a hollow spot! grabbed a hammer, and a minute later we'd bashed a baseball size hole in the wall. a "whoosh" of musky, ancient air filled the room. got the flashlight out and we could see it was a really old and really dirty fireplace (but with great potential.) next day we rented a reciprocating saw from Ace Hardware and started cutting down the wall. the fireplace was filthy. we spent days wiping it down, and weeks repointing the bricks (the cement made today is much brighter and didn't match so we hand mixed in some of the old mortar we'd scraped off to maintain the old look.) later we finished off the edges with sheetrock.
and today we have a beautiful fireplace that really speaks to the history of our apartment and the LES. it's very tall, the hearth area is almost 4 feet high. which fits the LES tenement scene painted by the Alienist. these fireplaces provided warmth but just as important, they were used to cook in. there's also a small square hole towards the top that served as a flue. the interior still has remains of a blue ceramic that covered the surface. and our favorite part is the massive hand cut granite hearthstone that supports the bricks above the opening.
it seems it was fashionable back in the 30-40's to cover these old fireplaces when they became obsolete (due new fangled heating and cooking methods coming on the scene.) but it's time they were brought back in the open! our fireplace is beautiful and adds a touch of magic to the apartment, with it's warm look and interesting history. we've spent many hours wondering what life was like at the turn of the century and it's given us a wonderful sense of the history we live in. so if you live in an old building in NYC and have strange architectural angles, grab a hammer and see what's behind it! (just a little warning, start with a small hole, our downstairs neighbor followed our idea and his fireplace was a cracked and smashed up mess.)
shape of things to come
it hit us like a ton of bricks this weekend (ok, pun intended) - the Avalon Chrystie Building has arrived! we have to admit we're pretty psyched about Whole Foods, a swimming pool and hopefully some good restaurants coming in. but there's no denying the landscape of our lovely, old fashioned, tenement lined East Houston has been changed forever...
tale of two buildings
both these construction photos were shot out the same window of our apartment. but the story behind each is quite different. the building on the left, named 195 Bowery, has been going up for about 2 years. and for 2 years it's looked exactly the same. Curbed broke some news on the place almost 4 months ago, and in the time since, all they've done is put in an elevator shaft and a small mini floor on top.
this is a crazy contrast to the Avalon Chrystie building on the right. just a massive whole in the ground 5 months ago, it's now starting to tower around 14 floors high and has suddenly become visible out our window. with the main structure nearing completion, this building (which, by the way, is about 20 times the size of 195 Bowery) is going up at an incredible fast pace. and it looks to be well built. now that's the way to get construction done! they should send a crew over to 195 Bowery, they'd have it finished in a month.
dangerous streets
we like to see a little history poking through construction around the city, but not when it’s in the form of street repairs done to 1920's standards! these old splintered boards with exposed bent nails used to cover a construction hole are smack in center of the right, bus lane on 1st Avenue at 23rd St. (snapped some shots and then called 311 and reported it…)
construction snaps and wraps
some shots of construction around town... the big showroom on the corner of Bway and Houston (where the "whale of a wash" car wash used to be) is going up fast. Bellevue Hospital is wrapping up the clever expansion they added to the front of the building to maximize their space.
a massive wrapping/scaffolding of the facade of Grand Central Station has been going up over the last few days, wonder what they're doin. now that Chashama and the surrounding buildings are gone, work has started on the massive hole that will be the foundation for the new Bank of America building going up.
hire this man
since we’re on the fashion week tip… here’s a photo shot this morning of beautiful, sexy construction guy, working at the massive site on the corner diagonally opposite the Fashion shows in Bryant Park. omg, look at that smile...
tacky trump terrorizes skyline
that dam Donald Trump, he's ruining the west side skyline with his chain of tacky brown monilith buildings.
hidden history
we love NYC construction. not just for the giant cranes, wonder bread trucks and sexy hard hats, but the amazing peak it can give into New York's past. after seeing our post earlier this week on the Chashama demolition, reader EG sent over this great pic he snapped last month; catching an interesting piece of history peaking out, that's now gone forever...
Chashama today, gone tomorrow
the old Chashama space (they’ve moved) was completely demolished last week as they make way for the building of the Bank of America headquarters going in between 6th Ave and Bway on 42nd St, revealing a crazy painted mural behind the walls…
42nd St subway reveal
after what seemed like a couple years of construction, the scaffolding has come down on the new multi-subway entrance on 42nd between Bway and 7th Ave, revealing a light box mural with a strange yet soothing underwater scene promoting the MTA
goodbye Salvation Army, hello gentrification
the "new boutique loft conversion" that took over our favorite local Salvation Army is underway at 115 Allen St. checking out their official website, we were dumbstruck by the irony of this absurd promotional paragraph... Hey Kids - Come be part of the gentrification of the LES as we edge out the old tenement storefronts in the ethnic capitol of the city!!
"The Lower East Side will always be synonymous in the minds of most New Yorkers, as the very first “ethnic” capitol of the city. As the flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe poured onto the city’s shore, at the turn of the century, they settled on the lower east side of town. The area stretched from Canal Street east and then over to Delancey. The most popular hubs for shopping were Delancey and Orchard Streets. Since most of the immigrants were Jewish, the flavors of the day were Pastrami, Knishes and Pickles and the vehicle of choice was the pushcart. Today, gentrification is everywhere. Wine Bars and snappy boutiques are edging out the old tenement storefronts. There’s no doubt about it, the Lower East Side has become one of the most sought after places to live and real estate has been revitalized in a way no one expected."
and check out Curbed's great coverage
demo-licious
we've been trying to sneak shots through the always-closed gates of the Bank of America headquarters going on between 6th Ave and Bway on 42nd St (that will also soon take over the former location of the Chashama Theater performance space.)
this week some construction karma came around and we saw someone exiting the site. asked if we could step inside for a minute and take some pics and the suited-builder said yes! (he asked that we note that this is the demolition stage. construction soon to begin.) we stood there marveling together at the "bones" of the city, till a crowd gathered and he said it was time to shut the gates again.
hole-some goodness
beginnings of a building on Fifth Ave and 42nd St.
us to construction worker: "how many floors"
construction guy: "it's gonna be about 40 stories"
us: "guess you're on zero then"
guy: "actually we're at minus 3 (big smile)"
The bigger the job, the bigger the trucks, the better.
love NYC construction. there's nothing like peeping inside the city's shell. below are photos from Monday of the giant hole being dug on Chrystie and Houston. does it get any better than this? (click pics to blow up)
and while we're at it... also from this Mon - Avalon Christie Place is going up FAST. a month ago it was a giant hole in the ground. now it's a giant hole filled with cement and rebar.
