August’s 10 Most-Read Stories

• Lottery Opens for 57 New Units Near Yankee Stadium, Starting at $494/Month
• Live on the High Line for $596/Month, Lottery Launching for 75 Units at New West Chelsea Tower
• Food Network’s Ina Garten Buys Former House & Garden Editor’s Park Avenue Pad for $4.65M
• Lottery Opens for 50 Middle-Income Units at High-End Rental West End Towers
• Live in a Flashy New Tower Near Hudson Yards for $913/Month, Lottery Opens Tomorrow
• Live in SHoP’s American Copper Buildings for $833/Month, Lottery Launching for 160 Affordable Units
• 79 Affordable Units Up For Grabs in New Luxury Hell’s Kitchen Project, Starting at $913/Month
• My 700sqft: Tour Two Photographers’ Bed-Stuy Brownstone Home, Complete With Shower in Kitchen
• Hudson Heights’ Famed Cliffside ‘Pumpkin House’ Returns for $5.3M
• New York before the invention of air conditioning

This Week’s Features

• Interview: Architect Cary Tamarkin on being his own developer
• 10 easy ways to give your rental kitchen a makeover
• My 350sqft: Inside a fundraising professional’s creatively balanced Park Slope studio
• Art Nerd New York’s Top Event Picks for the Week- 9/1-9/7
• Everything You Need to Know About Affordable Housing: Applying, Getting In, and Staying Put

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Images: American Copper Buildings via 6sqft (L); Lindsay Casale’s Park Slope studio via Angelica Vasquez for 6sqft (R)

You might be able to get some fresh air in Manhattan—if you hang out in Central Park all day. Otherwise, the hazards of breathing city air change just about as quickly as it takes for your Uber to arrive at your destination, according to a new study from MIT Senseable City Lab.

The MIT team came up with a new tool for determining the air-quality conditions and exposure hazards of different areas of the city: cellphones. Using cellphone data collected from New Yorkers over 120 days, and focusing on the prevalence of PM2.5 (a specific noxious particle) at different times of day, the researchers found that New Yorkers who live and work in Manhattan are exposed to more toxic pollution than residents who leave their Manhattan jobs and go home to the far reaches of the outer boroughs.

READ MORE AT METRO NEW YORK…

Every Friday 6sqft rounds up five of the best rental deals showcased on CityRealty.com’s no-fee rentals page, a space where house hunters can find the best concessions being offered by landlords across the city.

If you love being in the thick of it all, there’s no area of New York that pulsates quite like Midtown. With ample entertainment and dining options along every street and on every corner; stunning architecture spanning numerous decades and styles everywhere you look; and no shortage of transit options to deliver you to just about any neighborhood in a matter of minutes, this neighborhood is made for the truest of urban explorers and city enthusiasts. Ahead are five extra-tall modern towers that put the city’s spectacular offer up close and personal—and they’re all giving out free rent!

check out who’s offering deals here

Liberal commentator Keith Olbermann listed his Trump Palace condo on the Upper East Side for $3.9 million in April, publicly citing his opposition to the presidential candidate. Even though he took a loss on the sale (it went through for $3.8 million in July, but he bought it for $4.2 million in 2007), he couldn’t hide his relief: “I feel 20 pounds lighter since I left… If they had changed the name of it to something more positive like Ebola Palace I would have happily stayed.”

Now, just a month after Olbermann’s tweet that he was “FREEEEEEEEE!” and “got out with 90% of my money and 100% of my soul!” the 40th floor spread is back on the market for $3.9 million. As LLNYC reports, the buyer was Syrian businessman Albert Nasser, who has very different reasons for unloading the condo.

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This two-bedroom co-op at 11 East 92nd Street tops the menu for prime location and well-designed space: In Carnegie Hill half a block from Central Park, with spacious bedrooms on opposite sides, the elegant first-floor home offers a wood-burning fireplace and pretty pre-war details like a step-down living room. But the best surprise is the generous private landscaped side and rear garden paradise with its own brick fireplace.

What else comes with that?

6sqft revealed renderings at the beginning of the year of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill‘s Hudson Yards-adjacent, five million-square-foot Manhattan West project, which “will include two office towers, a rental tower with 844 apartments at 435 West 31st Street, retail space and a new landscaped public plaza designed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm responsible for the design of the High Line.” As of Tuesday, September 6th, New Yorkers earning 60 percent of the area median income can apply for 169 affordable apartments in the residential tower; they’ll range from $913/month studios to $1,359/month three-bedrooms.

Find out if you qualify here

Glenwood Power Plant was built in 1906 in Yonkers atop of 6,000 piles in the Hudson River for the electrification of the New York Central Railroad from Grand Central. After sitting vacant since the 1960s, the complex began a new incarnation in 2013 when developer Lela Goren embarked on a project to transform it into The Plant, a one million+ square foot conference, event, retreat, and performance venue, preserving its Romanesque Revival architecture and cultural history.

Another local developer, however, has a vision of their own–to suspend a glass cube from Glenwood’s two smoke stacks and have it function as a floating restaurant. First shared by ArchDaily, the conceptual plan from Big Foot Developers “aims to blend architecture and nature while having a minimal impact on the view of the site.”

More details this way

Queens is one of the most diverse places on the planet, and it’s believed that around 500 languages are spoken here. Fifty-nine of these, however, are endangered, meaning that those who speak these languages are the last people on Earth who know them. This number is staggering, considering the fact that UNESCO puts the worldwide number of “critically endangered” languages at 574, which is why artist Mariam Ghani has embarked on a mapping project that explores these disappearing tongues. First shared by Fast Co. Design, The Garden of the Forked Tongues is an online, interactive graphic and an acrylic mural in the Queens Museum, both of which plot colored polygons to represent how the languages are distributed throughout the borough.

All the info

It doesn’t get any more rustic than this. This custom-renovated, “Adirondack Great Camp Style” cabin is now on the market for $2.4 million. Located in Carmel, in Upstate New York, it looks like the ultimate escape–a gorgeous home decked out with custom-built woodwork and stone fireplaces, located on more than four acres of land. For anybody that’s wants the camping experience in truly luxurious settings, this may be the property for you.

Take the grand tour

• This United Nations office got a midcentury Danish renovation. [Curbed]
• Commercial needs and recreational desires are struggling to coexist in New York’s waterways. [NYT]
• The last two World Trade Center PATH train cars from 9/11 will open to the public for first time. [Untapped]
• Essex Crossing— the Lower East Side’s 1.65 million square foot mixed-use development–reaches a milestone with 175 Delancey Street topping out. [CityRealty.com]

Images: The office of the President of the UN General Assembly by UN Studio (L); 175 Delancey via Dattner Architects (R)

As you would expect from a former editor of one of the world’s most recognized lifestyle magazines, Tina Brown has for the last 20 years found refuge in a spectacular home in an equally spectacular building at 447 East 57th Street. But now the media mogul, who also served as an editor at The New Yorker and founded The Daily Beast, and her journalist husband Harold Evans, who himself boasts quite a resume having held top positions at the likes of U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic, have listed their elegant Sutton Place abode for $9.75M.

According to the listing, the triplex comes with five bedrooms, 5.5 baths and an incredible 19’x64′ private walled-in garden. But what might be the most alluring feature of this maisonette is that it’s more than once served as the backdrop for riveting conversations (and surely some heated arguments) with names like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger and Angelina Jolie. As Brown so breezily told the Journal, “Yes, we love to entertain our friends, but there is always content to the evening, where we try to bring exposure for someone that has something incredible.”

Have a closer look inside this special home

If you rent an apartment from a Victoria’s Secret model, you might expect some pretty posh digs, but one Airbnb customer is suing for the exact opposite. Christian Pugaczewski, a West Hollywood attorney with the New York-based firm Shearman & Sterling, rented a Roosevelt Island apartment from Lyndsey Scott, a Victoria’s Secret model in June. Pugaczewski alleges in his lawsuit that Scott misrepresented her pad on the site. According to Pugaczewski, the $3,075 a month apartment listed as a “comfortable spacious island retreat” was such a disgrace that he had to take refuge on a relative’s couch in the suburbs for two weeks until he could find another apartment.

READ MORE AT METRO NEW YORK…

Joakim Noah–NBA All Star, philanthropist, social activist, and noted free-spirit–signed with the Knicks in June for $18 million a year after spending nine years with the Chicago Bulls. Ahead of his debut season in New York, Noah has scooped up a $5.8 million Chelsea penthouse with an appropriately tricked-out entertaining terrace, reports the Post. The three-bedroom spread at 555 West 23rd Street not only has 2,300 square feet of impeccable indoor space, but the 2,000 square feet of outdoor space boasts a built-in hot tub, gas grill and wet bar, pergola, self-watering planters, and surround sound.

Check out the full bachelor pad

Last week, the city released their long-awaited Midtown East Rezoning plan, a controversial upzoning of the area bound by Madison and Third Avenues and 39th and 50th Streets that would encourage taller, more modern office towers to attract commercial tenants. One of the debated points is the proposal to permit owners of landmarked properties to sell their air rights across the district, whereas now they can only be transferred to sites directly adjacent or above the existing structure. The city has now embarked on an appraisal of these unused development rights, which amount to 3.6 million square feet and will likely be distributed to the 16 new towers that the rezoning would yield over the next 20 years.

As Crain’s explains, hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, which is part of the reason Mayor Bloomberg’s 2013 attempt at the rezoning failed–opponents were concerned about “the difference between what could be built on a given parcel (such as a soaring office tower) and what actually sits on the site (a church or synagogue a few stories tall).”

More details ahead

With lots of space, a wealth of pre-war details and plenty of natural light, this third-floor one-bedroom-plus-office brownstone apartment at 513 Macon Street in the historic Stuyvesant Heights section of Bed-Stuy looks like a pretty good deal at $1,850 a month. It also offers a fully renovated kitchen and bath with new appliances and a convenient location near the A and C trains. Besides trees and townhouses, you’re surrounded by the restaurants and cafes that have been making this neighborhood a new favorite.

See more of this cute Bed-Stuy pad

Earlier this year, sales launched at The NOMA, a 55-unit ground-up condominium developed by Alchemy Properties and designed by Daniel Kaplan of FXFowle Architects. The 26-story building is distinguished by a gray-brick skin and ribbons of gridded windows that pay homage the area’s industrious roots. The “neo-Bauhaus” exterior references the older loft buildings from the early 19th century, the clean lines of the Bauhaus movement, and the massing of the parade of newer residential towers that have cropped up along Sixth Avenue in Nomad.

Get the full scoop on the building

This Bushwick townhouse, at 169 Schaefer Street, has got a little something for everyone: details like the original fireplace mantle and wainscoting for the old house lover, a fancy, renovated kitchen for those who prefer something modernized, and a garden-level duplex rental for a buyer looking to make extra money from a renter. The two-family, semi-detached home was recently renovated to blend the old and the new, and it’s now asking $1.449 million.

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