Renderings courtesy of Williams New York

The future of the empty, former parking lot at 85 Jay Street was revealed last week when developers released new details and renderings of the highly-anticipated project. Named Front & York after its bordering streets, the development will be a 21-story residential and retail complex bringing 728 new apartments (a mix of condos and rentals) to the neighborhood. According to reporting by The Bridge, the development will be the largest yet in Dumbo and will supply enough housing to increase the population of the upscale neighborhood by 25 percent.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

A massive new venue will be serving up food and entertainment on the ground floor of 28 Liberty Street–originally named One Chase Manhattan Plaza–the New York Post reports. Legends Hospitality will be opening a 35,000-square-foot space, designed by noted architect Jeffrey Beers, that will feature live music and a restaurant. The property’s historic Noguchi rock garden will be incorporated into the new venue.

Food, music, film, this way

Aerial view of Co-op City via Wiki Commons

According to Governor Cuomo, the MTA, Empire State Development, and Amtrak have reached an agreement to build four new Metro-North Railroad stations along an underutilized rail line in the east Bronx, giving this very much underserved area access to Penn Station. The “transit desert,” as the press release calls it, will receive stations at Hunts Point, Parkchester/Van Nest, Morris Park, and Co-op City. And considering the Bronx had the most approved residential units last year, the news couldn’t come at a better time. The buried news here is that this will also be the first time Metro-North will come into Penn Station.

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Google Street View of the church

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has voted in favor of giving a calendar spot in the landmark designation process to the First Hungarian Reformed Church of New York, one of few religious properties designed by the noted New York City architect Emery Roth–himself a Hungarian immigrant. The church is also significant for its importance to the Hungarian-American community that settled in the Upper East Side‘s Yorkville neighborhood.

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Photo via Flickr cc

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted today to calendar the designation of four historic districts in Sunset Park, Brooklyn consisting of Sunset Park North, Central Sunset Park, Sunset Park 50th Street, and Sunset Park South, representing the Brooklyn neighborhood’s most cohesive and intact concentrations of high-quality architecture. The neighborhood’s preservation organization, Sunset Park Landmarks Committee, requested consideration for historic district status in 2014.

more on Historic Sunset Park, this way

Over 2,800 residents at the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn lost heat and/or hot water on Monday; via Flickr

In what has become an all-too-familiar story, thousands of public housing residents in New York City were without heat and hot water on Monday, when temperatures dropped to single digits. On the coldest day of the year, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) reported nearly 12,000 residents were experiencing heat and hot-water outages. A similar service disruption occurred roughly one year ago; during two weeks of brutal cold and a major snowstorm, the city had received 22,000 heat and hot water complaints, with a majority of those from NYCHA developments.

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Image courtesy of David Shankbone via Flickr
Last July, Rebuild by Design, a collaborative organization formed to address the affects of climate change, released an RFP for a stewardship partner for the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (ESCR), a reconstruction of the 64-acre, 1.5-mile East River Park. The project, a flood protection system conceived in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and budgeted at $760 million, was the first of three phases in a series of self-sufficient flood zones stretching from West 57th to East 42nd Streets. In October, the Mayor’s Office announced an updated $1.45 billion design that would begin in spring of 2020. 70 percent of the original design was updated, ostensibly to allow flood protection to be in place a year earlier, by summer 2023. But, as the New York Times reports, the new plan, which basically calls for burying the park beneath 8-10 feet of landfill and starting over–has left community groups who participated in the original plan feeling like they’ve been hung out to dry.

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After being on the market for four years, the iconic Halston House at 101 East 63rd Street finally sold to an anonymous buyer for an undisclosed amount last week. The modernist property, one of only three residences in Manhattan designed by famed architect and former Yale School of Architecture dean Paul Rudolph, is best known as the home of designer Halston in the 1970s where he hosted lavish parties attended by the likes of Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Truman Capote, and Jacqueline Onassis. It first hit the market in 2015 for $40 million when it was rumored that art dealer Jeffrey Deitch was interested in making a deal. One year later, the listing received a significant price chop to $28 million. According to a press release, the buyer was taken with the home’s rich cultural history and is an admirer of Rudolph’s architecture.

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Photo by Tia Richards for 6sqft

The official design of the first statue of non-fictional women in Central Park was unveiled last summer. The statue, a sculpture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, is set to be dedicated on August 18, 2020, marking the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationwide. Terrific, right? Not completely. Because, as the New York Times informs us, some women’s rights advocates feel the statue doesn’t show the whole story. One complaint: Stanton and Anthony were white. Included in the statue’s design, a list of women who aided in the cause contains a significant number of African-American women. Why weren’t any of them chosen to be the face of women’s contributions to social equality?

Gloria Steinem weighs in, this way