Adding to its unique character, Extell’s One Manhattan Square will soon be home to NYC’s largest outdoor private garden, detailed in a new video released today by the developer. The proposal, designed by urban planning and landscape architecture firm West 8, includes more than an acre of garden space for residents to both work and socialize, boasting indoor and outdoor grilling spaces, ping-pong tables, a putting green, children’s playground, adult tree house, tea pavilion, and an observatory made for stargazing.

Watch the video here

The Lower East Side will be losing a neighborhood fixture next year. Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema at 139-143 East Houston Street will be closing its doors when its lease expires in January 2018, to make way for a new mixed-use development with retail and office space. As the Post reports, the theater, which was built in 1889 and first opened in 1909 as the Houston Hippodrome, was sold for $31.5 million to developers East End Capital and K Property Group.

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Ben Shaoul founded Magnum Real Estate Group in 1999, focused on renovating small, rundown rental apartments. After growing its portfolio extensively over the past five years to includeretail properties, condos, and even a dormitory, the firm is now one of the city’s leading ground-up development companies. Their impressive portfolio includes 389 East 89th Street on the Upper East Side, 100 Avenue A in the East Village, and 100 Barclay in Tribeca, as well as their latest development that’s on the rise at 196 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. Adjacent to the famed Katz’s Delicatessen, the building will ultimately top out at 11 stories tall and host 94 condos when it’s completed next year. CityRealty recently caught up with Shaoul to discuss the project, its design, and the ever-evolving Lower East Side.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH BEN ON CITYREALTY…

Rendering of LES Target courtesy of Beyer Blinder Belle

New York City is experiencing a Target-takeover. The retailer has just signed a lease to open a 22,500 square-foot store in the Lower East Side at Essex Crossing, a 1.9 million-square-foot development stretching across several Manhattan blocks. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the new store will be located on the second floor of 145 Clinton Street, a 15-floor tower currently under construction. A Trader Joe’s supermarket will be on the lower level and apartments will be housed above.

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While today’s Lower East Side has no shortage of bars and clubs, New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century may have imbibed way more than current Big Apple dwellers. Slate shared this map drawn in 1885 and published in the Christian Union that details the number of bars per block in the neighborhood. Although the coinciding article described the social effects of LES drinking culture, overall the report found residents to be quite happy. It may have had something to do with the 346 saloons found in the area, compared to today’s mere 47 establishments.  Find out more

At the beginning of last month, the first affordable housing lottery opened for Essex Crossing at Beyer Blinder Belle‘s huge mixed-use building 145 Clinton Street, where 104 below-market rate units were up for grabs. As of today, the second lottery is open, this time at Dattner Architects‘ 175 Delancey Street, a 14-story, 100-unit building at the megadevelopment’s site 6 that will also offer ground-floor retail, medical offices for NYU Langone, and a senior center and job training facility from the Grand Street Settlement. These 99 one-bedroom apartments are set aside for one- and two-person households that have at least one resident who is 55 years of age or older. They’re also earmarked for those earning 0, 30, 40, 60, and 90 percent of the area median income and range from $396/month to $1,254/month.

Find out if you qualify

It’s been almost exactly a year since Beyer Blinder Belle released renderings of Essex Crossing‘s site 5, a $110 million, 15-story mixed-use building that will give way to 73,000 square feet of retail space, where Trader Joes and Planet Fitness will move in, and a 15,000-square-foot adjacent park. Located just a block southwest of the Manhattan entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge at 145 Clinton Street, it will have 211 rental units, half of which will be reserved for low- and middle-income individuals. These 104 affordable apartments are now available through the city’s online housing lottery, the first of the mega-development’s 561 affordable residences to come online. They’re set aside for those earning 40, 60, 120, and 165 percent of the area media income and range from $519/month studios to $3,424/month three-bedrooms.

Find out if you qualify

From Brooklyn Blackout Cake to Eggs Benedict, New York City is filled with gastronomic firsts. But while we have a clear origin for most of our foodie favorites, the New York Egg Cream is not one of them. This frothy sweet beverage is made from Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, seltzer water, and a splash of milk, which makes its story even more confusing since the beloved drink contains neither eggs nor cream. There are a few theories currently in circulation about the name and origin of the Egg Cream, each varying in time and circumstance, but most confirming that the drink originated on the Lower East Side among Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

All the mysterious theories

DoBro (Downtown Brooklyn), MiMa (Midtown Manhattan), Hellsea (Hell’s Kitchen meets Chelsea), BoCoCa (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens)–typically we blame brokers and real estate marketers for inventing outlandish neighborhood acronyms as a way to make their listings and developments seem unique and in uncharted territory. But this time, the writers over at Travel + Leisure have decided to try their hand at the name game, dubbing “NoLo” the next trendy ‘hood. “There’s no cooler neighborhood mashup,” they say, than “the parts of Soho where Nolita bumps against the Lower East Side.” Here you’ll find “a community of restaurants, shops, cafes and drinking spots that exude the city’s cutting edge style.”

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Despite the rapid influx of new development that’s popping up in the controversial Two Bridges area, the Chinatown-meets-Lower East Side neighborhood’s first project, One Manhattan Square, still reigns as the tallest. In fact, when it reaches its full 823-foot height, Extell’s 80-story condo at 252 South Street will have the highest rooftop between downtown and Midtown Manhattan. Now that sales have commenced, CityRealty paid the construction site a visit, noticing that the double-slab tower is already more than 30 stories tall and has begun to receive its reflective glass skin.

More views ahead

The 20-story, 300-room project at 185 Bowery was constructed in Poland and shipped to New York in 210 pieces. Owned by Dutch hotel developer/operator Citizen M with Brack Capital Real Estate, the high-rise hotel at 185 Bowery is more than half done, reports the Wall Street Journal. It will be the largest permanent modular hotel project ever in NYC. Modular construction is more common in Europe; the developer already has nine hotels up and running and 14 in the works. They’ve used the technique of stacking sealed, factory-made units containing finished hotel rooms on the majority of those projects.

Check out photos of the sealed hotel pods arriving

The historically low-income, low-slung neighborhood of Two Bridges–the area along the East River, near the footings of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges where the Lower East Side meets Chinatown–has become a high-rise hotbed over the past year. Despite the controversy that the four planned projects, all upwards of 700 feet, have caused, they’re moving along fairly swiftly, and The Lo-Down now has the big reveal for the final site–Starrett Group‘s 259 Clinton Street. Perkins Eastman Architects have designed the 724-foot, 62-story glass tower, which will have ground-floor retail and 732 apartments, 25 percent of which will be permanently affordable with a good chunk being set aside for low-income seniors.

More details and renderings ahead

Though he’s usually cast as the villain, off screen, Willem Dafoe leads a much less destructive life, splitting his time between Rome, Los Angeles, and NYC with his Italian-born wife Giada Colagrande. While in the big apple, the actor resides in a West Village penthouse, but in 2005, he and his son Jack purchased a Lower East Side co-op for $606,000. It went on the market for $850,000 in May, and judging by the listing photos (a little bit artsy, a little bit messy), it was either the younger Dafoe (a public-policy researcher) or another renter who was living there. The Observer reports that it’s now sold above ask for $860,000.

See the place here

L to R: One Manhattan Square, 247 Cherry Street, 260 South Street, and 271-283 South Street. The image above, created by CityRealty, depicts the possible massing of the new towers; No official design has been released

When L+M Partners and CIM Group announced plans last May for two 50-story towers at 260 South Street, their project joined a growing list of controversial towers sprouting up along the Two Bridges waterfront, including Extell’s 823-foot condo One Manhattan Square, JDS and SHoP Architects’ possible 1,000+ foot rental at 247 Cherry Street, and Starret Group’s shorter rental at 275 South Street. Now, in what’s becoming a trend for the Lower East Side-meets-Chinatown ‘hood, L+M and CIM have revealed plans for their project that actually show increased heights of 69 and 62 stories, or 798 and 728 feet. As first reported by The Lo-Down, the developers plan to include up to 1,350 apartments, 338 of which will be reserved as affordable, senior housing, ground-floor retail, landscaped outdoor spaces by Mathews Nielsen, and an upgraded flood-protection system.

Renderings and more details ahead