A program that serves needy East Village and Lower East Side immigrants is in peril, as a significant chunk of its funding will disappear when its sponsor, the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, closes next month.
After last-ditch efforts to keep the Cabrini Center open fell through and the new owner of its building at Fifth Street and Avenue B, Benjamin Shaoul’s Magnum Realty Group, announced in March that it would go ahead with redevelopment plans, it became apparent that the nursing home’s 240 residents would be forced to relocate.
Those elderly residents won’t be the only ones affected by the closure on June 30. The Cabrini Center also sponsors Cabrini Immigrant Services, a Lower East Side organization that, according to its director Sister Kelly Carpenter, feeds about 16,000 people a week. City, state, and federal grants totaling $94,000 pay for most of the meals, but the cost of administering them has, to this point, been covered by the center. Read more…
G.V.S.H.P.A rendering presented at a
previous C.B. 2 meeting.
Councilwoman Rosie Mendez and the Merchant’s House Museum are opposing plans to demolish a garage next to the historic structure and replace it with a nine-story hotel.
A statement released by the museum on East Fourth Street near Bowery indicates that at a meeting tonight, staffers along with Councilwoman Mendez will ask Community Board 2’s Landmarks and Public Aesthetics committee to recommend that the city deny a construction permit for the proposed hotel, on the grounds that it would “pose a beyond-serious threat to the structural stability of the house.” Read more…
Councilwoman Rosie Mendez joined around 50 tenants of three buildings on a stoop at 50 East Third Street yesterday evening to protest the unexpected non-renewal of their leases.
Last month, the Local reported that roughly 17 market-rate tenants from 50, 54 and 58 East Third Street received letters demanding that they move out when their leases expire over the summer. Their landlord, Abart Holdings, is in negotiations to sell the buildings.
Yesterday the tenants, some strumming guitars and singing protest songs, assembled outside of their buildings along with the councilwoman and representatives from activist organizations Good Old Lower East Side and the Cooper Square Committee. Read more…
The Department of Buildings smacked a partial Stop Work Order on the former Mars Bar site today. A sign posted on the plywood construction fence at First Street and Second Avenue, where a 12-story condo is being erected, indicates that “all chopping and saw cutting on foundation walls” must cease.
It’s uncertain what provoked the order (we’ll let you know what we hear from the D.O.B.), but it isn’t the first hiccup at 25 East First Street. According to paperwork, a partial Stop Work Order was served last month after the Department of Buildings received a complaint that a crane appeared to be unsafe, and an inspector found that the project’s engineer of record hadn’t signed off on it. That issue has now been resolved.
In December, before the dive bar was toppled, another stop work order was issued after a worker was injured during a ceiling collapse.
Before today’s May Day festivities kick off, let’s turn the clock back 22 years, to May 1, 1990. That’s when an affordable-housing festival in Tompkins Square Park ended in a riot in which 28 police officers were injured and 29 people – some of them activists, anarchists, and squatters who had participated in the better known riots two years earlier – were arrested.
The building, expected to be completed in the summer of next year, will replace a vacant one-story building at 227 East Seventh Street, near Avenue C. Plans to demolish the existing building, which was built around 1980, were approved by the Department of Buildings late last month.
The new structure also spells the end of a big Jim Joe tag. An email to the ubiquitous artist seeking comment bounced back. Read more…
A pair of items offer a rare bit of good news for those who rent. First, a change in policy in the New York State Unified Court System will eliminate easy access to so-called tenant blacklists, The Village Voice reports. Landlords have been able to buy the lists of people who participated in housing court cases from a third party as a way to weed out troublesome tenants. Now, plaintiffs and defendants in court cases will remain in the public record, but the lists of names in bulk will no longer be available for purchase online. Concern over the blacklists is real: it even came up in the comments of our coverage of the landlord-tenant fight brewing on East Third Street. In other news, the Post reports that the annual rent increase for rent-stabilized apartments will likely be the smallest its been since 2002.
The former home of Vishwa Dharma Mandalam, a Hindu temple, may soon be getting some less austere residents. The two-story mixed-use building at 96 Avenue B will double in size if an application filed on Tuesday with the Department of Buildings is approved, and the two additional floors will house a duplex apartment with a penthouse overlooking Avenue B.
Armand Pierro, an owner of the building, said the units would be strictly rentals, although he has no takers as of yet. “They’re going to be high-end rentals, whatever that means,” he told The Local. Read more…
The Wall Street Journal reports that Moby is putting his 3,000-square-foot, loft-style penthouse at 7 Bond Street on the market for $6.5 million – $2.75 million more than what he paid for it in 2009. Why’s he unloading it? The real-estate-savvy musician, who has also owned a small condo on Mott Street, tells The Journal, “I moved to L.A and recognized the absurdity of having two apartments in New York City two blocks away from one another.”
Less than a year ago, David Moster, a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., paid a $5,625 broker fee to move into his apartment at 50 East Third Street. “It was a huge hassle moving last summer,” he recalled. Now he’s getting ready to deal with the headache again. Earlier this month, his landlord, Abart Holdings, sent him a letter informing that the building would be sold within a few months and that his lease would not be renewed.
Mr. Moster and his two roommates, who pay $3,000 per month for their three-bedroom unit, are among an estimated 17 residents of the building and of two neighboring ones at 54 and 58 East Third Street who were given 60 days to find a new place to live. Yesterday, many of those tenants met to discuss their options. Read more…
The Local has discovered that Joseph Chetrit, the real estate mogul who last night faced Community Board 4’s disapproval of his controversial plan to bring a rooftop extension to the Hotel Chelsea, plans to convert an office building at 708 Broadway into another hotel. As with the Chelsea, the developer is seeking to add another story to the building at Broadway between East Fourth Street and Washington Place. An application filed with the Department of Buildings on Tuesday estimates that the conversion will cost a little over $9.5 million.
The application proposes that 127,064 square feet of space in the building, which comprises ten stories on the Broadway side and eight stories on the 404 Lafayette Street side, be divided into 249 units. Gene Kaufman, the architect who is also working on the Chelsea’s renovation, is listed as the applicant of record. Neither Mr. Kaufman nor the notoriously press-shy Mr. Chetrit have responded to The Local’s interview requests. Read more…
The owner of the building that housed Great Jones Lumber is seeking to add four floors of residential space, with high-profile architect Richard Metsky helming the enlargement.
Joseph Lauto, who owned the lumber business and is now manager of 45 Great Jones Street LLC, which owns the building, told The Local that the ground floor would remain a commercial space; the second and third floors would be converted to residential space and two new floors of apartments would be added. An application filed with the Department of Buildings indicates six new residential units will be added at a cost of $1,138,000. Read more…
The head of the organization that spent $20,000 rebranding a part of Vancouver as The East Village says the name isn’t a rip-off of our East Village. “People have said we’re copying the East Village in New York, when we’re not,” Tricia Barnes of the Hastings North Business Improvement Association tells Canada’s News1130. “There are East Villages around the world.”
The high-profile owners of the long-vacant “mystery lot” on 13th Street have applied for a construction permit, setting the wheels in motion for what promises to be a blockbuster eight-story condominium.
The application, filed last Thursday by developer Scott Shnay, indicates that the lot between Second and Third Avenues will get an eight-story mixed-use building containing 71 residential units. (The Post previously reported that the building would be a condo containing 82 units, to be completed late next year.) According to the application, which was under review as of Monday, the project will boast 5,275 square feet of commercial space (Brokers Weekly initially reported 4,500 square feet).
The architect of record is Todd Poisson of BKSK Architects, the firm behind 25 Bond Street, where a $19.5 million apartment was briefly home to Will Smith. In addition to Mr. Shnay and his brother Abe, developers said to be attached to the lot, which sold in November for $33 million, include Ironstate Development (a partner in The Standard East Village) and Charles Blaichman, whose projects include the Soho House building, the Richard Meier-designed 173/176 Perry Street, and an aborted hotel project with Jay-Z.
A couple of weeks ago, the founders of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space told The Local they had started hosting “spontaneous tours” of squats and community gardens. This past weekend, we joined just such a tour, as longtime squatter activist Frank Morales took visitors on a winding, nearly three-hour journey through the interiors of four urban homesteads.
Standing outside C-Squat, where MoRUS is to be housed, Mr. Morales described homelessness as “the consequence of state repression.”
“That was the point of entry for our taking buildings – to create communities of self defense, to defend against being forcibly moved into the shelter system,” he said.
Homesteaders recalled the raucous days of the late 1980s, when squatters controlled as many as two dozen East Village and Lower East Side buildings. Read more…
Suzanne RozdebaDorothy Rasenberger, Elizabeth Herring, and Joy Garland protested outside of the Cabrini Center this afternoon.
The staff of the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation were still breaking the news to elderly residents that their home on Avenue B and East Fifth Street would soon close, leaving some of them in tears, a family member of a resident said today.
While the meeting regarding the closure was going on, a small group of protesters outside toted signs saying “Occupy Cabrini!” and “Save Cabrini! From Condos.” The mix of around 10 locals and family members of residents decried the failure of the new owner of the property, Benjamin Shaoul, to secure a deal to keep it open. They also blamed local politicians for not doing enough to facilitate the negotiations. Without the deal, Cabrini will almost certainly become apartments of some kind.
“My mother turned 101 on Feb. 1, and she’s been here for two years. It’s a shame,” said George Matranga, 70. “Six months ago, she’s telling me that they’re going to make the second and third floor condominiums. I’m going, ‘Mom, you’re hallucinating.’”
He added that he received a packet last week detailing the closing and how Cabrini would help residents with the transition. Read more…
A Housing Court judge initially moved to evict a resident of Two Bridges who owes over $14,000 to the New York City Housing Authority yesterday, but then postponed the ruling, leaving 67-year-old Patricia James fearful that she’ll end up in a shelter.
During a hearing in Housing Court yesterday, Judge Verna Saunders initially granted a judgment of possession for the Housing Authority and asked both parties to work out a stipulation agreement. But Ms. James ultimately rejected a proposal that would’ve allowed her four months to vacate her apartment if she paid the back rent. She argued that the Authority’s requested sum of over $14,000 didn’t reflect changes in her income over the past year. Read more…
Efforts to keep the building that houses the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in use as a nursing home have proven fruitless, as Cabrini announced today that it will close its doors and will likely strike a deal that would move its beds to Brooklyn under a new operator. Benjamin Shaoul, whose company Magnum Realty Group bought the building at Avenue B and Fifth Street late last year, plans to start redevelopment immediately after the Center’s closure – likely in the summer.
“This week we are informing patients and their families and providing employees a three-month WARN notice required by the State Department of Labor,” Patricia Krasnausky, the CEO and President of Cabrini, wrote in a letter addressed to the elected officials who had tried to keep the Center’s 240 elderly residents in the East Village. According to the letter, which you can read below, a private nursing home operator in Borough Park is negotiating to acquire 117 of the Center’s beds for around $2.5 million, with plans to move them to Brooklyn, pending the state’s approval.
Even with that income going toward closure costs, said Ms. Krasnausky, Cabrini will have to spend another $4.5 million on its shutdown, due to the costs of unemployment insurance, pension funding, and severance pay. Read more…
Daniel Maurer76 Third Avenue (l) and 100 Third Avenue (r)
In case you’re a voyeur for this sort of thing: scaffolding and construction netting has gone up at 76 Third Avenue, the building next to the former home of Nevada Smiths that’s due to be replaced with a building designed by controversial architect Karl Fischer. A full demolition permit was issued on Feb. 24. Meanwhile, the building that will house the new Nevada Smiths, a block away at 100 Third Avenue, has been completely stripped of scaffolding. Might as well take a look, yes?
Update: According to Department of Buildings records, a permit to demolish the former Nevada Smiths building at 74 Third Avenue was issued today. Expect it to be shrouded soon as well.
Patricia James, the Two Bridges resident who is locked in a $14,000 showdown with the New York City Housing Authority, says the Authority has withdrawn an offer that would’ve let her stay in her home of more than 30 years.
Last week, in an e-mail sent before her Tuesday hearing in housing court, Ms. James said the notice had been given to her attorney, Kofi Scott: “The Housing Authority’s lawyer advised [Mr. Scott] that her supervisor was not pleased that she had been contacted by [The Local] and the deal may be off the table!” Mr. Scott said that N.Y.C.H.A. had left a message on his answering machine, terminating a verbal agreement to let Ms. James stay in her apartment if she handed over a check for over $14,000 in back rent and if she agreed to two years of probation. Read more…
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards. Read more »
Evan BleierSister Kelly Carpenter
