Arabella 101, the new rental building that began leasing apartments last August, is almost filled to capacity on Avenue D, where luxury apartments and new businesses are quickly and dramatically changing the landscape.
Today The Local got a tour of the 78-unit building, located at 101 Avenue D between 7th and 8th Streets, where only three apartments are still up for grabs. Green, and seeking LEED certification, Arabella 101 offers studios for $2,400-$2,995 a month, and one-bedroom apartments for $2,800-$3,400 a month (although half the units are at an “affordable” rate).
The apartments, which feature bamboo flooring and stainless-steel Whirlpool appliances, are located above The Lower East Side Girls Club. Sean Sorise, the property manager for the building, being developed by The Dermot Company, said they plan on co-hosting events with The Lower East Side Girls Club, and building a “strong partnership” together. Read more…
Today, we tip our hat to a couple of locals who are making the East Village a greener, cleaner place.
Steven Burke Christine Datz-RomeroAt the Union Square Greenmarket one Saturday morning, Christine Datz-Romero milled around the back of her utility van, handling clear bags of what looked like dirt. Wearing airy gardening clothes and a friendly smile, she moved with a calm energy and a spryness that belied her age of 53.
The material in the bags was compost. Ms. Datz-Romero, Manhattan’s mystic of food waste, was there to sell it, teach about it, and collect materials to make more of it.
Since 1994, Ms. Datz-Romero and the Lower East Side Ecology Center, which she co-founded 25 years ago, have run a collection service that takes local kitchen scraps, diverts them from landfills, and turns them into compost – a rich organic material that helps to provide plants with nutrients and to sequester carbon when added to soils.
The group currently collects four tons of food waste per week, from 1,500 households. Read more…
Stephen Rex BrownThe neighborhood’s top shop for photocopies, the Source Unltd., is one of 11 business in the Lower East Side and East Village that scored grant money to make environmentally friendly upgrades.
Thanks to the money from the Lower East Side Ecology Center — $1,000 is the maximum grant available — the copy store bought a new awning that will decrease its air conditioner use. It went up last week.
“We’re on the sunny side of the street here, so it makes the air conditioner run a little less, especially with the summer coming up,” said Santo Mollica, who opened Source Unltd. in 1982. “From noon to four we get bombarded, you know.” Read more…
Kathryn Doyle A beach under the Brooklyn Bridge is
inundated with sewage waste and runoff
from South Street in rainy weatherSwimming pools in the East River? Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer floated the idea in a video introduction to the Blueway, a project that would revitalize a stretch of the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge to Midtown East. And it’s not as farfetched as you’d think: the historically polluted waterway is perfectly swimmable by Environmental Protection Agency standards. There’s just one problem: sewage overflows.
Dan Tainow, education director at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, explained the issue to local residents yesterday during a tour of the East River that doubled as a discussion of the Blueway project. Due to the age of New York City’s sewer system, he said, wastewater from household sinks, showers and toilets shares the same set of pipes as runoff from city streets.
Most of Lower Manhattan’s wastewater travels through this pipe system to the Newtown Creek plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where it is cleaned, filtered and released into the East River. But during the fifty to sixty rainy days per year when gushes of street water could overwhelm the pipe system and force sewage back up into homes, the sewage is diverted directly into the East River by Combined Sewage Outflows, or CSOs. Read more…
