Friday, May 20, 2016

Icon Realty providing free space for Celebrity Catwalk events this weekend


[152 2nd Ave. via the Icon website]

Via the EVG inbox... edited for length...

Icon Realty Management is working with Celebrity Catwalk to provide free space for adoption and fundraising events at available retail spaces in New York City.

Celebrity Catwalk works with local animal rescue organizations to help with fundraising and awareness of national animal rescue. Celebrities include Jamie Foxx, Nicole Richie, Heather Mills and Melissa Rivers.

Icon Realty Management owns and manages over 1,800 apartment units located throughout the City and also has retail space. Icon feels it is important to give back to the NYC community and local neighborhoods and helping save lives of NYC homeless pets is a great addition to our community work.

“We are excited to work with Celebrity Catwalk to provide free space for adoption and fundraising events for animals,” said Terrence Lowenberg, Principal at Icon. “We are committed to giving back to the neighborhoods we are part of in as many different ways as we can and we are proud to do that here.”

Celebrity Catwalk will be hosting a weekend of events called “Paws in the City” including a “Pink Paws for a Cause” reception on May 20th 7-9 pm with an on-site veterinarian doing cancer pet screenings, which will take place at an Icon building. Additionally, on May 21st 5-8pm there will be the “Paws and PJ’s” event, which will also be held at an Icon building.

According to the release, Icon has been working with Celebrity Catwalk for the past four years.

Both events will take place in the vacant storefront at 152 Second Ave. between East Ninth Street and East 10th Street. The dress code for tomorrow evening's event is "Pajamas, Sleepwear, Loungewear."

Find more details on the events here.

As DNAinfo put it in their coverage of this: "The events will occur as Icon’s reputation in the neighborhood stands on shaky ground."

Stabilizing NYC, a coalition of City-funded tenant advocates and neighborhood organizations, named Icon Realty as one of the city's worst landlords last year.

During a rally outside two Icon properties on May 9, Cooper Square Committee and several elected officials accused Icon of employing "construction-as-harassment" tactics to displace rent-stabilized tenants.

Previously

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the ploy. Take horrendous actions against it's tenants, and then try to mask it with a "good" deed and call it "giving back" to the neighborhood. Despicable.

Anonymous said...

Sugar coated shit still taste like shit. If you want good will Icon then stop harassing your rent stabilized tenants, and tripling the commercial rents in your buildings.

Anonymous said...

"Icon will be taking the old cat carriers, evicting the old cat, and renovating it into a new 3 cat occupancy carrier with a real marble countertop! And a dishwasher! Starting rents: $12,000/month."

Anonymous said...

There should be protests at this events.

blue glass said...

give me a break
"Icon feels it is important to give back to the NYC community and local neighborhoods and helping save lives of NYC homeless pets is a great addition to our community work."
after harassing and trying to remove almost all of their tenants, who are they giving back what to?

Anonymous said...

Big deal. They're only doing it because they've had an empty storefront of forever because it's a fucking fortune and nobody wants it or can afford it. Nice PR move. At least it's a nice thing. But Icon are pieces of garbage and this does nothing to help the community, nice try though. Practice what you preach.

m2ndSt said...

do they allow tenants to keep these adopted pets in their apartments?

Anonymous said...

It takes a real scumsucker to offer up words like "Icon feels it is important to give back to the NYC community" with a straight face.

Anonymous said...

Kind of funny watching all these landlords scrambling around, obviously scared they too are going to get Croman-ated.

Anonymous said...

The only things Icon "gives back" to its neighborhood are noise & aggravation.

They don't care about the neighborhood, nor about their tenants' activities. They don't care about people who live in adjacent buildings who are disturbed by their tenants' activities.

Icon must be running scared after Croman's arrest - there is no other plausible explanation for this sudden need to "give back" (in their empty, un-rentable commercial space!).

I live next door to one of their buildings & I know many of the ORIGINAL tenants and have heard & seen what was done by Icon to try to get rid of those tenants.

If Icon wants to "give back" they can start by eliminating the party spaces from their roofs.

Gojira said...

"If Icon wants to "give back" they can start by eliminating the party spaces from their roofs" - and their gardens. 329 East 10th Street has turned into a frat shit show since they gut-rehabbed it and rented it to a group of loud, privileged drunks who think it's their right to go outside weekday nights at 1, 2, 3 AM and of course every single weekend, to drink, hoot and holler, ignoring the fact that they are within 30 feet, hence earshot, of any number of other buildings/apartments/people who might not appreciate being woken up by their charmless antics. Icon does not respond to calls, the 9th Pct. no longer answers calls, and calls to 311 are responded to long after the perps have gone inside and passed out, leading them to declare that there was no problem after all, and close the case.

Anonymous said...

@Gojira: It would be a welcome change if NYC were to establish a noise-hotline where one could get a response WHILE the noise is going on, instead of 8 hours later.

And it would be nice if the 9th Precinct would answer their phones - it is absurd that if you phone the precinct, you're just stuck in voice-mail hell; if you ever do reach a real police officer, my experience is that you're told that you can't expect them to be bothered OR else that I should have phoned 911.

I don't expect either of these situations to change anytime soon, as no one in NYC government gives a shit about actual quality-of-life.

And Icon: ah, yes, they care very much about "homeless animals" and will hold "benefits" for them, but regarding HUMANS who their actions have helped make homeless, nah, they don't really care about them.

Anonymous said...

They're trying to sound like they're hosting a pet adoption fair - but if you read the details about the event, it costs $$ to "attend" and it appears to have as much to do with adopting homeless pets as Icon has to do with preserving affordable housing. It's about "appearances", not about substance - precisely what one would expect of anything Icon is involved with.

Gojira said...

I could not agree with you more, Anon. 5.36.

Anonymous said...

That retail space has been empty for years. This is there way to generate some traffic to get a retail lease.

Anonymous said...

@5:36 If you want something done, show up at the precinct. When they close out your 311 complaint, call the precinct and request the officers name that supposedly went there. Always ask the name of the desk officer also. Go to the community meetings and bring up the lack of response. Etc etc.

Anonymous said...

@12:02pm: Appreciate the advice re: getting officer's name - will do that in future.

But in general, showing up at the precinct is a great idea but (a) doesn't work for me if it's 3 o'clock in the morning, and (b) last time my spouse went there (was hit by bike), the response was to either come back the NEXT day when the right person would be there to take a report OR else go back to scene of accident and call 911 and wait for 911 response to show up. NOT user-friendly. Ended up bringing home the form to report an accident, filled it out & mailed it to wherever - and I'm sure it went right into the circular file. Have never heard another word about it, and it's been at least 6 weeks.

Anonymous said...

Icon you are as bad as Croman and Toledano and are killing the neighborhood .Give back to the neighborhood not these fake good deeds .

Anonymous said...

Obviously they can't rent the space due to the ridiculous price they want to rent the space. So now they do this end run....silly people.....did they think that residents of the EV would fall for it?