The building at the corner of 13th Street and First Avenue (219 First Avenue to be exact), has been a boarded-up mess/construction site the last four or so years... Here's a shot of the corner from 2007....
(
Via Flickr)
However, there has been some slow progress to report of late.
According to the work permits, an additional two floors are being added on top of the existing four-story structure.
For starters, we're intrigued by the new roof...
Oh, anyway, if you look carefully at the building, there seems to be something off about it...
like that seventh floor (technically the attic?)
Which may be one reason
people have called in nearly 60 complaints about this site since 2005. (Several callers reported seeing squatters coming and going from inside the abandoned site.) The last
complaint was logged in late summer:
CLR STS AT ABOVE CONSTRUCTION SITE, PERMIT POSTED IS FOR 2 ADDITIONAL STORIES, BUT 3 STORIES ARE BEING BUILT. WORK IS BEING DONE OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF THE PERMIT #104894152-01 AL
So now what, lop off that slanted roof?
UPDATED: Per a commenter, there was
approval for the addition.
Meanwhile, you may recall what used to be in this space -- the Mee Noodle Shop. As
NY Songlines noted, it "was Allen Ginsberg's favorite Chinese -- and mine, too, I guess. It closed in 2005 after the building started to collapse."
As the
Times noted in its obituary on Ginsberg from April 1997:
Ah Lan Chong, a waitress at Mee's Noodle Shop and Grill on First Avenue, which was Mr. Ginsberg's favorite Chinese restaurant, remembered Mr. Ginsberg in simpler, less heavily freighted terms.
Sure, she knew he was someone important, someone artistic. She could tell that from overheard conversations and from the way other diners would sometimes point at him when he entered. But to Ms. Chong, he was mainly the unfussy man with a dependable hankering for steamed flounder in ginger sauce. "When he came in," she said, "we knew what he wanted."
