Massey Knakal Realty Services has been retained to sell 619 East 5th Street, also known as “The Mildred.” The property is a 40 unit, 6-story walk-up apartment building located on the north side of the East 5th Street cul-de-sac between Avenue B and Avenue C. The freestanding building consists of +/- 25,200 gross square feet and is fully occupied. Apartment layouts consist of 16 studio/one bedroom units, 4 one bedroom units, 9 two bedroom units, 9 three bedroom units, and 2 three bedroom duplex units. The 2 duplex units are located on the ground floor and go down to the lower level of the building with separate entrance/exit ways on the east side of the building. Of the 40 residential units, 27 units are Free Market and 13 units are Rent Stabilized.
Richard Armstrong [Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation] stated, “We are deeply grateful to the City of New York for joining with us in this adventure by allowing a Parks & Recreation property to be the inaugural site of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. We were convinced that the vitality and creativity of this dense, urban East Village location would be the ideal place to launch this experiment. Thanks to the understanding and cooperation of the City, this prediction was realized beyond our best hopes.”
The Lab’s wide range of programs encouraged community engagement and offered insight about today’s dense and changing urban environments, including the need for: the increased activity and involvement of community and neighborhood groups to institute urban change; stronger personal relationships and social interaction within cities to help achieve community cohesiveness; an increased focus on the reuse and revitalization of existing physical and organizational structures; and a growing interest in understanding urban interactions through the use of open-sourced data and models.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab New York received a highly positive response from the public, many of whom have praised its ability to bring individuals together, evoke a sense of community, generate positive energy, provoke questions and then listen to what people have to say, and ignite dialogue that can continue on long after the departure of the physical Lab structure.
You know what the difference between LA and NYC is (having lived in both places I can speak with some some degree of knowledge)?
In LA they don't give a rat's ass about the character of the neighborhood. There's very little consideration given to architectural context, and they have very few buildings that have been around since the 1850s.
Here we take some pride in the fact that our neighborhoods have some character, and saying that someone can do 'anything they want' with an old building may be technically true, but is completely out of the spirit of what makes this city different and why neighborhoods like the LES/EV what they are.
If someone comes in and buys a perfectly nice old building (and one that might actually be landmark-worthy) and then razes it to put up some monolith that has no relationship to the what's around it, well, then that person is, um, well, an idiot.
Having some knowledge of the world that Mr. Schwimmer comes from, it's not strange that he did what he's doing, because in his world oversize garish houses on small lots is what you DO. You could really care less about what your neighbors do or think or even what their house looks like.
Here, however, that's really annoying and I'd even go so far as to say dramatically uncool. Welcome to NY, David. It's clear you're just an interloper with more cash than sense.
Hospital was a store like no other in this city, selling a wide-range of fringe music and sound-art from a variety of genres. Established by Dominick Fernow as an extension of his tape label bearing the same name in 2006, Hospital’s early life as a retail outlet was spent in the basement of Jammyland—a record store specializing in dub and reggae. In those days, you’d walk down the aisle of Jammyland while the clerk eyed you suspiciously until you hit an almost totally vertical ladder to descend into Fernow’s foxhole filled with noise, black metal and experimental cassettes, LPs and CDs. Jammyland eventually left, and Hospital ascended from the basement and took over the ground level storefront at 60 East 3rd Street.
