But of course

The Real Deal reports (via Curbed):

Two thirds of a 15,000-square-foot East Village playground that was home to a popular flea market is under contract in a quiet, all-cash sale for $10.4 million to the Archdiocese of New York, court documents said.

The playground, divided into three ownership lots, is adjacent to the shuttered Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church on the east side of Avenue A between 11th and 12th streets. The Archdiocese owns the church located on a 13,000 square foot lot, city records show.

The Archdiocese did not respond to requests for comment, but real estate professionals speculated the church parcel and playground would be sold and developed into residential housing.

For further reading:
The Church Ladies (The New York Times)

[Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times]

When the Christodora House became a Greek house

[Photos by Charlie Kerman]

In 1983, when the Christodora House on Avenue B was still abandoned, members of the Tau Delta Phi, Delta Eta Chapter at Cooper Union, placed their Greek letters on the west side atop the 17-floor building. Don't have a lot of details, such as how long the letters remained there. Long enough for a photo opp, of course. Photos of the letters crew are below. (Note the condition of the Christodora...)

One iconic NYC concert venue that is getting renovated instead of torn down or turned into a condo or...

The Times on the renovation of the Beacon:

It almost became a grocery store in the 1970s. In the 1980s, it was nearly jackhammered into a cavernous disco with a triple-tiered restaurant. Somehow it escaped becoming a multiplex. And through 78 years, the neglect of the Beacon Theater in Manhattan — aside from occasional spasms of partial renovation — has often been profound.

The Beacon, at 2124 Broadway, at West 74th Street, is familiar to generations of New Yorkers living on the West Side who grew up there when it was a movie house, performance space and, in recent decades, what some have called the Carnegie Hall of rock rooms.

The Beacon went dark last month for a six-month, $15-million restoration by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, a division of Cablevision Systems Corporation, which announced in 2006 that it was leasing the theater for 20 years. The interior face-lift is to be completed by Jan. 31, in time for a February opening.

The Post has high opinions of LES housing

From today's paper:

Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.

What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an "attic-like space."

Fair warning

More before-and-afters from New York magazine

I had a post yesterday morning on New York's jaw-dropper of a piece this week titled The Glass Stampede. Here are more before-and-after shots from the feature:


11 and 22 East 1st Street


Palladium Residence Hall on East 14th Street.


One Astor Place


Union Square West

Also! I was so delirious looking at all this that I missed the article's reference to "one" Jeremiah Moss on the first pass yesterday.

As Justin Davidson wrote:

In his 1962 poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?

Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms “an ongoing obituary for my dying city.” His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars.

At Howl! Sunday afternoon

Just a few photos.





R.I.P. Eddie Boros.




Unfortunately, Mrs. Grieve and I missed the burlesque review. Luckily, Jill was there. (Blah Blog Blah)

Table Hopping with the International Bar

The Table Hopping feature in the Sunday New York Post put the spotlight on the International Bar, the old haunt on First Avenue between Seventh Street and St. Mark's that was brought back to life this past June. Good choice by the Post. Jeremiah profiled proprietors Shawn and Molly back in June. Oh, and the Table Hopping feature doesn't appear to be online. So here it is:

A poorly timed marketing campaign(?)

On Seventh Street and Avenue A Sunday. I'm assuming this is some sort of lame-o marketing project. (If he's actually missing, then my apologies to his family.)

This campaign is especially tacky when family and friends are in a desperate search for Hannah Upp, the 23-year-old teacher who hasn't been seen since Aug. 29.

"The city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel"

There's a piece in the new New York magazine titled "The Glass Stampede." It begins:

Our city is molting.

Bricks flake away. So do brittle fire escapes, terra-cotta encrustations, old paint, cracked stoops, faded awnings, sash windows, and stone laurels fashioned a century ago by Sicilian carvers. New York is shucking off its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories. In their place, the city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel. Bright, seamless towers with fast elevators and provisional views spring up over a street-level layer of banks and drugstores. In some cities, a building retains the right to exist until it’s proved irredeemable. Here, colossal towers are merely placeholders, temporary arrangements of future debris. New York lives by a philosophy of creative destruction. The only thing permanent about real estate is a measured patch of earth and the column of air above it. The rest is disposable.

And the metamorphosis has sped up. In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated—a rate of change that evokes those time-lapse nature films in which flowers spring up and wither in a matter of seconds. For more than a decade, we have awakened to jackhammers and threaded our way around orange plastic netting, calculating that, since our last haircut, workers have added six more stories to that high-rise down the block. Now that metamorphosis is slowing as the economy drags. Buildings are still going up, but the boom is winding down. Before the next one begins is a good time to ask, has this ferment improved New York or eaten away at the city’s soul?