City Will Spend $90,000-Plus Per Day for 15 Months to Rent Bankrupt Hotel in FiDi for Migrants The administration of Mayor Eric Adams plans to rent a bankrupt Holiday Inn hotel in the Financial District at a cost of more than $34 million per year, and operate it as a shelter for illegal immigrants who have […]
Archives for January 2023
Plaque Removal
What To Do with Erstwhile Heroes Who Now Look Like Villains? On Friday, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by calling for the removal from Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes two sidewalk plaques that honor French government officials who later collaborated with Nazi Germany. One recalls the October […]
Restoration Hardware
Push to Reactivate Beacon and Time Ball in Seaport Aims to Make Everything Old New Again A Lower Manhattan landmark may soon get a facelift. The Titanic Memorial Lighthouse has been hiding in plain sight at the corner of Pearl and Fulton Streets for nearly five decades. But its story stretches back for more than […]
Aerial Combat
Next Generation Wireless Antenna Network Generates Static City Council member Christopher Marte is joining a chorus of demands that the City offer more notice and greater consultation to communities before installing fifth generation cellular phone towers on public streets. The towers, which are each as tall as a three-story building, transmit more robust signals for […]
Using Downtown as a Template for Transforming New York
Proposal from Mayor and Governor Looks to Lower Manhattan as Model, But Risks Replicating Failures as Well as Successes In December, Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams partnered to release a new plan to transform New York City into a metropolis calibrated to the needs a post-pandemic world. This proposal paints a sobering statistical […]
Judge Says Landmarks Ruling Doesn’t Hold Water
Decision Nullifies Legal Permission for Seaport Project to Move Forward Opponents of the plan to build a large residential tower in the South Street Seaport district won a significant victory on January 12, when State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron handed down a stinging rebuke to the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), and by extension, […]