About Matthew Fenton

Lower Manhattan’s Local News View as Webpage An April Intervention The Hunter and the Hunted, Along with a Haunted Onlooker Isaiah Berlin famously observed that, “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” A Lower Manhattan resident thought of this on a Saturday afternoon in mid-April, when Downtown was locked […]

Going to the Mattresses Lower Manhattan Hunkers Down, as Coronavirus Crisis Grinds On Multiple residents of Lower Manhattan have now tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus, including one tenant at Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City, who has been hospitalized and is breathing with the assistance of a mechanical ventilator, according to a range sources […]

Higher, Wider, Handsomer City Council Announces Design Competition to Improve Pedestrian Access to Brooklyn Bridge Some 15,000 pedestrians and 3,600 cyclists compete with each other and souvenir vendors for as little as ten feet of width on the deck of the Brooklyn Bridge creating an unpleasant (and potentially unsafe) bottleneck. The City Council has partnered […]

Counter Cyclical Another Food Hall Coming to Lower Manhattan, Amid Signs That Community’s Appetite Is Diminishing The historic bank branch located at Broadway and Canal Street will soon be home to a new food hall. A new food hall is coming to a historic (and long neglected) Lower Manhattan building: the former First National City […]

Boat Brawl City Environmental Review of New Ferry Service to Battery Park City Springs a Few Leaks The ferry terminal on the Esplanade (near Vesey Street) is slated this year to begin hosting an additional 60 vessels each day, carrying as many as 2,500 passengers, as the City inaugurates a new ferry service between Battery […]

Super-Tall Stalled Plan for Lower Manhattan’s Highest Residential Tower Put on Hold The “super-tall” residential tower planned for 45 Broad Street (on which work recently halted) was slated to rise 80 stories, to a height of 1,115 feet. In what may be a harbinger of the decades-long  Lower Manhattan real estate boom coming to an […]

Vicinage with Vigor Lower Manhattan Ranked Among Healthiest Districts in New York Two Lower Manhattan neighborhoods rank among the healthiest communities anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City, according to new research by RentHop, an online listings database. The analysis gauged overall healthy by three criteria: the proportion of overall space within each […]

Compensation Dispensation Class-Action Suit on Behalf of Gateway Tenants Reaches Proposed Settlement Attorneys representing Gateway Plaza residents in a class-action suit that began in 2014 have reached a tentative settlement with the LeFrak Organization, the landlords at Battery Park City’s largest residential complex, which they value at $42 million. The suit claimed that conditions such […]

Poor Quay Cuomo Vetoes Legislation Sought by HRPT to Allow Development on Pier 40 The 14-acre former cruise ship terminal situated along the Hudson River waterfront, near West Houston Street, has evolved into a much-prized recreational facility. On New Year’s Eve, Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed a bill passed earlier this year by both houses of […]

Recalling Five Points Epicenter of a Notorious Slum Proposed for Commemoration The Five Points gang, a criminal organization that drew its members from the ethnic immigrant populations that inhabited the neighborhood. In 1831, the City government considered a petition that warned, “that the place known as “Five points” has long been notorious… as being the […]

What If All This Is Not Enough? Pondering Whether $300 Million and 16.5 Feet of Protection Will Matter 85 Broad Street parking garage after Sandy At the October 29 meeting of the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) board, Catherine McVay Hughes raised a potentially troubling question. As BPCA management reviewed plans to spend some $300 […]

Connection Reduction CB1 to Consider Cutbacks in Number of Stops on Free Bus Service A map illustrating the planned cutbacks in the number of stops served by the Downtown Connection free shuttle bus. Each of the nine triangles marked with an “X” represents a stop that is slated for elimination. Tonight (Tuesday, December 3) the […]

Excise Revise CB1 Endorses Plan to Ease Downtown Traffic with Toll Modification Miles Away The Verrazzano Bridge is located more than eight miles from Lower Manhattan, but a multiple studies indicate that tolling patterns there have a significant impact on traffic congestion here. Community Board 1 (CB1) has weighed in on a proposal to change […]

Special Cay Governors Island Caps a Banner Season; Faces Momentous Decisions in 2020 This rendering shows the size and location of the development zones that the de Blasio administration plans for Governors Island, in the hope that the revenue brought in by these projects will fund the public amenities elsewhere on the Island. Governors Island […]

Eighteen Years Later, What about the Children? Schools Agency Begins Belated Outreach Effort to Former Lower Manhattan Students at Risk of 9/11 Illness The dust cloud from the collapsing World Trade Center Tower advancing on PS/IS89 and Stuyvesant High School on the morning of September 11, 2001 photo: NYPD The City’s Department of Education (DOE) […]

Rents Within Reach for 50 Years Lower East Side’s Depression-Era Equivalent to Gateway Plaza Preserves Affordability Through 2069 Knickerbocker Village, in Two Bridges City Council member Margaret Chin has brokered an agreement that will preserve affordability for rental tenants at Knickerbocker Village, a giant apartment complex in the Two Bridges neighborhood, which was built by […]

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Shoot Chin Pushes Legislation to Rein in Production Permits A late-night film shoot on Tribeca’s Staple Street, one of the sites most frequently requested by production companies filming in New York City Council member Margaret Chin is co-sponsoring a package of bills in the municipal legislature to clamp […]

What’s In Store? Amid a Booming Economy, Lower Manhattan Retail Space Languishes Vacant storefronts dot the landscape of Downtown A new report from City Comptroller Scott Stringer finds that in one Lower Manhattan zip code — 10013, which covers parts of western Tribeca SoHo, and the Canal Street corridor in Chinatown — there are 319 […]

Putting the Tension in Detention City Council Approves de Blasio Controversial Plan for New Jail Complex in Lower Manhattan; Legal Challenges Likely A rendering that illustrates the original bulk and shape of the 45-story, prison complex that Mayor Bill de Blasio proposes to erect in Lower Manhattan, which has now been scaled back by approximately […]

Adding Insult to Penury Ridership Survey Indicates That Ferry Coming Soon to Battery Park City Primarily Serves Affluent Riders An analysis of who uses the NYC Ferry service, which the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to expand to Battery Park City next year, shows that riders are primarily white passengers who earn more […]