In the Annals of SWOs

Across the avenue and down from 669 Fifth, there are more dubious examples of construction. Poor 20th Street (Fourth/Fifth) has three less-than-contextual buildings rising on a low-scale mixed use block.  At 213 a five-story multi-unit building had a SWO rescinded this week. I tried to find out more about the building, but couldn't find an approved new building permit at the DOB site, only a new building application filed a year ago, which is still listed as disapproved/pending.  We'll put this down to a) a bureaucratic error, and/or b) my limited site-search abilities, and assume there is an approved permit lurking around somewhere or other.  The pending application listed fourteen residential units, which suggests rather small rental apartments were planned.

                                           








213 20th Street

Up the block at 231, where a four-story addition to a commercial building (six units) is was underway, a partial SWO has been in effect since May:

NO ROOF PROT @EXP2/4.NB TOPPED OFF OFF 5 STY.NO FDNY PERMIT FOR OXY/ACTEYLENE,NO FIREGUARD,NO TEMP/PERM STAIRS

Violations that include work without a permit & safety issues remain open.

231 20th Street

At the bottom of the block a third building is going up, at 187. This one is an eight-unit number.  A SWO was put in place last month, for safety violations, but this was also rescinded this week.  We're suffering construction fatigue, but will post a picture of the site shortly.

At Home

Olympus

Links

Listen to Billy Echeverria, Nicholas Rowe, Kurtis Jones and Charles Stewart talk about kite flying on Coney Island beach (Coney Island History Project)

New Amsterdam Stories: A digital dig to link 17th century records between Amsterdam and New York City (The John Adams Institute)

A Young Black Girl's View of Harlem at the Height of the Great Migration (New Yorker)

70 Artists Losing Gowanus Studio Space as Arts Group Moves to Sunset Park (DNAinfo)
Artists on the move - displaced from one gentrified neighborhood to perpetuate another cycle of change farther south?  

Hundreds March to Create 'Hate-Free Zones' in Queens Neighborhoods (DNAinfo)

On Staten Island, a centuries-old waterway helps shape new wetlands
New Creek will be a highly engineered waterway, but one that's closer to the creek that existed centuries ago  (Curbed)

New York State of Mind: Megan Bradbury's literary portrait of a city through its art (BBC)
Megan Bradbury’s debut novel Everyone is Watching is a portrait of modern New York from the perspective of the artists who have made it their muse. Zooming in on the lives of four creative figures - Walt Whitman, Robert Moses, Robert Mapplethorpe and Edmund White - it describes the way art influences a city and vice versa, from Walt Whitman’s visionary urbanism at the end of the 19th century, through to Edmund White’s nostalgia for a city that has all but disappeared by the start of the 21st.

Whitechapel Bell Foundry to ring in new era as owner sells site
The UK’s oldest manufacturing business – which cast Big Ben and the Liberty Bell – is on the move for the first time since 1739  (Guardian)

Campaigners try to save Sheffield library from becoming five-star hotel (Guardian)

On Optimism and Despair - Zadie Smith's talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize (New York Review of Books)

And celebrating a birthday this week:

Sinkhole opens on 23rd on Tuesday afternoon

Driver injured as school bus nearly plunges into Brooklyn sinkhole (Daily News)

City Department of Environmental Protection officials arrived on scene (23rd between Fifth & Sixth) to check the street’s water mains, and an official with the city Office of Emergency Manager said workers were looking to identify a nearby “gushing sound.”

Photos to follow shortly, but at least the one above (taken Monday) is thematically apt.

Wednesday morning on 23rd

A Christmas Favorite

Back again on 22nd Street 

The Contractor Has Left The Building

I haven't paid too much attention to 669 Fifth Avenue.  Plans were filed for an Alt 1 vertical expansion back in 2005, though work didn't get going until 2013.  The building's been shrouded in scaffolding and netting ever since, and has become one of those peripheral construction hulks that are all too common round here.  Work seems to have limped along over the years, accompanied by failure to maintain and safety violations (scaffolding unsafe and/or without permits). The DoB information for 669 isn't very helpful with alteration details; the virtual job folder is empty.

A few days ago I noticed a new(ish) SWO on the building:

BORO COMM HAS ORDERED ALL WORK STOPPED UNDER PERMIT# 302252390 11/10/16.(CONTRACTOR WITHDRAWAL)

It seems a good partner for 657-665 Fifth, at the other end of the block, now entering its twenty-first month of inactivity.

Seasonal Style

I'm fond of the festive decorations at Batrouni's.  There's a wreath above the auto shop, but I prefer the main attraction. A string of lights adorns a shrublet which is perched atop the unwrapped Cadillac DeVille. Happy Holidays to you too!  I don't know how much longer the business will be around, with the lot advertised for sale, but I hope it's a while longer.

The lights look nice at night!

W. 47th

My little pocket camera died in the Diamond District Friday.  Here's its last bleary shot.

On Third

Morning in midtown, a cafe on Third.  The place was nothing special, but the food was decent. Mostly the customers were getting their food to go, and only a few of the tables were occupied.  On one side of me a trio of construction workers talked loud and ate quickly.  They kept their hard hats on. On the other, a couple of tables away, an elderly lady was breakfasting alone.  She was taking her time, all too well-versed in the careful arts of self-sufficiency.  In looks she was a Sitwell through and through, with the long, dolorous face and hooded eyes.   I glanced at her every so often, though I didn't want to stare too hard. There was something of the 1940's in the good wool coat, the white powdered cheeks, the arched, querulous eyebrows.  She was a faded queen. When I left, I couldn't help but turn her way directly. We smiled at each other, her face lit up, and beauty flooded in. Imagine the palest of blues, a thin, light, almost transparent shade, and that was the color of her eyes. Of course she'd commanded hearts and kingdoms.

Edith Sitwell

Liquors, Wines

From the B63

Let's Go Back ...

If you could escape the current state of national, nay global angst we've all been suffering these last several weeks, would you take the chance on a little time travel?  I can't promise the period of your choice - that Eden of childhood, or the city in that decade you loved the best - but I have found a pocket of the past in the most unlikely setting.  This afternoon, in the sullen climes of the Cadman Plaza Post Office, between windows 6 & 7, an LED display is counting down the hours til the Millennium. I captured the clock this afternoon, the 8th of May, 1998, with only 520 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes and 35 seconds left of the twentieth century.

I thought of Ray Bradbury.  If I strayed off the customer waiting line could I possibly make the difference?

Food

Refuge from the rain for a white slice at Luigi's, where Meet John Doe is playing on the TV.   Gio's sitting at a table, his attention half on pizza and half on the screen.  The place is a living room, where familiar guests drop by.

I head down to Fourth and find the top of the Uneeda building gone.  Underneath the scaffolding there's a woman with a cooler - lunches for construction workers.   It's a good spot to sell food, with three of the corners at 15th active.  Chicken & rice & salad & hot sauce & home.

Nuts and Oddballs on Fifth

Links

When Cars Ruled the Night: New York City, 1974-1976 (New Yorker)

The automobiles are the stars here, but the backdrops are equally striking. They immerse the viewer in the unreconstructed New York of the era between the Fun City nineteen-sixties and the land-grab madness of the eighties. Other collections of photographs documenting those years tend to focus on extremes of misery, on infrastructure breakdown, on evanescent outbreaks of colorful behavior that will disproportionately resonate in later decades. Here you see the city as it actually was.

The South Bronx of America: photographs by Mel Rosenthal - at the Museum of the City of New York through January 8, 2017 (Guardian)


More on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art, on view at the Queens Museum through February 19, 2017 (City Lab)

When maintenance work is ignored, it may be at society’s peril. When it is celebrated, the results expand our very notions of beauty. Ukeles should be better known, and so should the spirit of her work.

How 'Maintainers,' Not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn (City Lab)

More flooding in Gowanus, & the Lightstone development has only made things worse (Pardon Me for Asking)

Sunset Park pol hosts a march for a day of unity and solidarity (Brooklyn Reporter)

John Lewis: ‘Read everything.  Be Kind. Be Bold.' In conversation with an American hero (Literary Hub)

More Than Coffee: New York’s Vanishing Diner Culture (NY Times)

Shakespeare Trilogy review – Donmar's phenomenal all-female triumph (Guardian)

Fifth

On Atlantic

On Atlantic in the golden hour, a piece of boomtown Brooklyn always has to crash the scene.

Is it too cheap a trick to catch the light at three or so, in late November?

The bottom picture shows my favorite church on this stretch of Atlantic, St. Cyril of Turau Cathedral, the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which appears (sadly, I'd say) to be getting a brown paint-job.  According to Slavs of New York (an inspired choice of blog name), the parish, founded in 1950, bought the Episcopalian church on Atlantic in 1957, and in 2005 had "about two dozen members."  It's still active.

The Belarusan Church website includes photographs of Feast Day, and a post-Christmas celebration for the children of Belarusian emigrants in the New York area.  Both pictures were taken this year.

Hot?

Not even one hot bagel here. The stores at the SE corner of 16th have been long-shuttered, but an auto-shop owner who recently sold his business told me there were plans for this location.

Vehicle Wraps

Prospect & Fourth