Photo: Angelica Frey
“Unscrupulous landlords” beware. This morning Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of the Tenant Harassment Prevention Task Force at a press conference in Downtown Brooklyn.
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Looking West on East 13th Street between Avenue A and 1st Avenue. (Photo: Jaime Cone)
A trio of residential buildings is set to change the look of East 13th Street, between Avenue A and First Avenue.
The facelift will be courtesy of two developers, one planning to transform two stubby garages into slender twin condos and another looking to tear down the former post office across the street to make way for an eight-story rental building. Construction-permit applications were filed for all three buildings in recent weeks.
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Starbucks’ new Williamsburg outpost (Photo: Kirsten O’Regan)
In case you hadn’t heard, Williamsburg finally got itself a Starbucks location this morning—on Union Ave near the Lorimer/Metropolitan L and G station. The neighborhood is already in the throes of an identity crisis, what with the closure of old stalwarts and the imminent arrival of megaliths like J. Crew. While the Twitter-sphere at large explodes with consternation at this latest development (woeful declarations of the demise of the neighborhood abound), we hit the streets to find out what locals really think about their newest coffee purveyor.
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Michael Che (Photo: Mindy Tucker)
Meet Michael Che. If you don’t know him, get to know him because the 30-year-old writer and stand-up comedian from the Lower East Side is blowing up right in his own backyard.
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Grand St. Bakery, a vintage general store, moved into an old, un-renovated store space on Grand about four years ago. The space hasn’t always been easy. (Photos: Elizabeth Flock)
Trendy shops open every other week on Grand Street near Bedford Avenue, but across the BQE in Williamsburg, the same street is experiencing growing pains. At least 16 shuttered storefronts line the six-block stretch along Grand from Union to Bushwick Avenue.
Spaces belonging to mom-and-pop stores have been put up for grabs, but instead of being replaced by beard-wax emporiums and bespoke monocle shops, their “For Rent” signs have lingered for months. While at least one developer is banking on “a migration to the eastern part of Williamsburg” as he replaces the Liberty department store with a Gene Kaufman-designed building at 774 Grand, it seems this part of Grand won’t be undergoing a major transformation in the immediate future.Â
Here’s a sampling of Grand Street shops that are currently closed or in need of tenants:
(Photos: Joshua Kristal)
Jazz is floating through my window and it’s coming from the taqueria across the street. At Mesa Azeteca, there’s live jazz on Thursdays and mariachis on Fridays. Welcome to Bushwick, 2013.
The restaurant sits on Wyckoff Avenue near Hart Street, which has become a clear dividing line between two different worlds. More →
Introducing The 40-Year-Old Hipster. He’s returned to his stomping grounds of Williamsburg after several years away.
(Illustration: James Powers)
We’re subletting Henry Miller’s childhood crib in the burg, the wife and me. While I’ve read too much Miller (if you know his work, you’ll understand what that means) there’s something anti-Miller about this. For the record, we didn’t seek it out, it just happened to be the most economical.
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A new study tells us what we might’ve guessed from the recent proliferation of ping pong-tabled “event spaces”: gentrification is on the rise in Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
Or so concludes a report studying Asian neighborhoods in Boston, New York and Philadelphia in order to analyze displacement occurring as a result of higher rents (and no, we’re not just talking about ).
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The crowd at 108 Starr Street. (Photo: Alexandra Glorioso)
Six years ago, Josefina Blanc, a former photography editor at Art & Commerce, found herself priced out of Bushwick when the rent on the 10,000 sq. ft. loft shot up from $2,500 to $8,000. Her husband, a performance artist now represented by a gallery in Chelsea, had spent years renovating the space with the understanding that, in exchange, the rent would remain stable, but efforts to appeal to their landlord were in vain. The couple decided to call it quits and moved to South Carolina that year.
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