Should Airbnb pay hotel taxes? The issue is still causing the kind of drama you wouldn’t want in your home — and lawmakers are now arguing that the service’s hosts, whose names they’re trying to get their hands on, are driving up rents for the rest of us.
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Housing + Development
Clayton Patterson Had a Farewell Show: Is It Really Goodbye For the LES Legend?
Word that Clayton Patterson was leaving the Lower East Side for Austria really rattled those who considered him the neighborhood’s “last bohemian,” as the Times headline dubbed him. Could the man who documented the Tompkins Square Park riots and the underground scenes of the ’80s and ’90s East Village, founded a gallery of “outlaw art,” and edited epic histories of LES radicalism, filmmaking and Jewish culture really be leaving the hood whose denizens he’s photographed religiously? We, for one, had to find out.
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Greenpoint Is Getting the Convention Center It Didn’t Know It Needed
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
A massive center for expositions will open in Greenpoint this October as part of the Greenpoint Terminal Market, an industrial complex that is still reinventing itself after a mysterious ten-alarm fire engulfed several buildings in 2006.
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Merchant’s House Desperately Needs You to Nominate Its Plaster For an Award
The Merchant’s House Museum suffered a blow on Tuesday when the Landmarks Preservation Commission finally signed off on the design of a controversial nine-story building that’s due to be erected next to the 182-year-old house. Today the museum sends out an e-mail indicating that it’s still concerned that the new building’s construction could damage the meticulously preserved East Fourth Street residence, and its custodians will soon be taking steps “to secure the necessary legal and engineering protective measures.”
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East Village Loses a Beloved Gallery: ‘Tribes As a Space Will Be Nonexistent’
(Photo: Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation)
A Gathering of the Tribes, which has been fighting for years to keep its East Village gallery and performance space, is finally moving out next week.
Steve Cannon, who has run Tribes out of the second floor of his apartment at 285 East Third Street for the last 20 years, will move around the corner into a much cheaper homestead apartment. From there, he’ll continue to run the Tribes website, literary journal, and Fly By Night publishing arm, with the help of employee Alyssa Devine.
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Steal This Building: Former Yippie HQ Is Up For Grabs
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
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A Legendary Guerilla Exhibit, ‘The Real Estate Show,’ Is Revived in a Proper Gallery
One of the Lower East Side’s most storied and significant art exhibits has been resurrected at James Fuentes Gallery, just a few blocks from where a group of guerilla artists broke into a city-owned building and staged The Real Estate Show on New Year’s Eve, 1979.
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Police Say This Guy Rented Out a Fake Apartment in Andy Warhol’s Old Building
We’ve seen this one before: a man posing as a broker conned nine women out of deposits for an East Village apartment he wasn’t licensed to rent.
Police say a man using the names David Horowitz and Michael Bryant offered an apartment at 321 East Sixth Street on Craigslist and managed to trick nine women into giving him cash deposits of $2,200 each.
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These 8 Images Show What a Stronger, Sexier LES Waterfront Might Look Like
One vision for the future of East River Park. (Renderings courtesy of Rebuild by Design).
The East River waterfront is in for a dramatic transformation in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Today, several visions of just what that transformation might look like were presented at a standing room-only meeting led by Rebuild By Design, a project of President Obama’s taskforce to rebuild the city after Sandy.
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Just How Sweet Is the Domino Deal?
Yesterday we reported that the city had struck a deal with the developer of the Domino Sugar factory site that would bring some 700 units of affordable housing to the Williamsburg waterfront. Here now is our handy-dandy chart showing differences between the previous developer’s plan, the current developer’s Bloomberg-era plan, and the plan that will be put to the City Planning Commission’s vote this week.
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