Curbed

A site for city people, from @nymag.

Sign up for the Curbed daily newsletter:

[Curbed @Curbed]

It’s easy to see why New York is a Halloween town. We love dressing up, and we have more candy stores per capita than any other major city. We spoke to local parents and Halloween diehards about their strategies for trick-or-treating on October 31. https://t.co/7UTPawTWQl

[Curbed @Curbed]

The Bushwick studio where Madeline Coven works is located on the hazy border between Queens and Brooklyn amid a cluster of beef distributors and hydraulic repair shops, gay nightclubs and indoor adventure parks. Her shared studio with a fellow artist is on the fourth floor of a building that’s been partially converted into a high-end members’ club. You enter through the lobby, which is decked out in a suite of vintage furniture, and take the elevator to Coven’s workspace. Noisy with the clatter of street construction, it’s packed floor to ceiling with boxes on one side and on the other with the drill presses and ventilation hoses that are the vernacular of makers.

When Jill Singer visited Coven in her studio last month, she showed her metal-casting tests for an upcoming exhibition in Santa Fe, and their conversation quickly turned to the limits of her design process — in a metaphorical and physical sense. Using images she’d found in the paleontology archives of a New Mexico university, Coven had carved the imprint of two prehistoric fossils into slabs of wood, then cast the resulting voids in aluminum.

“I’m always trying to recreate patterns or textures that occur naturally because they’re so unbelievable to me,” says Coven. “But the way they already exist is better than what I could ever make.” In this instance, the hot metal had burned away some of the painstaking detail she’d carved into the wood. Wasn’t that frustrating — even Sisyphean — to always fall short of an impossible benchmark? “I’m not striving for perfection,” Coven says.

Read more about Coven’s experiments with form and light: https://t.co/Hu6Tv2DGhD

[Curbed @Curbed]

When Stu Loeser discovered that his firm’s new midtown office had once been Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, he leaned into its unexpectedly glamorous past. https://t.co/zp16IUAncu

[Curbed @Curbed]

Coming from an artist’s background, Madeline Coven treats her studio like a lab, where she experiments with animals hides, metal casting, and materials from nature to create nonfunctional vessels, lamps, and more. https://t.co/VbS1SnL679

[Curbed @Curbed]

Here are some apartments to buy in New York City for under $1 million, including options in Carnegie Hill, Greenwich Village, Clinton Hill, and Greenwood Heights. https://t.co/HixFGRdBnK

[Curbed @Curbed]

In facing studios at Hotel Chelsea, Steve Willis, a pack rat and fountain-show choreographer, lives amid memories of his divas Janis Joplin and Dolly Parton. https://t.co/4G8ixrWpzZ

[Curbed @Curbed]

After a bitter two-year fight that pitted high-profile residents of the Pierre against one another, a controversial deal to sell the storied hotel and co-op on Fifth Avenue to a prominent Saudi family for $2 billion is dead. In the end, the defeat of the deal between the Khashoggis and the co-op didn’t come down to a board vote but a $100 million deposit that never materialized.

While the sale would have provided a windfall for most of the co-op owners, netting them far more money than they could get on the market, everyone would have had to sell — a distinctly unappealing prospect to those who were in their 70s or 80s or had sunk millions into custom renovations. The failed sale leaves the hotel under the management of Taj Hotels and allows everyone to remain, but the situation that prompted the board to explore a sale remains unaddressed: The Pierre desperately needs repairs. The once grand building, where celebrities and socialites have slept, lived, and partied for decades, is undeniably shabby, with worn carpets and crumbling plumbing. As the New York ‘Times’ reported, “Engineering studies have found that water leaks are penetrating its apartments and infrastructure, its pipes are old and corroded, and its fire safety systems are antiquated and potentially dangerous.”

Read more about the failed sale: https://t.co/TolIQ7FbwO

[Curbed @Curbed]

On a scale from the Chrysler Building to the Morgan Library, what is comedian and author of ‘Showbiz!’ Murray Hill’s NYQ? https://t.co/cdr5ipdoOO

[Curbed @Curbed]

The best NYC apartment listings available for rent this week in neighborhoods including Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Crown Heights, Sheepshead Bay, Greenwood Heights, Clinton Hill, and Cobble Hill. https://t.co/pnHmRWJGx8

[Curbed @Curbed]

John Krasinski and Emily Blunt appear to have downsized their Brooklyn Heights suite of apartments. A trust tied to the Hollywood power couple unloaded a ninth-floor apartment in the Standish for $6.5 million in an off-market deal this past June, according to property records that were made public on Wednesday. As you might expect with the Beaux-Arts tower known for both its celebrity residents and reputation for privacy, the apartment’s buyer was masked by an LLC.

Krasinski and Blunt first bought in the converted 1903 limestone-and-brick hotel in 2018, paying $11 million for a pair of units that covered the entirety of the eighth floor and added up to a potentially Goliath combination. The couple’s presence helped cement the Standish as a magnet for the boldface crowd, following Matt Damon, who paid $16.7 million for a 6,000-square-foot penthouse in 2017 (and subsequently craned in his family’s furniture). Earlier this year, Adam Driver paid $11.5 million for three sixth-floor units totaling 3,500 square feet. (All, of course, come with access to an amenities package that includes a 24/7 doorman, a fitness center, and a rooftop terrace with views of the harbor.)

Read more: https://t.co/lya2Pjjmma

[Curbed @Curbed]

The couple sold a ninth-floor apartment they bought at the Standish nearly three years ago for $5 million. https://t.co/22KoWKRt40

[Curbed @Curbed]

The Khashoggi family of Saudi Arabia was trying to buy the Pierre for $2 billion, a contentious deal that would have displaced residents. The sale fell through when they failed to put down a $100 million deposit. https://t.co/dqusyClKCJ

[Curbed @Curbed]

In dealing with tiny apartments, off-limits amenities, and rent that’s barely a bargain, tenants who won coveted rent-stabilized leases in the affordable-housing lottery can feel like their golden ticket isn’t so golden after all. https://t.co/6vl3wkw9kR

[Curbed @Curbed]

When two divorced septuagenarians got married, they felt out of place in each other’s apartments. The solution? Get an apartment for each of them in the same co-op building. https://t.co/DnF3BXR9Z3

[Curbed @Curbed]

The co-owner of Art of Play, a Brooklyn books-and-toys shop, spoke about the aftermath of a critical post by Kelly Clarkson, saying the threatening calls and hate speech have been relentless. https://t.co/cMkNnKmDby

[Curbed @Curbed]

Here are some apartments to buy in New York City for under $1 million, including options in Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, the Upper West Side, and Carnegie Hill. https://t.co/VIqKYxBEDK

[Curbed @Curbed]

Almost anywhere else, a Superfund designation would have spooked real-estate developers, writes Kim Velsey, but in Gowanus, it amounted to open season, signaling to investors that the federal government would soon be cleaning up the century-old cesspool that had hindered previous development schemes. Not long after, Whole Foods announced that it was opening a gigantic store with a rooftop greenhouse on a bleak, windswept corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street. Other of-the-moment businesses soon followed: Lavender Lake, a bar with a huge outdoor patio that served local draft beer and kale Caesar salads, opened in 2011, Dinosaur Bar-B-Q in 2013, and Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in 2014. Developers who’d been buying up land for decades started applying for spot rezonings to build luxury housing.

As a former community organizer and urban planner, then-local councilmember Brad Lander painted a vision of what Gowanus could become: a thriving, economically diverse neighborhood with thousands of new affordable apartments, stabilized artists’ studios, freshly renovated public housing, and a public esplanade along the canal. Lander was adamant that rezonings didn’t have to go the way of Williamsburg. Or worse, Hudson Yards. In 2016, he kick-started a five-year process to rezone the industrial neighborhood to allow for a massive amount of new housing.

What happened after “is such a complex thing,” says Jamie Courville, who moved there with her husband in 2009. “People call it gentrification, but it’s not. The neighborhood was knocked down and a new one was built.” And that doesn’t feel like an exaggeration. But is it really a good idea to dig up, cart out, and cap toxic muck as an influx of new residents move in? Artists may have loved the old Gowanus, but who would pay luxury rents to live in the new one?

Read Velsey’s full report on the booming neighborhood: https://t.co/lncQwjQYxv

[Curbed @Curbed]

The Gowanus rezoning of 2021 set off a massive residential construction boom in the Brooklyn neighborhood, which is happening at the same time as the cleanup of the canal, a Superfund site, and brownfields around the neighborhood. https://t.co/KHwV17wsZb

[Curbed @Curbed]

At 203 Prince Street is a rare Soho house that’s never been gutted for a store or torn down for a warehouse or factory. It dates to 1834 and survived because of one man. https://t.co/SZ0DijE2cR

[Curbed @Curbed]

On a scale from Eighth Avenue to Studio 8H, where does ‘SNL’ cast member Ben Marshall fit? This is NYQ, a series where we find out how ‘New York’ notable New Yorkers really are. https://t.co/dqcUlFe3xC