Construction Maison

NEW YORK, NY — In the summer of 1977, New York City was — literally and figuratively — on fire. It was the summer of disco fever, of Studio 54. It was the summer of Yankees mania. It was the summer that catapulted Ed Koch to City Hall. And in mid-July, it turned into the summer of darkness, when an epic, five-borough power outage — deemed an "act of God" by Con Ed — plunged the city into two days of total blackout. Airports shut down. News stations went off the air. Thousands were stuck in underground subway tunnels . Meanwhile, in the streets, the down-and-out — at their breaking point after years of municipal layoffs and a steady surge in violent crime — rioted and looted with abandon. Arsonists reportedly set more than 1,000 fires across the city in a single day. The Bronx, it would later be said, was burning. It was also the Summer of Sam. Want more local news? Sign up here to receive free newsletters and alerts from the New York City Patch . In spring 1977, police con...

In 2013, Randy Dillard was living with his four sons and a daughter in an apartment at 198th Street and Bainbridge in the Bronx. The windows were broken; mold and mildew streaked the walls. In the winter, Dillard’s family had to boil water on the stove to bathe; there was no heat or hot water. When the New York City Housing Authority conducted an inspection of the apartment on behalf of Section 8, the federal rent assistance program that financed Dillard ’s rental, the unit failed the test, and Section 8 stopped paying Dillard ’s landlord, demanding that he make repairs. That winter, Dillard was hospitalized for two months with a bout of emphysema; when he came out, he was served with eviction papers for nonpayment of rent. advertisement “I stood in the middle of my hallway looking around my apartment thinking: What am I going to do with my stuff?” Dillard tells Fast Company . “I told myself: I’m going to end up homeless. I’m going to wind up in a shelter.” Dillard got word of a Bron...

Is NYC going through an affordable housing crisis ? To get a better understanding of the city’s rental market, RentHop compared median rents for a two-bedroom apartment in various parts of the city to the most recent median income data available at the neighborhood level. It turns out that just nine out of the 139 neighborhoods included in the study had median asking rents that could be afforded with 35 percent of the neighborhood’s median income. RentHop added an additional 5 percent to the recommended affordability of 30 percent to make room for the income growth that has taken place since the Census data was released. The map above shows the median asking rent of two-bedroom apartments in neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs) across New York City and how that relates to the income of those neighborhoods. Darker shades of red indicate lower affordability , while the few green areas indicate that median asking rents are within reach for the neighborhood’s median household income . M...

Author John Freeman Gill takes Fodor’s on an urban safari. If you make the effort to gaze skyward in New York, you will discover (hiding in plain sight) a city teeming with remarkable architectural sculptures : gryphons and sea monsters, cherubs and pelicans, goddesses and kings. These exuberantly expressive artworks were the creation of gifted immigrant stone carvers who poured into New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries , most of them from the British Isles, Germany, and Italy. The ornament on the grandest edifices was typically specified by architects, but on the vast majority of city buildings , the design of the carvings was left up to the individual stoneworker. The carvers took this freedom and ran with it, incising their imaginations into New York’s skyline and transforming its streetscape into a marvelously quirky public art gallery . 555 Washington Avenue John Freeman Gill Ever since my novel, The Gargoyle Hunters , was published, I’ve been besieged by readers a...

We offer our predictions on communities that will rank among the city's most desirable in 2026. Plus a look at developers who are working to make those visions a reality. February 18, 2016 (page 7 of 7) 8 developers with insight who are rethinking our urban neighborhoods   BY DEBRA SMIT G reat neighborhoods — with ample green space , commerce and good housing stock — empower their residents to grow and prosper. Developers are key when it comes to weaving together the physical threads of a community, particularly in urban neighborhoods frayed by years of blight and decay. These are among the developers who are working to revitalize some of the city’s most challenged neighborhoods, striving to be restorers of streets in which to dwell. All have one eye, certainly, on the bottom line. Still, they are well aware of expectations that they give measured consideration to quality of life in the neighborhoods in which they build.   Wi...

Let’s face it: Nobody really knows what to do about the homeless crisis. The sheer numbers of 60,000 people in city shelters and nearly 4,000 more on the streets — many in the latter group psychotic, drug-addicted and violent — overwhelm the best-intended plans to help them. That said, there are better and worse ways to cope with the nightmare. It’s bad enough that the city now spends $2.3 billion a year on homeless services including $1.4 billion on shelter housing , twice what it spent just three years ago. But making things worse : City Hall is now paying landlords more money to put up the homeless than the property owners could make by renting apartments and hotel rooms to non-homeless people at ordinary market rates . Shouldn’t developers be incentivized to create actual affordable housing for permanent residents — not more shelters for transients with no links to a community? The hapless Department of Homeless Services has gone off the deep end at a site in The Bronx, whether ou...