Month: October 2018

The Fate of a Neighborhood

City Council member Margaret Chin and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer are leading a last-ditch effort to slow down the aggressive push by developers to erect a string “super-tall” luxury apartment towers in an area of the Lower East Side that has historically been a low-to-midrise haven for immigrants, as well as New Yorkers of...
An architect's rendering of the four new residential towers proposed for the Two Bridges neighborhood, which would contain more than 2,700 apartments. (The tower at left is already largely complete) while the four to right are currently seeking permission to build.

October 16

1590 – Carlo Gesualdo, composer, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, murders his wife, Donna Maria d’Avalos, and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples. 1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers. 1847 –...
The Nickel Plate Railroad connected New York, Chicago, and St. Louis

Each to Their Own Taste

On Saturday, October 20, the ninth annual Taste of the Seaport food festival will offer fare from dozens of Lower Manhattan’s best restaurants and purveyors, among them Eataly, Wolfgang Puck’s Cut, Insomnia Cookies, Lobster GoGo, Mad Dog & Beans, Barbalu, SUteiShi, and Toro Loco.   Complimentary family-friendly activities will feature creative cardboard ship-building, children’s tennis...

The Lease You Can Do

The annual membership meeting of the Gateway Plaza Tenants Associationwill be held tomorrow (Wednesday, October 17), in the auditorium of P.S./I.S. 276 (55 Battery Place, near the corner of First Place). The doors will open at 6:00, and the meeting will begin at 6:45 pm. There will be presentations by multiple elected officials — among...
Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City

EYES TO THE SKY October 15 – 28, 2018

  A waxing crescent moon appears to the upper left of planet Saturn in the south-southwest as darkness gathers tonight, the 15th. On the 16th, a half moon (first quarter) is suspended further left of Saturn, approaching red Mars, the most riveting point of light in the sky. By the 19th, a waxing gibbous (larger...
Photo from Goldpaint Photography of the 2011 Orionid meteor shower near Mount Shasta, California. It's a composite of every meteor captured during the night. Image via EarthSky.org

The Price of Resiliency

At an October 2 Open Community Meeting, officials from the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) discussed for the first time the overall budget for the resiliency plan they are formulating for the community. Authority president B.J. Jones said, in response to a question, “the overall resiliency cost for all four phases is about two-thirds of...
This preliminary rendering (now outdated) shows one early version of a plan for creating flood barriers along Battery Park City's Esplanade.