Month: October 2018

The Lessor Evil

A new online data tool from a leading housing advocacy group, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), indicates that Lower Manhattan is undergoing a gradual, but inexorable, transformation: Affordable housing, in the form of rent-regulated apartments, is steadily disappearing from the local landscape. ANHD’s Displacement Alert Map, which went live earlier this week,...
The Displacement Alert Map quantifies the loss of rent-stabilized apartments in Lower Manhattan, with buildings colored in red signifying the greatest loss of such units in percentage terms.

Asking for the Millennium

Community Board 1 (CB1) is pushing the City’s Department of Education (DOE) to lease more space within the historic Financial District skyscraper that houses Millennium High School. Tricia Joyce, who chairs CB1’s Youth & Education Committee, said at the Board’s September 25 meeting, “Millennium High School is the gem of our community. It was started...
Tricia Joyce, chair of Community Board 1's Youth & Education Committee: "Millennium High School is the gem of our community. It is a perfectly diverse school, but also a very crowded school."

EYES TO THE SKY October 1 – 14, 2018

When the great orange star, Arcturus, makes its debut in the east around the Spring Equinox, we look through bare trees in the darkness to see the distant sun rise above the horizon. The second brightest star in northern skies – next to Sirius – Arcturus is harbinger of warm weather. Now, as leaves change...
Arcturus is roughly 25 times greater in diameter than our sun. Arcturus/Antares/sun size comparison image via Wikimedia Commons.

Vendor, Vidi, Vici?

The City Council has enacted a bill, sponsored by Margaret Chin, which will expand the zone surrounding the World Trade Center that is off limits to street vendors. The original catchment, in effect since 2004, barred food vendors and souvenir hawkers from a district bounded by Liberty, Vesey, and West Streets, and Broadway. The larger...
Food carts (like these, shown in Zuccotti Park) have been banned from the area surrounding the World Trade Center since 2004, but will soon be pushed outside of expanded boundaries, as a result of security concerns.