The BroadsheetDAILY – 1/14/22 – Annual Food Fest Puts Lavish Meals within Reach of Thrifty Epicures

The Broadsheet: Lower Manhattan’s Local Newspaper

De Gustibus

Annual Food Fest Puts Lavish Meals within Reach of Thrifty Epicures

New York’s annual food celebration, Restaurant Week, starts next Tuesday (January 18) and continues for five weeks, until Saturday (February 13).

For those disinclined to venture above Canal Street, the goods news is that of all the 481 establishments participating throughout the City this year, more than five percent are located in Lower Manhattan.

Below, a list of 29 local eateries where a two-course lunch can or a three-course dinner is yours for $29, $39, or $59, depending on which plan your select. In many of these locations, the everyday prices are significantly higher than Restaurant Week offerings, which makes this value proposition a compelling opportunity to try places that might ordinarily be outside your budget. Because seats go fast, please call ahead to confirm availability and make a reservation.

Sending Love to Janet Lovell

Last summer, Janet Lovell—“Ms. Janet” to her many young charges—retired after 35 years at the Battery Park City Day Nursery. As she stood outside the nursery school on her last day, kids of all ages and their parents came by to reminisce and wish her well. As planned, Janet soon retired to her native Belize.

In October, her sister Denise visited Janet and her husband in Belize. On their way to a resort to celebrate, they were in a car accident. Denise was killed and Janet sustained a devastating spinal cord injury.

Ms. Janet is back in New York for surgery and to recover. If you would like to send good wishes to this wonderful woman who has meant so much to many of our children, the nursery school will collect notes, cards, letters and artwork and forward them to her. Please mail (or drop off) your messages to Janet Lovell c/o the Battery Park City Day Nursery, 215 South End Ave, New York, NY 10280, and administrative director Judy Sklover will forward them to her. If you have any questions, please email the nursery at info@bpcdaynursery.com and address your messages to Judy Sklover.

Solstice Setting

Governors Island is celebrating the first cold-weather season in which it is open to the public with an outdoor Winter Village, which has transformed the historic Colonels Row into a pop-up destination for holiday amenities, including a 5,000-square foot skating rink, open fire pits, a dozen-plus lawn games, and Jack Frost-friendly refreshments.

The 5,000-square-foot rink is open Fridays (noon to 5:00 pm), Saturdays, and Sundays (10:00 am to 5:00 pm) as well as on New York City public school holidays. Skating is free all day on Fridays, and priced at $11 on Saturdays and Sundays. (Skate rentals cost $8 at all times.) Extended hours are also available for youth, adult and nonprofit sports leagues.

Outdoor games (open seven days per week) include cornhole, can jam and giant Jenga. Winter arts and cultural programming will feature a sparkling display of holiday lights. Also on exhibit will be a vintage fire truck, available for free visitor photo ops. The Winter Village will offer bike and (in the event of snow) sled rentals.

Beside the Pointe

At 41 River Terrace, Affordability Provisions Extended for Low-Income Residents But Not for Middle-Income Renters

The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) announced Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to preserve 70 affordable rental apartments in the Tribeca Pointe building through the year 2069. The deal will require that the building owner, Rockrose, continue to offer deeply discounted rents to residents of 70 apartments within the 340-unit structure. These households are set aside for residents earning below either 40 or 50 percent of the “area median income” (AMI). This income bracket currently ranges from $33,440 to $41,800 (for a household consisting of one person), and goes as high as $47,720 to $59,650 (for a household of four).

When Tribeca Pointe opened in 1999, these requirements translated into $343 or $429 per month in a studio (for those earning up to 40 or 50 percent of AMI, respectively), $368 or $459 for a one-bedroom apartment, and $441 or $451 for a two-bedroom unit. Today, the same formulas (which cap rent at 30 percent of the two income thresholds) restrict rent on a studio apartment, inhabited by one person, to $836 (for a tenant earning below 40 percent of AMI) or $1045 (for a renter earning below 50 percent of AMI).

What Never Went Up in the First Place, Still Comes Down…

Lower Manhattan Site Purchased for $390 Million Being Shopped for Half-Off

In a story first reported by the Real Deal, the financial distress plaguing property investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings (itself part of the wider contagion surrounding Shenzhen-based real estate firm, Evergrande) has led to a fire-sale price for a trophy Lower Manhattan parcel.

The company purchased 80 South Street (located between John Street and Maiden Lane) from the Howard Hughes Corporation in 2016 for $390 million. This transaction included a companion site, at 163 Front Street, that shares a mid-block border with 80 South Street. The combined parcel, plus air rights from nearby lots purchased and assembled by Howard Hughes, gave China Oceanwide the right to build a tower with a height of more than 1,400 feet, enclosing more than one million square feet of interior space. To read more…

The Weekend Calendar

SATURDAY JANUARY 15

11AM

Howard Hughes Corporation

Today: Hit the Deck. Reservations are released at 10AM every Monday the week before class. Free

SUNDAY JANUARY 16

2PM

Museum of Jewish Heritage

Between 1880 and 1930, Latin America experienced its largest influx of Jewish immigration. These immigrants were fleeing the poverty and persecution that affected them in Europe. During the lead up to WWII, more Jewish immigrants arrived to escape the rise of the Nazi regime. This wave of immigrants often came to the region on tourist visas or by pretending they were Catholic. These immigrants arrived in a region that had Jewish communities living in a variety of contexts Some had been established three hundred years before, while some had only been there for twenty. Nevertheless, each community was vibrant, and many are still thriving today. Join the Museum for a program exploring Jews in Latin America.

This program will include a conversation between Dr. Marion Kaplan, the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University; Dr. Yael Siman, Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the Iberoamericana University, Mexico; Dr. Leo Spitzer, the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College; and Dr. Adriana Brodsky, Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The conversation will be moderated by Simon Romero, National Correspondent for The New York Times. Free; suggested $10 donation

CLASSIFIEDS & PERSONALS

Swaps & Trades, Respectable Employment, Lost and Found

To place a listing, contact editor@ebroadsheet.com

Charity Begins Close to Home

Trinity Church Awards to Multiple Downtown Public-Service Groups

Trinity Church, the Episcopal parish in Lower Manhattan, has donated $2 million to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, located on Chambers Street, to help offer housing to homeless students enrolled at the school. The funds will be used to construct a residential facility near the campus that will provide shelter to as many as 50 students for up to three years. The accommodation is expected to be open by this spring.

A 2019 survey of students at the City University of New York system (of which BMCC is a part) found that of the 22,000 respondents, 55 percent reported experiencing housing insecurity in the previous year, while 14 percent had experienced actual homelessness. To read more…

A New Aerie at the Former Home of Area

A Onetime Haunt of Ponies, Plutocrats, and Club Rats Will Get a Room with a View

Tribeca will soon have a new (albeit invisible) penthouse apartment, if the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission is guided by the advice of Community Board 1. At its November meeting, the Board recommended that the LPC give its okay to a proposal to add a rooftop structure to 157 Hudson Street, located between Laight and Hubert Streets, opposite the Holland Tunnel rotary.

The T-shaped building has a storied history. Erected in 1867, it was originally designed to serve as a multi-story stable for the hundreds of draft horses kept at the ready by the newly founded American Express Company. This was an era when the firm was primarily engaged in the secure shipment of valuable cargo, almost a century before the invention of credit cards. To read more…

‘One False Promise After Another’

Lenders Who Fronted Millions to Operators of Pier A Allege Fraud

Investors who lent more than $16 million to the operators behind the shuttered restaurant at Pier A, on Battery Park City’s southern border allege that the borrowers, “used a fraudulent scheme to squeeze out of the Project all the fees and distributions for themselves that they could before shutting the doors.”

In a development first reported by property industry newsletter the Real Deal, the lenders (Tribeca-based New York City Waterfront Development Fund II) filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court in November, seeking the return of $16.5 million (the original amount of the 2011 loan, none of which has been repaid), along with $2.63 million in accrued interest, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.

The defendants in this action are a partnership between the Poulakakos restaurant family (who operate numerous Lower Manhattan eateries) and the Dermot Company (a developer of garden apartment complexes around the United States that more recently branched out to New York projects, such as the conversion of Brooklyn’s landmarked Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower into condominium residences). To read more…

Lower Manhattan Greenmarkets

Tribeca Greenmarket

Greenwich Street & Chambers Street

Every Wednesday & Saturday, 8am-3pm

Food Scrap Collection: Saturdays, 8am-1pm

Open Saturdays and Wednesdays year round

Bowling Green Greenmarket

Green Greenmarket at Bowling Green

Broadway & Whitehall St

Open Tuesday and Thursdays, year-round

Market Hours: 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Compost Program: 8 a.m. – 11 a.m.

The Bowling Green Greenmarket brings fresh offerings from local farms to Lower Manhattan’s historic Bowling Green plaza. Twice a week year-round stop by to load up on the season’s freshest fruit, crisp vegetables, beautiful plants, and freshly baked loaves of bread, quiches, and pot pies.

Greenmarket at the Oculus

Oculus Plaza, Fulton St and Church St

CLOSED FOR THE SEASON

The Outdoor Fulton Stall Market

91 South St., bet. Fulton & John Sts.

212-349-1380 info@fultonstallmarket.org

Fulton Street cobblestones between South and Front Sts. across from McNally Jackson Bookstore.

Locally grown produce from Rogowski Farm, Breezy Hill Orchard, and other farmers and small-batch specialty food products, sold directly by their producers. Producers vary from week to week.

SNAP/EBT/P-EBT, Debit/Credit, and Farmers Market Nutrition Program checks accepted at all farmers markets.

TODAY IN HISTORY

January 14

Cecil Beaton photographed by © Arnold Newman

236 – King Henry III of England marries Eleanor of Provence

1539 – Spain annexes Cuba.

1911 – Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition makes landfall on the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

1943 – World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the first President of the United States to travel by airplane while in office when he flies from Miami to Morocco to meet with Winston Churchill.

1950 – The first prototype of the MiG-17 makes its maiden flight.

1953 – Josip Broz Tito is inaugurated as the first President of Yugoslavia.

1954 – The Hudson Motor Car Company merges with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation forming the American Motors Corporation.

1967 – The New York Times reports that the U.S. Army is conducting secret germ warfare experiments.

Births

83 BC – Mark Antony, Roman general and politician (d. 30 BCE)

1683 – Gottfried Silbermann, German instrument maker (d. 1753)

1741 – Benedict Arnold, American-British general (d. 1801)

1875 – Albert Schweitzer, French-Gabonese physician and philosopher, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965)

1904 – Cecil Beaton, English photographer, painter, and costume designer (d. 1980)

1928 – Garry Winogrand, American photographer and author (d. 1984)

1952 – Sydney Biddle Barrows, Mayflower Madam

1952 – Maureen Dowd, American journalist and author

1964 – Shepard Smith, American television journalist

Deaths

1555 – Jacques Dubois, French anatomist (b. 1478)

1742 – Edmond Halley, English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist (b. 1656)

1898 – Lewis Carroll, English novelist, poet, and mathematician (b. 1832)

1957 – Humphrey Bogart, American actor (b. 1899)

1977 – Anthony Eden, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1897)

1977 – Anaпs Nin, French-American essayist and memoirist (b. 1903)

1984 – Ray Kroc, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1902)

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