Photo by Scott Matthews of a sunrise from 106th and Broadway about a week ago.
A lawsuit over rats, a dog grooming betrayal and Bette Midler are in our news bulletin this week. Below, check out the recent stories about the Upper West Side that were published in other news outlets.
Charges against the 84-year-old man arrested for jaywalking on 96th street have been dropped. “We are gratified that the District Attorney concluded, as we have urged, that the charges against Mr. Wong did not merit prosecution,” his lawyer Michael Bachner said. (Daily News)
Two very old cannons are being restored and will be placed back in Central Park this summer. (NY Times)
The Department of Education has agreed to turn the Beacon School into a new 6-12 school starting in 2015, which could ease the local space crunch on middle schools. “The DOE is now in a race against time to get the details worked out so that they can be printed in a middle school booklet advertising local schools that is sent out to elementary school parents in the fall.” (DNAinfo)
Bette Midler says she loves Upper West Side bookstores. Does she know how few there are left? (Daily News)
A Broadway director rented an apartment at 615 West End Avenue for $15,000 a month. He’s claiming it came with some special guests: “A week after the opening, Warchus ‘reported that he saw a nine-inch rat in the kitchen of the apartment,’ according to papers in a lawsuit over the infestation in New York State Supreme Court. ‘On the same day he also reported that maggots were found in the sofa of the apartment.’…The landlord, Shira White, hired an exterminator to catch the rat while the producers — Matilda Broadway L.P. and Dodger Properties LLC — paid to eradicate the bedbugs. But when the nine-month lease expired and the Warchuses returned to England, instead of returning the security deposit, White’s company, NINIS LLC, sued Warchus and the producers.” In fact, the landlord says the tenants brought the rat into the apartment, claiming it was nesting in a chair they brought in. (Okay, I’m gonna be sick now.) (NY Press)
A man thought his apartment in the West 80’s was haunted, because the previous tenant had committed suicide. So he invested in some witchcraft. “She began mixing colored powders together, gave me a candle and instructed me to pour the mixture into a dish, light the candle, walk into all corners of my apartment with the burning incense and recite the words she wrote down for me.” (NY Times)
An Upper West Side woman betrayed her dog groomer by taking the pooch to a new place. But he knew. (NY Times)
Ariel Russo’s parents are upset about the city’s attempt to dismiss their claims in a suit over the little girl’s death. The city, they say, is arguing that because their four-year-old daughter didn’t make a 911 call herself, they aren’t liable. (NY1)
Citibike is trying to raise money in a hurry, and may want to raise rates. (No word on whether it will ever get to the Upper West Side) (Wall Street Journal)
Mayor de Blasio wants rich conservancies like the Central Park Conservancy to help pay for poorer parks. “I don’t like the notion there’s a lot of parks in our city in less advantaged neighborhoods that aren’t dong well; the parks aren’t those clean, safe spaces we want them to be. And we have to find way to address that.” (Politicker)
Being the president of one of those conservancy can be quite rewarding. “The president of Central Park Conservancy scored a $112,000 raise in 2012, the latest available tax returns show. Doug Blonsky pulled in $537,293 plus $32,004 in benefits, compared to $424,315 and $32,004 in benefits in 2011.” (NY Post)
New York has the most racially segregated public school system in the country. “The findings, published by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, showed that a majority of the city’s black and Latino students have no white classmates at all.” (NY1)
Some landlords have blocked access to Verizon when it tries to install Fios. That’s apparently happening at the Dakota. (New York World)
This Onion parody hits a little too close to home: “Report: Nation’s Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization.” (The Onion)
Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie project pissed off people on 81st between Columbus and Amsterdam. “Jesse was shooting a scene in a cab that gets stopped by a cop car. For 20 hours, they had oversized vans and trucks taking up all the parking spots, and cars were getting towed. People get hysterical about parking here . . . People sit for hours waiting for spots.” (NY Post)
Developers have been fighting on West End in the low-60’s. (The Real Deal)
Two reasons to visit the Upper West Side: The Nicholas Roerich Museum and Freda’s Caribbean. (NY Times)
Two rental buildings on Riverside Drive just changed hands. “A partnership between Thor Equities and global real estate investment firm GreenOak has received a $65 million loan from Blackstone Mortgage Trust for its purchase of two prewar rental buildings on the Upper West Side, a person familiar with the negotiations told Mortgage Observer on background. The floating-rate loan for the two buildings at 120 and 125 Riverside Drive closed on March 11, the same day as the acquisition, and carries a term of up to five years, that person said. GreenOak provided additional equity to fund the $85 million purchase.” (Observer)
Am I not recalling this correctly? Didn’t privately funded park support organizations like The Central Park Conservancy come to exist because the City was doing such a poor job maintaining the parks that private citizens created their own self-funded initiative to do the work the City had failed to execute properly? Now Mayor deB wants to siphon that privately raised money away to support other City-owned properties instead? Wow. The train wreck continues. At least he won’t have to spend time planning the agenda for his 2nd term.
That Onion article completely nailed the UWSers’ favorite past time: Kvetching.
The witchcraft story made me smile.
It’s interesting that Related put in a bid for the US operations of Bixi (the Montreal-based providers of the physical bikes and docking stations used in Citibike). The whole system is so convoluted and opaque – I tend to picture Downton Abbey style discussions of the railroads in the 1920s. Anyway, Related and Equinox bid $5 million for the venture, but it was awarded to a Montreal bidder instead for $4 million. Sounded like perhaps a sweetheart deal. Fingers crossed we see bikeshare in the UWS in 2014. How I would love to take one across Central Park to the Met on a nice day.
I think the two buildings on RSD appear briefly in the opening scenes of ‘Citizen Kane’ as the putative residence of media baron Kane and one block south of WR Hearst’s real apartment at the Clarendon.