Morning Bulletin: New UWS Building Not Just for Oligarchs, Did Judy Garland Live Here?
At Broadway and 103rd Street. Photo by Nicholas Noyes.
October 23, 2017 Weather: Cloudy with a high of 72 degrees.
Notices:
Readings, concerts and more local events are on our calendar.
Talk to police officials from the 20th precinct at the community council meeting on Monday night at the precinct, 120 West 82nd Street.
News:
Robert A.M. Stern’s latest Upper West Side building at 250 West 81st Street will have a different vibe than 15 Central Park West, Stern says. “Unlike 15 Central Park West, which attracted several high-profile international buyers, Mr. Stern said his new project will have a local vibe, on a more intimate scale. ‘I don’t think this building is being designed for Russian oligarchs to come jazzing in for two nights and picking up a little smoked salmon,’ said Mr. Stern, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, noting that this building will serve as a primary home for many buyers.”
Director James Toback has been accused of sexual harassment, with some of the allegations centering around the Upper West Side and Central Park. Toback has denied the allegations. “Toback approached Sari Kamin at a Kinko’s in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2003. He pulled out a DVD copy of ‘Two Girls and a Guy’ and told her he’d like to cast her in his next movie. He said he felt an instant connection to her…”
A home at the Dakota on 72nd Street that was apparently once owned by Judy Garland has been sold. “The apartment, which was first listed in 2016 for $16.75 million, has 13-foot-high ceilings, a library, seven wood-burning fireplaces and ‘radiates the quintessential grandeur that has long defined this iconic cooperative building,’ reads the listing.” But…While the broker is highlighting the Garland connection, two news organizations couldn’t find records of her owning it.
Service programs that have an important impact in NYC have been targeted for cuts by the Trump administration and Congress. “In May, Congress quietly defunded the Social Innovation Fund, which had a $50 million budget and provided grants to social service organizations that aided the nation’s poorest. ‘We’re disheartened,’ said Nicole Truhe, the government affairs director at America Forward, a Washington-DC based public policy agency, which helped create the fund in 2009. The fund, Truhe said, “shined a light on what was working in communities and helped build on it.’ New York alone received one fifth of the Social Innovation Fund’s total budget.”
Never heard of a Judy Garland connection to the Dakota until this property went on the market, and think it must be an urban myth of very recent origin. One real estate site suggested she lived there in the later forties and early fifties, when Garland was still very much in Hollywood. Another more recent source, citing the apartment sale, suggested Judy and her two youngest children may have lived there briefly in 1967. By that chaotic time Garland was mostly making concert appearances and staying in hotels they often had to leave without paying the bill. She was very friendly with Betty Bacall and Leonard Bernstein, who could have been her entree to sublease in the building. But I haven’t seen anything to suggest that her connection to the Dakota is any other than slender, if at all.
No international oligarchs at the new Stern-designed building?
Just “regular” wealthy people.
The demographic transformation marches on, upper-income replacing middle income on the UWS and elsewhere….
At least a graceful, contextual design.