Monday, November 6, 2023
Partly cloudy. High 54 degrees.
It finally happened. For the first time in nine weekends, it did not rain in New York City.

Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.

The General Election is on Tuesday, November 7th. For those with questions about local candidates and polling sites, you can check out West Side Rag’s election preview — HERE.

Upper West Side News
By Gus Saltonstall

The Walt Disney Company is looking to sell its Upper West Side armory for around $30 million, as first reported by The Real Deal.

The 120-year-old castle-like property at 56 West 66th Street has served as a television studio since 1973 and is currently home to ESPN’s New York City headquarters. The sale comes as Disney is consolidating its offices in the city to a new building at 4 Hudson Square.

The three-story building — one of 10 armories built in the city — is part of the ABC campus on the Upper West Side and spans 43,000 square feet. It sits directly next to a site owned by Extell Development that was purchased in 2022 for a whopping $931 million.

You can read more about the sale on The Real Deal’s website.

An Upper West Side ZIP code was one of just five in New York City to be named among the 100 most expensive areas in the United States for 2023.

RealtyHop, a site that tracks real estate prices, released its annual list of the 100 most expensive ZIP codes in the country for home sale listing prices, and the Upper West Side’s 10069 ZIP Code earned the 85th spot. The 10069 ZIP code doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as 10023, 10024, and 10025  — all staples of the neighborhood — but it represents the majority of the area west of West End Avenue from West 59th to 72nd streets.

The stretch is full of towering luxury buildings facing the Hudson River and also the recently developed Waterline Square near 675 West 59th Street, which boosted the area’s median home sale price.

In 2020, the 10069 area had the largest one-year jump in home sales of any ZIP code in the country, when it rose $800,000 over the previous year. The jump coincided with the first year of sales at Waterline Square.

The median home sale in the 10069 ZIP code for 2023 was $2.15 million, according to RealtyHop.

The most expensive ZIP code in the entire country for the year? Atherton, California, in San Mateo County south of San Francisco, where the median listed price for homes was $7.95 million.

You can check out the full study and see the other most expensive New York City ZIP codes — HERE.

The New York City Marathon took place on Sunday, which means that one Central Park statue took its annual pilgrimage through the park to greet runners at the finish line.

A life-sized bronze statue of Fred Lebow, the founder of the New York City Marathon, is stationed at 90th Street and East Drive for 364 days a year. However, on the first Sunday of November, park workers take the 600-pound statue from its base to a spot near the marathon’s finish line.

Each year, runners leave flowers and medals on the statue.

Lebow, who served as the president of the New York Road Runners organization, spearheaded the first New York City Marathon in 1970. He was born in Romania, before escaping from the Nazis and eventually living in the city.

You can read more about the statue on Untapped Cities’ website — HERE.

Last week, the New York Times jumped into the conversation of what ever happened to the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt that was stationed at the front of the American Museum of Natural History for eight decades

“What Is a Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Doing in North Dakota?” the Times headline asks. It describes the $333 million project of creating a presidential library in the tiny town of Medora, North Dakota and the differing of opinions when it comes to Roosevelt.

The piece also touched on the fate of the equestrian statue of Roosevelt that was removed from the Upper West Side in January 2022, and shipped to the site of the North Dakota library slated to open in 2026.

Edward O’Keefe, the library’s chief executive, told the New York Times that the statue featuring Roosevelt on horseback towering over a shirtless African man and Native American man, will not be on display when the library opens, but any plans beyond that for the statue are uncertain.

(For the record, when WSR queried officials in North Dakota a few weeks ago about the statue’s status, we were told: “the statue is in a safe and secure location in North Dakota” and, “at this time, there are no plans yet developed for displaying the statue. Happy to keep you posted in the future.”)

You can read the full Times’ piece — HERE.

On a personal and melancholy note, our family dog Bella passed away at the age of 13 this weekend. She was a brown Labradoodle who started out as red and lived a long and happy life eating bacon, walking in the woods, cooling in the grass, enjoying the ocean breeze, strolling the city, and spending time with her human and animal families.

She was a steadfast friend and canny observer of moods whose quiet grace and gentle nature added a sense of love and camaraderie to all our days. She was the most dignified and gentle of dogs. She passed peacefully in bed surrounded by her family.

And for that reason, hug your dog this Monday, take an extra long walk, let them sniff all the smells and meander their way through a grassy spot.

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