Monday Bulletin: 200 Amsterdam Penthouse Sells for $20M; It Took Two Decades and a TV Camera to Get a NYCHA Tenant Heat; Shakespeare in the Park Is Going Mobile; Robert Frost and a Bad Decision

Monday, February 26, 2024
Cloudy. High 53 degrees.

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

For the first time in four years, 2024 is a leap year and this Thursday is February 29. If anyone has a birthday on this “extra” day of the year or any special traditions, let us know what they’re like. Read why there is a leap year — HERE.

Community Board 7 is holding a Health & Human Services Committee meeting on Tuesday at 6:45 p.m. that will include a presentation on the planned conversion of the former Calhoun School into a transitional shelter for single women on West 74th Street. You can find out more information, and sign up to speak — HERE.

There were some developments in the local-news world earlier this month, as more than 100 New York newspapers launched the Empire State Local News Coalition, a joint advocacy effort to advance a legislative package that would deliver long-term sustainability to the field.

Since 2005, more than 3,000 newspapers have shuttered across the country, resulting in thousands of layoffs. New York State itself has seen a 40 percent decrease of newspapers between 2004 and 2019.

You can find out more about the coalition and the legislative package — HERE.

Upper West Side News
By Gus Saltonstall

A penthouse just went into contract at the notorious, 51-story 200 Amsterdam Avenue address, and it is the most expensive home sold on the Upper West Side this year.

The four-bedroom unit sold last week for $20 million, which was slightly below its asking price of $22.5 million, as reported by Mansion Global. The penthouse is on the 43rd floor, has two outdoor terraces and floor-to-ceiling windows that give panoramic views of both the Hudson River and Central Park.

The building also comes with a 75-foot pool, fitness center, steam rooms, infrared sauna, and golf simulator.

The buyer has not been identified.

The 200 Amsterdam penthouse price tag beat out the $16.5 million that a buyer paid for an apartment at the nearby 50 West 66th Street address earlier this year.

An Upper West Side woman who recently became a grandmother hasn’t had consistent heat in her NYCHA apartment for over 20 years, as reported and profiled by PIX11.

Chinese Gordon lives in the Frederick Douglass Houses near West 103rd Street and Columbus Avenue and has been putting in tickets to fix the heat in her apartment for over two decades to no avail. With the recent birth of her grandchild, she decided to up the pressure on management by having Monica Morales, who is the host of the PIX11 show, “Monica Makes It Happen,” visit her apartment.

Morales spoke with both Gordon and Carmen Quinones, who is the president of NYCHA’s Douglass Housing Tenants Association and a candidate for the Assembly District 69 seat, about the issue.

Following the visit, NYCHA told PIX11 that the “heating staff have spoken with the resident and will be visiting the unit this evening to assess and work to resolve the issue.”

With the Delacorte Theater in Central Park undergoing renovation, Shakespeare in the Park is taking its act on the road this summer.

The Public Theater, which oversees the long-running and beloved Shakespeare performances, announced earlier this month that it would be doing smaller-scale performances of “The Comedy of Errors” in parks and plazas through the city between Memorial Day and the end of June.

The nonprofit will then oversee outdoor screenings of “Much Ado About Nothing” from July through early September.

The Delacorte is expected to reopen from its $78-million renovation in the summer of 2025, in time for the traditional Shakespeare in the Park season that year.

You can find out more information — HERE

A smattering of snow fell again last week, and it made me think of both my favorite poem and a not-so-great decision connected to it.

In college, I took a poetry class that I mostly had a tough time waking up for. But it did leave me fully enamored with Robert Frost.

It also made me appreciate short, punchy sentence structure — in poetry I found the smaller word count meant the space around the lines and letters does an equal amount of the work.

Years after that early-morning poetry class, a focus on sentence length and paragraph spacing were preoccupations of my first boss in journalism.

“There is nothing more powerful than a one-word sentence,” he’d tell me (very often). He loved any paragraph of four words or under, because:

“It catches the eye.”

I can still hear him saying, “Use the short sentence as the second paragraph to set up the quote. Don’t ramble. Keep the reader engaged.

Find your voice. Get to the point.”

“Understood.”

I’d say back.

But anyway, I liked Frost. I liked the way he wrote about nature. I liked the way he wrote about the ordinary.

That admiration, though, quickly led to that not-so-great decision.

After getting back on some Saturday night my junior year of college, in a slightly altered state, I decided that it would be really cool to write the last four lines of my favorite Frost poem on the white wall of my dorm room.

I did it in huge letters with a black marker and promptly fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning to discover that I had done it with permanent marker.

I was also quick to discover that it is particularly unsettling to have large letters scrawled on a white wall in a person’s bedroom. My friends all made sure to tell me the same and I had to spend the rest of the year coming up with bad explanations for why I had four lines, beginning with “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces,” printed in bad handwriting on the wall next to my bed.

At the end of the semester, I got a $250 bill for the cleaning fee.

This is “Desert Places” by Robert Frost.

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

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