Photo by Alan Robbins.
August 9, 2021 Weather: Cloudy, with a high of 79 degrees.
Notices:
Our calendar has lots of local events!
News:
“Mayor de Blasio’s bid to move homeless people out of pandemic hotel rooms on the Upper West Side has become a fiasco, with dozens of adults being transferred to a new hotel with no refrigerators or a working elevator, residents and advocates said Monday,” according to the Daily News. They were referring to former residents of the Hotel Belleclaire, on 77th and Broadway. “Supporters of the city’s homeless told the Daily News the process of moving that group of vulnerable people from the Upper West Side hotels was being rushed to appease Manhattan’s squeakiest wheels in the well-heeled neighborhood.”
“A falling tree branch in Central Park injured two tourists on Thursday,” the New York Post reported. “The 57-year-old woman and 62-year-old man from Amarillo, Texas were sitting on a bench in the Great Lawn Playground just after 5 p.m., when the branch snapped and struck them, police said. Both people were taken to NY Presbyterian Weill Cornell University Hospital with minor injuries they were expected to recover from, according to cops.”
The story about the most expensive townhouse currently for sale on the UWS, in 6sqft features wonderful photographs of “the six-bedroom home at 32 West 76th Street…with 11,300 interior square feet (there are 21 rooms!) and an additional 2,600 square feet of outdoor space spread across two terraces, a backyard, and a full roof deck with an outdoor kitchen and views of the San Remo. In the basement, there’s a double-height basketball court, a temperature-controlled wine storage room, and a fitness center.” The price has been dropped from $35 million to $27.5 million. A bargain.
Dear all rich UWS people: please do not buy beautiful brownstones, gut them, and put in boring modern interiors. There’s plenty of new construction if you want to do that!
Please post links showing the decor of your apartment. Without knowing anything about you we will all arbitrarily apply our personal tastes to your life and let you know what changes we’d like made.
Sarah, I agree with you. NYC brownstones are a limited resource. Why buy a beautiful historic structure just to deface it with an ugly, modern interior? I read about a celebrity who did that to a Dakota apartment years ago. Uglification delux.
On a fall evening in Park Slope you can see what Manhattan brownstone apartments used to look like through the lighted windows. Incredible wood, plaster, and marble built-in features. So beautiful, and now very rare.
I not only agree, but after a little googling, found out the buyer of that brownstone, Dana Lowey Luttway bought it in 2014 for $10M through her development company, Holliswood Development, mostly to flip it (that’s what her company specializes in).
She, apparently, spent years renovating it, only to jack up the price to $35M and try to sell it. Talk about privilege. I truly hope nobody buys it.
Yeah, what a terrible person…
In 2014, Dana Lowey Luttway could barely step foot through the front door of the century-old, Renaissance Revival townhouse her company had recently purchased on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for $6.55 million.
“You couldn’t go into this thing without fear of falling through the planks,” months just to stabilize the structure, which also had a massive hole where there should have been a roof that let in a menagerie of pigeons on the upper floors.
Inane arrogance.
If you don’t want to do this, fine, But please don’t dictate how others design their own living spaces.
You won’t be the only person who ever owns the space. What you tear out can’t be replaced.
Who knew there was such a lobby for boring modern interior design on WSR, though?
I wouldn’t call it a lobby; I would call it respecting the rights of a property owner to his/her aesthetic choices. It’s no one else’s business unless the interior has been landmarked which is the proper legal way to address these questions.
Brownstones are even more unaffordable than all the new high rise construction that everyone always complains about.
Well, the good news is tourists are back…
That ain’t no real B-ball COURT; much too narrow.
Good for one person to shoot hoops…maybe.
And that dining table! Like the dining room at Hogwarts!
Probably reasons for the price-cut.
was thinking the same thing but saw that if you put a backboard on the long wall as well, you could still practice all your shots at home.
For that price I would expect an on site garage.
If you can afford it you can afford a driver.
I’ve said this all along: it’ll be extremely difficult to get homeless people put of hotels and back into congregant housing. After anyear in a great environment, it’s hard to blame them for not wanting to leave and for advocacy groups to do all they can. My only point here is we need to consider things like this when debating “temporary” solutions.
Why does anyone have the right to be snarky over the way someone chooses to live in their own home? Jealousy?
Exactly! Why else would you have nothing good to say about someone who lives in a home nicer than yours. Also, privilege is NOT a dirty word so just stop.
The amount of green with envy (couched as sarcasm) in the neighborhood is becoming unbearable. Yes some people are wealthy. Many worked yard and the opportunity exists to make money. It is not their responsibility to feed and cloth everyone else especially all the UWSers who stayed true to their passions all these years. You have probably benefited from some aspect of it at some point. Oh well. Life in the big city. Sigh.
Assuming you meant “many worked hard,” that would not include the brownstone’s owner Dana Lowey Luttway, whose mother was former Congresswoman Nita Lowey who disclosed her personal asset wealth as $41.2M.
Do you think if you lick the rich’s boots enough they will just give you their money and you can be rich, too? Stop kissing a congresswoman’s daughter’s tuchus after she drove her neighborhood to madness with 3 years of loud renovations to the place she is now trying to flip.
More on the Texas tourist tree injury please. The Post story seems in error. To my knowledge, Central Park has no playground named Great Lawn Playground, nor does a playground exist in the Great Lawn.