Latest news with #Gowanus
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Brad Lander Doesn't Belong in Jail. Does He Belong in City Hall?
We live in an age that favors strongmen and showmen. Brad Lander's problem is that he's neither. Sandwiched between Andrew Cuomo's dark energy and Zohran Mamdani's bright charisma, Lander has struggled to attract attention — at least, he did before ICE agents arrested him on Tuesday. But Lander deserves our attention. A list of his achievements runs long: He was instrumental in passing New York City's paid sick leave and Fair Workweek laws. He led the effort to set the first minimum wage in the country for delivery drivers. He helped integrate the schools in District 15. He used New York City's pension funds to rescue 35,000 rent-stabilized apartments after Signature Bank collapsed. He pushed for the Capital Projects dashboard that tracks how much New York's infrastructure investments are costing and how long they are taking. When Times Opinion asked 15 experts to pick the next mayor, Lander was far and away the favorite. On Sunday, I spent a rainy afternoon walking with Lander through one of his accomplishments. The Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn is best known for its canal, which is best known for being filthy. Speckled on both sides by factories and refineries, the canal was described, as far back as 1910, as 'almost solid' with sewage. In 2009, New York magazine called Gowanus 'the only underdeveloped section of brownstone Brooklyn, for good reason: The canal is disgusting.' In 2010, the E.P.A. named it a Superfund site, and the cleanup of the canal began. It was clear that once the noxious fumes wafting off the water eased a bit, Gowanus was going to flourish. It sits between the ritzier neighborhoods of Park Slope and Cobble Hill and was already a hub for artists and young professionals and public housing. Much of the neighborhood was zoned for industrial use, but that was going to change, and how it changed was going to matter. Lander was the City Council member for the district that included Gowanus. And he helped rally the community around a plan for the new development, which mandated that at least 25 percent of all new units would be affordable, designated big investments for the neighborhood's existing public housing, created new infrastructure for capturing the storm water that kept flooding the canal with sewage, ensured public access to the waterfront and even set aside space for artists. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
$1B residential project kicks off in Gowanus — as ‘starchitect' reveals vision for 1,000-unit rental tower
BIG is back – and better — in Gowanus. The developers of 175 Third St. tapped Bjarke Ingels' much-in-demand architectural firm to design their planned, 1,000-unit, rental apartment tower – and it's nothing like BIG's earlier concept for previous site-owner Aby Rosen's RFR Realty. The new 175 Third St. in the burgeoning residential neighborhood from Charney Companies and Tavros will stand 27 stories encompassing over 1 million square feet – the fifth building by the partners on four different sites on the Gowanus Canal's eastern side. The images on this page reveal Ingels' new vision for the first time, which the architect described as 'stacked blocks of cascading concrete volumes, cascading down toward the canal waterfront.' 'We had our eyes on the site forever,' Charney Companies principal Sam Charney said. 'But someone else always owned it' until 'the price finally came down [to $164 million] and we knew this was the time.' The purchase closed in May. When RFR bailed, it was expected that Charney and Tavros would choose a different architect. Instead, they liked Ingels' new concept the best of the proposals they solicited from a half-dozen 'starchitects.' 'We did not like the previous iteration,' Charney told Realty Check. 'It was inefficient and hard to build. It had a red-brick design that kind of drowned out the [red brick] Powerhouse Arts structure next door.' But Ingels' new conception 'blew us away,' Charney said. Its textured 'architectural concrete' will look as if it's chiseled out of rock' — an homage to the area's industrial past. Chamfered, angled corners at various heights generate 'cool outdoor spaces.' A federal-supervised cleanup of the two-mile-long, noxious canal that began ten years ago prompted the city to rezone 82 blocks in the former low-rise manufacturing area for residential use. The rush to create nearly 9,000 new rental apartments spurred a construction boom. A portion of the once-toxic canal – long a punch line of stand-up comedians – emerged as the district's unlikely scenic centerpiece. The waterway now suggests a picturesque, slow-moving river between handsome apartment towers on both sides. The new 175 Third Street will have 1,000 rental units, of which 25% are 'affordable' as required by neighborhood Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning. It will follow Charney and Tavros' 224-unit Union Channel, which opened in February and is already 60% rented; and Douglass Port at 251 Douglass St. and Nevins Landing at 310 and 340 Nevins St., both under Charney estimated the development cost of 175 Third St., including the land purchase, at about $1 billion. With 100,000 square feet of retail space, it will be the crown jewel of what Charney and Tavros call a 'Gowanus Wharf campus' even though the buildings aren't next to each other. It will boast a 30,000 square-foot public park with 250 feet of canal boardwalk; sports facilities, a dog run, rooftop lounges, spa pools and a three-acre, landscaped courtyard, plus 35,000 square feet of lavish indoor amenities. A waterfront promenade will eventually run the canal's length, with each developer responsible for the segment in front of their buildings. The ones Charney and Tavros are installing on their Nevins and Third Street frontages will be landscaped by Field Operations of High Line Park fame. Construction of 175 Third St. will likely start when the Nevins and Douglass Street buildings are finished roughly a year from now.
Irish Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp: Building a novel around a protagonist with a ‘low quantitative IQ'
Paradise Logic Author : Sophie Kemp ISBN-13 : 978-1398533745 Publisher : Scribner UK Guideline Price : £16.99 They say love is blind. Well, I once dated a blind man, and he broke up with me after a month. Maybe it's more accurate to say instead that love is stupid. This at least seems to be the contention of Paradise Logic , the debut novel by American writer Sophie Kemp, whose 23-year old heroine, Reality Kahn, has the winsome qualities of a 'low quantitative IQ' and 'one of the most pure and open hearts in the world'. After her friend and part-time lover Emil suggests she needs a new hobby, Reality sets out on a quest to find a proper boyfriend and become the 'greatest girlfriend of all time'. So ensues a luridly imagined and slapstick narrative that follows Reality around Gowanus, New York, as she valiantly attempts to win the affections of Ariel, a 27-year-old doctoral student with the 'hazel eyes of an introspective family pet', who lives at Paradise (#221), a 'DIY venue with a jazz twist'. They start going out and Ariel quickly becomes the 'apple of [her] eyeball'. Though his true feelings for her seem vaguer, he agrees to be her boyfriend; she, meanwhile, starts taking an experimental drug called ZZZZvx Ultra (XR) to transform herself into hyper-feminine perfection. One runs into problems when writing the stupid: gags alone might not sustain a reader's interest across a novel, while true stupidity might come at the expense of developed plots and characters. Our heroine, however, is not simply a dum-dum; it would be too easy to dismiss the idiocy of her cavorting, and the book itself as a mere vessel for a batty phraseology. For one thing that language is genuinely entertaining in its outré imagery and syntactical constructions, often managing to marry the ebullience and abjection of 21st-century girldom. READ MORE But while it's fun to fall into Kemp's 'cracked-up' universe, something else lies beyond the crass first-person narration, a hyperbolic riff on the unreliability of the 'I'. By its end, Kemp isn't skewering misogyny in heterosexual romance as much as showing the lengths a girl will go to in her quest to remain 'delulu' and avoid a hard truth about love. Is it a perfect novel? No. But following an era of self-consciously clever narrators, it's a valiant attempt to try something new.
