From left: Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and a rendering of NYU’s plans for 370 Jay StreetWhile many New Yorkers were celebrating Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s selection of Cornell University to build a science school on Roosevelt Island, Brooklyn politicians were pinning their hopes on another phrase the mayor uttered during the press conference.

According to the New York Daily News, Bloomberg said he was still in talks with three other universities and could award grants for another graduate science school. Brooklynites hope that award goes to NYU so it can build a school at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn. [more]

Williamsburg retailers are up in arms about partially shut down service on the L train on a dozen weekends since July, reaching out to community leaders and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to work out alternatives. The shutdowns have resulted in massive drops in sales for many of them, Crains reported, most dramatically on Black Friday, the stores’ biggest day of the year.

“Nobody was here,” said William Norton, owner of an apparel store Peachfrog in the vicinity of the L closure. “I lost 80 percent of my business, compared with last year.”

Since 1998, the L train’s ridership has increased by a massive 141 percent thanks to development of the now-trendy Williamsburg area, but local businesses are now suffering so much from the unreliability of commuters’ lifeline to the neighborhood that something must be done, they said.
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From left: State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and renderings of the Apple store in Grand CentralThe sweetheart deal that Apple got to open a store in Grand Central Terminal has caught the attention of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, according to the New York Post, and he’s launched an investigation into whether the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was overly generous with the lease terms.

Apple is paying less rent than most other tenants, including neighbors on the balcony, and is the only of the 100 retailers in the terminal that doesn’t have to share its revenue with the agency. [more]

Rendering of Grand Central Apple Store

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority presented Apple with an unusually favorable deal to take 23,000 square feet of space in the Grand Central Terminal, according to the New York Post.

Not only is Apple paying just $60-per-square-foot, while other tenants, such as Shake Shack, pay upwards of $200 per square foot, but Apple is also under no obligation to kickback a percentage of its sales to the MTA, as all other Grand Central tenants do. The Post said retail analysts believe the store should generate at least $100 million in sales per year. Real estate executives interviewed by the Post expressed some measure of surprise that the agency wasn’t able to recoup some percentage. [more]

While the New York City construction industry has been stable in 2011, drastic job and spending cuts are in the cards for 2013, according to a report released today by the New York Building Congress entitled “New York City Construction Outlook 2011-2013.”

Construction spending is expected to total $27.7 billion this year, just shy of the $28 billion spent in 2010, but 11 percent below the $31 billion peak in 2007. The Building Congress expects spending to be about the same in 2012, before plummeting to $23 billion in 2013.

Similarly, the average number of construction jobs will fall by 4,900 this year to 106,900. And after a 5,200 uptick in construction jobs next year, the Building Congress expects the number of jobs to plummet to 91,800, down 40,000 from the 2008 peak. – Adam Fusfeld [more]

Renderings of the Fulton Street Transit Center (source: MTA)

Unlike its Grand Central Terminal, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority directly leases space to tenants and has become known as something of a difficult landlord, the MTA will lease all the space in the forthcoming Fulton Street Transit Center to one company and let that firm manage it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the agency hopes to make it a shopping and dining destination.

Once complete in 2014, the three-story glass and steel structure at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway will have 70,000 square feet of retail space. [more]

Some residents near the Second Avenue Subway construction are complaining that the work is causing them to cough and forcing them to keep their windows shut and repeatedly sweep their apartments due to dust, DNAinfo reported.

Residents presented their complaints at a meeting of Community Board 8 last night, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shared information from an air quality study it conducted at 10 locations between East 69th and East 87th streets.

According to the MTA’s preliminary findings, pollution from morning rush hour traffic should be a much greater source of concern than the construction, which recently completed its first phase (see video above). [more]

Today, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will finish tunneling the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Trains won’t be running on the new subway line for at least five years, but that’s just a blip in the long history of the project, which was first proposed in the 1920s and has been kicked around ever since. [more]

Second Avenue Subway construction

The life of the the rocks being dug up as part of the Second Avenue Subway construction does not end on Second Avenue. Instead, the rocks have become part of an ecosystem as they are being used in construction projects around the New York and New Jersey region, WNYC reported. Contractor Skanska has an agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Administration to transport the rocks off-site to Newark. There, at Armored Recycling, the “mole rock” is turned into usable construction material using a machine called the jaw crusher. 
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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is banning underground
blasting along the Second Avenue Subway construction site in the night time after 7 p.m. starting
today, the New York Times reported, in response to noise complaints
from residents and community leaders.

The project’s contract
originally allowed the blasts until midnight, although MTA construction
chief Michael Horodniceanu said they usually stopped by 9 p.m. The
blasts (listen in video above) are necessary to remove underground rock for construction
of the three new stations that will serve the route, at 96th, 86th and 72nd streets. [more]