Deputy mayor: City likes World Trade Center site retail
The city is satisfied with retail plans at Ground Zero, according to Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff. The designs for three new office towers at Ground Zero will include 800,000 square feet of retail space. That’s enough, Doctoroff said last month, to satisfy the city’s demands for a substantial retail presence at the site. Most of this retail will be above ground and concentrated on Church Street.
Effort to keep Stuyvesant Town, Cooper Village affordable
City Councilman Daniel Garodnick, a longtime resident of the Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town complex, is organizing a group of investors in the hopes of buying the complex to keep its more than 11,200 apartments affordable. MetLife, the complex’s owner, announced last month it wanted to sell Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town for reportedly around $5 billion.
Group may toss Governors Island bids
The Governors Island Preservation and Education Group may toss out all the bids to revamp the 172-acre island between Brooklyn and Manhattan, Crain’s reported. The costs of the bids are reportedly too high. The city-state agency in August pared the list of Governors Island bidders to 10.
New World Trade Center site tower designs unveiled
New designs were unveiled last month for Towers 2, 3 and 4 at the World Trade Center site. Each is designed by a renowned architect — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki — and, together, the towers will occupy sites between Church and Greenwich streets, along the eastern edge of the trade center site. All three could be completed within the next six years.
MTA mulls other bids for Hudson rail yards
Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Peter Kalikow said last month that the MTA is considering other bidders besides the city to buy the Hudson Rail Yards on the far West Side, the New York Post reported. Two weeks earlier, the MTA got a new appraisal of the 26-acre railyards. The valuation is $1.5 billion — three times the city’s bid of $500 million, the New York Times reported.
Developer may reduce size of Atlantic Yards project
The size of the proposed Atlantic Yards project in downtown Brooklyn may soon be reduced. Developer Forest City Ratner is mulling a 6 to 8 percent reduction in the project’s size, which would eliminate hundreds of apartments and slash the height of the project’s tallest tower, the Times reported.
Manhattan DA charges four with contractor extortion
Four men from Akbar’s Community Services and P & D Construction Workers have been charged by the Manhattan district attorney with shaking down construction sites around New York City. Their victims were numerous contractors and minority workers who were forced, under threat of violence, to hand over a large portion of their pay, the New York Sun reported.
City nabs unlicensed home contractors
The city announced last month that it had caught 135 home contractors operating without licenses, the New York Daily News reported. The crackdown was based on recent homeowner complaints.
Building New York City on platforms
More details are trickling out about the Bloomberg administration’s plans for accommodating the 9 million New Yorkers expected to populate the city at the end of the next 20 years. Among the details: Building a platform over Sunnyside Yards, the 166-acre commuter train yard in Queens, which would support 35,300 apartments, the New York Observer reported.
Politics snarls Moynihan Station plans
The proposed Moynihan Station transit hub is snarled in a major imbroglio that involves development firms Vornado and the Related Companies as well as Gov. Pataki, the Empire State Development Corporation, state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and many others, the Observer reported. The plans to revamp the Farley Post Office Annex have evolved into much larger plans that include moving Madison Square Garden a block west.