1987: First citywide foreclosures threatened
Twenty years ago this month, Mayor Edward Koch’s administration threatened to seize property from 985 landlords throughout the five boroughs in the first citywide foreclosure action in New York history. The threat targeted commercial and industrial landowners who owed the city more than $2,000 in back taxes and residential property owners who owed more than $10,000. These owners owed $22.3 million collectively for charges dating as far back as 1976.
Foreclosure threats had become very effective tools in the 1980s because property values were on the rise compared to the 1970s, creating incentives for owners to hold on to their buildings and pay record amounts of & 8202;back taxes.
This large-scale threat came just six months after a previous threat to foreclose on 700 properties in Manhattan owned by tax-delinquent landlords yielded payment from all but 73 of them — a total of $15 million. “We shook them up and they paid up,” Mayor Koch told the New York Times. Seeing the success of this strategy, the mayor’s office decided to “get tough” with all the boroughs and announced the same threat to 575 landowners in Brooklyn, 210 in the Bronx, 125 in Queens, 50 in Manhattan and 25 on Staten Island.
1932: Completion of city’s largest building
When the Port Authority opened a trucking depot on Eighth Avenue in September of 1932, it became the largest building in the city in terms of volume, with 37.2 million cubic feet of space.
The depot replaced 78 individual buildings that formerly stood on the block bounded by Eighth and Ninth avenues and West 15th and 16th streets.
The structure was known as Union Inland Terminal No. 1, and today is an office building known by its address at 103 Eighth Avenue. At the time it was built, the depot proved that breadth could sometimes trump height, containing 1.2 million more cubic feet than the Empire State Building, which was completed in 1931 with 36 million cubic feet.
In addition to warehouse space and loading docks, the massive 15-floor building leased out showroom and office space to companies who shipped from the location. The Port Authority itself held offices on the top floor. The agency remained headquartered there until it moved to the newly opened World Trade Center in 1972, which it developed.
The Port Authority built the terminal after analyzing the inefficiency of the current system, in which imported items were stored in many different locations before they were shipped out of New York. The new building allowed goods to be sorted on site and shipped to railroads in New Jersey.
1927: World’s tallest apartment building to open
When the Sherry-Netherland Hotel opened in the fall of 1927, the largely residential hotel at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue was the tallest apartment building in the world. Designed by architecture firm Schultze and Weaver, it ushered in the age of high-rise luxury apartments.
The hotel’s planned Oct. 1 opening was not altered by a disastrous fire that had occurred in April 1927, during the building’s construction. The fire began on the 38th floor, but the damage was mostly restricted to the temporary wooden superstructure that was built around the tallest floors.
The 40-story building is topped by a 570-square-foot observation balcony. When it originally opened, the observation deck boasted a complete panoramic view of Staten Island to the south, Westchester to the north and the Long Island Sound as far east as Greenwich, Conn.