Apartment Rentals in New York City – what you need to know.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Kevin, my co-worker in the RDNY.com Listings Dept, watches NY1 TV all the time and saw a TV report today (June 25, 2008) that said that Brooklyn has the city\’s largest gay community and the 4th largest in the whole country. This is from the NY1 website: According to the borough president\’s office [Marty Markowitz], Brooklyn now has the largest…
The New York Observer has an interesting profile of someone I never heard of: Greg O\’Connell. He owns 1,000,000 square feet of Red Hook but seems to be a developer with a social agenda — can a New York City developer with lot of waterfront property truly be benign? Here are a few excerpts from the article to give you…
From New York Times on June 21, 2008 comes more news that finding a good rental apartment is getting tougher: Rise in Renters Erasing Gains for Ownership Here\’s the important parts for us renters: . . . the percentage of households headed by renters increased to 32.2 percent, from 30.9 percent. The figures, while seemingly modest, reflect a significant shift…
(Photo by Robert Stolank for the NY Times. The Times has great photographers.) The Rent Guidelines Board has finalized the 2008 rent stabilization rules: * Stabilized leases signed between Oct 1, 2008 and Sept 30, 2009 will increase 4.5% for a 1-year lease, and 8.5% for a 2-year lease. This is the biggest increase since the Board was created in…
I got these pix in an e-mail from the wife of the man who was my boss before I came to RDNY.com, and they are too adorable to not share. I\’ll write a real post about how to avoid identity theft at another time. For now, here\’s a god tip: never put anything personal on a computer you use at…
Ian, who is originally from Wisconsin [UPDATE: Ian is from Michigan. I always get Michigan and Wisconsin mixed up.], the but now has a home in Brooklyn, joined the RDNY.com Listings Dept yesterday (June 19, 2008). When I found out that he lives in Bushwick, I immediately asked him to tell me all about his neighborhood. Here is what he…
Mark, whose last name is now MCW@RDNYLD (My Co-Worker at RDNY.com\’s Listings Dept), sent me more info about old movie theaters. He lives in Jersey City and he loves movie theaters the way I love diners. Some more info on your post… I love the old movie palaces. The Loew\’s you wrote about is around the corner from where I…
This is my first post about New Jersey. I know I seem to use the New York Times a lot in this blog, but in my defense it\’s because they have the best photos. Look at this by Frank R. Conrad: This is the interior Loew\’s Theater at 54 Journal Square in Jersey City. It was built in 1929, just…
McMansions have come to Manhattan. Alistair and Catherine Economakis and their two children need a 5 story apartment building (which had 15 rent-stabilized apartments when they bought the building) in order to live comfortably in Manhattan. Click here to see the diagram in full. The photo is by Ruby Washington and the illustration is by Frank O\’Connell. While I think…
I was away for a few days in Florida, and here\’s a tip for anyone planning a summer trip to FLA: be sure to have something to read for the inevitable delay at the airport. I had to sit for 7 hours in the Fort Lauderdale Airport yesterday (June 16, 2008) while the storms cleared up here in NYC. Thankfully,…
Mark, my co-worker in the Listings Dept at RDNY.com, gave me the rest of the story about Manhattan\’s Mount Vernon. The building was originally constructed in 1799 as a carriage house for a 23-acre estate named Mount Vernon in honor of the home of the Father of Our Country. In 1826 and the carriage house was converted into the Mount…
Mark (the fellow who still hasn\’t explained to me what Mount Vernon is doing in the Upper East Side) sent me a link to another old house in Manhattan: The Dyckman Farm House in Inwood. Here\’s what the house looks like on their website: Wow. It looks like it\’s on a cliff, looming high above Inwood. I wondered how the…
That\’s a groundhog, not a rat. It\’s from an article by Tom Acitelli called Nobody Move! in the June 3, 2008 New York Observer telling us what we in RDNY.com\’s Listings Dept have always known: there\’s not much for a new renter to choose from in NYC because when a tenant has a good deal, they stay put. That\’s why…
Alyssa, my co-worker at RDNY.com\’s Listings Dept, came into work today a very happy girl. She spent Saturday and Sunday at the Big Apple BBQ Block Party at Madison Square Park where she totally indulged herself, BBQ-wise. I\’ve never met anyone get as excited about grilled meat as Alyssa does. Alyssa swore she could smell the aroma from 31st Street…
Mark, my co-worker in the Listings Dept of RDNY.com, likes NYC history as much as I do. I guess he got tired of my fascination with The Grange and he sent me an email with a link to another old house in Manhattan to remind me that Alexander Hamilton\’s house is not all that. This is a little-known old house…
I don\’t know why this story interests me so much. Here are 2 more photos from the NY Times of Sunday, June 8, 2008 showing Alexander Hamilton\’s country house on the move. My thanks to photographer Andrew Henderson.
Before the summer of 2005, I\’d never been to the Bronx on my own. My parents had taken me to the zoo once when we visited the relatives but all I remember from that visit was that I got a helium balloon and lost it. What I saw in summer 2005 has made me always fond of that borough. But…
More photos from 2005 when I was a new employee at RDNY.com and learning about Queens for the first time.
In the summer of 2005, I started working in the Listings Dept at RDNY.com and on weekends I\’d get on the subways and buses of the city and take photos of the neighborhoods I was writing listings about. The bosses at RDNY.com used many of my snaps for their eBooks. Here are some of my favorite photos of Brooklyn from…
Seeing photos of Alexander Hamilton\’s Grange today got me interested in the finding the oldest houses in each borough. I\’ll try to be brief and give you links to official websites. In Manhattan, the oldest house is the Morris-Jumel House which was briefly the home of Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton. It was built about 1765 as a…
Alexander Hamilton\’s country house, called The Grange, is moving again. It was built in 1802 on what became West 143 St, moved in 1889 to West 141 St, and is currently (Saturday, June 7) rolling down Convent Avenue to its new site at the northwest corner of St. Nicholas Park. I wanted to see this spectacle for myself, but I…