Today’s Madison Square Garden (born 1968) is now the oldest arena in both the NBA and NHL, but it almost didn’t make it to its twentieth birthday. In 1982, noting the flurry of sports teams then moving to New Jersey … Continue reading
Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who already owned 80 percent of the Brooklyn Nets and 45 percent of the Barclays Center where they play, completed his full set by buying the remaining shares of those two items from developer Bruce Ratner … Continue reading
Like most years in New York City, 2015 was a bit of an odd bird. The Mets reached the World Series on the shoulders of a player who earlier in the year was pilloried for his controversial comments. There was … Continue reading
On a recent Saturday afternoon on the Sunset Park waterfront, the Industry City warehouse complex was a hive of activity. On the first floor, the food court bustled with visitors scarfing down chicken tinga tacos and gourmet cookies. One floor … Continue reading
When Bushwick community groups announced in January 2014 that Read Properties, owners of the long-derelict Rheingold Brewery site along Flushing Avenue, had agreed to build as many as 200 units of affordable housing as part of the city’s rezoning of … Continue reading
New York may have recovered nicely from some of the issues that beset it a generation ago — violent crime, large swaths of the city being on fire pretty much 24/7 — but it still has its problems. There’s the … Continue reading
In a city where more than 60 percent of residents are renters and rents are perpetually too damn high, New Yorkers are preconditioned to view their landlords as mustache-twirling cartoon villains. Even the most cynical of apartment dwellers, though, would … Continue reading
Tamara Zahaykevich is one of the many New Yorkers who have found themselves both gentrifier and gentrified, as the front lines have gradually shifted. “I’ve been in New York since 1996, and since then I’ve moved my apartment ten times, … Continue reading
The former Rheingold brewery site in northwest Bushwick was set to be a perfect flash point between the families who’d rebuilt the neighborhood after the fires of the 1970s and the newcomers who’d begun settling there in the Great Williamsburg … Continue reading
If anyone needed a perfect Rorschach test for 21st-century gentrification angst, it showed up this summer on Slate. The website created an “Are You a Gentrifier?” calculator that promised a simple yes/no answer. The calculator itself was fairly ham-fisted — … Continue reading