Photo: Food of the Future The East Williamsburg Moore Street Retail Market is one of four remaining city-run public markets built during the tail end of the Depression; opened by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1941, the Brooklyn market was created to clear the streets of unhygienic peddlers and monitor the scales for customers. Today the market is occupied by 13 vendors selling mostly tropical produce, roots and other ethnic foods to the local......

Yesterday, the New School held a forum to discuss how New York City will save its public housing. The New York City Housing Authority, which is the city's primary sources of affordable housing to 400,000 residents, has an annual shortfall of $225 million. The Daily News reports that Sean Moss, the Regional Director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the NY/NJ region, offered a suggestion that "prompted shocked murmurs." His idea: Sell......

Elected officials, including U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, are speaking out against the proposed expansion of Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, directly south of the performing arts complex. The school wants to add 1.5 million square feet of building space to the midtown campus, which includes an undergraduate college and its law school, between Columbus and Amsterdam Aves., nearly tripling the complex's size from the current 800,000 square feet. Fordam gets to avoid complicated issues......

The NY Times weighs in on Bernard Tschumi’s Blue building at 105 Norfolk St. Fresh off reviews from New Orleans, Paris and Brazil, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is back home with a piece on the 17-story blue-paneled, crystalline tower. Ouroussoff, as regular readers know, is put off by most of the high-design, luxury residential towers now rising across Manhattan. But, walking along the streets of the Lower East Side, alongside brick tenements, public housing......

"Hard Times in the Projects," an in-depth review of New York City's publicly subsidized housing program, reveals how living conditions have declined over the past few decades. Federal legislators have reduced funds while operating costs have soared. As a consequence, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) struggles to maintain its buildings, collect the trash, or respond to service calls. Residents have experienced rent hikes and service cuts, and face the possible closure of senior......

NY State lawmakers are working on legislation that would guarantee rent subsidies that keep Brooklyn public housing project Starrett City affordable, no matter who owns it in the future. Real estate group Clipper Equities has been rebuffed twice in efforts to buy Starrett City, because it was expected the company would attempt to remove long-time residents and charge higher rents. While the legislation is being crafted in Albany in the State Assembly, U.S. Senator from......

Alarming news to start the workweek: The Daily News exclusively reports that the authorities are looking for "64 fugitive rapists, perverts and molesters" who have lied about where they live. Many of the sex offenders gave home addresses at city housing projects. But federal law prohibits Level 2 and Level 3 offenders from living in public housing, so the feds went to evict some offenders - only to find out they were never living there.......

Developers are grumbling, but they'll have to adapt. The tax breaks they have enjoyed for the past 35 years in exchange for building new housing units in NY will now come with more strings attached. Specifically, the new plan approved by City Council on Wednesday aims to create more affordable housing and staunch the flow of taxpayer subsidies toward luxury housing. The New York Times, which endorsed Speaker Christine Quinn's plan before it passed,......

A man was critically injured when he tried to escape a fire in his Bronx apartment building yesterday afternoon. The man had climbed out his fifth floor bathroom window and tried to make his way down a cable that broke. The fire was started by a lit cigarette on the lobby couch; the NY Times reports that the flammable paint on the building's walls caused it to spread. A firefighter said, "The paint on the......

City Councilman Eric Gioia will be demanding that the NYC Housing Authority explain why over 200 registered sex offenders are living in public housing. NYCHA policy - and federal law - prohibits sex offenders from residing in Post puts it, "they are filled with children and other vulnerable targets and in the past were havens for criminals." And the Daily News notes that this past week, a registered offender attacked a woman at the Ravenswood......

When school officials alerted police that 9 year old Mariah Navarro hadn't been in school for two weeks, the police went to her apartment at the Frederick Douglass Houses on 55 West 100th Street, only to find Navarro and her mother Maria Rivera's decomposing bodies. The two bodies were wrapped in blankets and found in separate rooms - Rivera in a bedroom and Navarro in a closet, and police believe the pair were dead for......

Mayor Bloomberg released the 2006 Fiscal Year Mayor's Management Report yesterday. The MMR is the Mayor's way of being accountable for city initiatives and agencies, and during the press conference, the Mayor felt that there was still work to be done, saying, "Two-thirds of the things are going in the right direction. A third aren't going as fast as I'd like, or in the right direction.": Like what? The quality of streets has declined (which......

When not discussing his distaste for Microsoft Office games, Mayor Bloomberg revealed some of what will be in his annual Mayor's Management Report. Here are the highlights: - Pest control complaints leveled off - The proportion of working families living in public housing was higher - Response time to child abuse reports increased - Placements in permanent housing rose for homeless single adults but fell for families - More students graduated from high school in......

Huh. We knew that the main reason that the city switched all 11,000 odd traffic lights and "Walk/Don't Walk" signs was because the LEDs they used were energy efficient. But we didn't realize how much more efficient (90 percent!), nor did we fully realize that it was part of a much larger plan on the part of the City to lead by example in energy efficiency. Not only that, but apparently, according to the grey......

Today, the NY Times revisits a series of articles it did in 1955 that predicted what the city might be like in the coming years (you know, until, as La Bamba from Conan O'Brien voice, woudl sing, "In the year 2000..." or maybe even in 2005, when the Times decided to get around to digging them up from the archives). Titled "Our Changing City," a 20-part series of articles in The New York Times painted......

September 25-29: Latin Beer Tasting Dos Equis, Sol, Corona and Negra Modelo, are paired up with tasty (and Kosher!) Latin dishes in a prix-fixe menu from September 25-29; cost is $49 per person. For details, visit their website. Park East Grill, 1562 Second Ave., 212-717-8400. September 27: Eat Out '05 Time Out New York continues to celebrate its tenth birthday with Eat Out ’05, a tasting event benefitting the Food Bank For New York City.......

If you don't really live in your apartment, and also tell a psychiatrist that you hate it, you might be evicted. Michael Tsitsires had a $104 per month studio (you read that right - it's rent-stabilized) at the Windemere, an SRO at West 57th and Ninth Avenue, but now he's been told to give up the apartment by a civil court judge, after the building sued to evict him. Tsitsires had "abandoned the apartment to......

Ming Kung Chen, the Chinese food delivery man for Happy Dragon in the Bronx, was greeted with happiness and amazement after being stuck in an elevator for three days - and without water or food (he had completed all his deliveries!). Many feared Chen had been killed, as delivery men as frequent targets, and the police were actively searching for him. Somehow, the NYPD and building didn't realize one of the elevators was out, and......

The Chinese food delivery man who had been missing since last Friday night was found safe this morning. Police had been aggressively searching for Ming Kung Chen, using search dogs and aerial units, even entering 817 of the 871 units in the Bronx housing project where Chen's last delivery was and where Chen's bike had been found parked outside. Much of the concern from the police and community was stemming from the history of violent......

Mayor Bloomberg had a lot to smile about, as he announced that New York City's crime rate was historic lows in 2004. NYC is still the safest big city in the U.S., reducing crime in all five boroughs, and is on track to have less than 600 murders for a third year in a row. Gothamist read the press release and found these points telling: - Crime is down 5% citywide; specific drops included 11.5%......

Sure, Curbed covers real estate, but it's high-falutin real estate (see $20 million loft), but Gothamist is here to tell you what real New Yorkers do for apartments: They dress up as their mothers for $170/month public housing. It's sort of like Big Momma's House meets Bosom Buddies, with a twist of Green Card. Authorities busted cross-dressing Michael Jones for impersonating his mother, who died four years ago. Other family members who lived in the......

The craftiness of New Yorkers know no bounds when it comes to $210/month rent. However, when it involves posing as dead tenants, the police start arresting people. Twelve people were arrested for posing as dead tenants in public housing. The Department of Investigation Commissioner said, "To pretend the dead were living, these defendants developed intricate schemes to gain scarce and valuable public housing." The schemes included forgery, having a dead tenant's twin brother pose as......

New York's politicians are generally displeased with President Bush's ideas for the new budget because, as Newsday says, it's a mixed bag of "a doubling of homeland security money and steady funding of transportation projects, but fewer funds for firefighters and police and cuts in public housing assistance." Senator Charles Schumer called the $2.4 trillion U.S. Budget for Fiscal Year 2005 "a bad news budget for New York that leaves New York behind." Representative Anthony......