Results tagged “rooseveltisland”

Back in April there were some updates on the preservation efforts of the 151-year-old smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, and word is that, as of yesterday, it's been saved from total destruction. However, NY1 reports that Trust for Public Land's Andy Stone "said the restoration process is painstaking and delicate, since every piece that fell down had to catalogued, and there are hundreds of pieces still waiting to be reattached." amNewYork also reports on the city’s only landmarked ruin, noting that aside from those finishing touches, it has "finished a $4.5 million stabilization after a portion collapsed in December 2007." Now that the structure is sturdy once again, ground was broken yesterday for the construction of Southpoint Park, which will encompass both the ruins and the Strecker Lab and will include "two large lawns, a scenic overlook and gardens along the southernmost part of the island." Look forward to frolicking there around Fall 2010.

       

This past Saturday Improv Everywhere held their sixth MP3 Experiment on Roosevelt Island (just a few days after Charlie Todd's book on the troupe hit stores). There's not much info yet on what exactly went down, but it appears there were inflatable weapons, primary colors, confused residents, synchronized fun and much more (get the mp3 that soundtracked the day here). Katie Sokoler was there to document the whole thing, and IE promises some video in the future.

Back in 2007, at a youthful 151-years-old, the eerie smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island suffered a major collapse on the north facade. The NY Times checks in now, as a team of engineers, architects, masons and more have swooped in to save the landmark, which was designed by James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Take a look at the progress on the guided video tour, where they mention the future fixed-up structure could house performances and a cafe. Too bad it won't be in time for the Roosevelt Live concert series.

After outraged and worried Roosevelt Island residents found out their apartment building would use submeters to charge for electricity—resulting in projected bills of up to $1,000—the NY State Public Service Commission ordered to suspend the submetering plan (read the letter here). Many tenants complained that the Roosevelt Landings building had poor heating and insulation—one tenant who got an $800 sample bill used her oven to heat her apartment—but the building claimed few residents responded to their offers to winterize the units. The NY Times reports that the PSC's order "states that the commission was not informed about the complaints regarding poor energy efficiency before granting approval to the plan" and "raised concerns" unpaid electricity bills would be used to evict tenants. Roosevelt Island 360 pointed out, "It is simply insane to expect many of the seniors in Eastwood to simply turn down their heat during the daytime when many cannot leave their apartments."

Residents of the 1,003-unit Roosevelt Landings complex on Roosevelt Island are used to paying for their electricity as part of their rents, but come April they'll start receiving separate bills for the first time. Last week the managers of the complex handed out sample electricity bills based on the readings of submeters installed in apartments, and now residents are shocked to learn that electricity is freaking expensive. One tenant who lives in a three-bedroom unit got a bill for $1,050.43, which was about half of what she pays in rent. Another tenant, Missy Feliciano, tells the Times, "I almost died when I opened the package." Assemblyman Micah Kellner wants officials to re-examine the submetering plan; he contends that "this is a de facto rent increase on this building," which used to be part of the state’s moderate-income Mitchell-Lama housing program. But the COO of the complex, Douglas F. Eisenberg, says, "They haven’t been responsible for their electric bills. Now they are. I think at the end of the day, I feel pretty good that we’re doing the right thing here."

The Observer looks at "Roosevelt Island 2.0"--as in the new developments on the island. The big development Riverwalk "could bring 2,500 to 3,000 new residents to the Island" which translates to over a 25% increase in population since 2000. Roosevelt Island 360 blogger Eric Schwartzman has been documenting the addition of Riverwalk said of the chain stores finally arriving, "It very funny, where a lot of areas are like 'We already have too many Starbucks,' on the island, when that first came, people began to feel like, 'Hey, we're part of civilization!'" (Schwartzman took this photo of Riverwalk signage that touts the Starbucks and Duane Reade among others.)

A well-known ruin is crumbling. According to Roosevelt Island Historical Society president and historian Judith Berdy, part of the north wing of the Smallpox Hospital collapsed about a week ago. She writes, "The rest of the north wing especially the front is in danger of coming down any time... [The Roosevelt Island Operation Corporation] is working with TPL, the Southpoint park developers to find a way to do emergency stabilization of the rest of the building... Please encourage RIOC to do all possible to save the rest of the building."

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on 155th Ave. and 79th St. in Queens, a bank robbery at the Chase branch on De Kalb and Bedford Ave. in Brooklyn, and a pedestrian struck at Hunts Point and Lafayette Aves. in the Bronx. The Guggenheim sent out a postcard inviting people to a seminar about Andy Warhol. The message on the reverse side is expletive-laced and describes Warhol and his fans in derogatory terms...

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: A boat in distress at the Roosevelt Island Bridge, a homicide on Howard in Brooklyn, and a stabbing on Jamaica Avenue and 161st Street in Queens
• Hillary Clinton out-fund-raises Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama in New York, which makes sense since she's been building her donor list as a Senator from New York.
• The big mystery of NYC: Where the middle class live.
• A man was fatally hit by a car on 54th Street between the West Side Highway and 11th Avenue; he apparently darted into traffic "to relieve himself on the side of the street."
• Is a honey bear in shoe-bomber Richard Reid's cell a deadly weapon? Maybe.
• Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas ate 173 Buffalo wings in 12 minutes, winning Buffalo's National Buffalo Wing Festival. Still, Nathan's Hot Dog eating champ Joey Chesnutt holds the record, eating 7.5 pounds of wings in 12 minutes (Thomas's 173 wings is about 5.17 pounds).
• In the wake of three people arraigned for their $5 million pot operation in Long Island, Newsday reports feds made 40% more indoor pot-farm busts between 2001 and 2006.
• If you find yourself near Chester, NJ, the Stony Hill Farm Market has a corn maze in the shape of the Manhattan skyline where you can also learn about Manhattan history!
• In addition to derision, there's much confusion about Julian Schnabel's pink palace, dubbed Palazzo Chupi.
• Nanny Diaries directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer-Berman explain the difficulties of filming an "apartment porn" movie to NYU: "[Robert] was like, 'I don’t know where you are, where are you guys,' we were like, 'We’re by the kitchen,' he was like, 'Which kitchen? There’s three kitchens.' It was crazy."

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: An overturned vehicle on the Triborough Bridge, which can't be good for all those getting away for the weekend; an escaped prisoner in The Bronx; and multiple pedestrians were struck Dyckman Street & Broadway.
• Early this morning in Bed-Stuy, a police officer sitting in a marked vehicle was shot in the arm. The officer was treated and released from Kings County Hospital but the NYPD is still searching for the shooter.
• A cat rescue group was formed to trap Roosevelt Island's feral cats (there are about 100, but many die during the winter)
• If you're going to shoot a Tylenol commercial that isn't site-specific, why film at the Hotel Chelsea?
• Still stuck at work or out of vacation days already? Perhaps you should try getting a job at IBM, a company that doesn't keep track of how many vacation days you take a year. While the policy sounds great, apparently it makes people work longer hours and work during vacations.
• PETA is crying foul over the Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic ritual kapparot, where sins are symbolically transfered to a chicken that is swung over ones head. PETA says the chickens are disposed of improperly and possibly mishandled, but a Hasidic activist says the tradition where as many as 50,000 chickens in Brooklyn are used, will continue.
• Kew Gardens residents are upset with the Department of Education for creating a transfer school for "older students who may have had difficulty at their previous schools" in their neighborhood without telling them.

This October, artist Thom Sokoloski will build 100 white tents on Roosevelt Island, and the public will be able to see the illuminated tents at night as well as explore what's in them. The project is called The Encampment and here is a description the website:

The Encampment is a large-scale public participatory art installation. 100 - 19th century luminous tents will be erected as a work of optical art on Roosevelt's Island Southpoint. From 7pm to 7am each night, New Yorkers will be able to view the luminous symmetries of the tents from both sides of the East River, as well as visit the actual site and experience the installations in each of the tents. It proposes an archaeological dig as its metaphor; the search for artifacts is replaced by the search for a collective memory of Roosevelt Island.

The alternative energy company that has plans to install hundreds of turbines in the East River to harness tidal energy and generate zero-emission electrical power is running into trouble due to the massive amount of energy they are dealing with. The small number of turbines already placed in the East River by Verdant Power have been temporarily removed as the strong currents continue to overwhelm the physical construction of the underwater "windmills." The six turbines that were placed in the water last December and were capable of supplying 1,000 daily kilowatt hours of power and serving the Gristedes supermarket on Roosevelt Island could not withstand currents.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a vessel in distress off Rikers Island in the East River, a dead body found in the East River off Roosevelt Island and Queens, and an industrial accident on 52nd Ave. in Queens.
• Confirming recent speculation, The New York Times is cancelling its TimesSelect initiative, in which people subscribed to read a number of columnists and other special online content.
• Mayor Bloomberg signed autographs, greeted courtroom personnel, and posed for a court artist's portrait, but was ultimately dismissed by one or both of the lawyers choosing from 40 potential jurors today. He did not take it personally.
• Norman Siegel is defending Rev. Billy, who was arrested on harrassment charges for reciting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in Union Square. Part of Siegel's strategy is to argue that the use of harrassment charges insinuates that there was some sort of romantic relationship between cops and Rev. Billy, as harrassment is normally reserved for "ex-boyfriend sexual stalkers and drunk husbands."
• The principal of a Manhattan public high school hosted a Santeria ritual at her school while no students were present. The officiant at the Afro-Caribbean religion's ceremony received school funds for other services and the assistant principle was asked to pay $900 towards the cost.
• Less than three-tenths of the money in a special fund dedicated to bridge and highway work was allegedly spent improving New York's infrastructure in 2004-2005. An upstate lawmaker claims that the money is being used to cover non-infrastructure general budget items.
• Brooklyn Heights Blog notes someone's complaint that on one of the hottest weekend days of the year, one may have to wait for hours to take a dip in a free public pool on the East River.
• Astronaut Photography of Earth includes an impressive shot of Brooklyn from space.

Long-held plans to build a memorial to FDR on Roosevelt Island may finally be coming to fruition, although not everyone is pleased. Welfare Island in the East River was renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973, anticipating the installation of a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt that had been in the planning stages since 1970. The renaming was probably also welcomed by future residents of the island's first residential housing that would open in 1976. Famed architect Louis Kahn completed his design for the memorial that would be installed at the southern end of the two-mile island shortly before his death in 1974. Before the memorial could be built, however, the city entered a period of deep fiscal crisis and building a new park or memorial was deemed out of the question. A fund-raising effort recently began so that the memorial could be built on the 35th anniversary year of the island's renaming.

The 31st Annual Macy's 4th of July Fireworks extravaganza is just around the corner. This is the largest display in America and takes a year to plan. This year's show will stretch wider than usual in a "high definition" format, choreographed to the New York Pops (simulcast on 1010 WINS, TV broadcast on NBC). The Daily News has an interview with Gary Souza, fireworks designer for the event; he says, "We have a new orange that’s really awesome. It’s a golden-red color. We also have this silvery pixie dust that bursts into pink and chartreuse. And look for the aqua jellyfish during the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' song."

THEATER: Gertrude Stein is regarded as an avant-garde intellectual whose adventurous prose has long overshadowed her plays – despite her Broadway hit Four Saints in Three Acts. (Who could forget?) A crack team of downtown experimental theater types are now hoisting six of Stein’s one-acts out of obscurity with a production in the East Village. The evening, irresistibly dubbed Steinese Takeout, boldly embraces Stein’s radicalism and runs with it. How radical are these plays? “How about no plot, no setting, and no pre-defined characters. Cryptic? Definitely. Absurd? Perhaps. Balderdash? Not at all.” – John Del Signore

The five conceptual proposals for redeveloping Governors Island, "The Park at the Center of the World," have been floating for over a week now. Maybe you saw the technicolor article in last week's New York Magazine. Or maybe you've swooned among the large-scale paradise boards on display at the Center for Architecture.

Yesterday, the MTA lowered the first of many parts of the Tunnel Boring Machine into the lower level of the 63rd Street tunnel as part of the MTA’s East Side Access project. The lowering itself could have been dismissed by passersby as just some sort of generic routine construction work, but it was much more than just moving a boring machine. When finally assembled in about two months, the 600-ton automated Spanish-owned and Italian-made machine will dig its way beneath the streets of Manhattan the tunnel that will finally bring the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Terminal.

Living on Roosevelt Island may afford you gorgeous views and short commute to Manhattan, but residents really would like more ways out. The Sun reports residents want to build a staircase and elevator to the Queensboro Bridge in case of an emergency. An emergency like evil, goopy water?

In week 2 of the NYC Department of Education's busted school bus route changes, parents are still complaining and the media is loving it. There's 5 year old Michelle Baum in the Post today, waiting outside in the freezing weather for her bus. And the hotline the DOE has been directing parents to seems to be just as bad: In yesterday's Daily News, there was 11 year old Eleanor Shanahan whose family was told a bus would return to take her to school earlier, versus dropping her off 45 minutes late - only for her dad to find out from the school bus hotline that she would be "unrouted."

Although we haven't heard the old "urban jungle" metaphor applied to New York lately, preservationists continue to churn out new lists of "endangered" architectural species. The newest, Ten to Save: Endangered NYC comes from an editor at amNewYork, Rolando Pujol. It is derived in part from the New York Landmark Conservancy's Endangered Buildings Online, which was unveiled last summer July.

Light and Oil on Water by mdpNY.

The New York City Journal is a blog about New York... in Sim City. It's author has spent many months laboriously recreating every detail of the five boroughs, from Times Square, to MSG, to Governors Island, to Roosevelt Island, and beyond. It's amazing stuff-- page through his monthly archives for reenactments of major New York events like September 11th and the Upper East Side plane crash.

Radar data indicate that the airplane was flying over the east side of Roosevelt Island prior to initiating a 180 degree turn. At this location, there would have been a maximum of 2100 feet clearance from buildings, if the full width of the river had been used. However, from the airplane's mid-river position over Roosevelt Island, the available turning width was only 1700 feet. The prevailing wind from the east would have caused the airplane to drift 400 feet toward the building during the turn, reducing the available turning width to about 1300 feet. At an airspeed of 97 knots, this turn would have required a constant bank angle of 53 degrees and a loading of 1.7 Gs on the airplane. If the initial portion of the turn was not this aggressive, a sufficiently greater bank angle would have been needed as the turn progressed, which would have placed the airplane dangerously close to an aerodynamic stall.

"An eventual field of underwater turbines in NY's East River" sounds like a dream, but it turns out it may be a reality in a near future. Verdant Power, with the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority is working on the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project that would bring up to 10 Megawatts of energy from an East River turbine field. While the first turbines are supposedly being deploye this year, Verdant has been talking about this since 2004. From the Columbia News Service:

Verdant Power plans to install hundreds of what look like underwater windmills in the East River -- the misleading name for the tidal channel that separates Manhattan and Long Island.

Continue reading "Turbines in the East River"

- Washington Irving High School, Union Square

-- According to NY1, the owners of the cars that got crushed in Inwood will get paid for them-- including the removal.

Just in time for the school year, the Roosevelt Island Tram is up and running again! It's been two and a half months since the tram stalled over for half a day with 68 people in two cars, and tram officials have said they have tested, re-tested, and tri-tested the cars, but still, more work would be done. WNBC reports Roosevelt Island Operation Cooperation president Herb Berman as saying "that in 2008, the entire system would be shut down for several months for a $15 million renovation that may include new cable cars." Maybe actual toilets, versus buckets with privacy curtains.