Results tagged “construction”

Back in 2008 Brooke Shields purchased a four-apartment Greek Revival townhouse on West 10th Street in the West Village. At the time, Curbed noted it was "going to take some serious work to combine into a single-family mansion, but Brooke Shields is up to the challenge." Flash forward to today, when the Daily News reports that her neighbors are fed up with construction, which starts around 6 a.m. every morning and has been going on for months. more ›

The offices of Lehr Construction in the Flatiron District were raided by the Manhattan DA's office Wednesday morning. While Lehr employees were arriving for work, detectives with the DA's Construction Industry Strike Force acted on a search warrant as part of an ongoing investigation of the interior construction industry. They carted away over twenty cartons of documents and several computer units. (Lehr executive Gerald Lazar has pleaded guilty to bribery before, as a part of a complex bid rigging plot with other firms.) Executives tell the NY Times that the interior construction industry, is said to be "headed into another troubled period." It's unclear when exactly the last period of fraud ended. more ›

This spring the city's hiring freeze may finally thaw. According to a new study lots of New York businesses say they’ll take on new employees in the coming months. Sixteen percent of the 18,000 companies surveyed said hiring was in the cards; that’s 4 percent more than last quarter. NY1 says just nine percent will make job cuts, down from twice that much in the previous count. We'll believe it when we see it, but stats say construction workers will find sites-a-plenty. As for finance, that industry's still on lockdown. more ›

Prepare to be shocked, readers: The feds have charged eight members of the Colombo crime family with extortion, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, and embezzlement of union benefit funds in connection with construction at the World Trade Center site. Yes, in addition to a lack of progress at the site, there's mob activity. more ›

Still $125 million short of completion, Brooklyn Bridge Park’s developers are considering unusual self-financing options to finish the 20-year-old project (Gothamist got a tour, see pictures here). Over the years it’s appeared in bits and pieces: there are benches and tree-lined paths on Pier 1 by Old Fulton Street, and a big playground on Pier 6 near Atlantic Avenue. Still, the bulk of the work is unfinished, and just running the park costs $16 million annually. But will seeking private moneys turn the park into Disney World, or worse the private backyard of a condo? “When you talk more broadly about parks,” said Sen. Daniel L. Squadron, who represents the area, “I don’t think we have figured out how to make them self-sustaining.” more ›

Months after residents of a Turtle Bay building found their apartments coated in a layer of dust, an environmental testing firm found "highly elevated levels" of a carcinogen inside the E. 47th Street condo tower. A toxic substance found in mortar called crystalline silica got into apartments while laborers did facade work at the L'Ecole building at 212 E. 47th Street, according to an attorney for tenants who have filed suit over the incident. "It was like there had been a snowfall," said Steven Rosenhaus, who suffered breathing trouble and eye irritation after his 20th-floor apartment was blanketed in the the powder. According to the Post, building management has denied any wrongdoing in court documents. more ›

Today's windy weather has blown debris from an unfinished Frank Gehry skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. Materials started falling from the 76-story Beekman Tower this morning, causing police to close off the "area between Gold Street, Ann Street and Park Row" to cars and pedestrians. The NotifyNYC service sent out an initial warning at 8:05 am urging New Yorkers to "[a]void the area near Spruce Street between Williams Street and Park Row," then followed up with another message at 10:04 am noting that "[d]ebris is falling because of the high winds." more ›

For the first time since the 1950s, the city's ubiquitous sidewalk sheds are going to get a makeover. The new scaffolding design — selected after an international contest — is intended to "improve quality of life, reduce construction impacts on businesses, increase pedestrian safety and increase available space for pedestrians on sidewalks," according to the Mayor's Office. The so-called "The Urban Umbrella" will "complement the city's architectural beauty rather than take it away from it," said Mayor Bloomberg. "Sidewalk sheds are a part of New York life, reflecting the face of a city that is constantly changing — yet the sheds themselves haven't evolved at all during the past four decades and its time to bring them into the 21st century." more ›

History nerds, rejoice. The Downtown Express has a neat little article on a recent finding in the Battery Park City landfill recently. Construction workers there uncovered a historic concrete bulkhead, which is actually on the State Register of Historic Places (this wasn't the first time a part of the wall has been exposed). It was put in place over 100 years ago when Civil War Gen. George McClellan launched the project "because silt and refuse was building up along the Hudson River shoreline and rotting piers, preventing ships from landing." Historic archeologist Joe Sopko allowed the workers to remove part of the slab, noting: “It’s just concrete." However, he points out it was one of the first examples of a large amount of concrete used in a construction project. [via Curbed] more ›

Why live in a Bushwick trailer park when you can live in a Williamsburg shipping container? The folks over at Curbed say shipping container architecture is a "Bigfoot" in the city's development circles, meaning it's "endlessly discussed yet rarely seen." Though it's been used in commercial applications — like the modular Subway sandwich shop installed atop a crane at the World Trade Center site — this narrow two-family home at 351 Keap Street in Williamsburg might be the city's first residential use of the environmentally-friendly, cost-conscious building material. Back in 2008, the Office of Emergency Management held a contest to design temporary housing for the thousands of New Yorkers who might be displaced in the event of a catastrophe, like a direct hit from a Category 3 hurricane. Most of those designs utilized shipping containers, so these Keap Street residents aren't just setting trends, they're braced for the end of days! more ›

As hardhats disassembled scaffolding on an Eighth Avenue high-rise on Thursday, a construction worker fell eight stories when a plank collapsed beneath him. Workers had just finished façade repairs on the 20-story building at the corner of 38th Street when a section of scaffolding collapsed on the 16th floor at around 2:15 pm, according to the Daily News. Jose Paulino, 29, plummeted all the way to the eighth floor, bumping off of metal support beams on the way down, which slowed his fall. more ›

During planning for the Ground Zero redevelopment, the Signature Theatre, which devotes an entire season of productions to one playwright, was to have been one of the anchor arts organizations at the WTC site. That idea was nixed in 2007, and now the company, whose lease at 555 West 42nd Street expires in 2001, has finally settled on a new home. Today the Bloomberg administration announced a $25 million contribution to the project, part of an $800 million, 59-story, residential building and hotel on 42nd Street and 10th Avenue being built by Related Companies. more ›

On Saturday, there were reports of windows falling from a Tribeca building, likely due to the strong winds, and now it turns out the building in question was the new Goldman Sachs headquarters at Murray and West Streets. And it's not the first time things have been falling from the nearly finished 43-story building. more ›

The city has stopped a developer from completing a large rooftop addition in Carroll Gardens — but that doesn't mean it has any way to force the builder to remove the two stories of steel girders he has already erected. more ›

Baseball season is done and over with, but Bronx residents are still waiting to go to the park. When the city approved the construction of the new Yankee Stadium, it allowed the ballclub to pave over 20.8 acres of parkland. In return, the city promised neighbors it would construct eight smaller greenspaces including public ballfields called Heritage Field as soon as the old Yankee Stadium was demolished. But "The House That Ruth Built" continues to stand, and Bronx residents still don't have much of that new parkland. more ›

We happened upon this photo in the LIFE magazine archives. The caption reads: "Construction in NYC: land being cleared for 20 story building in East 60s — still occupied brownstone is soon to go." It was still occupied! The photo was taken in 1959... any guesses as to what block it was on? more ›

Queens has been long ignored by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but the 160-year-old St. Saviour's in Maspeth has gotten a lot more attention than the likes of Jack Kerouac's old stomping grounds. In fact, Curbed recalls that at one point, "a deal was worked out to save the main church building and relocate it to a nearby cemetery, while the Parks Department works on a potential deal to acquire the land and turn it into a much-needed park." Here's a complete timeline of the saga. more ›

The city has made up its mind. Come December, the Brooklyn Banks will be boarded up and transformed into a construction area for the Brooklyn Bridge rehabilitation project, Scott Gastel, spokesperson for the city Dept. of Transportation told Downtown Express. more ›

The daughter of a 44-year-old construction-safety inspector who was killed in a suspicious Flushing apartment fire earlier this week is vowing to continue her mother’s fight in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed months before her death. more ›

It's not surprising that MyFox News has a four part series (so far) dedicated to broken subway escalators (though perhaps they should also shame the MTA for lack of elevators for the disabled). This time around they report from two locations, including 53rd Street, which sports a lovely escalator behind a glass wall that's been "under repairs" for months. To make matters worse, they even closed off the stairs. Watch to find out how straphangers work that puzzle out: more ›

A 44-year-old mother of two died and three others were critically injured by a fire that tore through a Flushing apartment early Sunday morning. The deceased, Bianca Wisniewski, was due in federal court today for a hearing in her $20 million sexual-harassment lawsuit against Total Safety Consulting and JPMorgan Chase. Four of the 110 firefighters at the scene suffered minor injuries, and the fire was ultimately contained to the single apartment, because the cement and steel walls stopped it from spreading. more ›

Six New York construction companies illegally paid white workers more than minorities who had the same jobs, a state lawsuit alleges. White workers earned an average of $25 per hour, while blacks netted $18 per hour and Latinos took home only $15 per hour, according to the suit filed by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Since 2002, pay discrepancies at at least ten different construction sites scammed minorities out of $4 million in wages and overtime. more ›

Yesterday we looked at the newly renovated lobby of the Empire State Building, and all its Art Deco glory made us nostalgic. LIFE magazine images are often good for curing that; they even have a whole gallery of the building being made by hand. Enough to make you reread The Fountainhead. more ›

Downtown Alliance's Re:Construction initiative has been going on for a couple of years now, and they continue to use construction sites as canvases. Today and tomorrow, two new art projects—Rainbow Conversation and Botanizing on the Asphalt—are being installed in separate Lower Manhattan construction sites (Louise Nevelson Plaza and Hudson River Park along West Street, respectively). more ›

If you've been to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Brooklyn Landing recently, you've probably noticed lots of work going on at the Brooklyn Bridge Park site. We were curious about what's been happening, and asked the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to give us a tour of the current site. While things are still very much under construction now, they told us that parts of the park will open as early as the end of this year. more ›

Remember how back in April how the MTA's $133 million project to connect the uptown 6 train at Bleecker Street with the B, D, F and V lines at Broadway-Lafayette had local merchants in a panic? They said their customers were being driven away by the massive construction ripping up Lafayette Street, and it really did look like an inconvenient eyesore down there. Well, the latest fly in the ointment is a three-story brick landmark building on Lafayette and Bleecker; dubbed the "Peace Pentagon," it's owned by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, where various progressive groups have their offices. MTA contractors couldn’t proceed with work because the scaffolding outside building is right where they need to dig. And the scaffolding can't be removed because, according to amNY, it's actually propping up the building. Officials now expect the project to be delayed two years because peace activists, not known for their spectacular wealth, need to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix the building. It's bad news for retailers like Jack Wu at the Adore Floral store; he says, "I have customers who call and ask if we are still open. They are trying to modernize the system, but it's killing me." more ›

Back in 2005, Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council rezoned a large swath of Williamsburg and Greenpoint to spark a boom in residential construction, and developers immediately raced in to begin work on luxury high rises. Then the economy curled up into a fetal position, and north Brooklyn is now littered with half-finished development. A team of building inspectors have found 143 stalled construction sites around the city, with the highest concentration in Brooklyn, which boasts a total 63 vacant lots and rusting steel building frames—18 in Williamsburg alone. Residents are increasingly outraged about the degentrication, which is attracting squatters and creating a fin de siècle atmosphere of urban blight. Philip DePaolo, who moved from The Bronx to Williamsburg in 1979, tells the Post his adopted neighborhood now reminds him of his old neighborhood: "It looks like I never left." And it's true—the artisanal cheese, the American Apparel, the burning buildings; life on the mean streets of Williamsburg these days makes the '70s-era Bronx seem like Greenwich, CT. more ›

A welder had a close call yesterday when he fell down a shaft on the 16th floor of an Upper East Side construction site. Luckily, the Daily News reports that George Saguay "was saved by a tangle of duct work" in the E. 77th Street building. Around 2:30 p.m., he slipped—prompting a co-worker to yell, "Yo, a guy just fell down the chute!" The duct work stopped his fall after four stories and his co-workers tried to reassure him. Firefighters were able to cut through and extract him, taking Saguay to New York-Presbyterian hospital to treat his minor injuries. A colleague observed, "He was really quiet and patient. But you could see the pain on his face." more ›

It may be cooler today, but with the heat sure to return and McCarren Park Pool renovations not set to be done until 2011, what's a sweltering Williamsburg hipster to do? Kiddie pools are barely even ironic anymore, but perhaps a dip in the stagnant mud water of a future luxury condo would cool you down. Restless points out two such swimmin' holes, one on the North Side and one on the South, and both likely "chock full of heavy metal mineral bath goodness." And look, barely any flies! more ›

The MTA's $133 million project to (finally) connect the uptown 6 train at Bleecker Street with the B, D, F and V lines at Broadway-Lafayette is angering local business owners who say their customers are being driven away by all the construction. With the sidewalk gone on the east side of Lafayette between Houston and Bleecker, pedestrians must navigate a maze of fencing and heavy machinery if they wish, for instance, to patronize Mexican restaurant Pinche Taqueria, where manager Yasue Yang tells the Daily News, "It's killing us. We're losing one-quarter of our normal business." To help mitigate the damage, the MTA has at least put up signs listing the shops that are still open on the other side of the labyrinth, but Racked reports that some retailers are encouraging customers to access them through the rear doors on Mulberry Street. The work on Lafayette is expected to continue through at least the end of the year, but the director of the NOHO Business Improvement District says it will all be worth it for retailers once the extension is complete... and people no longer have to go above ground? more ›