Expensive Vegetarian Eatery to Arrive

Signage indicates that a new, and rather large, Greek restaurant will be setting up shop on the east side of University Place around 10th Street.

She held up the Bank of America on the corner of University and 14th the other day.

Please be advised that curbside composting began on October 6, 2024. The program is mandatory and requires buildings to separate food and yard waste from other trash and recycling items. However, there is a grace period until April 2025 to allow buildings to implement the proper procedures and get everything in order.

• We have ordered one bin for each building and have ordered a second for each building in anticipation of participation.
• Residents are required to bring their food waste materials down and place them in the composting bin. The bins are on the second floor of 14^th Street and in the garbage area in the back of the lobby on 13^th Street. They are in place and ready for use.
• Acceptable materials for the composting bin include all food scraps, bones, dairy, prepared/cooked foods, and food-soiled paper (napkins, paper plates, coffee filters).
• Recycling and trash procedures remain unchanged.

Please see the attached DSNY flyer detailing acceptable materials for the composting bin. Additional guidance and recommendations include:

• Drain liquids before placing food scraps in the composting bin.
• Store composting materials in a plastic bag, brown paper bag, yogurt tub, or a designated organics container. Empty the scraps into the composting bin in the basement.
• To prevent odors, store scraps in the freezer if you cannot bring them down immediately.
• Newspapers, paper bags and certified compostable bags are acceptable in the composting bin. Plastic bags may be thrown in the bin as the DSNY has a method for removing them. Hard plastic, metal, and glass are not permitted.

As a reminder, plastic, cardboard, metal, and glass should be recycled separately and not placed in the composting bin. Regular trash items including Styrofoam, pet waste, or diapers must not be thrown into the composting bin.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me or Mecca at 212-986-0001 or via email at TCunningham@akam.com or MWhite@akam.com.

Thank you.

From the NY Times:

Barry Benepe, an urban planner who in 1976 conceived of inviting farmers to truck their ripe tomatoes, peppery arugula and fresh corn to forlorn patches of New York City, delivering bustling markets and excitement to the city along with flavorful and healthy food, died on Wednesday at his home in Saugerties, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 96.

New York’s popular Greenmarkets, the largest farmers’ market network in the country, helped start a national farm-to-table culinary movement. They are credited with saving thousands of acres of farmland in the region from development and reviving urban neighborhoods. Renowned chefs who discovered the bounties of fresh strawberries and zucchini blossoms were soon buying much of their seasonal produce from Greenmarket stalls.

Mr. Benepe (pronounced BEN-eh-pea) raised grant money and worked the city bureaucracy to organize the first market with a colleague, Robert A. Lewis, whose role was to recruit wary farmers. During a decade of high crime and urban decay in New York, farmers feared that whatever money they made would be boosted before they escaped the city.

Instead, the first Greenmarket — which kicked off in Manhattan in the summer of 1976 at East 59th Street and Second Avenue with a handful of upstate growers offering an open-air cornucopia — was an immediate success.

“It could not have been a better location,” between two popular department stores, Mr. Benepe recalled in a 2022 interview with On Hand, a foodie newsletter. “We were halfway between Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s. We were in the passage between the two, so you had to stop.”

By contrast, the Union Square market — today the rock star of Greenmarkets — did not have a promising start. It opened later that year, but for weeks nobody came to visit the farmers who had set up in a park strewn with litter and known for drug sales. Mr. Benepe personally watered crab apple trees on the site.

The market went on to anchor a neighborhood rebirth that included Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café and a multiyear improvement plan by the Parks Department.

“We both loved the idea of the city benefiting from the revival of a European kind of lifestyle,” Mr. Lewis, whom Mr. Benepe hired in 1975 for his one-man planning firm, said in an interview. “He’d spent so much time in France and England. The daily shopping at the market. The fresh bread — this is Barry, a romantic.”

Wondering how CitiBikes are deployed around town at this very moment. This cool interactive map has live data. See it here. And you can even see how other bike share programs around the world are doing too.

Read all about it here.