Time Out Food Hall Sets Opening Date

The City Tavern across 13th St. has closed.

If you like Thai food, Pranakhon on University Place is VERY good.

This 1920 photo shows the northeast corner of 5th Ave. and 13th St., the current location of The New School’s main building. If you look down 13th St. at the right of the photo, you can see our 13th St. building. 104 years ago!

Comparing 3rd quarter 2007 to 3rd quarter 2008, real estate prices around here have actually done pretty well, according to the Times.

Neighborhoods that experienced price drops include the Lower East Side and the East Village, where median prices fell 5.5 percent; and Carnegie Hill, where co-op prices decreased 7.2 percent. Median prices in Hamilton Heights and Morningside Heights dropped 30 percent, with sales decreasing to only 19 from 67 in 2007. In Washington Heights, median prices went down 6.3 percent, but the number of sales increased to 24 from 18 in 2007.

The neighborhoods that fared the best through the third quarter included Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue from 59th to 96th Streets, where median prices went up 35 percent. In Lincoln Square, an area between 57th and 72nd Streets from Central Park West to the Hudson River that is home to high-priced apartments in 15 Central Park West and the Time Warner Center, median co-op prices went up 18.6 percent and median condo prices went up 25 percent. Prices also rose in Lenox Hill, where median co-op prices went up 19 percent; and Chelsea, where median co-op and condo prices went up about 6 percent.

Other neighborhoods that experienced increases include Greenwich Village, where median prices for co-ops went up 3.9 percent; Union Square and the Gramercy area, where co-op prices went up 3.3 percent and condo prices went up 2.6 percent; and the Upper East Side, where median co-op prices went up 2.3 percent and condo prices went up 9.1 percent.

Over on East 12th St., it was Piola, the Brazilian pizza place, and now it’s Ribalta, the Italian pizza place. And it’s a pizza school, too. UrbanDaddy writes:

There are book smarts.

There are street smarts.

And then there are pizza smarts.

Today, we’re going to focus on that last one.

Also, we’re going to eat a bunch of pizza pies.

So let’s enroll at Ribalta, the only pizzeria in New York with three different types of ovens and its own university (but alas, no football team), now open.

Bottom line, this restaurant is really quite absurdly serious about pizza. The dough: imported from an Italian mill and aged 48 hours before baking (we’ll let you imagine what this does to a crust). The tomatoes: all San Marzano and all hand-crushed. The ovens: plentiful, varied and powerful.

Yes, these master pizzaiolos/fusspots felt it was necessary to install three different ovens in the place. Brick. Wood-burning. And stainless-steel convection. Reason #1: to bake your sausage-and-sage pie precisely the way God intended. Reason #2: the syllabus required it.

See, when this place is not standing in as the prototypical Friday night date spot, it’s doubling as the city’s first Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli—an esteemed pizza school that’s been around in Italy since the ’80s. So eventually you’ll be able to register here for classes, seminars and lectures on the science of the slice.

Assuming you scored high enough on the pizza SATs.

Heres an NY1 video report on how well the commercial spaces ringing Union Square are doing, depsite the failures of Circuit City and Virgin.