Italian Paradise Due at Madison Sq.

The upscaling of the neighborhood continues with speakeasy Everything’s Jake on East 13th St. Cocktail prices are… not bad.

A major renovation is coming to the former Tammany Hall headquarters in Union Square where owners want to put a new glass dome over the landmarked building and demolish a theater to make way for retail and office space, the project’s architects said.

The historic structure at 44 Union Square East, built in 1929 to house the Democratic Party machine, will undergo a major overhaul that will restore the facade, gut the existing theater and add windows and glassier storefronts, according to BKSK Architects which is designing the project.

The most striking change will be a new 30-foot glass dome on top of the building, which will add about 27,000 square feet to the structure and will house office space, according to Harry Kendall, a partner at BKSK.

“Our effort is…to make it a more distinctive destination and presence on Union Square,” Kendall said. “We think we can make this building into something it never was.”

After hearing a presentation about the proposal this week, Community Board 5’s Landmarks Committee voted unanimously to reject it, saying the changes would be too drastic for an historic building that was just landmarked last year.

“While I like the way it looks — can you put something like this on a landmarked building?” said Edward Klimerman, a committee member. “It turns it into a different building.”

The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building as a landmark in June 2013, noting its references to early American architecture, including Colonial columns out front. The building’s design drew inspiration from the original Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, where George Washington took his first oath of office.

Here’s a guide from the Union Square Partnership. 

The University Diner has finally found its new identity…as a European cookie shop. The details:

“Almost a year after the closure of the classic diner University Restaurant, an Austrian corporation will open a specialty food shop in its place later this month, the owner of the incoming business said Tuesday.

“Gunz Fine European Food will sell cookies, snacks and other fine foods imported from across Europe, Daniel Gunz said.

“It will be everything from Belgian chocolate to Spanish cakes to Italian olive oil,”

Our newest neighborhood business, Crumbs Cupcakes, opens on Friday on University between 13th and 14th. The big news: they’ll give away 1,000 cupcakes. No word yet on the opening time, but line up early.

Simply Grid announced today that it has launched a food cart electrification pilot in New York City’s Union Square. This is the first example of a mobile food vendor on New York City’s public streets using grid electricity rather than a noisy, polluting generator. Citywide, more than 3,000 mobile food carts create the equivalent pollution emissions of approximately 10,000 cars. This pilot, launched in conjunction with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Con Edison, the NYC Department of Transportation, and Closed Loop Advisors, will last for up to a year and abate up to 9 metric tons of CO2.

Simply Grid’s technology allows lot owners and municipalities to provide grid electricity to mobile food vendors which makes them cleaner, quieter, and more profitable. Electricity is made available to these vendors via outlets in industry standard electricity pedestals which have been customized with proprietary metering controllers. The controllers connect wirelessly to Simply Grid’s cloud-based platform which manages customer accounts, metering, and billing. The system allows vendors to initiate service with their mobile phones and connect to the electric grid with cables they already use with their generators. Grid electricity is a significantly cheaper energy source for food vendors, and it also eliminates the pollution and noise associated with running a generator.