Ultimate Guide to 4th Ave. History

This is the 2 week look ahead for the New School’s University Center. Next week (August 5 to August 9), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on all floors inside the building.

The following week (August 12 to August 16), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on all floors.

This weekend the site will be open on Saturday, August 3rd for interior, and sidewalk activities between the work hours of 7AM and 5PM as permitted by the City. Additionally we will be paving along 13th st.

Just a note to those who have made inquiry, the wall board panels are temporary and will be replaced when the final entrances are installed.

PLEASE READ: YOU MAY HAVE RECEIVED A LETTER FROM THE CITY IN ERROR:
Tens-of-thousands of city residents eligible for a popular condo and co-op tax break have received letters from the city incorrectly stating that they no longer qualify, according to city civic and co-op board leaders.

Late last week, co-op and condo owners began receiving the letter from the city Department of Finance stating that a revamped condo and co-op tax abatement bill passed by the Legislature in January meant they could not collect it. “Our records show that this unit is not your primary residence, so your abatement will be phased out,” the letter states. The new legislation only allows owners to claim the tax break on their primary residence, and no longer allows the break on secondary homes.

The problem was that many people received the letter at their primary residence—which is indeed still eligible for the full break, according to Warren Schreiber, co-president of the Co-Op and Condo Council in northeast Queens. Mr. Schreiber said in his own co-op of about 200 residences, some 45 people had received the letters— about 35 of whom actually count those units as their primary residence. That could make a difference of about $1,000 per unit on upcoming bills if not corrected, he said.

“Some people have been in their homes, 20, 30 or 40 years and are getting these letters,” said Mr. Schreiber. “I think what happened is that the Department of Finance’s records are out of date, but it’s causing a lot of confusion and chaos.”

Nearly two years ago, Finance Commissioner David Frankel acknowledged the department had erred on 15,000 property bills the city mailed that July because of a “computer glitch.”

But in this case, a Department of Finance spokesman said the agency had used available data to determine which of the city’s 360,000 condo and co-ops would qualify for the abatement, and automatically enrolled 230,000 of them. In instances where there was not enough information, the agency sent out 130,000 of the letters to homeowners saying were not eligible for the tax break.

Mary Ann Rothman, the executive director of the Council of New York Cooperatives & Condominiums, said she too had been contacted by several people who have received the letters—despite simultaneously receiving the state’s STAR tax rebate on the same property, which can only be claimed at one’s primary residence.

Still, she defended the city Department of Finance, arguing that it was simply sending the letters out to the large number of co-op and condo owners in an effort to make sure the city’s records were correct under the revamped program.

“This is making people nervous, but you have to remember that this is a total change in the way that the abatement is administered,” she said.

The letters the city sent to co-op owners directs them to send a form to an address in Maplewood, N.J., verifying that they are in fact receiving the abatement on their primary residence. The form is due on April 1, and city tax bills reflecting whether the abatement will still be granted will go out in June. Those no longer eligible for the abatement would retroactively have to pay 50% of the normal break in July, and would stop getting it altogether in July 2014.

But Mr. Schreiber said he was concerned that elderly property owners, those with disabilities or those who live elsewhere for the winter, would have their tax break incorrectly pulled.

The parameters of the new condo and co-op bill were originally hashed out in June 2012, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo at that time decided not to issue a message of necessity circumventing a three-day waiting period to pass it before the end of the legislative session. As a result, the city Department of Finance decided essentially not to collect hiked condo and co-op taxes under the expectation that the legislature would eventually pass the agreed-upon bill—which it finally did this January.

The revamped program offers greater benefits to middle-class owners, raising their tax abatements from 17.5% to, 26.5% next year and 28% in 2015 for properties whose average assessed value is less than $50,000. Units valued at more than $60,000 would get abatements of 17.5% over the next three years. Other previous aspects of the program—including one that allowed real estate speculators to claim abatement for secondary residences—were eliminated.

From The New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary:

Greenwich Village’s Bowlmor Lanes on University Place, open since 1938 and one of the longest continuously running bowling alleys on the East Coast, shut its doors on Monday to make way for new condominiums.

Much more than the disappearance of another landmark is the loss of Mark Braunreuther, Bowlmor’s man at the door for the past 16 years: benevolent minder, gentleman greeter, peacekeeper on the rowdy corner between Bar 13 and Bowlmor, an area labeled by one resident as the intersection between “Bucket” and “Blood.” On weekends, residents regularly awaken to police sirens and find violent traces splattered on early-morning sidewalks. Mark was always deep in the fray. His judiciousness was the reason so many revelers went home unharmed.

Mark B. was the mayor of University Place. He knew most of us, and all of our pets, by name. Last summer he tended corn seeds in the tree bed out front. Just seeing those struggling cornstalks made one glad for summer. This coming season, he was planning some tomatoes.

Mark regularly brought my husband and me cake from his favorite Queens bakery. The box always included biscuits for our dog. We reciprocated with Carolina barbecue sauce.

Mark lost everything in Hurricane Sandy — his entire apartment and his car. His bosses replaced the car so he could get in from Far Rockaway. And when our Bowlmor closed for good, they promised a good position at their Chelsea Piers location. Mark was very grateful but he admitted he’d miss our neighborhood.

Mark died suddenly a few weeks before Bowlmor Lanes closed its doors forever.

Rest in peace, brave knight. I, for one, will miss you long after a bowling alley is a distant memory.

Once again, Jeremiah of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York eulogizes another block lost to development, in this case the nearby block of 3rd Ave. between 13th and 14th Streets.

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.

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