neighborhood watch

Don’t Fear the River, Lower East Siders!

Downtown Brooklyn: The doctors and dentists who held on to office space in the clock-towered Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, which is going luxury housing, say they’ve lost 10 percent of their business owing to faulty HVAC systems, leaks, unsightly entryways, sporadic elevators, and other pesky stuff. [Real Deal via Brownstoner]
Greenpoint: When you buy into the “luxury lots in the heart of the village of East Williamsburg” — a.k.a. the wasteland south of the BQE — villagers will politely (or not) remind you to tidy up after your dog poops. [Newyorkshitty]
Lower East Side: The city is planning “community-centric” riverside pavilions for Ping-Pong, aerobics, karate, etc., right under the exhaust-choked stretch of the FDR near Rutgers Slip. Asthma with your t’ai chi, seniors? [Villager]

Park Slope: The long-unreplaced, urine-soaked wood chips in the dog run here are making all the pooches sick! How are they supposed to finish their doggie novels and get their pups into a good doggie pre-K? [Brownstoner]
Turtle Bay: Thirty-three out of 43 floors of the building whose crane devastatingly collapsed last month must be used for a medical clinic, church, or other community use, said city officials, admitting the residential project was wrongly approved. Locals hope to parlay the gaffe into capping the tower’s height at its current eighteen floors. [NYP]
Union Square: An escalator’s been broken in the congested subway station here for more than a year, but you can still climb it, so why block it off? That was one guy’s thinking, allegedly. He apparently went cuckoo, tore away the blockage, and ran up the thing recently. [amNY]
West Village: Isn’t it touchingly ironic that as buildings are torn down to make way for new buildings — in this instance, for a new Karl Fischer hotel on West 13th — the process sometimes reveals structures and signs like these dating back centuries? [Curbed]

Don’t Fear the River, Lower East Siders!