The Village Voice is giving us an irreverent retrospective of the year in loud protests, observing that “activism replaced bottle service” in the city as Occupy Wall Street made grassroots activism cool with its loud and showy encampment that was impossible to miss for anyone in downtown NYC. Walking around the area was a surreal experience during the protest, as the pedestrians in the area had a remarkably different look and feel to the norm of the neighborhood. The Voice goes on to observe:

The marchers stomped against financial institutions all over the city—and ultimately, the world—while the OWS home base at Zuccotti Parkbrought back a ’60s-ish rebel-yelling community, complete with old-style folk singers, fringed ponchos, and new-style celebrity drop-ins.

The hypocrisy and absurdity of the event hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Voice’s writers either, who remind us that Alec Baldwin has played both sides of the fence by supporting OWS while shilling for Capital One as their spokesman. New York City has had its fair share of champagne socialists over the years.

The OWS movement is mobile and ensconced in more heated digs now that the police tore down the encampment, and Zuccotti Park still has some radicals hanging about the place, although not as much as in the heydays of November. If the economy doesn’t improve soon, we might find yet another show against income inequality in the new year after the ice thaws and flowers start to bloom. Spring is a lovely time for rallying cries.

Downtown is a good place to live for a number of reasons, although I’ll discuss most of those in a separate post. One perk is transport: almost all of the subway lines that run north-south are accessible by a short walk in downtown. Travel to Brooklyn is fast and easy, too, and taxis are easier to hail at the bottom of Manhattan than any other part of the city (although, in all honesty, it’s not as hard to get a cab in the city as a lot of non-New Yorkers seem to think). Towncar services are also readily available in the area.

With all that in mind, it’s worth paying attention to new developments in the area, such as the new complex going up at 111 Washington. This 54-story building will be approximately 430,000 square feet high and will offer about 500 studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedroom apartments. This increase in rental properties in downtown is in keeping with recent trends, as a number of new apartment complexes such as  the 76-square feet behemoth at 8 Spruce Street, the Gehry masterpiece on the eastern edge of the Financial District.

What does this mean for the real estate market? In such a small area, an increase in rental properties will probably drive up the price of condominiums because they are being crowded out by rentals. At the same time, it might not put much of a dent in the price of renting, since supply cannot keep up with demand, and an overabundance of luxury apartments don’t tend to lower rental prices in any case. Manhattan is a good market for buying, and you can see what is available to purchase at our website.

Whether their partner will be as efficient is another story. The Port Authority (the public authority that both is and is not a government body, and is one of the biggest powerhouses of the city) is infamous for its glacial pace and tough line negotiations, but it seems that we might see real progress on the venture soon. Construction at the site has developed in recent days, and there is visible progress to be seen through the chain linked fences surrounding the construction site.

The retail space will be prime retail property both for its location and for its symbolism. Knowing this, the developers have made plans for approximately 360,000 square feet of retail space to be built immediately. Only half of this will be available to shopkeepers, since around 200,000 square feet is reserved for the transit hub designed by Santiago Calatrava, itself a beautiful sight:

Alison Gregor at the New York Times is reporting that renters in the Financial District are already upping their asking prices for rents, with a staggering 36 percent increase in rents since spring 2010. Compared to a rent increase of 2 percent in downtown overall, this is a noteworthy spike.

Want to live in the Financial District? Care to see what residential properties are available near the WTC and around Wall Street? Why not visit our website or give one of our agents a call at 1-877-852-6636 today!

Every so often, we receive breaking news of a so-called “new New York City neighborhood.” In recent decades, we’ve been asked to add TriBeCa (the “triangle below Canal Street”), NoHo (“north of Houston Street,” modeled on the forty-year-old designation of SoHo, “south of Houston Street”), and even DUMBO (“down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass,” believe it or not) to our local lexicons. Even more recently, there have been attempts to brand NoLita (“north of Little Italy”), CanDo (“Canal Street downtown”), and BoHo (“Bowery south of Houston Street,” whose nickname at least has an appropriate double-meaning, as in bohemian).

These designations underline the fact that in New York, the neighborhood – as opposed to the city, county, or borough – is the relevant local unit. Unless he or she is out of town (or speaking to out-of-towners), you rarely hear a New Yorker say “I live in Manhattan.” Rather: “I live in Chelsea” or “I live in Harlem.” Some of these neighborhood identifications arise organically, assigned to areas of the city by people who live there; others are the calculations of marketers and developers looking to imbue a neighborhood with unearned cachet. Regardless, these designations often prove fleeting, and any survey of the city’s history is also a survey of neighborhoods and names which have come and gone with the passage of time.

The phrase new neighborhood is generally a misnomer, actually describing a neighborhood which has been there all along, but now has a new name. Usually, neighborhoods don’t simply appear, but they have been known to disappear. San Juan Hill was once the name of a thriving working class neighborhood on Manhattan’s west side; it was obliterated in the 1960s to make way for Lincoln Center. (It lives on in art as the setting for West Side Story.) Little Syria was once a similarly authentic Middle Eastern neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, but in the same era, it was demolished to clear space for the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Some of Little Syria’s population relocated to the southern portion of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, just as the German residents of what was once Little Germany (now the East Village) moved uptown (to what is now Yorkville) following the havoc wreaked upon their families by the General Slocum steamboat disaster in 1904. In the Civil War era, before the development of Harlem, the city’s preeminent African-American neighborhood was a section of Greenwich Village known as Little Africa.  A cool site to see NYC Neighborhood Reviews.

Along with these defunct ethnic enclaves, there have been business districts which lost their names when they lost their businesses. Park Row, east of City Hall, was called Newspaper Row when the city’s press was based there, in the nineteenth century; the future World Trade Center site was known as Radio Row before its cluster of electronics stores was decimated to make way for the towers.

Sometimes, old neighborhood names have been abandoned in an effort to dispel an area’s unsavory reputation. The Five Points (now the cusp of Chinatown and the municipal district) was such a notorious slum in the nineteenth century that its name was forsaken when it was rehabilitated. On the west side of midtown, the Tenderloin was similarly known for crime and corruption, but renaming it Hell’s Kitchen hardly seems like an act of euphemism. Still, this neighborhood’s residents persist in using that richly evocative expression, rather than the area’s colorless official name, Clinton.

As long as New York City exists – which, judging by the daily news, should be for at least another few weeks – it will be cleverly divided into distinctive neighborhoods, and these neighborhoods will be given names, reflective of their character, residents, purpose, or location. These can be expected to come and go, as they always have. In the early 1990s, the New York Times held a contest to rename the southern portion of the extreme West Village. The winning entry, WestHo, never caught on. One wonders if more lasting success would have been granted to one of the runners-up: AssHo.

That’s right, Operator – geology. Surveying the city today, we behold what appears to be a manufactured environment; it’s hard to believe an indifferent thing like the planet Earth could have any effect on it. But in fact, the single most important factor in the evolution of the modern city is the Manhattan schist – the bedrock on which the island rests.

Manhattan schist is a thick, reddish sediment, and perhaps the toughest bedrock in the world. At the dawn of the skyscraper era, it was the incredible strength of the schist that made tall buildings possible. In other cities, the distance one must dig down is a function of the distance one wants to build up. Chicago’s 108-story Sears Tower has a very deep basement with many levels, essential to anchor the structure in the earth. But in Manhattan, where the bedrock is dense, the 102-story Empire State Building is anchored by the island itself. Its basement is a mere two stories deep.

But the schist doesn’t just hold the skyscrapers in place. In doing so, it makes possible the vast underground component of the city, where subways, tunnels, and utilities have only shallow basements to work around.

The schist also dictates, to a surprising degree, the shape of the Manhattan skyline. An aerial view of the city, or a long-distance view from the east or west, reveals that the famous New York City skyscrapers are largely restricted to two specific areas – the Lower Manhattan financial district, and midtown. These two parts of the island are where the schist is thickest and strongest. So before a single building was erected in Manhattan, the general contours of the skyline to come were geologically ordained.

If you want to, you can see the Manhattan schist. There are outcroppings of the rock, in its natural form, in Central Park and Inwood Hill Park. The schist was also used in the construction of some Manhattan buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – most notably St. Paul’s Chapel, on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey Streets. Completed in 1766, this is the oldest public building in Manhattan, and one of very few surviving relics of the colonial period. Its principal material – that’s the stuff dreams are made of.

It was another snow day here in New York City, and I don’t know if you noticed but the day was a perfect for heading to New York public parks for some fun in the snow. Minus the transit troubles, the city was beautiful. Just check out my friend Gillian’s view outside her balcony on East 89th Street, a tree line shot right to Central Park:

If you are a new comer to New York, or you are planning to buy a new condo in the area, here are some tips for adjusting to the harsh New York winters.

1) Make sure you have serious snow boots that can take the deep slush puddles on every corner as the snow slowly melts. Great snow boots are key to wintering in New York.

2) Make sure you have the proper socks, jacket, hats and gloves because you are going to need it. You never know when a the subway is cancelled or the buses get cancelled and you need to do a little more walking.

3) If you have a car, I would suggest parking it in a garage for the winter. Digging your car out in New York can be impossible. Just check out my friend Marley’s car in Chelsea:

It took my friend several hours get this car out.

4) Watch out for falling trees, icicles and the over abundance of salt eating away at your shoes. Check out what happened on my co-worker Anna’s block, a tree could not handle the weight:

I feel like I see way to many people out there that are unprepared. If you are new to town or planning on moving to New York in the future, you will look like a natural with my tips.

If you need help in your process of buying your piece of New York, contact one of our agents. We can help you save money that you can use to buy your stylish winter gear.

Central Park, December, 2010. (Photo: Noah Diamond)

Given the wintry mixes with which our city has been battered in recent weeks, it seems a good time to discuss heat, both literal and figurative.

First: Is there any area of New York that is not at least occasionally referred to as one of “New York’s hottest neighborhoods?” Google that phrase, and among copious results you’ll be told that the city’s hottest include Alphabet City, Astoria, Allerton, Arden Heights, and Annadale — and that’s just the As. Some neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village, Soho, and Tribeca, have been referred to as “one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods” for so long that they beg questions about the nature of hotness itself. Can the Village really be hot if it’s been hot since the nineteenth century? The Village was hot for a hundred years before this particular meaning of the word hot even existed. But it seems to me that when someone says, “Oh, Battery Park City is truly one of New York’s hottest neighborhoods,” their implication is that it has attained this status recently. Hot, in all its sexy, slangy glory, connotes newness, urgency, up-and-coming.

Therefore, we might immeasurably improve the level of public discourse in this town by developing a new term, to apply to neighborhoods which have been hot for longer than a decade. First a place is hot, and then after ten years, if it’s still hot, it graduates to — torrid? Sweltering? Radioactive? Suggestions are welcome in the comments section.

But that’s just figurative heat, and figurative heat, poetic though it may be, does little to improve a frigid day in January. And my inquiry into hot neighborhoods has me thinking: What is New York City’s hottest neighborhood, in the literal sense? Whether seeking heat in the winter or cool in the summer, it would be useful to know if, say, Turtle Bay is a few degrees hotter or colder than Murray Hill.

There’s been surprisingly little scientific inquiry into this question, though last summer one atmospheric physicist at Columbia University discovered that the warmest and coolest neighborhoods in the five boroughs are, inexplicably, right next to each other: East Flatbush (cool) and Bensonhurst (hot), can be separated by as many as five degrees Fahrenheit.

In Manhattan, the greatest contributing factors to heat are crowds, exhaust, skyscrapers, asphalt, and reflective surfaces. All of this points to the Financial District, but no — because Lower Manhattan is so narrow, and the water is so close, the Wall Street area is generally slightly cooler than, say, the office districts on the east side of midtown. Conversely, the western extremes of Hell’s Kitchen are close to the river and should be relatively cool — but the abundance of automotive and industrial facilities seems to negate the effect of being on the waterfront.

We could nominally point to Times Square as a safe bet. It has everything going for it, thermally speaking — crowds, traffic, skyscrapers, and more electrical wattage than any other part of town. But then again, it has less traffic now, since Broadway has become a pedestrian promenade. And Times Square is open, due to the diagonal of Broadway; it ought to be fairly breezy compared with the heat-retaining cast iron buildings of Soho or the cramped, winding side streets of Chinatown.

You know what? Never mind. I have to cool down.

Curbed NY recently reported the winner of the HGTV Urban Oasis this past week. The winner is a 21-year old Floridian student by the name of Adam Venckauskas, and yes we are all a little jealous. I do wonder how he is going to pay his monthly payments as a student? Good luck non-the-less.

This awesome prize, which I blogged about back in September, is a condo in the amazing Downtown W Hotel and Residences. It boasted spectacular views, killer design, and great ammenities.

There are plenty of units still available in the building. If you are in the market for a condo in the Financial District, please contact Condodomain. We would be happy to help you with the process.

Just think you could be neighbors with Mr.Venckauskas.

The New York Times recently reported that twenty-somethings moving to New York for the first few years are doing everything they can do to survive in this expensive city during this horrible economic slump. Being a twenty-something myself, going on my fourth year in the big apple, I understand all these baby New Yorker woes.

Living in a city where you have to start out residing in a windowless box, sleeping on a twin bed with your feet hanging off one end is not the ideal situation for any young adult trying to make it on your own, but hey this is New York. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Hang in there my fellow twenty-somethings, one day you will be able to afford that luxurious condo with a view like the this picture above.

My suggestion to those parents out there that are worrying about their off spring living in closets in the sketchiest New York neighborhoods, is to invest in the New York real estate. Why not buy a condo. If you are lucky enough to afford one, your starting out twenty-somethings can take care of your investment until they get on their own feet.

Hey it might not be the best option for everyone. But if you are parents that can afford the option, help a struggling baby New Yorker out.

If you are interested in buying a condo and saving money at the same time. Check out Condodomain. We can help you help your struggling twenty-something.

You can enter the sweepstakes up until October 20, 2010. If you happen to not be the one that is picked, don’t be sad there are plenty units available in this building.

If you are interested in purchasing a residence at the W, and save money while doing it, click here.

Check out my blog I wrote up on The Residences at W New York-Downtown.