Volume One, Issue 26, March 16 - 22, 2007
The Buzz
COVENANT HOUSE ON THE MOVE: The renowned youth social service agency moved their corporate office from the architecturally significant West 17th St. location to 5 Penn Plaza (34th St and Eighth Ave.) last week, leaving the tiny tikes at the nearby Corlears School (324 West 15th Street) high and dry come “graduation” time. “For the last five years, our school has had our commencement ceremony at Covenent House,” said Rorry Romeo, the school’s admissions director. “We book their auditorium, which seats around 400 people, right after each graduation, then call as the next year’s ceremony approaches to confirm. But when we called a week ago to check and make sure everything was okay, some guy on the other end of the phone said, ‘No, you can’t hold graduation here. They’ve sold the building. They’ll be renovating.’” Romeo’s crack team of investigators at the school unearthed the buyer of Covenant House’s digs as Hampshire Hotel and Resorts, who could not be reached for confirmation by press time. Romeo was loathe to give up hope initially: “Once we found out, we figured maybe we could have one more graduation there this year. We do a great celebration with Dixieland bands; it’s very festive.” To no avail, it appears. “The crazy thing is, if we hadn’t called them, we might have just shown up with the bands and encountered the auditorium locked! I don’t know why we had to call them to find out,” she said.
WHEN YOU NEED THAT ASPIRIN AT 3 A.M.: Chelsea has long been a “24-7 neighborhood,” but drug stores have been slow to catch on to the idea. That is, until this week, when people noticed that the CVS pharmacy at 24th St. and Eighth Ave. was no longer closing its doors: Now the store’s listing on cvs.com proudly proclaims “Open 24 Hours!” and store clerks confirmed that the change happened just this past Monday. How long will nearby Duane Reade and Rite Aid let CVS corner the market on late-night med seekers?
DO THE MATH, COUNCIL TELLS LANDLORDS: City Council representatives Gail Brewer and Dan Garodnick introduced a bill Wednesday to stiffen penalties on landlords who run illegal hotels, to complement the rent law changes being pressed by State Senator Thomas Duane and Assemblymembers Liz Rosenthal and Richard Gottfried. While Gottfried and Duane’s bill aims to change the rent laws, Brewer and Garodnick’s would change the city building code and hike the fines, according to Shula Warren at Brewer’s office: While current fines for renting residential rooms on a daily basis max out at about $800, said Warren, the new rate structure would start the fines at $1000 and add another $500 every day the violation continued; a three-strikes provision then sets the penalty for a third such violation, within 18 months of the first, at $10,000, and a separate provision adds civil charges, which fine offending landlords $300–400 per day per room. The hope, said Warren, is to make the illegal-hotel business less profitable; right now, with rooms that can rent for $400 a night and fines that max out at half that, the temptation is too great. “Who wouldn’t?” she asked rhetorically.
C.B. 5 GETS FIRST FLUSH: While the New York Times scribbled raptly as C.B.5’s meeting last week rejected the popular proposal to name a corner after actor Jerry Orbach, the board turned a corner of a different kind earlier in the meeting by approving one of the first of the city’s new pay toilets, designed by Cemusa, Inc. When Parks Committee member David Golab described it as a “glass pavilion,” board member Maxine Teitler asked, “What, see-through glass?” to much laughter and the comment: “Yeah, it’s one of those public art projects!” Helen Gunditis called the design “nondescript,” with “a silvery kind of Jetsons look to it,” while Parks chair David Siesko said simply, “It looks like a bus shelter.” That last fact should surprise no one, since Cemusa is also the company hired to develop the City’s newest bus shelters, as well as the controversial new newsstands.
Got something you think is Buzzworthy?
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