Volume 2, Number 23 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | March 07 - 13, 2008

The Buzz

WEB TIP OF THE WEEK If you’re anything like Chelsea Now, you’ve become way too reliant on Google when trying to find information about our neighborhoods. But now we’ve realized that we can go to local community sites that have added quick links to anything one might need to research Chelsea and Clinton. First, thanks to new attorney Stuart Lawrence, Clinton anti-poverty agency Housing Conservation Coordinators has transformed its site at www.hcc-nyc.org. In addition to links to tenant-advocacy resources, Lawrence has consolidated gobs of useful city info that made Chelsea Now swoon, like property-sale records or the state’s long list of rent-stabilized buildings.

In the More Fun Web Dept., as well as the oft-mentioned Rail Yards Blog (railyardsblog.org), Friends of the High Line’s Katie Lorah (see Talking Point, p. 9)maintains the separate High Line Blog (blog.thehighline.org). This week, the site tipped readers off about the Meatpacking District’s Banchet, “a Unique Event Space near the High Line”; ran twin photos of City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, one from atop the High Line, and one receiving an award from the New York City Cititzens Committee; and carried an especially hunky picture of FHL co-founder Robert Hammond from the Crain’s New York Business “40 Under 40” issue. If neighborhood directories are your thing, Downtown real estate broker/online entrepreneur Bobby Weiss has his meatpackingdistrict.com site up and running, offering local news updates and listings of local amenities. Weiss also wants to implement a Craigslist-style classified section on the sites, as well as a networking option allowing users to create their own profiles in the vein of other popular social sites. A longer-term goal, Weiss added, would be a feature for artists to post and sell their original work online. We wonder how long it will take all these sites to get mirrors on Facebook—though we warn all parties, Chelsea Now has standards. Get a MySpace page, the kind that starts singing at you before you’ve looked at it, and we’ll just have to give up and do actual reporting again.


DOB TRAFFIC JAM After our Buzz last summer about Annabelle Selldorf’s new garage-in-your-apartment condo complex at 200 11th Ave., we thought the interior elevator parking system was going forward as advertised—despite the objections of Community Board 4’s Lee Compton and the board’s reports of cut-rate, non-union workers doing construction. But now, it seems Department of Buildings commissioner Patricia Lancaster may be able to do what CB4 couldn’t: After 59 complaints, 20 DOB violations, and 13 violations with the Environmental Control Board, a stop-work order has been issued at the site. Meanwhile, Compton told us yesterday that unionized construction workers have been passing out photos of sub-standard work being performed by the non-union workers. (Maybe we should ask them to come take pictures of the Trump Soho building around the corner from our offices, where we saw three workers almost kill themselves lifting heavy interior pipe instead of waiting for an expensive crane.)


Building knowledge about their new building: New School President Bob Kerrey and C.B. 2 will host a 6 p.m. Thurs., March 13, meeting at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th St., to inform the public about The New School’s plans for its new academic building at 65 Fifth Ave. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and the lead architect, Roger Duffy, will present designs for the building at the open meeting, to be followed by a public question and answer session.

Artigiano
Electrical Contracting
"A Passion For Excellence"
212-905-3400
www.Artigianoelectric.com

Report Distribution Problems

Who's Who at
Chelsea Now

View our mediakit

Home

Chelsea Now is published by
Community Media LLC.
145 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
Phone: (212) 229-1890 Fax: (212) 229-2790
Advertising: (646) 452-2465 •
© 2008 Community Media, LLC

Email: news@chelseanow.com

Written permission of the publisher
must be obtained before any of the contents
of this newspaper, in whole or in part,
can be reproduced or redistributed.