Lower East Side

Construction continues to progress at Essex Crossing, the roughly 1.9 million-square-foot mixed-use development planned to stretch several blocks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The site, also known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, sat abandoned since 1967 until the city sold the nine sites to developers in 2013. While construction of the first phase of the massive project, which includes sites one, two, five and six, is underway, Curbed has acquired renderings for the development’s second phase, sites three and four. The third and fourth sites will be designed by CetraRuddy and Handel Architects, respectively, and feature residential, retail, office and outdoor space.
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Architecture And Design

On the Lower East Side in the 19th century, a kooky cat lady took in more than 50 feline friends

Image courtesy of New York by Gaslight via Ephemeral New York

September 26, 2017

On the Lower East Side in the 19th century, a kooky cat lady took in more than 50 feline friends

Before cat sanctuaries existed in New York City, one woman, in particular, may have been responsible for saving many kittens from the harshness of 19th-century city life. In the 1870s, a woman named Rosalie Goodman lived in a run-down home on Division Street on the Lower East Side. While she rented out most of the home’s bedrooms to tenants, she left two rooms for her family and her roughly 50 cats (h/t Ephemeral New York). In an article from 1878, the New York Tribune wrote, “Lying in the closets, on the tables, and under the stove, were cats of all descriptions. Some had broken limbs or missing eyes, the result probably of prowling around at night.”
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History

September 8, 2017

The Urban Lens: Ash Thayer’s poignant photographs of ’90s Lower East Side squatters

By Diane Pham

6sqft’s series The Urban Lens invites photographers to share work exploring a theme or a place within New York City. In this installment, Ash Thayer shares intimate punk portraits of Lower East Side squatters from the 1990s. The photos are part of her collection "KILL CITY," which was recently compiled into a book and published under the same name. These days it's difficult to think of the Lower East Side as much more than a destination for bar hopping, rapidly rising rents, and general raucousness, but not that long ago the neighborhood was a place pulsating with community, character, and openness to all walks: including squatters. One such squatter who found solace in this once distinct downtown enclave was photographer Ash Thayer who came to the city in the early '90s to enroll at the School of Visual Arts, but after a series of misfortunes (e.g. a shady landlord who stole her security deposit) found herself homeless. Thayer, however, had always had an affinity with the counterculture community and it didn't take long for the kids of NYC's punk scene to lend her a hand. In 1992, she joined the See Skwat, one of several squats she'd ultimately spend eight years living in and documenting. Ahead, Thayer shares some of her emotional photography from her time at See Skwat, and she speaks to 6sqft about her experience living in what she describes as an "important piece of the unknown history of New York."
more photos inside the squats and of those who lived in them

Places

September 8, 2017

Extell reveals deluxe upper-floor ‘Skyscape Collection’ at One Manhattan Square

Living in any of One Manhattan Square's 815 units is a pretty extravagant opportunity; the 800-foot Two Bridges tower will boast more than 100,000 square feet of over-the-top indoor and outdoor amenities, ranging from a tree house with fire pits and stargazing observatory to a 70-seat movie theater and bowling alley. But those 25 condos on the upper floors will be afforded an even more luxurious lifestyle, with "limitless bird's eyes vistas" of the skyline, Brooklyn, New York harbor, and the East and Hudson Rivers. According to a press release from developer Extell announcing this Skyscape Collection, the deluxe residences are mainly three-bedroom homes, along with the building's five five-bedroom penthouses, two of which are duplexes (one of these already sold for $13 million).
Find out more right here

July 28, 2017

$2.4M Lower East Side pad uses inventive design to complement its railroad layout

By Emily Nonko

This apartment is long and narrow, but it's also got a ton of square feet and some inventive design to make for a pretty nice pad. Located at the Lower East Side condo 71 Ludlow Street, it boasts 1,646 square feet, three bedrooms, and a $2.395 million price tag. (It last sold in 2013 for $1.65 million.) A curvy kitchen dominates the middle of the open space, while bedrooms are placed on either side. And surprisingly, for a railroad layout, the apartment boasts three exposures to bring in light.
Take an interior tour

Distinctive Homes

May 23, 2017

VIDEO: West 8’s proposal for NYC’s largest private garden at One Manhattan Square

Adding to its unique character, Extell's One Manhattan Square will soon be home to NYC's largest outdoor private garden, detailed in a new video released today by the developer. The proposal, designed by urban planning and landscape architecture firm West 8, includes more than an acre of garden space for residents to both work and socialize, boasting indoor and outdoor grilling spaces, ping-pong tables, a putting green, children's playground, adult tree house, tea pavilion, and an observatory made for stargazing.
Watch the video here

Lower East Side’s Landmark Sunshine Cinema will close next year

Photo via East End Capital

May 19, 2017

Lower East Side’s Landmark Sunshine Cinema will close next year

The Lower East Side will be losing a neighborhood fixture next year. Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema at 139-143 East Houston Street will be closing its doors when its lease expires in January 2018, to make way for a new mixed-use development with retail and office space. As the Post reports, the theater, which was built in 1889 and first opened in 1909 as the Houston Hippodrome, was sold for $31.5 million to developers East End Capital and K Property Group.
Find out more

New Developments

May 5, 2017

Interview: Developer Ben Shaoul on 196 Orchard Street, his Lower East Side condo rising next to Katz’s

By 6sqft

Ben Shaoul founded Magnum Real Estate Group in 1999, focused on renovating small, rundown rental apartments. After growing its portfolio extensively over the past five years to includeretail properties, condos, and even a dormitory, the firm is now one of the city’s leading ground-up development companies. Their impressive portfolio includes 389 East 89th Street on the Upper […]

Target to open at Essex Crossing in the Lower East Side

Rendering of LES Target courtesy of Beyer Blinder Belle

May 1, 2017

Target to open at Essex Crossing in the Lower East Side

New York City is experiencing a Target-takeover. The retailer has just signed a lease to open a 22,500 square-foot store in the Lower East Side at Essex Crossing, a 1.9 million-square-foot development stretching across several Manhattan blocks. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the new store will be located on the second floor of 145 Clinton Street, a 15-floor tower currently under construction. A Trader Joe’s supermarket will be on the lower level and apartments will be housed above.
Find out more

April 28, 2017

Shop and nosh your way through 20 of NYC’s best flea and food markets

With spring weather in full effect, the city's flea and food markets roll out the red carpet and the irresistible edibles, and it's pretty likely there's one happening near you. The shop-and-snack mecca Brooklyn Flea has changed locations yet again, a night market returns in Queens and antiquing, arts and local maker standbys in all corners of Manhattan offer more of what you didn't know you couldn't live without. The goods may be odd, but they're out there, and the list below rounds up 20 of the city's top food and flea picks. Just don't blame us for the tchotchke overload—or the calories.
Find a market this weekend

Events & Things To Do

April 24, 2017

‘Beerdom’ map shows 19th century Lower East Siders drank more

While today’s Lower East Side has no shortage of bars and clubs, New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century may have imbibed way more than current Big Apple dwellers. Slate shared this map drawn in 1885 and published in the Christian Union that details the number of bars per block in the neighborhood. Although the coinciding article described the social effects of LES drinking culture, overall the report found residents to be quite happy. It may have had something to do with the 346 saloons found in the area, compared to today’s mere 47 establishments.
Find out more

History

April 17, 2017

Affordable housing lottery for seniors opens at Essex Crossing, from $396/month

At the beginning of last month, the first affordable housing lottery opened for Essex Crossing at Beyer Blinder Belle's huge mixed-use building 145 Clinton Street, where 104 below-market rate units were up for grabs. As of today, the second lottery is open, this time at Dattner Architects' 175 Delancey Street, a 14-story, 100-unit building at the megadevelopment's site 6 that will also offer ground-floor retail, medical offices for NYU Langone, and a senior center and job training facility from the Grand Street Settlement. These 99 one-bedroom apartments are set aside for one- and two-person households that have at least one resident who is 55 years of age or older. They're also earmarked for those earning 0, 30, 40, 60, and 90 percent of the area median income and range from $396/month to $1,254/month.
Find out if you qualify

Affordable Housing

March 2, 2017

Lottery opens for first affordable units at Essex Crossing, from $519/month

It's been almost exactly a year since Beyer Blinder Belle released renderings of Essex Crossing's site 5, a $110 million, 15-story mixed-use building that will give way to 73,000 square feet of retail space, where Trader Joes and Planet Fitness will move in, and a 15,000-square-foot adjacent park. Located just a block southwest of the Manhattan entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge at 145 Clinton Street, it will have 211 rental units, half of which will be reserved for low- and middle-income individuals. These 104 affordable apartments are now available through the city's online housing lottery, the first of the mega-development's 561 affordable residences to come online. They're set aside for those earning 40, 60, 120, and 165 percent of the area media income and range from $519/month studios to $3,424/month three-bedrooms.
Find out if you qualify

Affordable Housing

January 31, 2017

The mysterious origins of the famous New York Egg Cream

By Rebecca Paul

From Brooklyn Blackout Cake to Eggs Benedict, New York City is filled with gastronomic firsts. But while we have a clear origin for most of our foodie favorites, the New York Egg Cream is not one of them. This frothy sweet beverage is made from Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, seltzer water, and a splash of milk, which makes its story even more confusing since the beloved drink contains neither eggs nor cream. There are a few theories currently in circulation about the name and origin of the Egg Cream, each varying in time and circumstance, but most confirming that the drink originated on the Lower East Side among Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
All the mysterious theories

History

January 26, 2017

Travel + Leisure dubs ‘NoLo’ NYC’s next trendy neighborhood

DoBro (Downtown Brooklyn), MiMa (Midtown Manhattan), Hellsea (Hell's Kitchen meets Chelsea), BoCoCa (Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens)--typically we blame brokers and real estate marketers for inventing outlandish neighborhood acronyms as a way to make their listings and developments seem unique and in uncharted territory. But this time, the writers over at Travel + Leisure have decided to try their hand at the name game, dubbing "NoLo" the next trendy 'hood. "There's no cooler neighborhood mashup," they say, than "the parts of Soho where Nolita bumps against the Lower East Side." Here you'll find "a community of restaurants, shops, cafes and drinking spots that exude the city's cutting edge style."
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Uncategorized

January 25, 2017

Extell’s One Manhattan Square reaches halfway point and gets its glassy skin

Despite the rapid influx of new development that's popping up in the controversial Two Bridges area, the Chinatown-meets-Lower East Side neighborhood's first project, One Manhattan Square, still reigns as the tallest. In fact, when it reaches its full 823-foot height, Extell's 80-story condo at 252 South Street will have the highest rooftop between downtown and Midtown Manhattan. Now that sales have commenced, CityRealty paid the construction site a visit, noticing that the double-slab tower is already more than 30 stories tall and has begun to receive its reflective glass skin.
More views ahead

January 9, 2017

Built in Poland and shipped in pieces, NYC’s biggest modular hotel project is 55 percent complete

The 20-story, 300-room project at 185 Bowery was constructed in Poland and shipped to New York in 210 pieces. Owned by Dutch hotel developer/operator Citizen M with Brack Capital Real Estate, the high-rise hotel at 185 Bowery is more than half done, reports the Wall Street Journal. It will be the largest permanent modular hotel project ever in NYC. Modular construction is more common in Europe; the developer already has nine hotels up and running and 14 in the works. They’ve used the technique of stacking sealed, factory-made units containing finished hotel rooms on the majority of those projects.
Check out photos of the sealed hotel pods arriving

December 13, 2016

Renderings revealed for 724-foot Lower East Side tower, final piece of controversial site

The historically low-income, low-slung neighborhood of Two Bridges--the area along the East River, near the footings of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges where the Lower East Side meets Chinatown--has become a high-rise hotbed over the past year. Despite the controversy that the four planned projects, all upwards of 700 feet, have caused, they're moving along fairly swiftly, and The Lo-Down now has the big reveal for the final site--Starrett Group's 259 Clinton Street. Perkins Eastman Architects have designed the 724-foot, 62-story glass tower, which will have ground-floor retail and 732 apartments, 25 percent of which will be permanently affordable with a good chunk being set aside for low-income seniors.
More details and renderings ahead

December 12, 2016

Willem Dafoe unloads Lower East Side co-op for $860K

By Annie Doge

Though he's usually cast as the villain, off screen, Willem Dafoe leads a much less destructive life, splitting his time between Rome, Los Angeles, and NYC with his Italian-born wife Giada Colagrande. While in the big apple, the actor resides in a West Village penthouse, but in 2005, he and his son Jack purchased a Lower East Side co-op for $606,000. It went on the market for $850,000 in May, and judging by the listing photos (a little bit artsy, a little bit messy), it was either the younger Dafoe (a public-policy researcher) or another renter who was living there. The Observer reports that it's now sold above ask for $860,000.
See the place here

December 2, 2016

Controversial Lower East Side site getting two more 700+ foot towers

L to R: One Manhattan Square, 247 Cherry Street, 260 South Street, and 271-283 South Street. The image above, created by CityRealty, depicts the possible massing of the new towers; No official design has been released When L+M Partners and CIM Group announced plans last May for two 50-story towers at 260 South Street, their project joined a growing list of controversial towers sprouting up along the Two Bridges waterfront, including Extell's 823-foot condo One Manhattan Square, JDS and SHoP Architects' possible 1,000+ foot rental at 247 Cherry Street, and Starret Group's shorter rental at 275 South Street. Now, in what's becoming a trend for the Lower East Side-meets-Chinatown 'hood, L+M and CIM have revealed plans for their project that actually show increased heights of 69 and 62 stories, or 798 and 728 feet. As first reported by The Lo-Down, the developers plan to include up to 1,350 apartments, 338 of which will be reserved as affordable, senior housing, ground-floor retail, landscaped outdoor spaces by Mathews Nielsen, and an upgraded flood-protection system.
Renderings and more details ahead

Uncategorized

November 30, 2016

The 15 best NYC holiday markets and indie pop-up shops

December's first days bring a dazzling parade of holiday gift markets all vying for the opportunity to find new homes for a bounty of goodies and crafty gifts. We're all familiar with the big NYC markets at Bryant Park and Union Square, but some of the best finds—and the most fun—can be found at smaller, cooler pop-ups and neighborhood markets. Some are only around for a weekend, others for the whole month or longer. In addition to locally-made jewelry and crafts, vintage finds, artfully curated fashions, home items and other things we didn't know we needed, these hip retail outposts sparkle with drinks, food, workshops, tarot readings, nail art, music, and family fun to keep shoppers' spirits bright.
Find out where to get the goods

The neighbors who arrived first: Cherry Street residents prepare for One Manhattan Square

Images via Extell and Google Maps

November 21, 2016

The neighbors who arrived first: Cherry Street residents prepare for One Manhattan Square

By Cait Etherington

Images via Extell and Google Maps The construction of Extell’s high-rise condo development at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge is now well underway. When complete, 250 South Street (formerly 227 Cherry Street) will rise more than 80 stories above the East River and be home to just under 800 units, but that’s not all. As the Extell […]

Real Estate Trends

November 10, 2016

East River Skyway endorsed by local politicians as L train alternative

By Diane Pham

It looks like the East River Skyway is getting a big boost from local elected officials. Three politicians have jumped on the idea, including U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, City Councilman Stephen Levin, and State Assemblyman Joseph Lentol. The trio together drafted a letter to Mayor de Blasio, encouraging him to back the transit initiative as a solution to impending L train closure. "This is the coolest thing we could do for the neighborhood," Lentol, told DNA Info. "I don’t want to denigrate the BQX but this is even a greater plan to have a gondola going from Brooklyn to Manhattan forever."
find out more here

Transit

November 2, 2016

Sales launch for Extell’s Lower East Side tower One Manhattan Square

Despite community opposition against the surge of new development in the Two Bridges neighborhood, things are moving full steam ahead in the Chinatown-meets-Lower East Side area. Curbed reports that the project that started it all, One Manhattan Square, has officially launched sales for the first batch of its 815 condos, and they range from a $1.18 million one-bedroom to a $4.4 million three-bedroom. It's prices like these, as well as the 823-foot height, that have angered residents of the mostly low-rise and low-income neighborhood, but nevertheless, the huge luxury building at with an insane amenity package is well on its way to opening its doors.
Find out more this way

November 1, 2016

New renderings revealed for Essex Crossing’s 150,000 square-foot mega-market

The Essex Crossing megaproject is taking shape in the Lower East Side, most notably with the Market Line, the 150,000 square-foot retail area serving the project's buildings. Within will be the new home for the neighborhood's beloved 76-year-old Essex Street Market, upon which concept the modern retail destination was built. As 6sqft previously reported, the SHoP Architects-designed market will be among the largest in the nation. Principal Rohan Mehra of the project's retail development firm Prusik Group told Curbed that he compares the new market to Seattle’s Pike Place Market or Barcelona’s La Boqueria, “hubs of activity” all. The Market Line will stretch over 700 feet across three buildings, incorporating the new city-operated Essex Street Market and several new spaces.
More renderings this way

October 12, 2016

New Renderings of Rogers Partners’ residence above historic Lower East Side bank building