Uglifying Manhattan

From the NY Times:

Casting a glance skyward in Manhattan these days may include the risk of beholding not sky but horizontal appendages that curve and jut outward from the sides of residential towers and hover like geometric mutants above the roofs of vertically challenged neighbors, inhabiting space once occupied by open air.

Typically built of glass and steel and suspended in midair, they are not optical illusions. In fact, they are vista-grabbing, profit-generating cantilevers the likes of which Frank Lloyd Wright probably did not contemplate in 1935 when he designed a rural residence known as Fallingwater, which levitated, with assistance from cantilevers, above a 30-foot waterfall in Mill Run, Pa. Wright cantilevered for the aesthetic thrill of it. Piers and bridges cantilever for the sake of a design imperative. The cantilevered entrance of the former IBM building at 590 Madison Avenue, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes & Associates, continues to be a piece of modernist eye candy that wows passers-by.

But the escalating popularity of cantilevers in luxury residential (and some commercial) developments is apparently driven by — what else? — economics. With “bigger is better” the prevailing mantra among developers, cantilevers are getting bigger, too: superior apartment layouts are the desired endgame.

Crazy Corona Crapitecture

So I was walking down Roosevelt Avenue, going about my business, when this "house" caught my eye.

If you're saying to yourself, "That thing CAN'T be legal, rest assured, it's not!

I looked through all the info on DOB's site, and connected the following dots:
The owner of 108-41 Roosevelt Avenue applied for an alteration permit back in 2002. It was reissued in 2006. The permit was revoked in 2007 and a stop work order remains in effect.

So now you're saying, "But that house looks lived in." Why yes, it is - with no C of O because the SWO was never rescinded and the revoked permits were never reissued.

Basically, what we have here is an illegally built house with illegally rented units.

And when complaints about an illegal nightclub being run out of the basement were called in to DOB, they passed it off on the NYPD.

One of the more recent complaints from September 2011 still has not been addressed:

"THIS HOME HAS GUTTED OUT THE BASEMENT AND IS RENTED OUT FOR PARTIES. THIS IS USED AS AN ILLEGAL CLUB AND ABOUT 100 PEOPLE INCLUDING CHILDREN UNDER 12 ARE IN ATTENDANCE. THEY ALSO BRING ALCOHOL & MUSIC."

A similar complaint from earlier this month apparently means shady activity is still going on here.

Hey DOB: Call FDNY and have the place vacated and sealed already.

All this crap going on and I didn't even touch on the top floor of the house hanging over the driveway and the column of balconies in the shadow of the el...

Welcome to Queens!
(Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor; Helen Marshall, Borough President)