Friday, March 18, 2022
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Seventh Avenue Holdout
Steve Roth, the 80-year-old billionaire real estate mogul, has a dream.
With the blessing of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, he wants to raze much of the area around Penn Station and put up 10 skyscrapers.
But 92-year-old Arnold Gumowitz is ready to spoil the relative whippersnapper’s hopes.
The real-estate mogul owns 421 Seventh Avenue, an office building across from Madison Square Garden that will need to be demolished if Roth’s controversial glass and steel supertalls are to happen.
But Gumowitz doesn’t want to sell the 15-story structure that he bought 43 years ago. It’s where he runs his commercial real estate empire, and where he still comes to work with his son every day.
He also definitely doesn’t want it demolished by eminent domain, a possibility he just found out about recently when he saw plans for the project with a drawing of a roughly 80-story tower in place of his own building.
“I look for fairness but when someone attacks me, I respond,” Gumowitz told The Post. “This is a generational piece of property. This is also a piece of real New York. I also hate to see this area become another impersonal Hudson Yards with nothing but tall buildings and no sunlight.”
Because the state declared the area “blighted” a year ago, Roth’s Vornado Realty and the Empire State Development Corp (ESD) — the state agency directing the project for Cuomo — have the right to tear down certain blocks in the designated area. At least 200 people will lose their homes and 9,000 employees will be out of work if the project goes ahead.
Gumowitz’ building sits at a critical spot for the planned Empire Station project: it’s in an area where the state wants to build a subway entrance and enlarge the sidewalk.
State officials, while cagey about whether they’d take Gumowitz’s building by eminent domain, indicated in a recent community board hearing on the issue that it’s a card they could play if they had to.
But to employ eminent domain, the ESD’s plan would have to undergo another review process, and a public hearing, said an official who did not want to be named.
They could also acquire the building through a negotiated sale.
Good luck with that, said Evan Cooper, who has worked for AAG Management, Gumowitz’s real estate management company, for 23 years.
“Roth and this project are coming at Arnold like a speeding train,” Cooper said. “But what they don’t realize is that Arnold is the immovable object.”
Saturday, July 3, 2021
Make that 323 D.O.B.
A crane toppled onto a Queens building under construction Friday morning, officials said.
The commercial boom truck fell along the side and on top of the two-story building on 36th Avenue near 35th Street around Dutch Kills about 8:30 a.m., according to FDNY and Department of Buildings officials.
Workers told PIX 11 that the crane was loading steel beams into place at the site of the new apartment building when the load apparently became too heavy.
No one was hurt, officials said. The cause remains under investigation.
“We got a report that there [were] only two workers inside the building under construction. They were also removed,” FDNY Captain Carmine Calderaro said at the scene.
“We had an aerial view of all sides, and we were pretty confident we did our due diligence to make sure nobody was in the building right now.
“Apparently, they were doing some work. The crane was up and moving some equipment around. That’s all I can tell you at this time.”
Monday, August 19, 2019
Hovels discovered in Lower East Side apartment building
PIX News
It was a 311 call that led city inspectors to this building at 165 Henry St. on the Lower East Side and their disturbing, even shocking, discovery.
The NYC Buildings Department says the owner of one apartment created a new floor between the fourth and fifth floors to rent out nine micro apartments, tiny spaces with ceilings in the apartments between four-and-a-half and six feet from the floor.
In one picture, you see an inspector on his knees almost touching the ceiling.
Tenants in these windowless, tiny, cramped, illegal apartments were being charged up to $600 a month.
“I’m concerned for the safety of the tenants, mostly an immigrant population, Ben Kallos, a NYC Council Member, told PIX11 News. “Part of me thinks this is like the movie 'Being John Malkovich,' back in the 1990s. Then there was this idea of creating a floor in between. But that was fiction and this is a horror story,” he added.
The Buildings Department issued a vacate order for apartment 601 and the apartment right above, 701. You can even see from the outside of the building the many air conditioners and boarded up windows in the two apartments.
de Blasio's D.O.B. office is a joke, But from the mayor's viewpoint, these hovels are a good way to claim that affordable housing is being built.
