Trustafarian City Council candidate caught with his nips clamped

 NY Post

 It’s a late-breaking case of electoral bondage.

Zack Weiner, 26, a City Council candidate running in Manhattan, has found his campaign tied up after video of him enjoying a sadomasochism session found its way onto Twitter.

“My magnificent domme friend played with Upper West Side city council candidate Zack Weiner and I’m the only one who has the footage,” reads a tweet from the anonymous account which posted the video last week.

The footage — flagged to The Post by Weiner’s own campaign manager — shows a gagged Weiner, unable to speak, subjecting himself to various abuses by a leather-bound woman who pours wax on him and clips his nipples with clothespins.

The footage was filmed at Parthenon studio in Midtown — which is known for its high-quality BDSM dungeons.

In a call with The Post, Weiner confirmed it was him in the video and said the footage was made about 18 months ago with a former girlfriend he met during a Halloween party in 2019.

“I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are. I am not ashamed of the private video circulating of me on Twitter. This was a recreational activity that I did with my friend at the time, for fun. Like many young people, I have grown into a world where some of our most private moments have been documented online.” Weiner said in a statement.

“I am a proud BDSMer. I like BDSM activity,” Weiner told The Post. He refused to name the woman in the video and said he had no idea how on earth the footage surfaced.

“It’s definitely a violation of trust,” he added.

 Weiner has a professional background in film production and is the co-founder of Stag Pictures, an independent film production company. Zack’s father, Eric Weiner, is a co-creator of the popular children’s television show “Dora The Explorer.”

Judge orders circumcision on luxury tower development

New York Times

 In an extraordinary ruling, a State Supreme Court judge has ordered the developers of a nearly completed 668-foot condo tower on the Upper West Side to remove as many as 20 or more floors from the top of the building.

The decision is a major victory for community groups who opposed the project on the grounds that the developers used a zoning loophole to create the tallest building on the West Side north of 61st Street. A lawyer representing the project said the developers would appeal the decision.

Justice W. Franc Perry ordered on Thursday that the Department of Buildings revoke the building permit for the tower at 200 Amsterdam Avenue near West 69th Street and remove all floors that exceed the zoning limit. Exactly how many floors might need to be deconstructed has yet to be determined, but under one interpretation of the law, the building might have to remove 20 floors or more from the 52-story tower to conform to the regulation.

“We’re elated,” said Olive Freud, the president of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, one of the community groups that brought the suit.

“The developers knew that they were building at their own peril,” said Richard D. Emery, a lawyer representing the community groups that challenged the project before the foundation was even completed. Mr. Emery said this decision sent a warning to other developers who proceed with construction in spite of pending litigation.

The question at the heart of the suit was whether the developers had abused zoning rules to justify the project’s size.

It is common for developers to purchase the unused development rights of adjacent buildings to add height and bulk to their project. But in this case opponents of the project argued that the developers, SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan America, created a “gerrymandered,” highly unusual 39-sided zoning lot to take advantage of the development rights from a number of tenuously connected lots. Without this technique, the tower might have been little more than 20 stories tall, instead of the nearly finished 52-story tower that now stands.

The decision also sets an important precedent, said Elizabeth Goldstein, the president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, one of the advocacy groups that brought the suit against the project.

“The way this zoning lot was constructed has been invalidated, and that is extremely important,” Ms. Goldstein said, adding that the decision would deter other developers from attempting similar strategies.

Scott Mollen, a lawyer with the firm Herrick, Feinstein, which is representing the project, said the ruling contradicted earlier decisions from the Department of Buildings and the Board of Standards and Appeals that were based on a long-established zoning interpretation. SJP, one of the developers, said they would “appeal this decision vigorously.”

Mayor de Blasio and DHS switches successful homeless shelter for women into one for men

WPIX

 A homeless shelter on West 107th Street in Manhattan Valley, currently housing women, is expected to transition to single adult men in October. And much of the neighborhood is not happy. 

"Once men are involved here, the landscape could potentially change and everybody is concerned," neighbor Ali Jafry said.He lives next door to the shelter and said in recent years the women have been good neighbors.

The New York City Department of Homeless Services recently announced the change and Manhattan's Community Board 7 held a meeting Tuesday night to address it. But a DHS representative didn't come.

 "Up until 4 o'clock they were coming. At 4 o'clock they called the office to say they can't come," CB 7 Chair Roberta Semer told PIX11 News. This did not sit well with the shelter's neighbors. 

One man at the open meeting said, "Why are they not here? Why are they hiding from us?" The current shelter houses 120 women and most have jobs. Tari Wheeler said this shelter helped her get her life together. 

The Department of Homeless Services said it will move the women to permanent housing or another shelter. 

While Wheeler doesn't know where she will be sent, she is also worried about the kids in the neighborhood. "No offense on the men, but there are small children around here. We have to look out for the small children besides ourselves," Wheeler said.

One community's zoning victory

From the NY Post:

A state appeals panel has yanked the permit to build an Upper West Side nursing home, a controversial project with the mayor’s support.

Neighbors of the 20-story Jewish Home Lifecare project at 125 W. 97th St. had sued to block construction, arguing the area is already too densely populated.

In 2016, the mayor’s ­Office of Sustainability greenlit the project, even though a state environmental review had expressed concern about noise and hazardous material related to planned construction.

But on Tuesday the Appellate Division put the kibosh on the plan, saying it violated zoning regulations about open space.

City's biggest sinkhole?

From PIX11:

Rene Rodriguez says he was dumbfounded but not surprised, when he saw a massive sinkhole open up outside his home on Manhattan Avenue near 101st Street on the Upper West Side Tuesday morning.

It’s a sinkhole he and many residents who live in the area have complained to the city about since 2013.

“It just got bigger and bigger and they would fill it up with asphalt, asphalt and more asphalt and yesterday it finally gave in,” Rodriguez told PIX11 News.

After calling 311, both ConEdison and the Department of Environmental Protection arrived to the scene. Workers assessed the damage, put up a few cones and then, according to Rodriguez, left.

“It’s what, Wednesday the eighth, 2 o’clock in the afternoon and the sinkhole is still here,” he said. “If it was Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue this matter would’ve been settled already.”

The sinkhole measures roughly 15 by 7 feet in size, and nearly 4 feet in depth, consuming an entire side of Manhattan Avenue.

The crater makes it almost impossible for traffic to get through, but it isn’t stopping some drivers from trying.

De Blasio keeps hiding the homeless

From NBC:

The homeless New Yorkers that were cleared out of an NYC park earlier this week for a Mayor de Blasio appearance have returned. Melissa Russo reports.

Tenants forced to use fire escape to enter building

From PIX11:

Tenants of an Upper West Side five-story walk-up were briefly forced to use the fire escape to access their apartments after their landlord told them about plans to renovate the building’s only staircase.

The Department of Buildings has since issued a stop work order on the West 83rd Street building after the tenants, some of whom are elderly, had an emergency meeting with Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal.

The situation was even worse for some tenants. They don't have access to the fire escape from their apartment.

AirBnB costs woman her rent controlled apartment

From the Daily News:

An unemployed Upper West Side woman using Airbnb to rent out rooms in her huge Central Park West apartment has been ordered to stop doing it by a Manhattan judge.

Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead said in a decision that Noelle Penraat, 62, appears to have made a substantial income over the past two years through Airbnb and that’s a violation of both rent control and zoning laws.

Penraat, a photographer who has been mostly unemployed since 2006, said in a court affidavit that she was forced to use Airbnb to pay her $4,477 monthly rent and other mounting bills.

The owners of her building at 315 Central Park West estimated that she could have made as much as $8,883 a month if she had rented out all four bedrooms in her rent controlled unit, which has views of Central Park. She charged $75-$150 a night or $450-$1,000 a week, depending on the size of the bedroom.

Penraat had the right to stay in the apartment because she grew up there and always lived there; it was first rented by her father, architect Jaap Penraat, a wartime hero who saved 406 Dutch Jews from the Nazis by smuggling them from the Netherlands to France where the Resistance got them out through Spain. He died in 2006.

Jeffrey Turkel, the lawyer for Brookford LLC which owns the building, said Edmead in her decision clarified changes made in 2010 to the rent laws when the legislature barred landlords from turning residential buildings into hotels because health and fire standards are much more strict in the hotel industry.

Eventually, he said, his client will seek to evict Penraat from the unit, which on the open market can earn three or four times what she is paying.

Second class citizens?

From the Village Voice:

Dear big developers: Not every tax break is worth a bad headline. Extell Development Company is building a 274-unit luxury condo building in the Upper West Side, with plans to put in a separate door for people living in its planned below-market-rate units. The reason? It's a workaround enabled by the city's Inclusionary Housing law to help Extel collect on some major tax breaks and building allowances. Local residents are upset and have gotten their elected officials to jump into the ring.

Of the 274 units in the building, 55 will be below-market-rate housing, meaning only those earning less than 60 percent of the neighborhood's median income will be eligible for leases. That's about $51,000 for a family of four for the Upper West Side--about the same as the median income for the city as a whole.

The building's affordable units would occupy floors two through six, attached to the building but legally as a separate entity. That separate entity allows Extell to cash in millions in affordances for technically having an entire building devoted to affordable housing. To add insult to injury, zoning law requires that a separate building have a separate entrance.

Neighbors are crying wolf when it comes to Extell's blueprints, accusing the developer of demeaning potential tenants with the second entrance.

Bloomberg taking Liu to court over former commissioner's contract

From the NY Times:

Fed up with what he views as a pattern of obstructionist behavior, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has taken the rare step of filing a lawsuit against the city comptroller, John C. Liu, for rejecting two municipal contracts.

The contracts would pay Aguila Inc., a company run by Robert V. Hess, Mr. Bloomberg’s former commissioner of homeless services, a total of $67.6 million to operate homeless shelters in the South Bronx and on the Upper West Side. The shelters on the Upper West Side, on West 95th Street, have long been a target of criticism from local residents and elected officials, who say, among other complaints, that the area has an excess of similar facilities.

Mr. Liu rejected the contracts on July 3, saying they were too vague as to how many people would be offered services. And in a criticism of Mr. Bloomberg’s record on homelessness, Mr. Liu argued that “it would be unconscionable to compound past errors with these faulty contracts.”

But Mr. Bloomberg, in a lawsuit filed on Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the courts had long held that registration of contracts was “not a vehicle for the comptroller to usurp the mayor’s authority to enter into contracts.”

So what do you think is really going on here? Bloomie trying to get his buddy a contract before he leaves. So loyal to this particular individual that he will waste taxpayer money on a lawsuit to make sure he gets paid. Sounds like honest graft to me.

Sell it or fix it!

From the Daily News:

A top official at the embattled Board of Elections has let a landmark brownstone she owns on the upper West Side become a neighborhood nightmare.

Community leaders have spent years pleading with Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Election’s chief clerk in Brooklyn, to unload the vacant and decrepit townhouse on W. 76th St.

The 123-year-old building, which city records show she bought for just $5,000 in 1976, could fetch as much as $5.5 million today, according to real estate brokers — yet Haslett-Rudiano refuses to sell.

And so the building slips into further disrepair by the day.

More than $12,000 in back taxes and 20 Buildings Department violations have piled up, records show. Last month, the Landmarks Preservation Commission slapped Haslett-Rudiano with a violation for failing to maintain the cornice, threatening a fine of $5,000 a day.

“It’s a tragedy,” says Judy Samuels, a teacher who has lived in an adjacent townhouse since 1984.

Another neighbor, Kristine Reynal, a banker, calls the dilapidated building a “health concern and a safety concern.”

“I am horrified that this public figure is so negligent and disrespectful,” she said.

The brownstone is in such disrepair, it was named one of the five ugliest buildings on the upper West Side last year by the West Side Spirit.

UWS illegal hotel busted

From The Real Deal:

An illegal hotel operating out of the Upper West Side last week became the latest victim of a new state law that’s cracking down on these facilities, the New York Press reported. Located at 318 West 75th Street, the landmarked five-story, 11-unit building had four of its units used as hotel rooms.

The rooms were advertised online at Airbnb.com, a travel site where owners can rent out their rooms or homes for short-term stays at a lower price than general hotel rates. Dee Rieber, the president of the neighborhood block association, said the building’s owner, Ron Shoshany, who is also the president of Sirkin Realty, has been trying to rid his building of tenants in hopes of operating all units as hotel rooms. Shoshany did not return calls requesting comment.

The online ads are now gone, as are guests of the illegal hotel, said Rieber. The Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement has issued violations, though specifics of the penalties were not mentioned.

Missing munimeter means tickets

From WPIX:

Store owners and residents on the Upper West Side say they are getting hefty tickets for not paying the Munimeter, but there are no meters.

"It's ridiculous really," said Nick Bazas, owner of Quality Florist on 81st street and Columbus.

Bazas says after the Department of Transportation changed the design of the street and put in new bike lanes, taking out the Munimeters, he's been ticketed for legally parking.

More of Upper West Side to be designated

Well folks, pretty soon the entire Upper West Side will be landmarked, along with the entire Upper East Side and Greenwich Village. For some reason, the privileged don't want art crappo invading their neighborhoods. But it's perfectly acceptable and even encouraged in your backyard. Ask your council member why today.

She has it made

From the NY Post:

It's not an urban myth: an Upper West Side apartment that goes for $99 a week.

Dorothy Williamson, 70, a retired computer-systems administrator from Queens, checked into the Imperial Court Hotel at 79th Street and West End Avenue as a "tourist" in 2009 for a 10-day stay.

Two years later she's still there, living as a permanent, rent-stabilized resident, paying $398 a month for a room in a classic pre-war building in one of Manhattan's priciest neighborhoods.

All Williamson had to do was request a permanent lease.

The sweetheart deal comes courtesy of a little-known quirk in the city's housing law that applies to the city's 30,000 Single Room Occupancies, known as SROs.

"An individual can become a permanent tenant by simply requesting a lease," said Marti Weithman, director of the SRO Law Project. "If someone comes in and pays for a night, he or she can request a lease orally, or in writing. The very act of requesting a lease gives you statutory tenancy."

Once you've asked for the lease, you can't be evicted.

Her 200-square-foot carpeted room has a window overlooking 79th Street. She has a bed, a chair, a television, two refrigerators, a microwave and a hot plate She uses a communal bathroom in the hall.

You had me up until the communal bathroom.

Unintended consequences

From the NY Times:

When Albany passed a law last summer preventing landlords of rental buildings from using their apartments as hotel rooms, neighborhood activists on the Upper West Side, where many of the conversions had taken place, were ebullient.

No longer would tenants in these buildings have to contend with European backpackers and other transients traipsing through their halls. No longer would landlords force out long-term residents to make way for more lucrative hotel guests.

But now some backers of the law, which makes it illegal to rent out most residential rooms and apartments for less than 30 days, are wondering if they have opened a Pandora’s box. To the dismay of many on the Upper West Side, at least one building that was stopped from operating as a hotel is now being turned into a homeless shelter for 200 men.

This was not the outcome the law’s supporters hoped for or, they say, expected. They also fear that more such buildings will follow suit, in a neighborhood that many residents contend is already saturated with homeless shelters and homes for the mentally ill and recovering addicts.

Must be nice to live on the Upper West Side

From the NY Post:

A battle of historic dimensions is brewing on the Upper West Side.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission is considering a proposal that would extend protection to an additional 790 buildings between 70th and 106th streets west of Broadway.

The area already has 2,577 landmarked buildings in a series of seven existing historic districts.

"By making this aggressive landmarking effort, they will be hurting the economic future of the city," fumed Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

"Landmarking the entire city does not leave opportunity to grow."

Spinola lashed out at the commission, charging that members are using historic designation as a way to regulate land use -- a power held by the City Council -- rather than out of a desire to protect buildings of architectural significance.

"Using landmark designation to protect views from penthouse apartments, to freeze architectural-style preferences of a few current residents and to promote the self-interests of private parties is a misuse of the landmarks law," Spinola said.

A separate district, the Upper West Side-Central Park Historic District, covers a huge swath east of Broadway and is not proposed for landmarking expansion.

Richard Emery, one of the founders of the West End Preservation Society, accused the Real Estate Board of siding with developers who want to make a fast buck without regard for the surrounding neighborhood.

"They're trying to protect the right of developers to put up junk," said Emery.

"The landmark designation does not prevent development, it only prevents development which is discordant with the architecture of the community," he said.
_________________

I kind of lost interest after "The area already has 2,577 landmarked buildings"...

Hi ho, sliver!

From the Real Deal:

Following community outcry, the Board of Standards and Appeals ruled today to put the fate of a sliver building at 330 West 86th Street in the hands of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, according to Westside Independent, thus creating another roadblock for the project. HPD has opposed the demolition of the existing five-story rental building. The decision comes three months after BSA ruled that Midtown-based Darkhorse Development could build a 17-story building on the 20-foot wide plot between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. That ruling said the city's Department of Buildings could not restrict the height of the proposed building to just a few stories. Darkhorse conceived of the project a decade ago and its plans have been stymied due to years of litigation by city agencies.