u/Magpie-Paju-1950

Probably one of the biggest urban changes happening in New York City is the building boom in Gowanus - What do people think of the new Gowanus? Would you live there while the canal and toxic sites are still a work-in-progress?

"Jamie Courville and her husband, Chris Reynolds, moved to Gowanus in 2009, a year before the canal was designated a Superfund site and the federal clean-up process kicked off. As filmmakers, they were drawn to the unexpected beauty of the desolate, postindustrial landscape. “You couldn’t take a bad photo of it,” says Courville. Besides all the visual stimulation, those warehouses and defunct factories also made for excellent studio spaces, and while there wasn’t much housing other than the NYCHA projects, apartments tended to be cheap and spacious, if a bit rundown. Courville and Reynolds rented a well-size 1,100-square-foot apartment in one of the older residential buildings for around $2,000 a month, where they also worked. At a time when other industrial neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Long Island City were being remade into shinier, more generic versions of their former selves, Gowanus still felt mysterious and full of possibility. “There was a lot going on behind closed doors,” says Courville. It felt feral and gross and hopeful and free.

Of course, there was a reason why Gowanus was still a haven for artists in 2009, when so many of the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods had gentrified: the noxious, flood-prone canal running through it, filled with sewage, toxic sludge, and pretty much “every imaginable pathogen.” “I used to say I would never raise kids here,” said Karen Gibbons, an artist who moved there in the early 1980s. But she and her husband did — three of them, plus numerous cats and dogs. As with a lot of life decisions in New York, real estate was part of it — they ended up with two sprawling lofts, one protected under loft law, one a shared studio space — and, like Courville and Reynolds, had fallen under the spell of the place.

Almost anywhere else, a Superfund designation would have spooked real-estate developers, but in Gowanus, it amounted to open season, signaling to investors that the federal government would soon be cleaning up the century-old cesspool that had hindered previous development schemes. Not long after, Whole Foods announced that it was opening a gigantic store with a rooftop greenhouse on a bleak, windswept corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street. Other of-the-moment businesses soon followed: Lavender Lake, a bar with a huge outdoor patio that served local draft beer and kale Caesar salads, opened in 2011, Dinosaur Bar-B-Q in 2013, and Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in 2014. Developers who’d been buying up land for decades started applying for spot rezonings to build luxury housing..."

How do people feel about Spence's expansion (and the expansion of other private schools in the area?)

Has anyone lived over a public bathroom? or fought a noise battle for years?

The REI in the Puck Building will close its doors on July 23, ending a nearly 15-year run on the corner of East Houston and Lafayette. This is a closing of note. When the news broke last year, outdoorsy types across the city grieved and wondered where they would buy camping stoves for last-minute trips to the Adirondacks. There are plans for a funerary shrine on Lafayette Street. A reliably clean bathroom has also been lost. (“You learn a lot about a culture from how they treat public bathrooms,” said Juan Pablo Baene, an artist, while checking out a monocular with his kid. “It’s sad.”) Employees mourned too — mostly about being out of a job. I also overheard a few customers lamenting the recent arrival of OpenAI, which now occupies 90,000 square feet upstairs. There goes the neighborhood.

A story about the daily meetup in Jackson Heights for all ages -

A pretty unique club at Stuyvesant - "It was a warm Thursday in early June at Rockefeller Park, ideal weather for tanning on the grass or kicking around a soccer ball. But on a shady patch under a sprawling river birch, ten teens who had wandered over from Stuyvesant High School assemble themselves into breakout groups to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s recently released housing proposal."

some cool photos here from the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, 1971-including the rooms of Patti Smith and Jonas Mekas -

"When asked by the critic and art historian Michael Stoeber if the apartments at the Chelsea Hotel were “portraits of their occupants,” the photographer Albert Scopin replied, “Definitely. That amazed me. The magnitude of it was new to me.” Those likenesses, uncanny in the way a dog and its owner might begin to resemble one another, are unmistakable while paging through Chelsea Hotel, a new collection of Scopin’s photographs taken in and around the historic locale between 1969 and 1971. These images, long considered lost, resurfaced in 2016. In the book, they are paired with Scopin’s recollections on the people — Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lounging in his annex studio on the ground floor; a woman named Lola who left her apartment just twice a week, “once to see her shrink and once to go shopping” — and their lives at 222 West 23rd Street."