Y Downtown?
St., specifically in the Hudson Square neighborhood. “I had heard that they were looking at a Downtown facility,” Community Board 1 chairperson Julie Menin told UnderCover. Menin said she heard the news from 92nd Street officials, and was under the impression that the location might be permanent.
Alix Friedman, a 92nd Street spokesperson, told UnderCover that the organization was considering various locations for the move.
After 9/11, C.B. 1 supported 92nd Street’s attempts to open a location Downtown, but those plans never materialized. “We would love to get a 92nd Street Y facility Downtown,” said Menin. “It’s one of the top priorities of the community board.”
Hudson Square does make sense since Trinity Church owns a good chunk of neighborhood property and Carl Weisbrod, who now heads the church’s real estate department, was a big Y backer when he led the Downtown Alliance.
Baby boom
Bust out the Bugaboo strollers, Tribeca has gone baby crazy. The birthrate in the neighborhood has increased nearly 250 percent since 1991, making the neighborhood one of the fastest baby makers in the city, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff said at the groundbreaking for the Tribeca segment of the Hudson River Park.
Historic Greenwich South
Someone has to love the neglected buildings of New York City. And that someone is the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which recently launched a database of the 56 most endangered darlings in the city. Its hope: that some organization or developer will open its heart to the forsaken few.
Of the 24 Manhattan buildings that made the cut, three of them are within blocks of the World Trade Center site, in the forsaken Greenwich South neighborhood. “There’s a lot of indecisiveness in the minds of property owners about what to do with buildings that are close to ground zero because for so long things have been so slow to happen there,” said Roger Lang, director of community programs and services, for the conservancy.
All three of the Greenwich St. buildings — 67, 94 and 941/2 — date back to the Federalist Era when Greenwich was an avenue of mansions akin to Fifth Ave. “They’re all real old. We’re talking 200 years old. Stuff in Manhattan doesn’t get to be 200 years old,” said Lang. “They should be respected for their age alone.”
The strip of old mansions weren’t so respected when most of them met their end when Robert Moses began to build the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in 1940. Although these three buildings narrowly missed the wrecking ball, they haven’t necessarily gotten the royal treatment. Sixty-seven Greenwich “has been actively neglected since the 1940s. It’s a wonder that it’s still there,” said Lang.
Nagging train
The South Ferry train station was built almost a century ago, but the M.T.A.’s system to let riders know the trains are too long for the station is still a work in progress. The latest method: browbeating.
Last week, a conductor repeatedly warned riders traveling on a Downtown 1 train that they had to be in the first five cars to exit at South Ferry — stepping up the rhetoric as the train drew closer.
“I have been telling you since 28th St. to move to the front and no one has been listening to me,” she scolded, adding that ignoring her would be dangerous in an emergency. “You’re in the wrooooong place.”
Of course there is no way to know which car you are in once you are on the train and many riders in the back were in the right place if they wanted to go out the northern exit of the Rector St. stop. Two tourists apparently did need the nagging as they scurried to the front (in violation of the rule against walking between cars) only after hearing the most dire warnings.
Unable to solve the problem with signs, the M.T.A. hopes the problem will go away when the $400-million station extension is done at the end of next year.
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