Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:39:07 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Julia Vitullo-Martin :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Julia+Vitullo-Martin istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/style/getting-a-lift/82340/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST During a recent jazz dance class at Equinox, a gym acquaintance I hadn't seen for a while greeted me with this: "Uh, did you have some work done?" she asked, using the euphemism for plastic surgery. The response was no, but I had discovered something easier, cheaper, far less invasive, and immediately effective — a facial called "the French lift." A specialty of the Jeffrey Stein Salon on the Upper West Side, the French lift uses low-frequency, low-intensity micro-currents administered through... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/range-of-motion/73496/ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST If every New Yorker regularly did Gyrotonics — a type of exercise that builds on yoga, ballet, tai chi, and swimming — ours would be a far more beautiful, happy, and relaxed city. Created in the 1980s by a classically trained dancer whose career had been put on hold due to an injury, Juliu Horvath, Gyrotonics uses movements that are both circular (thus gyro, a Greek word meaning "spiral") and rhythmic. The exercises encourage the body to lengthen, strengthen, and relax. Mr. Horvath invented a... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/small-gym-wonders/71801/ Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST New York is a big, powerful city, and lots of New Yorkers like going to big, powerful gyms. But over the last few years, many anti-big gyms have sprung up, often resulting from the personal vision of founders. In recent weeks, I tried three independent gyms with very different pitches — each one excellent in its own way and attentive to members. CLAY (25 W. 14th St., just off Fifth Avenue, 212-206-9200, insideclay.com) Walking into serene and gracious Clay from rough 14th Street is one of those... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-yorks-exercise-convention/70283/ Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Each year, the ECA World Fitness Convention rolls into town — giving New Yorkers an opportunity to take three days worth of classes led by some of the nation's most renowned fitness professionals. An association for those working in the fitness and wellness industries, ECA will offer more than 100 workshops, programs, and classes at the Midtown Manhattan gathering from February 7 to February 10. While targeted at industry professionals, the convention is open to anyone who registers and pays... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/resolving-to-learn-latin-dance/69416/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Were you standing against the wall on New Year's Eve, that old high-school feeling of angst rising in your stomach as you watched glamourous dancers twirling confidently around the room? If so, do not despair. All you need to do is enroll in a class at any one of hundreds of city dance studios, including those detailed below. All are open to individuals, so you are welcome with or without a partner. The skills learned can transform you into the star of next year's New Year's Eve ball and can... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/working-off-the-fruitcake/67775/ Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The holiday party season is followed by the season of remorse. Now we eat, drink, and make merry. After January 1, we diet and work out. Each year, gym attendance soars after New Year's Day. But which gym is right for you? At first, New York's offerings seem limitless and the choices difficult. But the market is actually pretty well segmented to let you choose how much you want to pay for what level of service. Plus, at this time of year, several gyms are offering inducements to sign up. All... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/exercise-passport/66951/ Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST At $75 a year, the New York Fitness Access PassBook — a collection of coupons offering entry to dozens of gyms, martial arts studios, swimming pools, health clubs, and dance studios — seems to be just about the biggest bargain in city fitness. It is a bargain, but one that needs to be used strategically. To begin with, in the tumultuous world of small business, many fitness facilities close up shop in any given year. Others modify their missions, schedules, or clienteles, severely limiting... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/dance-workout-challenge/66290/ Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST "You're sitting at a table alone in Buenos Aires," fitness instructor Rosie Fiedelman says, looking up at us beguilingly from beneath her long, curled lashes, as she turns on some tango music in the exercise studio where she's teaching. "It will soon be dawn. You see him across the room. You're wearing a sexy black dress slit up the leg and high strappy heels. You have a flower in your hair. It's your last chance. You walk toward him." Actually, the 20-something Ms. Fiedelman is wearing a... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/dismissed-by-jane-jacobs-harlem-reinventing/64816/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST So rarely did Jane Jacobs discuss race in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" that her biographer, Alice Sparberg Alexiou, felt compelled to cite this "glaring but seldom-mentioned shortcoming" in the introduction to "Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary." For this failing, contemporary liberals often attacked Jacobs. Indeed, the architecture critic of the Nation magazine, Walter McQuade, wrote in a 1962 review that Jacobs's ideas were "not even a semi-solution to the main problem of the city... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/from-a-surly-kind-of-slum-to-a-desirable-locale/63471/ Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST New Yorkers who love the Upper West Side can get a little spooked by how much Jane Jacobs disliked it. After all, doesn't the West Side have the stretches of old buildings she so admired usefully recycled for new and different purposes? And isn't it endowed with wide sidewalks and mixtures of street uses, especially on the commercial corridors? Well, she designated it one of her "areas of city failure." She even called Morningside Heights "a surly kind of slum." The West Side functioned as one... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/linking-a-city-housing-authoritys-money-woes/62532/ Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Can the New York City Housing Authority, landlord to more than 180,000 families and owner of one of every 13 rental units in the city, relieve some of its financial problems by responding to a criticism voiced by Jane Jacobs? In viewing cities as "delicate, teeming ecosystems," the urban writer and activist disdained public housing projects as concrete monocultures deliberately designed without the functional and commercial diversity she admired. The street-level merchants who kept traditional... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/west-village-houses-a-monument-to-a-1960s/61592/ Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Few strategic victories have been memorialized in such an unprepossessing, undecorated fashion as Jane Jacobs's vanquishing of Robert Moses's effort to alter the makeup of Greenwich Village in the 1960s. The West Village Houses, a grouping of 42 five-story walkups, are a living testimony to that victory by Jacobs and her fellow New Yorkers. Without great arches or heroic statuary, the houses are plain brick buildings punctured by small windows, topped by flat roofs, and unadorned by anything... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/brooklyn-neighborhood-resists-eminent-domain/56045/ Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST If New York City had such a thing as the Most-Endearing-House-in-the-Five-Boroughs Award, the tiny four-story frame house at 493 Dean St. in Brooklyn, built sometime in the 1830s, would be a contender. Fronted by a fenced herb garden, casement windows above and a small Alice-through-the-looking-glass door below, the house seems to beckon visitors in from the street. At Sunday's Garden Walk 2007, held by the Brownstone Brooklyn Garden District Association, the owner, Jerry Campbell, said his... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/london-real-estate-hits-the-stratosphere/54167/ Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 EST London now has the world's most expensive residential property, according to a new study by Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank. The average cost of prime central London property has reached $4,600 a square foot, compared with $3,200 in New York. The report also predicts that the growth of "serious wealth" will continue in Britain, further increasing the demand for prime residential properties as primary and secondary homes and investments. The London market upsurge has been driven by wealthy... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/bushwick-buzzing-but-not-quite-ready-for-prime/52812/ Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST "I love the J train," Loriann Girvan said, gesturing out her Brooklyn apartment's window at the train thundering by overhead. "I love going over the bridge every day into Manhattan. It soothes me." Like the J train itself, which is thrilling but far from lovely, Ms. Girvan's neighborhood, Bushwick, is something of an acquired taste. Despite being repeatedly proclaimed as the city's newest hip neighborhood, it still looks disorderly and a little dejected. Many of Bushwick's older buildings have... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/columbia-expansion-spikes-west-harlem-prices/51472/ Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST "Columbia is going to make a whole lot of people in Harlem very happy," a Harlem real estate broker, Willie Kathryn Suggs, said as she gestured out the window of a fifth-floor apartment for sale at 36 Convent Ave. Ignoring nearby City College, the ad for the apartment instead says it is "just north of the Columbia University Campus." The apartment's views are impressive. The Hudson River shimmers to the west as Midtown Manhattan looms to the distant south. With 5 1/2 smallish rooms and one bath... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/once-troubled-housing-complex-seeks-change/50520/ Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST If the name Flatbush Gardens seems slightly familiar, it could be because the Brooklyn complex has been in the news as the "other" development owned by the principals of Clipper Equity, the investment group that offered $1.3 billion for Starrett City. Taken aback by the large price tag for Starrett, and fearing for the development's moderate-income renters, public officials criticized the sellers. But they also denounced the buyers, whose 71 other residential buildings were said to have... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/and-the-next-sixth-borough-is-newark/40507/ Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST When 23-year-old New School University graduate student Bryan Epps was pondering recently where he would live once he got his master's degree in urban policy analysis, he considered Manhattan briefly — and then bought a brownstone for $200,000 in Newark. "That's way lower than in Harlem," said Mr. Epps, who expects to close in the next couple of weeks on his new house on Martin Luther King Boulevard, about five blocks from the historic Queen Anne brick house on James Street where he grew up. "I... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/housing-advocacy-group-works-at-being-a-good/37225/ Thu, 3 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST The city's real estate market is so strong that a sound neighborhood can easily absorb facilities that once would have been a problem — like one housing formerly homeless people — as long as they are well run, the president of the Community Preservation Corporation, Michael Lappin, said. Just up the block from his company's East 28th Street headquarters is the now-beautiful Prince George Hotel. During the Koch administration, the Prince George was the largest and one of the most disreputable... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/with-scenic-homes-and-a-rich-heritage-addisleigh/36375/ Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Manhattan is home to the nation's most famous black neighborhood, Harlem, but Queens is home to what may be the loveliest, Addisleigh Park, in the western section of St.Albans. Developed in the '20s and '30s as an enclave of Tudor and colonial single-family homes on large lots, Addisleigh Park attracted affluent blacks away from Manhattan — including Fats Waller (thought to be the first African-American to move in), Count Basie, John Coltrane, Milt Hinton, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, James... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/rehabilitation-20-years-in-the-making-clinton/35994/ Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST "I love this neighborhood," said Rondo Moses, looking out his backbedroom window on the third floor of a building at 430 Clinton Ave. in Brooklyn. Beautiful brownstones line Vanderbilt Avenue in the foreground. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank, Brooklyn's most famous landmark, towers in the distance. Mr. Moses lives in the Clinton Hill Historic District, renowned for its mid-19th-century mansions, row houses, and early 20thcentury apartment buildings. Clinton Hill is bordered on the east by the... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/surprise-lurks-at-stuyvesant-town-luxury-rentals/35516/ Thu, 6 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Urban planning and architecture students from around the world who make the requisite pilgrimage to Lower Manhattan to study MetLife's acclaimed moderate-income developments - Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town - are in for a surprise these days. A sign that hangs over the management office on Avenue C now announces the availability of luxury rentals. The legendary waiting list of thousands of households has been shredded. The 1947 plaque proclaiming "the vision" by which "families of... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/developers-partner-with-preservationists-to-save/35286/ Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Churches and synagogues that have anchored neighborhoods for decades are deteriorating all over New York, victims of many forces, including changing demographics, increasing secularism, and years of disinvestment. Although some cannot be saved, congregants and preservationists argue that there's a powerful technique for protecting others: sensitive development that uses various tools, like the transfer of development rights, to preserve a house of worship while building profitable housing to... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/columbias-planned-expansion-to-manhattanville/33667/ Thu, 1 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Columbia University's planned expansion northward from its Morningside Heights campus into West Harlem, which it calls Manhattanville, is now quietly being reviewed by the Department of City Planning. But the negotiations will not stay quiet for long. Columbia's expansion is not only opposed by several small business owners in the area who have refused to sell the university their property, it is also at odds with the local community board's official plan. And while many issues are ostensibly... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/arts/battle-of-red-hook/30918/ Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST When the Queen Mary 2, said by the Cunard Line to be the grandest cruise ship ever built, enters New York Harbor on Saturday, she will have sailed by some of the most contentiously disputed real estate in the world - the South Brooklyn waterfront. Entering through the Narrows, gliding beneath the Verrazano Bridge into Upper New York Bay, she will pass the piers of Sunset Park, dominated by the huge Brooklyn Army Terminal; Erie Basin, which houses the barges that deliver everything from grain to... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/signs-point-to-rollback-of-city-program-that/30509/ Thu, 6 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST There are some indications that the Bloomberg administration is about to cut back one of the most important tools it has for encouraging new residential construction. Mayor Bloomberg has set up a task force of prominent developers, bankers, housing advocates, community organizers, and government officials to evaluate the merits of one of the largest tax abatement programs in the city, the 421-a program that lowers the new taxes ordinarily imposed on multiunit housing developments. The group... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/irish-famine-church-decays-in-east-village/29212/ Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST "The first thing our ancestors did when they emigrated here was build a church," said Patti Kelly, a stained-glass artist and an organizer of a benefit on Sunday to raise money to save St. Brigid's, a Roman Catholic church on 8th Street and Avenue B, across from Tompkins Square Park. Known as the Irish Famine church, St. Brigid's was built in the late 1840s by poor Irish immigrants who had settled on the teeming Lower East Side to be close to the docks where many worked in backbreaking labor... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/first-fully-market-rate-apartments-come-to-harlem/28474/ Thu, 2 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST "There's very little real estate speculation going on in Harlem right now," a developer, Lewis Futterman, said at a symposium about Harlem real estate on Friday. "Ha!" a woman in the second row of the audience shouted. "There's nothing but speculators running around up there." Undeterred, Mr. Futterman went on. "Some 95% of the home ownership is from user-buyers. And very little displacement is going on because the private development community has learned that there's no advantage to moving... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/equinoxs-real-assets/27263/ Thu, 9 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST When New York's largest residential developer, the Related Companies, announced in December that it was offering about $505 million to buy Equinox Holdings, some industry analysts wondered why Related wanted such a seemingly small, dissimilar business. With 14 luxury rental and six condominium buildings in prime New York neighborhoods and many mixed-use buildings - most famously the $2 billion Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle - Related has become one of the most formidable players in real... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/once-heralded-address-lags-behind-rest-of-harlem/26140/ Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST At 9 o'clock on a recent Friday morning, a big guy in a scruffy blue coat stood dealing drugs in front of the main gate to the Graham Court, an Italian Renaissance palazzo called the most luxurious apartment house in Harlem by the AIA guide book. In its 1984 designation, the Landmarks Commission said the Graham Court reflected a "conscious effort to evoke an image of luxury," and is "one of the premier reminders of the urban development of Harlem at the turn of the century." Developed by... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/new-york/test-of-mayors-housing-assumptions-is-about/24490/ Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST Will households that have paid $700 a square foot or more for waterfront condos be happy living adjacent to subsidized households paying far less? Mayor Bloomberg's 165,000-unit housing plan, a cornerstone of his re-election campaign, is based on the assumption that the answer is yes. New Yorkers are about to find out if these assumptions are right. The premiere mixed-income project, Schaefer Landing on the Brooklyn waterfront, is scheduled to open by the end of the year. Thought to be the... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/sobro-high-quality-of-life-low-price-tag/21816/ Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST The Bronx is the last housing frontier, says Willie Kathryn Suggs, a prominent Harlem real estate broker who has crossed the river and expanded her business into the South Bronx. "It's insane to pay Harlem prices of over a million when you can buy in the Bronx," she adds. "The prices are low - you can get a house for under $500,000 - and banks want to give you the money to invest." Building permit numbers suggest the Bronx is indeed coming back. Issuance of new permits jumped to 4,924 in 2004... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/developer-may-soon-revive-landmark-theater/20711/ Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST At a public hearing on Tuesday, the Board of Standards and Appeals signaled that the 20-year saga of the RKO-Keith Theater in Flushing, Queens, may soon end, leading to the building's rebirth. The board's chairwoman, Meenakshi Srinivasan, indicated she would be receptive to granting the variance that would allow a major reconstruction of the site to go forward. Further negotiations will be necessary to decide the details of a tentatively reached compromise proposed by the development director... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/travel/spring-lake-effect/20506/ Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Manhattan book publicist Lynn Goldberg took her first trip to the Jersey shore four years ago. "Serene is not the first word most people associate with the Jersey Shore," she said. "But Spring Lake is a treasure, a lovely town that's never been corrupted by honky tonk. Plus, you don't need a car. You can walk or bike everywhere. And it's retained its special character from the 19th century, when people sat on the large open porches, sipped lemonade, chatted, napped, and read books, and strolled... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/in-an-effort-to-restrict-residential-development/20024/ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST In the hopes of halting the kind of development it regards as undesirable - particularly out-of-scale buildings - the City Planning Commission began the official review process late last month to downzone Whitestone, a residential neighborhood in northeastern Queens. Among other things, property owners will no longer be able to build two houses on lots where only one is now standing. Together with the Bloomberg administration's other efforts, including the earlier downzoning of nearby Bayside... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/new-york/residents-developer-wrestle-over-ps-64-site/18803/ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST The slogan "Help keep New York filthy" is scrawled on the graffiti-filled wall running the length of the 135,000-square-foot Beaux Arts building at 605 E. 9th St. that was the subject of a contentious hearing held on Tuesday by the Board of Standards and Appeals. The building's owner is certainly doing his part to live up to the slogan, some concerned neighbors say. An elderly Irish man sitting on the stoop across the street cites broken windows, trash strewn the length of the front, and "rats... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/queens-neighborhoods-mix-of-industry-housing-may/17677/ Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST Just over the Queensboro Bridge and immediately north of Queens Plaza lies an intriguing, mixed-up, dense, partly industrial, partly residential neighborhood called Dutch Kills. Every urban use seems to flourish here side by side - manufacturing plants nudged in between tiny houses, movie production facilities beside grocery stores, nightclubs on industrial blocks, auto repair shops on residential blocks. It has virtually no vacant land and very little public space. Still, it's a Jane Jacobs... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/city-is-rich-in-land-ripe-for-development-new/16972/ Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST At the northern tip of Manhattan, east of the thriving, overcrowded neighborhood of Inwood, lies a large peninsula called Sherman Creek, named for the inlet that once ran across most of the top of the island. In stark contrast to the beauty of the Harlem River, which curves beckoningly at 207th Street, Sherman Creek is dominated by a desolate, low-rise jumble of subway yards, Con Ed substations, garages, auto repair shops, and parking lots. More than half of the land appears to be unused or... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/pioneering-queens-garden-community-flourishes-anew/16589/ Thu, 7 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST In the 1920s, decades before the term "affordable housing" was coined, the prominent developer Alexander Bing joined forces with a few renowned urbanists and intellectuals to build a "garden community" of about 1,200 units on 77 acres in Queens left over from the construction of the Long Island Rail Road's Sunnyside train yards. Called Sunnyside Gardens, it was one of the first home-ownership projects in the nation to target low- and middle-income families. Despite some hard times since the... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/harlems-renewal-spreads-to-the-boulevard/14506/ Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 EST On a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May, Harlem's Frederick Douglass Boulevard is happening. Hipsters and elegant West African couples sip ginger juice and eat couscous at Les Ambassades' outdoor cafe on 118th Street. Young businessmen with cell phones attached to their ears rush in and out of the UPS store up the block. Locals stand in line for the famous fried fish at Lovie's Fish & Chips. The Moca Lounge won't open until 5, but its elegant wooden facade looks beckoning - no ugly... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/residential-vs-industrial-the-battle-for-the-soul/14094/ Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 EST As high-end residential development moves beyond Manhattan, New Yorkers are taking a fresh, even covetous, look at the waterfront, which has been inaccessible to the public for most of the city's history. Working harbors have generally been dangerous, polluted places that protect themselves by keeping the public out. Yet as traditional maritime businesses have declined, New York's underused waterfront has become increasingly attractive for housing and parks. Are industrial retention advocates... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/health-fitness/dancers-without-borders/13883/ Mon, 16 May 2005 00:00:00 EST "Ladies, I have taught this routine to three sets of dancers downtown, and everybody got it," Calvin Wiley said sadly, surveying the group of thin, bejeweled, Upper East Side women in front of him at his Calvinography dance class at Equinox on East 85th Street. He had spent half an hour trying to teach a set of slick hip-hop moves - lots of isolations and contractions - using Lady Saw's song, "I've Got Your Man." His downtown class, at Equinox in Greenwich Village, had loved the song, but it... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/audubon-terrace-lost-and-found/12229/ Thu, 14 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST "The cab driver hugged me and told me everything was going to be okay," said Dee Wedemyer, recalling her move uptown one evening last summer, when she lugged her belongings from an apartment in serene Tudor City to the far-from-fully renovated Riviera on 157th Street in lower Washington Heights. "He'd seen where I'd been living, and he was worried about where I was moving." A former editor with the Sunday real estate section of the New York Times, Ms. Wedemyer had lived on Park Avenue and... Julia Vitullo-Martin http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/how-the-spirit-of-ayn-rand-haunts-the-city/11079/ Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST Ayn Rand's spirit seems to be returning to haunt us all, infusing downright bizarre criteria into today's increasingly heated debate over preserving modernist buildings. The preservationists, naturally enough, want to protect everything designed by the Howard Roark-style, celebrated modernist architects who argued they were erecting pure buildings in a compromising world. Buildings by original Bauhaus architects like Joseph Urban are on everyone's list, as are most buildings by Yale brutalist... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/young-new-yorkers-discover-norwood-one-of/10699/ Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST "You have to think of the territory of the Bronx in two parts, east and west, divided by the Bronx River, the city's only true river," says the publisher of the Norwood News, Dart Westphal. "The east Bronx is like Queens. The west Bronx, with its handsome old buildings, is more like Washington Heights. Now consider the triangle of events. You have Co-op City opening in 1972, New York University moving out in 1974, Burnside Avenue burning during the blackout of 1977," he says, spreading a large... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/travel/back-to-the-future/9760/ Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST In the movie "Dirty Pretty Things," hardworking young immigrants in London wish the city would be more like New York - where "they put lights in the trees in winter and where you can skate in the parks." I, however, often wish New York were more like London - where so many museums and exhibits are free or very cheap, where the Tube takes you just about anywhere, and where they've figured out how to redevelop their once desolate waterfront into thriving neighborhoods. London's 2,000-year-old... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/four-year-odyssey-ends-at-the-queens-waterfront/6412/ Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST "When you live here, you really understand that Manhattan is an island," says Francis James, gesturing from his 29th-floor apartment on the Queens waterfront toward the four bridges to the south that delicately clutch Manhattan to Brooklyn. Across the East River, the Manhattan skyline beckons, Oz-like. Far below, the New York Waterway ferry, which docks a hundred yards downriver, transports residents to 34th Street and Wall Street. The extraordinary views are new to Mr. James, who recently... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/health-fitness/so-many-turns-so-little-time/4100/ Mon, 1 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST Bowling arms, bowling arms," Hugo Diez says as he chasees across the floor to the music of Jennifer Lopez. And indeed he dips his right arm as if he were tossing a bowling ball, but then brings it back seductively across his chest, shooting himself a smoldering look in the mirror. "I don't think that's how we bowl in America," says the dancer beside me, who looks like she would know. Undeterred, Mr. Diez chasees to the right, bowling with his left arm and slithering his hand back across his... JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN http://www.nysun.com/new-york/vineyard-of-our-own/150/ Fri, 30 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EST Natives like to call Shelter Island the non-Hamptons, but I think it's more like the non-Vineyard. The gorgeous views of water at every turn, softly hilly terrain, and 19th-century Methodist camp buildings, plus the excellent biking, hiking, sailing, kayaking, and golf, are all reminiscent of Martha's Vineyard. But Shelter Island, nestled between the North and South Forks of Long Island, is smaller, sweeter, quieter, and much closer to New York. The only Hampton- or Vineyard like social scene...