State Parks or State-Owned Land for Camping Near New York City

Sebago Cabin Camp in Harriman State Park

Located just north of the New York-New Jersey state line in Rockland and Orange Counties, New York, Harriman State Park offers 200 miles of hiking trails, 31 lakes and reservoirs, and two public beaches. The rustic cabins (no water or electricity) and full-service cottages are tucked into a rocky, wooded hillside. The campground offers amenities like rowboat rentals, basketball courts, tennis courts, and beach access. Cabins sleep six. Rental: $266 – $736/week, depending on cabin or cottage size, plus processing fee for reservations.

Mills Norrie State Park – Esopus Island Backcountry Site

As the name suggests, Esopus Island Backcountry campsite is located on Esopus Island, an island in the Hudson River between Hyde Park and Staatsburg. Accessible only by boat—you’ll need to bring your own canoe, kayak, or other vessel—the campsite offers a fire pit and portable camp toilet in addition to the standard camping platform and canvas-walled tent. It accommodates four people and is pet-friendly. Cost: $45/night.

Fahnestock State Park

Just an hour and a half north of the city by car, Fahnestock State Park features 76 dog-friendly campsites. Each site features a fire pit, grill, and picnic table; bathroom facilities are interspersed in the camping area. The park itself is over 14,000 acres, and is designated an official Bird Conservation Area. Bring your binoculars and get ready to spot broad-winged hawks, veeries, worm-eating warblers, and scarlet tanagers. Cost: $15-19/night plus processing fee for reservations.

Mongaup Pond Campground

The outdoors are for everyone, but campsites are all-too-often inaccessible to those who use a wheelchair or other mobility devices. Mongaup Pond Campground offer eight accessible campsites, with accessible picnic tables and fire rings. The nearby beach has an accessible access trail and accessible shower facilities. Cost: $22/night for New York State residents, $27/night for others, plus processing fee for reservations.

Gillette Castle State Park

Gillette Castle State Park is named for the 19th/early 20th century actor-manager William Gillette’s castle, which was acquired by the state in 1943 and sits within the park. Designed by Gillette himself, the castle is a mix of architectural styles and personal quirks. Consider camping at the public park’s public campsite on the Connecticut River, which has a primitive toilet and is accessible by canoe or kayak, and hiking into the park to explore the castle. Stays are limited to one night. Cost: $5/camper/night.

Round Valley State Park, New Jersey

An hour and twenty minutes west of New York City you’ll find Round Valley State Park, which offers the only wilderness camping in the state. While sites offer fire rings and grills, and primitive toilets are within walking distance, not all offer drinking water, so you may need to carry that in. And “carry it in” means a rugged three-to-three-and-a-half mile hike, or a boat trip across the Round Valley Reservoir. Sites sleep six and are pet friendly. Cost: $17/night for New Jersey residents, $22/night for others.

Devil’s Hopyard State Park

Located in East Haddam, Connecticut, about two hours and 15 minutes northeast of the city, Devil’s Hopyard is known for its waterfalls and pothole stone formations. This may be the origin of the park’s unusual name: angered by the falls for getting his tail wet, the devil “burned holes in the stones with his hooves as he bounded away.” The legend does not account for what the devil was doing in Connecticut in the first place. Today, the park offers 21 tent sites in a wooded setting, with water and restroom facilities. $14/night for Connecticut residents, $24/night for others, plus processing fee for reservations.

Kettletown State Park

A quiet, forested state park, Kettletown’s campground offers 61 wooded and open campsites and a few rustic cabins near Lake Zoar in Sunbury, Connecticut. One of the campsites is ADA accessible. Bathrooms and showers are provided. The park features horseshoe pits, a small beach, and six miles of trails overlooking Lake Zoar and the Housatonic River. Visitors appreciate the varied wildlife. Cost: $17/night for campsites for Connecticut residents, $27/night for others; $50/night for cabins for Connecticut residents, $60/night for others, plus a processing fee.

Worthington State Forest

An hour and a half west of the city, Worthington State Forest has 26 miles of trails, including a section of the Appalachian Trail, and is a great destination for hikers. The park offers one backcountry campsite, available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Sunfish Pond, a National Historic Landmark, is a 41-acre lake created by glaciers during the last ice age and a popular destination within the park. The park has 78 tent and trailer sites along the Delaware River, all of which have fire rings and picnic tables. The campground offers showers, restrooms, and drinking water. Cost: varies.

Camp By the Beach Near New York City

Hither Hills State Park 

Montauk, at the far eastern end of Long Island, offers two excellent beach campgrounds, Hither Hills State Park and Montauk County Park. Hither Hills offers 189 oceanside campsites, just steps to the beach. The park offers a comfort station with showers, restroom facilities, volleyball, hiking, basketball, and fishing opportunities, among others. Cost: $35/night for New York State residents to $70/night for non-residents.

Montauk County Park

If a more rugged beach camping experience is what you’re looking for, consider Montauk County Park. You’ll need to drive a camper or haul a trailer onto the beach, but the views of Block Island Sound make up for the hassle. This is the kind of place you hunker down for a week of sun, sand, and screen-free life. Vehicles require an outer beach permit, and each group is limited to two dogs. Cost: varies.

Smith Point County Park

Smith Point County Park campground is located on the Fire Island barrier beach, and all 270 campsites have water. Many also offer sewer and electric hook ups. The park’s white sand, excellent surf, playgrounds, showers, and snack bar make it a very popular destination. It’s a great spot for sport fishermen. Cost: varies.

Hammonasset Beach State Park

Just two hours from New York City by car, Hammonasset State Park is Connecticut’s largest shoreline park. The park’s William F. Miller Campground offers 558 grassy sites (six of which are ADA accessible), with a  concession stand, bathrooms, and showers. No pets allowed, but you can swim, fish, and beach to your heart’s content. Cabins are available for rent on a weekly basis, Sunday to Sunday. Cost: $20/night for Connecticut residents, $30/night for others, higher for campsites with water, plus processing fees.

Primitive Camping Near New York City

Castle Rock Unique Area

If getting off the grid and away from others is your goal, consider camping at Castle Rock Unique Area near Philipstown, New York. This 129-acre area offers Hudson Highland views and a short trail. Primitive camping is allowed 150 feet from the nearest road, trail, or body of water. Cost: Free.

Hickok Brook Multiple Use Area

Get away from it all in Sullivan County, New York at the Hickok Brook Multiple Use area, which offers short hiking trails, a pond for fishing, and designated and primitive campsites. Designated campsites are marked with yellow signs; primitive camping is allowed 150 feet from the nearest road, trail, or body of water. Cost: Free.

Sundown Wild Forest

Sullivan County, New York’s Sundown Wild Forest is 30,100 acres of mixed terrain in the southeast Catskills. This a place for some real hiking, mountain biking, or horseback riding (BYO horse), as well as fishing. The Peekamoose Blue Hole is a gorgeous, popular swimming site. The forest’s Peekamoose Valley Camping Area offers primitive campsites (some accessible) and a seasonal port-a-potty. Reservations are required for campsites. Cost: Free.

Unique Camping Experiences Near New York City

Lavender Farm, Pleasant Valley

This campsite, offered through Hipcamp, is a private site on a working lavender farm. Located in  New Jersey a little over an hour from New York City by car, the site is within easy reach of Red Bank and Asbury Park. It features a fire pit and camp toilet and is pet-friendly, though dogs must be leashed (there are chickens on site!). The site accommodates six campers. Cost: $60/night.

Historic Sundial Farm

Located on Westchester County’s oldest working farm, this pond-side campsite offers a tent site, bathrooms, potable water, and is pet-friendly. It accommodates up to eight people and is convenient to both Harriman State Park and Fahnestock State Park. Cost: $68/night.

Mountain Top Campsite

If you want a gorgeous campsite plus easy access to New Paltz AND an on-site farm brewery, consider Mount Top Campsite. Located on a working farm with farm story, brewery, and live music on weekends, the site accommodates tents or RVs and offers toilets, a fire pit, and picnic table. It accommodates up to ten people. Cost: $95/night.

Heated Geodome in the ‘Gunks

If roughing it in a tent or rustic cabin isn’t what you’re looking for, maybe staring out the skylight of your private geodome is the best way for you to connect with nature. Each geodome overlooks a ravine and stream. Geodomes feature a bed, linens, towels, a hammock, private deck, and fire pit. There are toilets on site, showers, potable water, and private hiking trails. But all this doesn’t come cheap: the geodomes run $295/night.

The post 20 Places to Camp Near New York City appeared first on CitySignal.

Indigenous Lenapehoking

Before the island now known as Manhattan was colonized by the Dutch, the area around St. Mark’s Place was inhabited by the Lenape people and was part of Lenapehoking, or the Lenape homeland. Lenape people hunted, fished, foraged, and practiced agriculture in Lenapehoking. Modern-day Astor Place, just west of St. Mark’s, was known as Kintecoying or “Crossroads of Three Nations,” a central gathering point between three different Lenape groups who lived in Manhattan in the 16th century and the site where three important trails intersected. Part of one of these trails (which ran from Shempoes Village near present-day Stuyvesant Street and Second Avenue to Kintecoying) passed through St. Mark’s Place.

Petrus Stuyvesant

In the seventeenth century, a mixture of European diseases, land takeover by Dutch colonists, war, and violence either killed or drove most Lenape people from Manhattan. The area’s colonial history begins when the land north of New Amsterdam (present-day Lower Manhattan) was divided into 12 “bouwerijs,” the Dutch word for farm. The largest, Bouwerij #1, was used to support the governing officers of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In 1651 it was sold to Petrus (or Peter) Stuyvesant, the last director-general of New Netherland (the name for the entire area claimed by the Dutch in eastern North America); Stuyvesant’s purchase included two enslaved people. Stuyvesant purchased adjacent acreage, including more of the area now known as St. Mark’s Place. He may have eventually enslaved an estimated 40 people who labored on that land.

Stuyvesant also built a Dutch Reformed church, known as Bouwerij Chapel, on the site of what is now St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery. Stuyvesant himself is buried beneath the church, and nearby Stuyvesant Street, Stuyvesant Square, and Stuyvesant Town bear his family name. Interestingly, an enslaved woman named Mayken van Angola and her husband, Domingo lived near the chapel and in 1662 petitioned the Dutch West India Company for her freedom in exchange for doing housework for Stuyvesant. She was manumitted (freed) and may also be buried beneath St. Mark’s.

After the British seized control of New Amsterdam in 1664, Stuyvesant surrendered in exchange for keeping 62 acres of his land. It remained in his family through the American Revolution. In 1793, his descendants sold it to The Episcopal Church for $1. The present building, St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, was consecrated in 1799. Today it is one of the oldest church buildings in Manhattan, second only to St. Paul’s Chapel.

A Fashionable Address?

St. Mark’s Place is an extension of 8th Street. When the city commissioners laid out the plan for the Manhattan street grid in 1811, 8th Street was a demarcation line: streets below it would retain their configuration, as they were too developed to shift to a grid pattern. North of 8th Street, the grid would be adhered to, with buildings and roads shifted as needed.

In 1811, however, 8th Street wasn’t developed east of Broadway. The first houses (besides farm buildings) weren’t constructed until 1831-32. These oversized Federal-style homes were built on both sides of the street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, and developer Thomas E. Davis built them in hopes of attracting wealthy New Yorkers, who were moving steadily north as the city expanded. This is likely why, in 1835, he named the street St. Mark’s Place, after the nearby fashionable church, in an attempt to make it sound like an exclusive address. Two of the original townhouses remain today: number 4 (the Hamilton-Holly House) and No. 20 (the Daniel LeRoy House). However, numbers 25, 20, and 28 also remain but with significant alteration.

St. Mark’s Place never took off as a truly fashionable address, possibly because cattle were driven through it regularly, causing injury to pedestrians. Still, it was home to some famous names. Eliza Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton, and two of her children lived at No. 4 from 1833 until the home was foreclosed on in 1842. Author James Fenimore Cooper lived at No. 6 during the same era. Many more successful but less well-known New Yorkers made it their home: David Hanriques, for example, a Jamaican-born banker who was eulogized in The New York Times as “a gentleman of the old school,” lived on St. Mark’s Place from 1831 until his death in 1859.

St. Mark’s Place residents had easy access to a growing number of important institutions built nearby. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded at the western edge of St. Mark’s Place in 1859. The Astor Opera House, the site of the Astor Place/Shakespeare Riot of 1849, opened on Astor Place in 1847.

Little Germany

By the mid-nineteenth century, would-be fashionable New Yorkers were moving on from St. Mark’s Place. German immigrants, who came to the United States seeking better economic prospects, moved into the area, turning it into a “Little Germany,” also known as Kleindeutschland or Deutschlӓndle. By 1855 New York City had the third-largest German population of any city in the world, including those in Germany itself. By 1880, 250,000 German speakers called New York City home. Most of those folks lived in the East Village.

With the influx of immigrants came new services, social halls, singing societies, and fraternal organizations, many headquartered on St. Mark’s Place. In 1884, for example, the New-York Cooking School held classes for poor girls (“plainly clad but bright looking girls,” The New York Times reported) in the Wilson Industrial School at 125 St. Mark’s Place. They learned to make an Easter feast of egg and bread dishes. Now it holds apartment buildings and a Starbucks, to many residents’ chagrin.

Today, the most visible remnant of Little Germany is the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schützengesellschaft (German-American Shooting Society) building at 12 St. Mark’s Place. Shooting—specifically target practice and marksmanship—was a popular hobby for an immigrant group that had experienced both the Revolutions of 1847-48 in Europe and the threat of anti-immigrant violence in their new home. The building was constructed in 1888 and features beautiful terracotta ornamentation created by Professor H. Plasschaert, a sculptor. The society’s logo, located on the building front at the fourth story, features crossed rifles and the inscription “Einigkeit Macht Stark,” or “Unity Makes Strength.” The society sold the building in 1920.

The Ottendorfer Library, today a part of the New York Public Library, on 2nd Avenue between St. Mark’s Place and 9th Street is another relic of the neighborhood’s German past. Built in 1884, the library was a gift to the community from successful editor Oswald Ottendorfer and was the first free library in the city.

Elevated train lines opened on both Second and Third Avenue during this time period, with the Second Avenue “El” offering service starting in 1875 and the Third Avenue El beginning in 1878.

Apartments and Boarding Houses

The increased population density of the East Village during the latter half of the nineteenth century led to a shift away from large, single-family homes to boarding houses, apartment houses, and tenements. Other immigrant groups moved into the area. The German population shrank as its members found economic success and moved to less-crowded neighborhoods. Their exodus was sped up by the General Slocum Disaster in 1904, when over 1,000 people, mostly women, and children from the city’s German community, died in a boating incident, leaving the neighborhood grief-stricken and traumatized.

City directories and census lists from the later decades of the nineteenth century reveal St. Mark’s Place as home to both those born in New York as well as immigrants from Germany, Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, Sweden, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The street seems to have maintained something of a middle-class character, despite the presence of boarding houses, where many, unable to afford rent on a full apartment, lived. Druggists, physicians, lawyers, journalists, piano manufacturers, carpenters, clerks, tailors, masons, laborers, and manufacturers all called St. Mark’s Place home those decades.

The Little Missionary’s Day Nursery, founded in 1896 by Sara Curry, acquired 93 St. Mark’s Place in 1901. It offered day care, kindergarten, classes, and clubs for neighborhood residents. It still operates today.

The Early Twentieth Century

The demographics of the neighborhood around St. Mark’s Place continued to shift as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fled violent pogroms and moved to the Lower East Side and adjacent areas. Italian immigrants also began moving to the area. St. Mark’s Place, while home to many, was also a commercial strip frequented by New Yorkers of many backgrounds, with businesses, saloons, drug stores, and restaurants. A photo below from 1910 shows the businesses at 14 – 18 St. Mark’s Place: a cigar store emblazoned “Smoke Telonette,” a clothing store advertising “Furnishings for Correct Dressers,” H.J. Tillman Tailor, The Astor Place Cafe, and 14 St. Mark’s Restaurant.

A 1915 photo of 18 – 23 St. Mark’s Place below shows Weiner’s Private Restaurant & Dairy Lunch Room, Schultz & Co Manufacturers of Gold and Silver Leaf, Victoria Printing Co, Cur-o-Pile Paper Co, a ladies tailor and furrier, and the Office of Arlington Hall.

Arlington Hall at 23 St. Mark’s Place was a ballroom used for weddings and parties as well as union meetings and political rallies. It was here in 1917 that the People’s Council for Democracy and Peace, a pacifist group organized in response to WWI, held a rally to oppose conscription. Members of the U.S. Army’s Thirty-First Company, Eighth Coast Artillery set up checkpoints at both ends of the block, ostensibly to allow only as many as would fit in the hall into the area. According to The Sun, a crowd of four or five thousand gathered in Second Avenue as a result. Soldiers and plainclothes cops attended the meeting, then checked all men for their registration cards, arresting fourteen.

This incident shows how St. Mark’s Place was developing as a home for freethinkers, radicals, artists, and intellectuals. Leon Trotsky lived briefly at 80 St. Mark’s Place. The small printing presses in the area, like Victoria Printing Co., produced leftist magazines and newspapers. Anarchist Emma Goldman opened the Modern School at 6 St. Mark’s Place on New Year’s Day in 1911. For ten years the school offered children a decidedly anti-establishment education. This was only the beginning of the street’s countercultural reputation.

Gangsters, Guns, and Gamblers

St. Mark’s Place also saw its fair share of vice in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1900, the Rev. Dr. Charles Parkhurst, president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime led a raid on 9 St. Mark’s Place in order to demonstrate that the cops were getting kickbacks from gambling houses. His raid found 300 men and boys actively gambling, while most police raids of gambling dens found nothing because everyone had been tipped off. (Bizarrely, Parkhurst, a well-known anti-corruption activist, and minister died in 1933 at the age of 91 after he climbed out a bathroom window and off a porch roof while sleepwalking.)

Twelve years later, police themselves attempted a raid on a gambling den on the second floor of 6 St. Mark’s Place. Prevented from entering by an “ice chest door” (the heavy, reinforced front of an early refrigerator), as The New York Times reported, the cops were shot at while attempting to hack their way into the room. Seven men were eventually arrested.

Perhaps most famously, Arlington Hall was the site of a January 9, 1914 “dance” that quickly turned into a gunfight between rival gangs: the Italian gang headed by Jack Sirocco and the Jewish gang headed by “Dopey” Benny Fein. Both men were labor racketeers, and the dispute was over control of the East Side labor unions. The gunfight ended up on the street. A 65-year-old court clerk named Frederick Strauss, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and the financial secretary of the Odd Fellows Lodge in St. Mark’s Place, where he was headed that night was shot twice in the head in the melee. He died of his wounds. Only one person was charged in his death: Captain John Sweeney of NYPD was called to account for the neglect of duty that allowed a dance-that-was-clearly-going-to-be-a-gunfight to occur in his territory.

In 1921, 19-year-old Harry Cook, an employee of the delicatessen at 130 St. Mark’s Place, was shot in the heart while on the job in the early hours of November 8. He stumbled outside, bleeding, in view of two cops, but the shooter was never found. The motive was unclear, but there were hints that it was personal. The young man was to be married the next day, and his future father-in-law had helped him buy into a partnership of the delicatessen but may have had reservations about Cook or the business deal.

But perhaps the most terrifying crime occurred in the wee hours—around 4:30am—of October 4, 1925. Max Pfeffer’s restaurant at 25 St. Mark’s Place was full of waiters, coming off shift at the end of a long week with their wages and tips in cash on their persons. Six armed men entered and robbed diners of a total of $9,000. One Julia Kardos, a young woman who worked the restaurant’s pie counter, fainted and was revived by the gunmen who poured cold milk on her head. The robbers sped away as the proprietor of nearby Arlington Hall fired his gun in an attempt to draw the attention of local law enforcement.

Hippie Haven

The Great Depression and WWII years pushed St. Mark’s Place toward decline. The housing stock was old. A June 1935 fire in The Mansion, a social hall at 27 St. Mark’s Place, killed six wedding guests. 82 St. Mark’s Place was condemned in 1938, when a crack in the wall threatened to collapse around residents. An emergency shelter catering to men with substance use disorder opened at 69 St. Mark’s Place (and hosted, among others, a former cornetist in John Philip Sousa’s band). The elevated train lines on Second and Third Avenues were torn down in 1942 and 1955, respectively, cutting off the eastern edge of the neighborhood from mass transit but paving the way for better and more profitable streetscapes.

By the 1950s, cheap rent in the St. Mark’s Place area had begun attracting Beatniks and others who eschewed the values of conventional post-war American life. Poet W.H. Auden and Beats like Jack Kerouac moved into the neighborhood, which was gaining a reputation as Greenwich Village’s rougher, cheaper counterpart. Activists Abbie Hoffman and Jack Rubin lived at 30 St. Mark’s Place, while Lenny Bruce made his home at 13 St. Mark’s Place for a time. Many of these folks patronized Gem Spa, the neighborhood soda fountain/deli/candy store that occupied the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue from the 1920s until 2021.

Arlington Hall had become the Polish National Home or Polski Dom Nardowy. The downstairs bar area known as The Dom became a Beat hangout after a local bar proprietor took it over. It was described in a 1965 guide to the neighborhood as “a groovy get-together place for the neighborhood cats and chicks who dig dancing and Polish food at Avenue A prices.” The bar was open from 4 pm to 4 am, with dancing starting at 8:30 pm, and breakfast served starting at 12:30 pm. It was an immediate hit with people from all walks of life.

In 1966 Andy Warhol curated the multimedia show Exploding Plastic Inevitable (featuring Nico and the Velvet Underground) at The Dom. Photos from the event show sharply and conventionally well-dressed young white people. Soon Warhol had transformed The Dom’s upstairs area into the Electric Circus, a discotheque that didn’t serve alcohol because everyone was high on something else. At that point, according to a 1974 article in The New York Times, The Dom became a popular hangout for Black Beats, hippies, and neighborhood residents.

In 1967 500 hippies held a “be-in” featuring bands like The Group Image and Sheila the Slum Goddess on St. Mark’s Place; they planted a tree in the middle of the street that was later moved to Tompkins Square Park. The East Village Other, a local paper, chronicles this era well.

Theater 80, at 80 St. Mark’s Place, opened in a former nightclub space; the building had also previously had a speakeasy/jazz club called Schieb’s. The 1967 world premiere of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown put the theater on the map and on secure financial footing; it’s perhaps surprising that a street with St. Mark’s reputation would birth one of the most wholesome musicals in the American canon. (Its next major production was Hair, a more apt choice.)

In the 1980s, Theatre 80, under the same ownership, transformed into a movie theater that screened revivals. It returned to its Off-Broadway roots in the 1990s and continues to this day, though it is facing massive financial challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The building also houses Schieb’s Place/William Barnacle Tavern, a speakeasy that pays tribute to the building’s past, and the Museum of the American Gangster.

The Dom closed in 1974 and was converted into the Cowpalace, a country-western disco. But during its heyday, The Dom helped make St. Mark’s Place into a hippie haven. The counterculture there was so strong that tourist buses would pass through just to gawk at the street’s denizens. Clothing stores like Limbo opened, offering vintage and second-hand items, especially denim, to shoppers like Janis Joplin and Yoko Ono and inspiring influential stylists. An ice cream parlor called the Ice Cream Connection, which sold drug-named flavors, operated at 24-26 St. Mark’s Place. It later became a longstanding neighborhood eatery Dojo.

Punk Days

The 1970s on St. Mark’s Place was marked by a turn toward punk. Club 57 opened at 57 St. Mark’s Place, a church basement, in 1979. An alternative disco specializing in absurdist theme nights and performance art, it was frequented by artist Keith Haring. Manic Panic, which bills itself as America’s first punk boutique, was opened by sisters Trish and Snooky Bellomo in 1977. Trash and Vaudeville, another boutique, soon followed. St. Mark’s Place had record stores like Freebeing, technically on Second Avenue, and St. Mark’s Sounds at number 20. The neighborhood had a vibrant visual arts scene in those days as well. St. Mark’s Comics opened in 1983 at 11 St. Mark’s Place.

6 St. Mark’s Place, former home of the anarchist Modern School, became a bathhouse in 1915, serving the neighborhood’s immigrant population. By the 1950s, it was a run-down immigrant-focused bathhouse by day, gay bathhouse by night, and became an exclusively gay establishment in the 1960s. In 1979 it was purchased by Bruce Mailman, a theater producer and entrepreneur, who renovated it and reopened it as The New St. Mark’s Baths. The baths were a popular attraction for gay men until they were forcibly closed in 1985 amid the AIDS epidemic.

For a good view of St. Mark’s Place in this era, check out Billy Joel’s 1986 music video for “A Matter of Trust,” which was shot in the old Arlington Hall/Dom space.

A Changing City

Throughout the 1990s, St. Mark’s Place hung on to its downtown character, though that has changed in the 21st century as small businesses across the city have faced rising rents and stiff competition from chains. Coney Island High at number 15 was a popular punk venue in the 1980s and 1990s. It closed when the building was demolished in the early aughts and replaced with condos. 19-25 St. Mark’s Place has been home to both a Supercuts and Chipotle. All the music stores have closed.

Today, St. Mark’s Place is lively and youthful, albeit less “downtown” or countercultural than in the past. The most commercial block of St. Mark’s Place, between Second and Third Avenues, offers many options in Asian fast-casual dining and take-out, catering to the area’s large international student population. Other options for eats include New York classics Mamoun’s Falafel and 2 Bros. Pizza.

For drinks, there’s Barcade, a spin-off of the popular Williamsburg spot, and Irish Pub Bill McCabe’s. Moving further east, bookstore Printed Matter/St. Mark’s is just across Third Avenue in the Swiss Institute building. That block is also home to Porto Rico Importing Co, a coffee and tea supplier owned by the same family since 1907, and the Slovenian Church of St. Cyril.

At the end of the block, you’ll find more options for drinks and eats, including Electric Burrito and Holiday Cocktail Lounge. Crossing First Avenue, the easternmost block offers East Village Books, a neighborhood fixture, and two tattoo parlors, as well bars and restaurants. Here you’ll find Crif Dogs and its hidden bar, Please Don’t Tell, accessible through a phone booth inside the restaurant. The street dead-ends into Tompkins Square Park. Perhaps fittingly, the final establishment on St. Mark’s Place is the symbol of gentrification and chain store takeover itself: a Starbucks.

The post An In-Depth History of St. Mark’s Place appeared first on CitySignal.

Upper East Side

Upper East Side is a perfectly polite Bergdorf Blonde whose shoes cost more than your rent.  

Upper West Side

Upper West Side has faint traces of golden retriever hair on their jeans. Will def invite you to their postcard party where you’ll eat Rolled Gold pretzels off a cocktail napkin and scribble missives to “likely-Democratic voters in red states.” 

Theater District

The Theater District is the loudest person in the room. They’ll talk to anyone and drink whatever the host has on offer, which makes them a great party guest – until they inevitably break into show tunes or force you to watch bootleg YouTube clips of divas on their iPhone 7. 

Williamsburg

Williamsburg is the Gen-X-iest Gen Xer you’ve ever met. They’ve got salt-and-pepper hair and a few extra pounds but they don’t care because they own the brownstone they bought for $12,000 back in 1997. Can’t stop talking about “low-hanging fruit.” 

Crown Heights

Crown Heights has 50-year-old cool aunt/uncle vibes. They’re cool on the outside but do not hesitate to talk trash about you after you walk away or call your mom to report on your latest breakup. 

Park Slope

Park Slope is a graphic designer in her mid-forties with uber-hip glasses frames and No. 6 clogs. Seems chill at first but then starts in on the middle school admissions process and you can’t get out of there fast enough. Will inevitably corner Middle Village to get their take on the whole school situation. 

Bensonhurst

Bensonhurst is a sweet grandparent type who came with a big purse full of homemade wine. A lot of smiling and nodding and pouring the vino. Cozy up to them and they’ll give you a glass. 

Lower East Side

Lower East Side is somebody’s college-age niece or nephew who parties too hard and ends up throwing bottles out the window.

Financial District

FiDi is a 22-year-old finance bro who can’t stop talking about some crypto app you’ve never heard of. He spends the night trying to impress West Village. 

Middle Village 

Middle Village was dragged here by his wife. Seemingly unaware his jokes are racist. 

Flushing

Flushing wears pearls and a cardigan and seems reserved until they have a few drinks (or a long conversation) at which point they spill their entire life story. And it.is.wild. 

Kips Bay/Murray Hill

Kips Bay/Murray Hill is that person who can’t stop networking and talks way too much about their job at some multinational corporation you’ve never heard of. Has a half-eaten Sweetgreen Shroomami Bowl in their purse. 

Staten Island North Shore

North Shore has a lean and hungry look and greasy hair. They’ve got an art studio in some garage where they make Seurat-inspired pointillist dog portraits that nobody buys. Came on their bike.

Sunnyside

Sunnyside is just so bubbly and optimistic you wonder if they’re living in the same reality as everyone else. 

West Village

West Village is a twenty-something marketing assistant who secretly reads Buzzfeed Guides to Adulting and takes notes. Their apartment: amazing block, 17 roommates, zero closets. 

Jackson Heights 

Jackson Heights is a total foodie. Don’t try to top their personal “top ten momo shops” list or *gasp* admit that you like Chipotle. 

Riverdale

Riverdale shows up fifteen minutes early, which might be ok except that he’s a friend-of-a-friend and the host’s hair is still wet. 

Mott Haven

Mott Haven is an up-and-coming actor. Unlike Theater District, they’ve got some serious credits and are up for a role in this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park – but they’d never brag about it. 

Marine Park

Marine Park brought their own magnum of red and won’t stop talking about the time they fell off a speaker at Ramones concert.

South Shore Staten Island

South Shore works in building management, wears khakis with their phone clipped to his belt. If you need an escape from an awkward conversation, stand by him and ask about their kids. 

Concourse

Concourse knows how to work a room and will forcibly take over DJ duties at the first hint of Chumbawamba. 

Inwood 

Inwood is an exhausted public school teacher with a hyperactive toddler at home. They “needed this night out so much” but they’re falling asleep on the sofa by 8:45pm. 

Astoria

Astoria is the host-with-the-most and loves cramming everyone else into the “large two bedroom” they share with two school aged kids and a cat named Willy Wonka. Knows every shopkeeper on the block. 

Bushwick

Bushwick shows up in platform Crocs and a crop top and invites you to their indie music venue. 

Gowanus

Gowanus is a chill late-thirties professional who casually mentions that they’re an actual marine biologist and instantly becomes the most popular person in the room. 

Greenpoint

Greenpoint is that person who has it all together. They’ve got perfect hair they “really didn’t style, it’s just like this,” and are genuinely interested in what you’re saying. 

Dumbo

Dumbo is rich. Dumbo loves vegan tacos. Dumbo loves the view from their apartment. 

Cobble Hill

Cobble Hill is all about that beige aesthetic. Older sibling to Boerum Hill, they came together, and brought their own wine. Snoops the medicine cabinet. 

Boerum Hill

Boerum Hill won’t stop checking their Slack notifications. Loves latte art. 

Chelsea

Chelsea’s got the chiseled calves to prove their 4:30am Peloton-or-boot-camp routine. Despite this they are still wide awake at 2am and loud AF. 

West Harlem 

West Harlem is a dedicated public servant focused on championing small businesses. Full suit. Ready with a sound bite on literally any topic. 

East Harlem

East Harlem regularly contributes to @bodegacats and wants to show you pics of their pitbull Snuggles. 

East Village

East Village is an aging restaurateur who spends a lot of money on the “90s downtown” clothes they donated to Goodwill in 2002. 

TriBeCa

TriBeCa is a power player who has multiple EGOTs in their contacts. What are they even doing at this party? 

Rockaway Beach

Shaggy-haired Rockaway Beach vapes in the corner and pushes the surfer look to low-key hide the fact they’re an undercover cop.

Forest Hills

Forest Hills is FIVE MONTHS PREGNANT CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?! Glowing but won’t stop rubbing the bump, accentuated by lululemon leggings. 

The post The NYC Neighborhoods All Went To A House Party… appeared first on CitySignal.

Heat complaints across the city are up 25.6% over the same period last year. The findings, published last week by RentHop, shine light on the neighborhoods and buildings where landlords are unable or unwilling to comply with heat season regulations and how well the city’s complaint redress process is working.

Who is Cold?

The burden of cold apartments appears to be falling on the lowest-income New Yorkers. There is a strong negative correlation (-0.474) between the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment and the number of heat and hot water complaints in a neighborhood. In simple terms: the lower the median rent of a one-bedroom, the more heat complaints in the area. Correlation is not causation, but citywide data suggests a clear relationship.

Of the 25 neighborhoods with the most heat complaints, 17 are in the Bronx, the borough with the highest poverty rate in the city.

Zooming in on one example, Fordham South in the central Bronx had the highest number of heat complaints in the city. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the neighborhood is $1,500 compared with a city median of $3,150.

2018 data on the area’s health shows that 65% of households are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income for housing. Residents also face worse-than-average health and education outcomes, some of which (like air pollution) are directly related to their living environments. Creating a city that serves all New Yorkers better is a complex and ongoing process, and ensuring that landlords follow city law and uphold the terms of lease agreements is one part of the bigger picture.

Heat Requirements

First, some basics about residential heat and hot water requirements. The laws currently in place were codified in the 1929 Multiple Dwelling Law (page 79), which aimed to raise the standard of living for New Yorkers in both older buildings and new construction by requiring windows, ventilation, and fire protection; allowing for more significant buildings; and prohibiting construction of new apartments without heat, hot water, or electricity.

As per the city, “Heat season runs from October 1 through May 31. During that period, NYC buildings owners are required to maintain minimum indoor temperatures:

• Between 6 AM and 10 PM, if the outside temperature falls below 55 degrees, the inside temperature must be at least 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Between 10 PM and 6 AM, the inside temperature must be at least 62 degrees Fahrenheit at all times. There is no outside temperature requirement.

Hot water must be provided at all times at a constant minimum temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Making a Heat Complaint

Tenants whose apartments lack adequate heat or hot water are first encouraged to directly contact their landlord or building management. If the issue is not resolved, tenants file a service request through the city’s 311 Portal. There are separate forms for complaints about a single apartment versus an entire apartment building. It’s possible to submit the form anonymously.

Service requests are handled by the Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). (Translators are available throughout the process: just let HPD know what you need.) HPD contacts building management and informs them that a complaint was filed and the problem must be corrected or a violation will be issued. HPD then follows up with the reporting tenant to confirm that the heat or hot water was restored. If HPD can’t reach the tenant or the problem was not corrected, a uniformed Code Enforcement officer is sent to the building to do an inspection and, if warranted, write a violation. Heat violations are Class C or “immediately hazardous” and require immediate correction. A $250 fine is issued for each day the problem persists.

At this point, if the building fixes the problem, the owner or management files a certification of the repair, and notice of this is sent to the reporting tenant. HPD may make the repair under the Emergency Repair Program if the issue isn’t addressed and bill the owner. Alternatively, tenants can initiate an HP proceeding in Housing Court. The proceeding results in a hearing after which landlords can be forced to make repairs.

How Long Does This Take After Making A Heat Complaint?

Of course, if you’re shivering in your kitchen, you can’t wait long for a Code Enforcement Officer.

According to HPD data, it has taken an average of 11.4 days to close an emergency complaint this fiscal year, a decrease from the 14.8 day average from last fiscal year. Additionally, only about half of emergency violations are corrected by owners, putting the burden of advocating for suitable living conditions on the tenants. The deadly January 9, 2022 fire at 333 E. 181st St. in the central Bronx was caused by a malfunctioning space heater, possibly used to compensate for the lack of building heat.

The city has developed several proactive approaches to buildings with poor maintenance and heat records. The Heat Sensors Program requires installing internet-connected heat sensors in every apartment in select apartment buildings with a history of heart complaints. Building owners and tenants then have access to temperature data. Code Enforcement officers will also conduct bi-weekly inspections of the properties to ensure heat compliance. Property owners are subject to increased fines for heat-related violations.

Another program, the Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP), is an enforcement program for buildings with many open housing violations. It provides for frequent inspections to ensure violations are addressed. If the owner fails to complete the repairs in the program’s first four months, an Order to Correct is issued. If the problems persist, HPD can make the repairs and bill the landlord, and if needed, begin legal proceedings to collect the cost.

The Takeaway

The city provides a clear process for reporting violations of heat and hot water regulations, but it could take weeks to fix the problem and places a heavy burden of action—calling building management, making the complaint, meeting with the Code Enforcement Officer, and confirming whether or not repairs are made—on tenants. The proactive approaches to building maintenance like AEP and the Heat Sensors Program are a step in the right direction but only apply to a limited number of buildings in New York City.

The post A Look at NYC Heat Complaints appeared first on CitySignal.

In keeping with Woodson’s original goal of educating his fellow citizens about African American history, here are some books to dig into to help you commemorate and learn about Black history.

Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City

by Carla Peterson

Peterson’s search for information about her own ancestors’ lives is at the heart of this non-fiction book, which explores the experience of free Black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century. Shaped around her search for information about the lives of her great-great-grandfathers, Peterson asks us to examine the assumptions we make about Black life in old New York. If you’re looking for a personal and cultural history that illuminates the city’s past this is the book for you. 

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

by Jessica B. Harris

If the title of this recommendation sounds familiar, it should: the book was turned into a successful Netflix documentary series of the same name. High on the Hog, by culinary writer and James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award winner Dr. Jessica B. Harris explores African-American culinary history from ingredients brought from Africa to contemporary Black chefs. It all adds up to a mouthwatering exploration of the influence of African food on American cuisine. This is the book for curious cooks and eaters alike.

Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen

by Jervis Anderson

Bayard Rustin is one of those historical figures who most people don’t know enough about. A Quaker of deep conviction, Rustin was a pacifist and influenced the non-violent tactics used by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s closest advisors, Rustin was the organizer behind the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the 1963 March on Washington. He also took an active role in the gay rights movement: Rustin is lesser-known today than his peers in part because he was homosexual. Intrigued? This biography, written by one of Rustin’s former colleagues, Jervis Anderson, who had full access to Rustin’s papers, is the book for you. 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

by Richard Rothstein

The only book on this list by a white author, The Color of Law is a detailed look at federal, state, and local government policies that deliberately created racial segregation in housing, and how that segregation directly contributes to present-day racial inequities. If you’ve ever struggled to understand or explain systemic racism this is the book for you: direct, factual, and infuriating. You’ll never look at real estate the same way again. 

Go Tell It On the Mountain

by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical 1953 novel takes readers to the Harlem of his boyhood and teenage years in the 1930s. The novel’s religious themes are both real and metaphorical. The story takes place primarily in the protagonist’s Pentecostal church as he struggles with his sexuality, an abusive stepfather, and his developing perspectives on both Christianity and racism. Baldwin’s prose takes the reader inside his character’s mind and heart: the images and emotions he evokes stick around after you’ve closed the book. 

Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940

by George Schuyler 

Considered the first Afrofuturist novel, Black No More is a 1931 satire about a Black scientist who invents a procedure that turns Black people white. The procedure, “Black-No-More” gains popularity and the results expose the ridiculousness of race and racism in the United States. A new musical based on the novel (with book by John Ridley and lyrics by Tariq Trotter) is set to open at Pershing Square Signature Center on January 18, 2022, and run through Black History Month. 

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

created by Nikole Hannah-Jones 

The 1619 Project in book form is an augmentation of The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning—and controversial—1619 Project, a re-examination of American history with an emphasis on the central role slavery played in shaping (and continue to influence) the nation. In addition to 18 historical essays, Hannah-Jones includes 36 poems and works of fiction that offer readers a personal entry point to the past. 

Skip Amazon and order or pick up one of these books at a local NYC bookstore such as The Lit Bar, Sisters Uptown Bookstore, or Cafe Con Libros.

The post Seven Books to Get You Started for Black History Month appeared first on CitySignal.

Rent-Stabilized Apartments

There are three key types of apartments in NYC: market rate, rent-stabilized, and rent-controlled. According to city data, 966,000 NYC apartments are rent-stabilized, a bit under half of the total apartment stock.

Rent-stabilized units can be found in buildings from 87 Chrystie Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to 209 Avenue P in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, to 47 Featherbed Lane in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx. The rent on this type of apartment can only be raised a certain percent at each lease renewal, a number decided upon by the Rent Guidelines Board. Both tenants and landlords have representatives on the Rent Guidelines Board, and both use the annual hearings to make their cases for a rent hike, freeze, or reduction.

The Rent Guidelines Board issues an annual report on the Price Index of Operating Costs for owners of rent-stabilized units, which is then used to inform its decisions on rent hikes. The 2022 report shows an overall increase in operating costs of 4.2%, with significant increases in insurance costs (up 19.6%), and maintenance (up 9.2%). The tax burden was only number to fall this year (down 3.7%). The categories were derived from a 1969 report on landlord expenditures, and have been adjusted over the decades. The Rent Guidelines Board uses that information to calculate the “commensurate rent adjustment” needed to maintain the owners’ current dollar net operating income.

Rent Guidelines Board annual negotiations are routinely headlined as “rowdy” and “raucous” and have been compared to a mud wrestling match. Neither owners nor tenants are ever satisfied by the outcome of the annual negotiations. In 1980, when the board approved increases of 11%, 14%, and 17% depending on the length of the lease, owner members called it “a disaster.” In 2008, tenant lobbyists called the 6.5%, 9.5%, and 12.5% rent hikes ”unjustified and outrageous.” In 2016 the New York Times made this video of the signs and chanting.

Last year, the meeting was held virtually and the tenant representatives joined from an outdoor rally and chanting drowned out the meeting at times. Owner members asked for increases of 2.75% on one-year leases and 5.75% on two-year leases. Tenant members asked for a rent freeze in light of pandemic-related economic conditions.

Despite the 3% increase in operating costs, for 2021-22, the Rent Guidelines Board voted to keep rent hikes at 0% for the first six months, followed by 1.5% rent increases for the following six months. For two-year leases, the rent may be increased by 2.5%. Some owner and tenant members of the board voted no on the proposal, revealing the proposal’s weakness to both sides.

The new rates went into effect in October. Supporters of the decision point to the economic difficulties faced by tenants as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the fact that a 2018 study found that 44% of NYC tenants already pay at least 30% of their income in rent. Landlords are unsurprisingly displeased with rent hikes that leave them unable to raise the rent at a rate commensurate with rising expenditures. Vito Signorile, a spokesperson for the Rent Stabilization Association, a property owners trade association, broke it down in an op-ed for the New York Post: “approved rent-guideline increases average 0.75 percent over the past seven years, while operating expenses, on average, increased 3.6 percent during the same period; property taxes alone have risen 6%.” His position is backed up in the RSA’s 25-page document commenting on the 2021 Preliminary Rent Guidelines.  As the weather has turned cold, landlords are now facing a double-digit rise in the cost of heating fuel.

Rent Controlled Apartments

In addition to the 966,000 rent-stabilized units, about 2% of NYC units, or 22,000, are rent-controlled. Rent control limits how much a tenant can be charged and provides protections against eviction. In order for an apartment to be rent-controlled, it must have been built before February 1, 1947, and continuously occupied by the same tenant (or passed to a cohabiting family member) since June 30, 1971. As a result, many rent-controlled tenants are elderly and low income.

Unlike rent-stabilized units, rent-controlled units are governed by the New York State

Division of Housing and Community Renewal (HCR), not the Rent Guidelines Board. The state formula for determining the rental price of rent-controlled units is based on the Maximum Base Rent (MBR) Program, which was established in 1970. Owners apply for the MBR program bi-annually and prove that they have no outstanding housing code violations on the units in question and are providing essential services in order to qualify. Under the program, the state sets a maximum base rent, adjusted every other year, for each unit individually “according to a formula calculated to reflect real estate taxes, water and sewer charges, operating and maintenance expenses, return on capital value, and vacancy and collection loss allowance.” The MBR calculations include not only the costs incurred by the landlords but also a capital return allowance, something not used in the calculations for rent-stabilized units. A preliminary version of the most recent report on rent-controlled landlords’ expenses found that for the 2022-23 year, costs—including the return on capital value allowance—rose a median 11.43%. This number, called the Standard Adjustment Factor, is used to calculate the increase in the MBR for each unit.

Based on the MBR, the HCR then calculates the Maximum Collectible Rent, typically lower than the Maximum Base Rent. For many years, Maximum Collectible Rent increases were capped at 7.5% per year— a significantly higher percentage than rent hikes on stabilized units. But per the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, MBR has now capped at 7.5% over two years or “the average of the last five years of increases approved by the Rent Guidelines Board, whichever is lower.” The lower of the two for 2021-22 is the average of the last five years of increases, just 0.85%. Thus, owners of rent-controlled apartments are able to raise rents less than owners of rent-stabilized units, decreasing the landlords’ income.

In some cases, ownership of these units no longer makes financial sense, a point that has created a lot of contention.

The post The Impact of Inflation on Rent-Controlled and Rent-Stabilized Apartments in NYC appeared first on CitySignal.

The plan for 5 WTC calls for development of a 900-foot tall residential tower by both Brookfield and Silverstein Properties at 130 Liberty Street, the site of the Deutsche Bank Building, which was damaged in the attacks on September 11, 2001 and torn down in 2011. The tower, the first and only residential development within the World Trade Center Complex, will offer 1,325 apartments; 25% of those units will be set aside as permanent affordable housing. The building will also hold significant office space, community space, and retail.

Lower Manhattan has changed significantly since 2001. The residential population has doubled, from 33,000 to 64,000, and the number of housing units has risen from 14,588 to 33,714. But the area has added just 300 units of affordable housing since 2014, bringing the total to around 1200 apartments. 

In September 2021, the average market-rate rent in the Financial District and Battery Park City was $5,061, and the rental vacancy rate was just 1.64%. However, the neighborhood has a glut of unsold luxury condos: over 1300 vacant units in the district, and more currently under construction. There are concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made living near the office less important, may exacerbate the problem. 

While the 300+ units of affordable housing represent a significant increase, the plan has raised questions. For long-time neighborhood residents, many of whom survived 9/11 and experienced health effects as a result, the plan doesn’t include enough affordable housing. They have formed The Coalition for an Affordable W.T.C. Tower 5 to lobby for the building to be 100% affordable housing, arguing that, “Long-time moderate and middle income residents are being forced from their homes. Their children, who survived and grew up in the aftermath of the terrorist attack and helped rebuild Lower Manhattan, cannot afford to live in the area. Much of the new luxury housing is not even succeeding. Many towers are unfilled or unfinished, including 125 Greenwich Street across the street from 5 World Trade Center, which entered foreclosure.

A fully-affordable building could be economically difficult to achieve, given that the cost of developing and maintaining affordable units is higher than the revenue they bring in. Additionally, in a mixed market and affordable building, the rent from the market rate apartments effectively subsidizes the affordable units. The issue is heightened in the case of 5 WTC, as both the building’s height and location push the price tag higher. Each unit will cost approximately 1 million dollars to develop which causes some affordable housing advocates to look at the expense of the apartments and see public funds that could build far more than 300 units in places within the city where the development cost would be lower. 

Finally, the proposed affordable units are meant for families and individuals in the “low income” bracket, those who earn 31-50% of an area’s median income. The income threshold for those apartments is 50% of the area median income, $53,700 for a family of three (see chart here for additional specifics) and who should be paying around $1,250 in monthly rent costs based on a rent affordability calculator. The nation, and New York City, are in greatest need of units affordable to those in the “very low income” and “extremely low income” ranges, as demonstrated by a report from Comptroller Scott Stringer. 

Much remains unknown about 5 WTC, which isn’t slated to break ground until at least 2023. Controversy around the current plan raises questions that New Yorkers have long grappled with: how do you create sustainable communities in a city of change? What is the responsibility to the public when public funds are used? What does the city owe to those who survived 9/11, stayed in the neighborhood, and helped make Lower Manhattan the vibrant neighborhood it is today? In a city of 9 million, there are many opinions, but no easy answers. 

The post The Development of 5WTC appeared first on CitySignal.

For almost every American alive today, a mention of Thanksgiving Day conjures not just thoughts of turkey and pumpkin pie, but of giant balloons in the shape of cartoon characters winding their way through New York streets. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is a national phenomenon: what began as a retailer’s promotional stunt designed to encourage Christmas shopping is now the world’s largest parade and must-see television for millions. 

If you’re eager to join New York’s Thanksgiving Day tradition, you’re in luck: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is once again open to spectators, after a television-only event in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The parade will feature a brand new giant balloon in the shape of Grogu, better known as Baby Yoda, alongside perennial favorites like the Nutcracker and Snoopy. Floats will include the Jennie-O turkey, LEGO’s The Brick Changer, and, of course, Santa’s Sleigh. 

Details of the 2021 parade route and guidelines for spectators have yet to be announced. Social distancing will be in place and masks and COVID-19 vaccination will be required for all parade participants and staff. Check here in early November to learn how to view the parade in person. Macy’s is considering the return of the balloon inflation event, which takes place the day before Thanksgiving in the blocks around the Museum of Natural History. That announcement will also be made in early November.

The First Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was held on Thursday, November 27, 1924. Macy’s—which moved to Herald Square from its original location on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street in 1902—had expanded to fill an entire city block, making it, in the words of its advertising wizards, the “World’s Largest Store.” The parade was an ingenious way of inaugurating the Christmas shopping season at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a time of financial prosperity and increased disposable income for many New Yorkers. 

The parade began at Convent Avenue and 145th Street in Harlem, and made its way down Convent, Morningside, and Manhattan Avenues before turning west on 110th Street to Broadway, where it processed to 34th Street. That first parade included a marching band, bears, elephants, donkeys, and floats like Mother Goose and Little Miss Muffet. Santa Claus, riding a float “in the form of a sled driven by reindeer over a mountain of ice,” and preceded by “men dressed like the knights of old, their spears shining in the sunlight,” was the parade’s focal point, as The New York Times explained. Upon his arrival on 34th Street, Santa was greeted by 10,000 spectators. The jolly fellow ascended a throne and sounded a trumpet, at which time the Macy’s Christmas window displays were unveiled. The theme in 1924 was “The Fairy Frolics of Wondertown,” and displays featured Mother Goose marionettes. 

In 1927, the live animals of the first parades were replaced by animal-shaped balloons designed and built by puppeteer Anthony Frederick Sarg, who also designed the 1924 window displays. The balloon tradition continues to the present day. 

The Curious History of Thanksgiving in New York City

While the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been New York’s tradition for almost 100 years now, it’s worth noting the two customs that preceded it, and influenced its form and popularity. During the Revolutionary War, the city was occupied by British soldiers. Their evacuation on November 25, 1783, was a cause for celebration. For many years thereafter, citizens celebrated November 25 as Evacuation Day, with military drills, parades, cannons, fireworks, and feasting. Schools and shops were closed, and the public spilled into the streets in their finest attire, drinking and carousing.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving (previously a New England regional festivity) a national holiday, superseding Evacuation Day in public imagination, though the military marches continued. From about this time a curious new tradition evolved: fantasticals. Originally a spoof of the day’s martial marches, the fantasticals created parades of their own, featuring joke companies of men and boys costumed to look like “imitation Bill Tweeds, aborigines, clowns, women of the period, Wild Irishmen, man-monkeys,” as The New York Times described in 1878. Children joined in, wearing old clothes, cheap masks, and begging door-to-door for pennies and treats. This practice evolved into something known as “Going Ragamuffin.” It is immortalized in the classic New York novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “Most children brought up in Brooklyn before the First World War remember Thanksgiving Day with a peculiar tenderness. It was the day children went around “ragamuffin” or “slamming gates,” wearing costumes topped off by a penny mask…The street was jammed with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin horns…Some storekeepers locked their doors against them but most of them had something for the children.”

“Going Ragamuffin” died out in the 1920s and 1930s due to a prohibition on begging and the Great Depression—the very moment the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was establishing itself as the city’s premiere celebration.

The post A History Of The Macy’s Day Parade appeared first on CitySignal.

If you’re looking to see some great theater this fall and winter, you may want to look beyond the Great White Way to Off Broadway offerings. 

Most people are familiar with Broadway theaters, which hold upwards of 500 audience members and are located in the Theater District around Times Square. (The term “Great White Way” was coined by a newspaperman in 1902 and referred to the area’s many electric signs lighting up the night.) Their size makes them expensive bets for producers, and the shows they host are often (but not always) flashy and commercial, aimed at attracting a wide audience. 

Off Broadway emerged in the 1950s as a descriptor for smaller theater spaces that could put up riskier productions that were “born of the impulse to create a coun­ter-theater that would bring glow, wings, and artistic cohesion to an art which had become the prisoner and plaything of the middle class,” as Judith Malina and Julian Beck explained to the Village Voice in a 1985 oral history of the Off Broadway movement. The theaters that emerged were often downtown, and their leaders were more likely to be Black, female, and/or members of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

The term “Off Broadway” was formally defined during negotiations with the Actors Equity Association, the union of actors and stage managers, in January 1974. Off Broadway theaters hold between 100 and 499 audience members, and are located in Manhattan and that definition has held to the present.

Here are five Off Broadway productions you won’t want to miss. 

Kimberly Akimbo 

Atlantic Theater Company

November 5 – December 26, 2021

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori (the duo behind Shrek The Musical, though that hardly does justice to the breadth of their careers) have teamed up to adapt Lindsay-Abaire’s award-winning play of the same name into a musical. The story follows a New Jersey teenager with an aging disease that gives her the look of a 72-year-old woman and stars Victoria Clark in the title role. 

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing

New Group

November 1st – December 18, 2022

This play was written by Will Arbery, and tells the story of ice salt drivers in Illinois. The drivers swap stories and jokes while trying to avoid the bad news from their boss as well as the impending climate disaster. It’s a play all about facing the future, and doing everything you can do in the here and now, even when the present is scary is uncertain. See this play while you still can!

The Gett

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

November 9th – December 11st, 2022

Written by Liba Vaynberg Is the story of a Jewish woman confronting her own faith, as well as the meaning behind the major holidays that she and her friends celebrate. It’s also a story of love, acceptance, and loss, largely based on the playwright’s own life. This semi-autobiographical tale is only on for a short time, so see it while you can.

Only Gold

MCC

Through November 27th, 2022

This new musical Is told mostly through dance, and is about love through all it’s stages, beginning, ending, and beginning again. In 1920’s Paris, a King and Queen hope to rekindle their floundering marriage. However, the entire royal family needs to grow up and understand one another, before it’s too late.

A Raisen in the Sun

Public Theater

September 27th – November 20th, 2022

A classic from Lorraine Hansberry, this play tells the tale of a family who comes into a large inheritance, but each member of the family has a different idea about what to do with it. This American classic will leave audiences with a lot to think about, and is only on for a short time. See this beautiful play while you can.

The post Five Off Broadway Shows to See this Fall appeared first on CitySignal.

The recommendation comes at the end of the Nassau County Back Bays Coastal Storm Risk Management Study. It was commissioned five years ago after Superstorm Sandy-related flooding caused $65 billion in damages to the area, and funded by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-123). The South Shore of Nassau County was identified as one of nine areas at elevated risk from increased coastal flooding caused by climate change. The study sought to investigate “problems and solutions to reduce damages from coastal storm-related flooding that affects population, critical infrastructure, critical facilities, property, and ecosystems.” The TSP will next be presented at public meetings for review and comment, then finalized. The plan must then be approved by Congress and funded in order to be realized. 

Climate change has dramatically worsened flooding on the East Coast: rising sea levels erode shorelines, overrun low-lying areas, and increase the salinity of estuaries, all of which contribute to a change in ecosystems and coastal vulnerability. Sea levels at Sandy Hook, New Jersey (the location that tracks the Nassau County-area ocean) rose 9.8 inches between 1960 and 2020, and are expected to rise an additional one to four feet by 2100. At the same time, the average number of flood days per year rose from 1.4 in the 1950s to 10.8 in the 2010s. 

According to the study, raising the level of the affected houses and dry flood proofing other structures delivers a benefit/cost ratio of 4.5 during the 50 year period between 2030 and 2080, indicating that this plan makes financial sense. Alternative measures including storm surge barriers were considered, but did not yield the desired results when tested in models of likely scenarios. 

Though the South Shore is at increased risk from flooding, it is home to three of Long Island’s hottest zip codes (where the most homes sold) in 2020: 11758, which includes Massapequa and North Massapequa; 11561, which includes Long Beach, East Atlantic Beach, and Lido Beach;  and 11566, which includes Merrick and North Merrick. Home prices were up 14.5% year over year. While many locations dealing with the early impacts of climate changes are lower income or home to historically oppressed communities, this isn’t particularly the case on Long Island today. 

Today, only 11% of homes in Nassau County are required to have flood insurance, but in the South Shore the percentage of homes considered at risk for flooding in the coming decades is well over 50%. This year, FEMA released its Risk Rating 2.0, which provides updated maps and calculations of risk for property owners that better reflect the changing likelihood of flood damage.  Damage from floods is not covered by standard homeowners or renters insurance policies. Flood insurance can be purchased from private insurers or through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The average premium nationally is $700 per year. 

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