The Gray Lady slums it out to far East Williamsburg to report on the hipster bohemian squalor of the sprawling McKibbin Street “dorms;” two hulking buildings converted from garment factories to lofts in the late nineties by a trio of savvy Stuyvesant alums. It’s since become a filthy, bed-bug ravaged rite of passage for the young DIY arts set, who pile on top of each other in warren-like lofts more crowded than one of Dan......

The Fog Rolls in on Harlem, by jschumacher at flickr Harlem resident met with city planners in a public forum yesterday afternoon to discuss whether a major rezoning plan will enhance the historic neighborhood or rip out its heart. The zoning plan, covering 124th, 125th, and 126th Streets, paves the way for condos, a 21-story office tower, a hotel, and more. Rezoning supporters say the plan instills order into the economic transformation the neighborhood......

Leval Lyde, a 36-year-old Brooklyn rapper who went by the street name "Kevlar," was gunned down yesterday on the corner of Clinton Ave. and Fulton St. in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Lyde was shot just before 5 p.m. on the street corner and declared dead on arrival at Brooklyn Hospital. Lyde had just exited Fish & Crustaceans Quality Seafood and was walking with his sandwich towards the maroon Jaguar (owned by the mother......

City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden was called a "rich, rich, rich horrible person" by an opponent of 125th Street rezoning. The City Planning commission approved rezoning for the boulevard, which means a 21-story building called Harlem Park, which includes new headquarters for Major League Baseball TV, will be one of the many new developments for the neighborood. Burden said the commission wanted to "maintain and enhance 125th Street's unique and varied character and its identity......

The Mayor and City Council are facing off over housing regulations that could lower barriers to low-income tenants receiving federal housing vouchers to subsidize their rents. The City Council is attempting to pass a law which would make it harder for landlords to refuse Section 8 tenants, but Mayor Bloomberg just vetoed the Council-passed law. The vouchers fall under the law known as Section 8, which many landlords prefer not to get involved with, citing......

Image of current and future Brooklyn House of Detention: New York City Department of Design & Construction The notorious Brooklyn House of Detention – immortalized by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Jonathan Lethem – has been closed since 2003, but plans to reopen the jail at twice its previous size are still moving forward. Last year many newcomers to the steadily gentrifying neighborhood decried plans to bring back the detention center, located at......

Williamsburg missed a crucial stage of gentrification; the phase where gay people were supposed to pioneer a neighborhood before the young hipsters could supplant them. The social hop-scotching has left gay people out in the cold in Billyburg, unwelcome in what should be a pioneer ghetto. The nightlife reflects the less-than-edgy environment that marginalized NYers try to seek out.“There’s like one go-go boy, what is that?” grumbled Matthew Kane, a scruffy 22-year-old photo agent. Still,......

The Cedar Tavern has been closed for over a year now, and someday soon New Yorkers will finally get more of what they so desperately need: more condo units priced at $1.7 million and up! The famous tavern on University Place, long associated with the drunken hi-jinks of notables like Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, shut down in December 2006 for “renovations” and never reopened. Promises to come back as part of the nine-story condo......

It’s a common gripe that pretty much everything that gives New York its flavor is being steadily eviscerated and replaced with corporate chains and exclusive amenities for the affluent, but this week has been a doozy. In the past two days, for starters, we’ve seen closures announced for the following joints:The classic, blue collar Donuts Coffee Shop on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. The beloved unassuming LES coffee & bar oasis that was Lotus Lounge.......

The old saw is that one can't fight City Hall, and we can apparently add the ivory tower to the bulwarks of imperviousness. Despite fierce community opposition, Columbia University will be expanding its upper-Manhattan campus to surrounding blocks. The plan to expand the university's property by 17 acres and several blocks in each direction was approved this afternoon by the New York City Planning Commission. CityRoom reports the neighborhood meeting wasn't exactly neighborly:A majority......

Elizabeth Currid's new book, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, posits that the city's culture is the key our fiscal well-being. With insights culled from many of New York's leading players in the worlds of art, fashion and music, she draws a detailed blueprint of how these creative processes become big-money industries. Currid's thesis is that the conditions that have made New York one of the cultural capitals of......

New York seems to have a love/hate relationship with the branded beanery Starbucks (their seasonal Peppermint Mochas sure are tasty, but their sterile generic storefronts keep the siren's call muted). While the local mom and pop collects our $3/day coffee allowance, there are plenty lining up at the corner 'Bucks for their daily buzz. Alas, there is now a book to appease the haters and the adoring herds of the establishment. Taylor Clark has gone......

Insert obligatory phoenix metaphor here: Brooklyn’s Freebird, the used book and corn dogs mecca that closed earlier this year, is set to re-emerge a little later this week from The Embers of Gentrification. While the NY Magazine article linked in that last sentence is about the real estate debacle of Red Hook, the shuttered Freebird, which is technically in Cobble Hill, is sometimes considered (with restaurants like Alma) to be an extension of that troubled......

Given the city's more nuanced real estate market, NY magazine covers "degentrification," focusing mostly on Red Hook. Adam Sternbergh chronicles the neighborhood's ups and downs - for pre-gentrifiers, the stroller set and real estate enthusiasts, of course. He tells the story through a 30 year-old named Ivy Pochoda, who grew up in Cobble Hill when "Smith Street was still too sketchy to walk home on alone." (NB: Smith Street still was sketchy into the 1990s.)......

ART: Duke Riley brings his latest exhibit, After the Battle of Brooklyn: East River Incognita II, to Magnan Projects. Starting tonight and showing through December 22nd, the works imagine New York during the Revolutionary War and "interweave historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of overdevelopment and gentrification of waterfront communities to contradictions within political......

Do you hate graffiti? Do you also hate Brooklyn gentrification? Then you're really going to hate this email we received from Gothamist reader Paul Vogeler: Hey this developer has chosen 7 local Brooklyn based artists to “wheatpaste” their art on the construction fence on North 10th and North 11th between Bedford and Berry in Williamsburg. It should set a new precedent for developers beginning to incorporate more artists in the beginning, middle, and final......

Yesterday, East Harlem residents protested "greedy landlords" to raise concerns about gentrification. One resident, Otoniel Santiago, told amNew York that his $1,100 rent for his family's two-bedroom has zoomed up to $3,000 because of extra charges his landlord has added, "They said I had to pay or they would take legal action. I think they want us to get tired and move out, then they will bring in people who will pay $1,700 a......

The NY Post reports on the ever-declining neighborhood of Red Hook today, with the area going through some changes that may make some suckers wonder why they just spent $800K on an apartment there. The Brooklyn Paper reported on the neighborhood last month as well, stating it "is in fact turning cold one year after New York’s gentrification guard branded it as The Next Big Thing." Of course, the "gentrification guard" had its eyes on......

The American Fern Society is profiled in The New Yorker this week, as the piece's writer describes the outing of a number of people fascinated by one of the oldest forms of life still proliferating in New York City. Ferns could be described as biological pioneers. The plants' spores float to inhospitable locales and flourish, creating biological and envrionmental conditions for larger plants to grow. Ferns are the bellwethers of biological gentrification. An outing with......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

Yesterday was the opening of an outdoor display of sculptures on Brooklyn's waterfront. The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC) invited artists from around the world to contribute to a show called "Still Flying." It's BWAC's 25th anniversary outdoor sculpture show and a good number of works can be viewed while visiting Empire-Fulton Ferry and Brooklyn Bridge Parks. BWAC puts on four shows a year with the volunteer efforts of its members. The New York Sun......

Columbia University's plan to expand its campus into Manhattanville has prompted much debate about the eminent domain, college's commitment to the neighborhood, and gentrification and its effects on the community. The NY Sun revealed last week that Columbia spent over $400,000 for lobbying between January and April of this year, a sign that the school is getting aggressive to make sure its plans come through. And yesterday, there was a NY Times Op-Ed by......

In 2005, hip-hop pioneers DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel and more, lent their names and likenesses to a vintage hip-hop clothing company called Sedgwick & Cedar. The press release for the company told this story: "on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc's sister Cindy Campbell decided to throw a back to school party in her building's small rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. Kool Herc introduced extended break beats, which mesmerized......

Another milestone has been reached in the gentrification of the corner of Spring and Elizabeth: the arrival of advertising signage. It only took a week from the time the plywood went up (presumably to protect the building from graffiti while it was being cleaned), for marketers to begin using the spot to broadcast their own messages. And what do those messages entail? Ads for bands, of course-- but also for luxury condo sales. That......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a person under a train at Whitney Ave. and 43rd St. in Queens, shots fired at Jefferson Ave. and Broadway in Brooklyn, and an overturned vehicle on the southbound Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx. Wearing your Red Sox gear outside of Yankee Stadium on a gameday is a hazardous proposition. Wielding a video camera to elicit Yankees fans' responses is a whole new ballgame (see video clip to the......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery and arrest on 1st Ave. in Manhattan, an unstable building report on President St. in Brooklyn, and a tall truck met a low overpass bridge on West 231st St. in the Bronx. NJ Governor John Corzine remains on a ventilator and is heavily sedated, a day after he was involved in a car accident that left him severely injured. The severity and extent of the Governor's......

The Department of Buildings ordered workers to "immediately demolish" the rest of a Harlem building that partially collapsed yesterday morning. The vacant building's roof suddenly fell as workers had been preparing it for demolition. One witness told the Post, "I heard a loud noise. The building started shaking. It was moving and cracking. Then there was a cloud. The cloud was faster than me. By the time I crossed the street it had completely covered......

Despite a recent triumph for Carroll Gardens, an area that once hosted one of the city’s most concentrated Italian communities, there are few remaining vestiges of the neighborhood that was. Among them is Sam’s Restaurant, a quintessential red sauce joint and pizza destination helmed by Louie Migliaccio, the self-named “Son of Sam.” Though the place isn’t exactly bustling, it is without the sense of doom that lingers over so many neighborhood relics that feel......

The Wooster Collective has photographs of wheatpastes from Columbia's Student Coalition on the Expansion and Gentrification that call attention, "in tongue and cheek fashion, Columbia's condemnation of Manhattanville as a 'blighted' neighborhood." Benign animals, explaining eminent domain in street art? That's gold! This complements news about yesterday's SCEG protest on the Columbia campus. The group organized a rally with students and local residents to call Columbia's South Lawn "blighted" since dirty snow has been......

This week New York Magazine chose Eric Harvey Brown as their look book subject. We decided to ask him a few questions ourselves, and dig a little deeper - beyond the beard (just a little though). How did NY Mag approach you for the Look Book piece? They found me walking past Times Square. Why do you think they picked you? I have crazy facial hair. Where did they shoot the photo? They shot the......