New York is one of the most diverse cities on the face of the earth. Its huddled masses yearning to breathe free include immigrants from places completely unlike the Big Apple: Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Uruguay—even North Dakota. There are m…
In 1906, the dashing and amply-mustachioed Stanford White was shot dead by one Harry Kendall Thaw during a show at the Madison Square Roof Garden. Thaw was the jealous husband of one of White’s old flames, and the press dubbed the resul…
The roof is the uppermost part of any residential building, serving as the first line of defense against whatever the skies throw at its inhabitants. In many New York co-op and condo buildings, the roof is also a social space, complete …
Every co-op, condo and HOA community is different—each has its own distinctive character, attitude, and expectations. The same is obviously true for the individual people who manage these communities and help them run their day-to-day b…
The economy cratered—to use a term in popular parlance at that time—in September, 2008, with the collapse of too-big-to-fail Lehman Brothers. While the measures undertaken by the federal government and the Federal Reserve averted complet…
A few years ago, when I lived in the East Village—in a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up—I had a creepy experience when the cable guy came to hook up our service. He arrived in a beat-up windowless van that looked like it had been boosted …
One of my five-year-old daughter’s favorite YouTube clips involves an elaborately decorated house, whose thousands of colored Christmas lights were programmed to flicker, strobe, wave, and blink to the tune of the Trans-Siberian Orchest…
As the directors of a cooperative corporation, co-op board members have a number of duties to their shareholders, chief among them to preserve and improve their investment and to maintain and/or improve shareholders’ standard of living …
Whether you're talking about an individual unit owner's renovation project or a major capital improvement that affects the whole building, chances are that there will be an architect involved at some point, to a greater or lesser degre…