It Happened One Weekend: Condos Not as Common, Bob Vila Loves ShackBurgers, Italian Town is Our Future, More!

1) It's the exhaust of the revving condo engine: defaults on common charges are spiking, and if a condo unit is the subject of foreclosure, the bank gets first dibs on equity and the remaining owners must cover the common costs. Curse you, co-ops, you win again! But why did the Times use a model of 56 Leonard to illustrate the story? ['The Downside for Condos in a Downturn']

2) For the wacky co-op board anecdote of the week, we turn to The Hunt column, where a woman's quest for a $500K one-bedroom takes her and her dog ("Buttah") to an intense board approval meeting in Murray Hill that involves a doorbell bark test and a promise to ditch the dog if neighbors complain. Harsh! [The Hunt/'The Dog and the Doorbell Test']

3) Dumbo overlords Two Trees Management have made building a middle school a chief component of their controversial Dock Street Dumbo building plans, but at the same time the company is about to oust a school for disabled students from one of its other buildings. [The City/Dumbo]

4) There's something weird about former This Old House host Bob Vila buying a fancypants Manhattan condo. Shouldn't the charmingly bearded renovator have a fixer-upper townhouse in BoCoCa, not a $5.9 million spread at 15 Madison Square North? [Big Deal/'For Bob Vila, Move-In Condition']

5) Following a well-publicized competition, the listing for Brooke Astor's Park Avenue co-op wound up with Corcoran, but now that it has moved to Stribling following some hefty price chops and no sale, Stribling's Kirk Henckels is talking a little smack: "We were the ones who priced it right in the first place." Well, the price ($29 million) will be right if it sells, so let's not pop the champagne just yet. [Big Deal/'What Would Mrs. Astor Say?']

6) A look at the gritty West 13th Street meatpacking plant (dying breed!) that will come down to make way for this thing. [The City/Urban Studies]

7) The story of how the film collection at shuttered St. Marks megastore Kim's wound up being shipped off to a town in Italy is almost too strange for words, but if there were no words, there wouldn't be this amazing quote: "Salemi is the future, New York is the past. That's why Kim’s is coming here." [The City/'La Dolce Video']