1) More and more buyers are lawyering up to break contracts and get their deposits back, but what's their strategy? Some, including buyers at 20 Pine, District, 75 Wall, One Hunters Point and One Brooklyn Bridge Park, are attempting to use a legal loophole called the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act. Others are looking for slight discrepancies between the offering plan and the finished product. Will any of these plans work? TBD! ['What Contract?']
2) People know the Westbeth artists' housing complex as that big building in the Far West Village where artist pay pennies to live and work in cool apartments, and this Habitats story will...do nothing to change that impression. But artist Karen Santry's 500-square-foot studio is pretty darn wacky, like an acid-tinged '80s fever dream. [Habitats/'Karen in Wonderland']
3) The real victims of the recession: Former bank executives who stand to take big losses on the Park Avenue co-ops they purchased at the height of the boom to cement their UES social status. The heart weeps. [Big Deal/'The Discounted Duplex']
4) The writer and director James Toback is selling his late mother's 2,200-square-foot 15th-floor apartment in The Majestic on Central Park West in a "best and final" bidding process that ends Thursday. The minimum bid is $1.999 million (the 2BR had been listed for as much as $3.75M), and the place needs work. The co-op board also requires half the purchase price to be in cash, the buyer's net worth to be three times the purchase price, and a vial filled with the blood of the buyer's first-born son. [Big Deal/'Make a Bid']
5) Will a few well-publicized crimes in Fort Greene stop the flow of young gay dancers and wealthy playwrights to the neighborhood's pristine brownstone blocks? No, according a community board member, who says the local police are teaching people better crime-reporting techniques or something. [Living In: Fort Greene/'Multiple Identities Can Be a Good Thing']
6) A guy with a custom shoe business and money to blow goes looking for a sleek new Midtown condo, finding something wrong with the location of various Curbed favorites (Atelier, Orion, Charleston) before finally snapping up a two-bedroom unit in the Platinum, located in...Times Square. But he likes the madness, even if the place ain't worth what he paid for it anymore. [The Hunt/'Calm in the Din of Times Square']
7) Cruise ships docked in Red Hook's terminal run their diesel engines all day to keep the power on, creating a wee bit of exhaust (like, 10,000 cars' worth every day). But that might change by 2011, when New York could become the first port on the East Coast to provide shore-based power for cruise ships. Of course, there are money issues, but what's a few million dollars if it keeps the youth of Red Hook away from the black lung, right? [Dispatches/'Smoke on the Water']
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