Ditmas Park Manse Finds a Fixer to Up ItDitmas Park: Remember that beautiful, dilapidated mansion on the market for $1.75 mil that New York featured a while back? It just sold for $1.55 mil. Happy fix-up, somebody. [Ditmas Park Blog]
East Village: Gentrification haters have two fun protests tonight — one of the imminent Cooper Square Hotel, another of a local shoot for SATC ripoff Lipstick Jungle. [Vanishing New York]
Greenpoint: Chuck, fuck, but definitely not marry. That’s how Miss Heather feels about the daily papers that rip stories off from her posts (like last week’s one about sneakers hanging from phone lines) without crediting her blog. Girl, you gotta change that scatological blog title … yeah, even for the gutter mouth Post! [Newyorkshitty]
developing
Hudson Yards Development: Guaranteed GreenYou may have seen a bunch of renderings of potential designs for the land above the Hudson Yards in this morning’s papers. But as one of the teams’ lead architects pointed out to us, “The challenge is, your eye immediately goes to the buildings, but it’s unlikely any of the buildings are going to look like this. That’s the challenge to the MTA, to boil down fundamental issues for the public.” So instead, we’re giving you one of the images that probably will find its way into reality if its team is selected — one for the long, narrow green space looking eastward from the Durst/Vornado proposal. That might just be the glass arc over the proposed Moynihan Station that you see in the distance. But meanwhile, what is Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling doing in the foreground on the right? —Alec Appelbaum
Related: The Next ‘West’ Thing [NYP]
Five Companies Bid to Remake Six Blocks of Hudson Yards Area [NYDN]
in other news
A Beard for Every BoroughOver on Men’s Vogue’s Website, socialite/designer/whatever Amanda Brooks is agitating hard for the return of the “uptown beard.” Even after perusing the pictures, we personally can’t tell exactly what separates an uptown beard from the others — probably because we come from slightly different stock than Amanda and such subtleties are lost on us — but we’re guessing she means something like the fuzz George Clooney has been sporting lately. And we quite like the idea of regional beard styles. For instance, there could also be the downtown beard, dark and spirited, like Simon Hammerstein’s. Or the Williamsbeard, which would be pomaded with Miller Genuine Draft and sprinkled with panko bread crumbs (the East Williamsbeard would have side curls.) The Jerseybeard would be a soul patch. Other beard suggestions? Tell us in the comments!
Uptown Beards [Men’s Vogue]
in other news
Dolly Lenz Can’t Imagine Why Anyone Would Dislike HerWhen it first came out that a prominent real-estate agent had been murdered several weeks ago, Robert Kolker writes in New York this week, before that person was revealed to be Linda Stein, some in the real-estate community guessed the deceased might be super-broker Dolly Lenz, a fact Lenz backed up herself, telling the writer she got twenty calls from people that night, including her own son, asking if she was okay. That’s weird, we thought. Wouldn’t her own son know if she was dead or not? Oh maybe not. “I would say I speak to my son 10 minutes a week,” Lenz says in an Observer profile coming out later this week, tidbits of which are on their Website now. “I would say I spend an hour [a week] with my daughter.” Even with her superb parenting skills, sterling reputation (“I’ve known Dolly for over twenty years, and systematically, whatever friendship she has, it dissolves,” former Elliman president Paul Purcell told New York in 2005), and — as the Observer nicely puts it — “outsize” personality, Dolly can’t imagine anything bad happening to her. “Never,” she tells the paper. “I feel like I treat everybody 100 percent fairly, and I think at the end of the day that’s all they really expect.” But maybe she shouldn’t be so sure. When Stein died, “we were hoping it was Dolly,” one broker told New York with a giggle. Um, yikes.
The $748,319,000 Woman [NYO]
Related: Death of a Broker [NYM]