Labor Strategy and the Politics of Elite Division in Midtown Manhattan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Thomas MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Land Use ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
York City ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Hotel Workers

This chapter discusses a campaign by the New York hotel workers to ensure new hotels built in East Midtown will employ unionized labor and continue to offer decent wages and benefits. This case shows how the New York Hotel Trades Council's (HTC) intervention in East Midtown formed part of a broader campaign to block hotel development in a sector that is increasingly fragmented by service format, and most worrisome, witnessing a rapid growth of hotels providing few services and competing on price, leading to a stronger employer opposition to unionization. The outcome of this case speaks unequivocally to organized labor's strength in New York City politics and to a growing recognition in real estate and policymaking circles of labor's importance in urban land use planning.

The Changing Landscape of Asian Entrepreneurship, Minority Banks, and Community Development

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Tarry Hum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Commercial Real Estate ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Real Estate Development ◽  
Public Data

This policy brief examines minority banks and their lending practices in New York City. By synthesizing various public data sources, this policy brief finds that Asian banks now make up a majority of minority banks, and their loans are concentrated in commercial real estate development. This brief underscores the need for improved data collection and access to research minority banks and the need to improve their contributions to equitable community development and sustainability.

Scribner’s Bookstore

LOGOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
David Emblidge
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Business Model ◽  
York City ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Personal Service ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Real Estate Developers

Abstract In 1989, a literary landmark in New York City closed. Scribner’s Bookstore, 597 Fifth Avenue, stood at the epicentre of Manhattan’s retail district. The Scribner’s publishing company was then 153 years old. In the 1920s, driven by genius editor Max Perkins, Scribner’s published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. Scribner’s Magazine was The New Yorker of its day. The bookshop and publisher occupied a 10-storey Beaux-Arts building, designed by Ernest Flagg, which eventually won protection from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Medallions honoured printers Benjamin Franklin, William Caxton, Johann Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius. The ‘Byzantine cathedral of books’ offered deeply informed personal service. But the paperback revolution gained momentum, bookshop chains like Barnes & Noble and Brentano’s adopted extreme discounting, and the no-discounting Scribner’s business model became unsustainable. Real estate developers swooped in. The bookshop’s ignominious end came when Italian clothier Benetton took over its space.

Upscaling New York

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Ocejo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Postindustrial City ◽  
Rapid Destruction

This book has examined how bars and nightlife scenes structure and influence life in downtown neighborhoods that have become, through advanced gentrification, upscale destinations for consumers and residents and prime locations for investment in high-end real estate and business. The proliferation of bars and growth of nightlife scenes underscore the importance of nostalgia for people in today's postindustrial city of constant, rapid destruction and ever-changing fashions. With upscaling comes conflict as well as ephemerality, as anchors of stability lose their strength to ground people amid their turbulent surroundings. Longtime residents of New York City use a nostalgia narrative of a dark period in their neighborhood's past to fuel their continuous protest despite the process's inexorable march towards an upscale status.

The Import of a Narrative : The Role of Aesthetics and Discursive Elements in Fabricating Change in the Centre of São Paulo

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Kalichman ◽  
Beatriz Rufino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
The Past

This chapter examines the use of aesthetic and discursive elements in the production of a narrative about República, a district in the central area of São Paulo (Brazil) that has been transformed through a real estate boom in the past ten years. We focus on newly built studio apartments, and on the efforts to differentiate them from the quitinetes, apartments with similar features built in the 1950s and 1960s that have been heavily stigmatized. We situate our analysis of this purposeful urban transformation within a context intertwined with urban marketing, publicity, and image making. Our research shows the strong presence of an industrial aesthetic in the area, which we understand as being a deliberate echo of the gentrification process that took place in SoHo in New York City in the 1970s.

A Hotel of Her Own: Building by and for the New Woman, 1900-1930

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-541
Author(s):  
Nikki Mandell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
A Site

This article examines the little-known phenomenon of apartment hotels built for single middle- and upper-class women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on New York City, where the first and most influential of these residences opened, this study argues that upscale women’s apartment hotels severed the Victorian equivalency between home and family, and reconfigured home as a site of women’s independence and self-fulfillment. They also helped redefine women’s economic role; rather than engaging elite women as consumers of household goods, apartment hotels engaged them as consumers of housing and as real-estate developers. As women’s apartment hotels moved from amusing experiment to markers of twentieth-century modernity, they etched the New Woman’s individuality, ambitions, sexuality, and civic engagement into the urban landscape.

Regulation, Welfare, and the Rise of Environmental Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 729-748
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Business Law ◽  
Small Cities ◽  
Apartment Buildings ◽  
American Law

This chapter discusses changes in American law in the twentieth century covering land use, environmental law, intellectual property, regulation of business, and business law. The twentieth century was a century of land-use controls. An important legal invention was zoning. The central idea of zoning is to divide a town or city into zones or segments and to regulate what kinds of land use are allowed in each of these segments. Some zones will be limited to one-family houses, others will be open to apartment buildings, stores and offices, and even to factories. New York City was a pioneer in the zoning movement. After the state passed an enabling act, New York City adopted the first comprehensive zoning ordinance (1916). Zoning soon spread to city after city. By 1930, it was pretty much the rule in both large and small cities and in the suburbs as well.

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