Wow, I am shocked, shocked that this is being allowed to happen!

OK, enough sarcasm. The New York Times has an article about Bukharans building McMansions in the Cord Meyer area. Thank you to Sarah on our forum for posting the link.

In typical New York Times fashion, by the time the story is covered, it is usually about 3 years too late, the issue is usually over, not trendy anymore or there’s nothing that can be done about it.

So much for the news flash and purple bunting. AJ’s Pizza was open for business tonight, at 9:15 PM. Same signage, same menu, and a few customers waiting on line. (Sorry I didn’t have my camera-phone charged up.)

A sign of the times at the corner of Church Street and Warren Street in Tribeca, Manhattan.

“Would you like a large Slurpee, Mr. DeNiro?”

A report from the field, otherwise known as “my work neighborhood.”

This large commercial space has been empty since before Sept. 11, 2001. For a while, it housed a closeouts store and a temporary Chirstmas decorations store. Otherwise, this juicy piece of property right above a major subway station laid dormant for over eight years, in one of the hottest, trendiest, most popular neighborhoods in all of NYC.

During those intervening years, in addition to ever-increasing numbers of tourists, the neighborhood has experienced tremendous residential growth (mostly via the conversion of office buildings into luxury rentals), including a massive baby-boom enough to make the sole elementary school in the nabe dangerously overcrowded.

Now that Robert DeNiro’s brainchild, the Tribeca Film Festival, is “Tribeca” in name only, and the WTC site (sorry, “Ground Zero”) is considered “boring” by tourists because it is just a construction site, perhaps the “riff raff” felt they could finally move in. There goes the neighborhood!

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! The new newsstand arrives on a rainy Wednesday evening,

and after-work commuters congratulate Jai on his new home!

See the slide show of the event here.

News stands are a whole social scene!  You should have seen have seen the number of local folks congratulating Jai, shaking his hand, giving him the thumbs up. Many passers-by were pleasantly surprised that the news stand and Jai were coming back. Many thought, like myself, it had closed forever and he had simply moved on. One guy even told him, “When I saw the new cement platform, I praised God that you were finally getting a new place!”

These newsstands will have an upgraded Lotto machine and phone lines.

Just like Weegee used to do, it’s important to be at the right place at the right time, and have your camera ready.

As a result of the outcry from late-night QC readers, the news stand is saved!

Just kidding.

As the rest of the world seems to know, local newsstands are being replaced. Here’s this week’s progress.

One day, you’re the lead-off story, next day you’re yesterday’s news.

Last week we were coming home late in the evening and saw the newstand guys cleaning everything up, and we thought they were just going on vacation or something. Guess not.

The curious thing about it is that the newstand was left open and abandoned like so for at least 3 days.

The guys who ran the newstand always seemed to have a great rapport with their regulars every morning. They always seemed to have steady business during commuting hours, even with a supermarket, candy store and subway-based newstand within spitting distance. One of the more comforting phenomena of NYC is the ability of a newstand and a candy-and-newspaper store to co-exist and thrive right next to each other.

To the Queens Boulevard and 71st Road Newstand Guys: I wish you all the best! May you always have many customers, sell lots of candy, and sell winning lottery tickets wherever you are!

Looks like somethin’s cookin’!!

A Queens resident recently wrote to real-estate doyenne Barbara Corcoran asking her if he should rip out his lawn to build a driveway, like all the cool kids are doing. Quoth Corcoran in her Daily News column:

Hey, a flower garden might look pretty and keep your wife happy, but the space in front of your house is worth a hell of a lot more as a driveway.

Lovely! I feel kind of ridiculous claiming I know more about real estate than Barbara Corcoran, who has become very very very rich selling it, but ripping out lawns to create driveways makes the neighborhood hideous, which, in the long run, decreases the value of the property. Corcoran implores the writer to hurry up and kill the lawn right quick, because the “city council of Queens” — we have a city council now? — is enacting legislation to ban exactly this sort of thing for exactly the reason I just described.

But! I do have one question. When Corcoran moves into a neighborhood, it’s a sign that the neighborhood is about to become hot. Corcoran has no operations in Central Queens. If she loves paved-over lawns so much, why not? She’ll find them here in spades.

Before I appeared on Brian Lehrer Live last month, the producers asked me if I could send them any web videos to use on the show. I managed to dig up a couple of things, but really, it was a tall order — there’s not much Central Queens video out there. So naturally, I was pleased to see this Forest Hills short, part of an ongoing neighborhood-by-neighborhood series about real estate. Lots of NOVO 64 stuff, but they do a pretty good job of canvassing the whole nabe. I also learned that white people are called “snowflakes.” Please do visit the site for more, but through the magic of Web 2.0, here it is right now, no additional clicking necessary!

Sure seems like a lot has been going on around these parts lately, but what can I cover that hasn’t already been done so well by Forest Hills 72? In no particular order, let’s take a look at a few, bullet-point style. Discuss!

• You can say goodbye to the trees along the Long Island Rail Road tracks. They’re pretty but cause service interruptions for reasons that are so arcane you’ll just have to read the article to find out. The damage to the neighborhood’s character will be severe, assuming you live on Burns Street — otherwise you never really go down that way anyway, now, do you?
• Queens renters say they’re not staying. Heh, good luck renting that swank Chelsea pad at Kew Gardens prices, buckaroos.
• “Via Veneto” is coming soon to Austin Street. Mike of Mike’s Notes is dead on with his National Lampoon’s European Vacation analogy.
• In Forest Hills Gardens, even the sex offenders are upper-crusty. (I should probably point out here that nothing has been proven, though the Post does do something I was taught never, ever to do in journalism school when it writes that the guy was arrested “for child sex” (emphasis mine). The Post also disappoints by not branding the alleged offender a “perv,” as it usually does.