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.

Forest Hills’ underrated affordability gets some love, sort of, in the current issue of The New York Times, and the forums are already buzzing. Despite what some people are saying, I think the real-estate agent quoted is spot on in his assessment:

Fernando Arce, a broker with Foxtons, says studios and one-bedrooms under $200,000 can be found in Forest Hills, but they will be modest in size and come mainly in postwar co-ops and in buildings without doormen.

The article, on neighborhoods where you can still buy for $200k or less, is nicely illustrative of why I live here. For a variety of reasons I’ve discussed here before, between Inwood, Riverdale, Forest Hills, Jackson Heights and Flatbush, I think FoHi is definitely the best of the lot. Hopefully this’ll get some more people interested in moving in.

Got some e-mail the other day from the fine folks over at NOVO 64, Forest Hills Your Way, who proudly announced the “Grand Opening” of the controversial condo development. This despite the fact that the building is nowhere near completion and the sales center opened months ago. But there’ll be wine and music and maybe, if you’re lucky, cheese, so who are you to complain? Write talia@novo64.com to RSVP, or call Talia herself at 212-448-9400, ext. 21. It’ll be Thursday, 6:30 to 9, at the sales center, I guess.

I would totally go to this, but I’ll be in sunny Saint Martin, French West Indies, starting right about — now. I’ve lined up a possible guest blogger while I’m gone, so stay tuned. And as always, you are encouraged to go crazy in los foros. So long, non-Caribbean vacationers!

So, uh, some of you have noticed that I’ve completely dropped off the face of the earth. It’s due to work-related issues — things heated up somethin’ fierce, but they’ve started to cool down, so I’m going to slowly work my way back. Luckily, others have been Johnny on the spot with area news while I’ve been out, but that’s nothing new.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, a top three of things that have happened in the couple of weeks since I last posted, starting after the jump right about … now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Big news today for any and all interested in living in luxury up in Little Tashkent at NOVO 64. NOVO announced today that they’re shooting for an opening date of summer 2008, but the bigger news: prices! At the very low end — for those unconcerned with living space but wanting to be within an easy walk to that creepy Russian supermarket — a 720-square-foot 1-bedroom is going for a cool $455k, which is less than twice what I paid for my 1,000-square-foot junior-4 near the subway. What a deal! For those feeling a little more spendy, a “starter 2 bedroom, one bath apartment” will run you in the mid-$600s, probably a little more than I’d like to pay for a non-starter house in the suburbs with a yard where I plan on living the rest of my natural life.

The high end? A “spacious 3 bedroom” with “incredible sun exposure” (do the others not have windows?) is $960k, making NOVO, I’d educatedly guess, officially the most expensive apartment building in town now that the Windsor’s prices are down.

Act fast — this is “pre-sales pricing”!

Thanks to Forest Hills 72 for picking up on this one — the Daily News has picked up on the saga of the last remaining turn-of-the-last-century townhouses in the neighborhood, so now maybe something will actually happen, or, better yet, not happen. If you’re just tuning in, the entire block used to be lined with the charming, classic rowhouses, but they’ve been gradually sold off and demolished in favor of some truly unattractive office buildings. According to the News, preservationist Michael Perlman is on the case and is pushing for a historic district. For the record, I think that’s an incredibly bad idea — a historic district covers an entire neighborhood, not a specific building. Do we really want all the Austin Street area closed off to new development? It’s very, very tough to think of any architecturally significant buildings on the stretch, and I’d love to see much of the neighborhood spruced up, just not that one side of that one block. Landmarking seems like a much better plan — or am I just not getting how this all works?