Frank Gehry's design for the WTC performing arts center

••• CB1 chair Julie Menin lays out the value of using LMDC money for a performing arts center at the World Trade Center—specifically, where the Deutsche Bank building was and not at Site 1B, where it’s currently planned, because that would take longer and cost more. (Downtown Express)

••• The Tribeca Trib‘s gift guide mentions that Oliver E. Allen’s Tribeca: A Pictorial History is coming out Nov. 15: “Tribeca’s colorful 300-year history in more than 150 exquisitely reproduced photos and illustrations, with text by the Trib’s history columnist, Oliver E. Allen.” It’s $50 and it’ll be available from the Trib or Amazon.

••• “Bruce Radler, who has been trying for nearly 10 years to open a seven-court Basketball City franchise on Pier 36, popularly known as the ‘Banana Pier,’ on the East River, has finally got his game together. Radler and the city announced on Oct. 18 that financing for the $13 million project was in place. Construction on the 65,000-square-foot sports center on the pier at Montgomery St. [midway between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges], formerly occupied by the city Office of Emergency Management, is expected to begin within 30 days. Completion is expected in six to nine months.” (Downtown Express)

••• Designer Jon Call—who totally looks like Chris Isaak—fake-shops for end tables for the New York Times: “At Duane, a Tribeca antiques shop, he spotted a 1960s pedestal table. ‘I just bought two of these for a client,’ he said. ‘The proportions are spot-on, both the height and the depth, which should be the full depth of the sofa.'”

••• Terese Loeb Kreuzer (who has left the Broadsheet Daily and is writing about Battery Park City for Downtown Express), sits down with new Battery Park City Authority president Gayle Horwitz.

••• CB1’a task force on affordable housing debated what exactly “affordable housing” is. (Broadsheet Daily)

••• Express—which is the Washington Post’s giveaway paper?—interviewed Tribeca Treats’ Rachel Thebault about her new book, Sweet Chic.

••• Downtown Express profiles Tribeca artist Robert Swain.

••• Author Gary Shteyngart “spent Election Day surrounded by fellow immigrants at the home of Sayu Bhojwani, head of the New American Leaders Project, an organization that prepares immigrants and the children of immigrants for public office. Ms. Bhojwani is of Indian descent, but raised in Belize. Other nervous Democratic-leaning immigrants included a Haitian, a Russian, a Korean, and an Alabaman.” This was in Tribeca, so here it is. (The New Yorker)

••• “A tipster has some harsh words for an apartment in newish Tribeca luxury tower 200 Chambers Street. The link to the $4.495 million listing arrived with the following description: “worst apartment I have ever seen.” (Curbed)