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History of Tribeca Buildings
In the News: Trump Expected to Snarl Traffic
••• 360 Broadway is on the market for $52 million. That’s the building at the southeast corner of Franklin, where Roll and Go and Black Burger were. It “offers 64,430 buildable square feet for development. Its frontage extends 56 feet along Broadway, and 115 feet along Franklin Street, with air rights adding up to 12,886 square feet.” The question now is whether the L-shaped lot on either side of it—where an 18-story building is planned—will pony up so they can go much, much higher. —New York Times
••• “The phones at The Architect’s Newspaper have been down since August 4; we apologize if this has caused any inconvenience. However, this is part of a wider service outage in Tribeca. Moreover, we’ve learned from our service provider Verizon that a major cable was cut and our service won’t be restored until August 22. There is no notification of a service issue on Verizon’s website. AN has filed a complaint with the Public Service Commission. If you are affected by this outage and have already reported the same to Verizon, we will see a better response if you also join us in filing a complaint with the Commission.”
••• “Ben Busko, a designer of home, garden and gift items inspired by his boyhood garden, is to open Ben’s Garden in a 1,450-square-foot ground floor space with a 1,000-square-foot basement” at 42-44 Grand (W. Broadway/Thompson). “Its three other locations are in Oyster Bay and Huntington, N.Y., and Brooklyn. He has signed a 10-year lease for the new space, previously occupied by the Grand Street Deli.” —New York Times
••• “Joe & the Juice, a coffee shop and juice bar chain, has just added a new item to its menu that may gladden the hearts of ardent recyclers: pulp muffins, made from the detritus of cold-pressed juices. […] Each muffin sells for $2.99 in Joe’s Financial District and Midtown locations, and the company plans to offer them in all its New York City branches.” —New York Post
••• Sola Pasta Bar “opens Wednesday” (which could mean today or next Wednesday) in the former Combina space at W. Broadway and Grand: “There are five [woks] set into electric burners in the square kitchen that occupies most of the space, where chefs prepare pasta dishes in full view. [The] menu features eight pastas, mostly familiar ones like penne all’arrabbiata, linguine with clams, fettuccine Bolognese and tagliatelle with porcini.” (Sola also has a Sola Lab project in the works at 45 Beekman.) —New York Times
••• “The team behind the [Tribeca Film Festival] is creating a separate event devoted solely to television, to be called (naturally) the Tribeca TV Festival. The festival, to be held for three days beginning Sept. 22, will feature premiere screenings, previews and panel appearances from the likes of Pamela Adlon, Louis C.K., Amy Sedaris and the cast of ‘Will & Grace.’ […] All events will take place at the Cinépolis Chelsea, which serves as the main venue for the Tribeca Film Festival.” —New York Times
••• “Travelers can expect traffic snarls between Trump Tower and Wall Street as the president leaves town Wednesday afternoon, officials said. President Donald Trump is slated to depart Manhattan from Pier 11/Wall Street between 1 and 3 p.m., according to NYC Ferry, which warned of closures and delays.” He’ll probably go out of his way to take White Street. Below: I assume these aircraft, which landed at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, are related. —DNAinfo
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Re the reporting to NYS PSC when Verizon isn’t helpful… definitely do it. While the Chambers Street work was being done we had a deluge which seriously damaged a bundle of the old copper telephone wire which was exposed due to the work, including the one which provided service to our home. Verizon gave us the runaround for days, telling us that they couldn’t even give us an estimated date of repair. Then I saw some Verizon guys at the corner of Chambers and said to one, “I hope you’re fixing my telephone problem”. He said, no, we’re not fixing anything broken, and you didn’t hear it from me, but put in a complaint with the PSC and it’ll get fixed pronto”. So we filled out the form online and that afternoon got calls from someone at the PSC who confirmed some information and then about 30 minutes later from a manager at Verizon who magically had the ability to switch us to another cable 2 days hence, which happened. Also got follow up calls from the PSC and Verizon after the fix. We told the neighbors who were also affected but they didn’t bother to report to the PSC and also didn’t get their phone service back for 3 more weeks.
I finally ditched my copper line this summer. The service had been terrible for months. They fixed it once and then the same thing happened again. Then they made all kinds of excuses to avoid fixing it again. I got the feeling that they want to abandon their copper network.
They do want to abandon copper in favor of fiber optic. Years ago, we were having ongoing problems with our copper line and Verizon repeatedly “repaired” it. One of their techs told me that it was routine for them to shift the “bad” line with a “good” line and wait for the subscriber who got the “bad” line to complain…if they ever did. He said there were no excess copper lines so they had to keep reusing the “bad” ones since Verizon had no intention to install new, additional copper.
Verizon got a big chunk of the LMDC money to lay the fiber optic infrastructure everywhere below Canal Street, hence some lucky ones of us being able to get FiOs. My impression is that Verizon isn’t interested spending the money to make the FiOs connections to the smaller Tribeca buildings even though it’s physically possible now.
The line that there’s no excess copper seems suspect since some mid-size and big buildings got hooked up to the fiber optic. Maybe for some east/west blocks if the problem is right there, but not in general. My old copper infrastructure has been available for several years since I’ve never seen Verizon removing anything, only stringing new fiber.
Part of the reason Verizon got the money and started aggressively installing fiber is because the subterranean wire vault in their building at West and Barclay was flooded by Superstorm Sandy. Some of that cable was close to 100 years old and had paper insulation. Once soaked with saltwater, it was pretty much useless. Fiber isn’t susceptible to water damage. So there has been a significant loss of copper circuits as a result.
In the wake (no pun intended) of Sandy, Verizon’s CEO described the damage to copper lines as a huge opportunity:
“Now our strategy here going forward which I think is important for investors is that where we have damaged copper cable, we are not replacing it. We are going in with fiber. In Broad Street, that is literally the entire feeder cable will be converted over to fiber. And I think that will help us in a number of ways. We have got that platform then that we can build on but the businesses will be able to add services, higher-speed services, change their services much more easily than we could in a copper environment. It will reduce our maintenance costs dramatically. […]
“But more often than not when we move a customer off of voice onto FiOS, they take either a double play or a triple play right after that because I think they have seen the resiliency of those networks. FiOS, the minute power came back, FiOS was back up in the majority of the cases. And the same thing with wireless. I mean, when we have an event like this, we have a tendency to a see a shift in share because of the resilience of our networks. So our plan is to take advantage of this disruption if you will in our operations to accelerate these platform expansions and I think it will serve us very well.”
http://www22.verizon.com/idc/groups/public/documents/adacct/vz-transcript-2012-12-04.pdf
I was recently able to get my very small building near the corner of Leonard and Church converted to FiOS, after fighting with the company to get the service for about 5 years. I thank Erik and Tribeca Citizen for providing good contact information on these pages. I do recommend the service _very_ highly. It has only been three weeks, but it has been superb in pretty much every way. And Verizon seemed unusually eager to convert the building once I’d made that contact. In speaking to the managers, there was the strong implication that the company wants to get away from copper as much and as soon as possible.
David,
Can you please post the contact. I would like to get FIOS in my building.
Thanks
I lost 2 lines in May 2017 and 1 more last week – and finally my last and 4th line today. I complained to PSC and got no contact although I have been talking to Verizon people in departments called “Escalation” – which has been more attentive but still the net result is no land line. I requested Fios a few times but not consistently and got no response. And similar to NV it was a Verizon employee who directed me to contact PSC – sadly without the same result. It has been over 8 months! As of today I was given an expected repair date of 2/28/18.