••• “The Dead Rabbit, a lower Manhattan drinking spot that sees wait times of 2 hours on busy nights, has signed a lease on a two-floor space adjacent to its Water Street site. The bar plans to combine the two locations, nearly doubling its total size to 5,500 square feet.” —Wall Street Journal

••• “As FEMA revises the maps to account for climate change, deciding who is in the flood zone will be a battle with millions of dollars at stake. […] In some cases, however, the reaction has been to get out of the flood zone, in any possible way. Consider a project in Tribeca to convert a 10-story office building at 11 Beach Street into luxury condominiums priced at up to $12 million apiece. Constructed in 1900, the building was outside the original FEMA flood zones. But the southeast corner of the building would fall inside the newer zones, ‘thus subjecting the entire building to FEMA regulations,’ according to documents filed with the city’s Department of Buildings in October 2013. At first, the project’s developer, HFZ Capital Group, and its architects believed that they would be exempt, in part because the affected piece of the building, on the corner of Beach Street and St. Johns Lane, was so small. But city officials said that was not the case. So the architects proposed an ingenious solution: slice two feet off the bottom corner of the building. After consulting with FEMA, the city ultimately concluded that the proposal ‘shall absolve the applicant from complying.’ —New York Times

••• “Trinity Church Plans Major Restoration of Facade, Doors, and Stained-Glass Windows. […] An architectural team overseeing the restoration of Trinity Church is proposing the addition of a 91-foot long glass and metal canopy to the building’s south facade,which Community Board 1 views as detracting from the structure’s historic character.” —Broadsheet

••• “At [Camilla Marcus ‘s] new restaurant, Westbourne, which opens on Wednesday [at 137 Sullivan], she combines the hippie-bowl café’s health mantras with an actual cause. Westbourne sounds straight out of a ’90s Soho fantasia, but its mission is grounded and good. Through a partnership with the Robin Hood Foundation, one percent of every purchase will go to Soho neighbor the Door, which provides free youth-development services. Marcus says they’ll also fund and build what she calls a neighborhood ‘hands-on hospitality retraining program’ with the Door, from which they’ll hire employees.” —Grub Street

••• A cartoon by Ellis Rosen in the New Yorker.