John’s Terminal workplace in Manhattan is expected to close in the first three months of the year. That’s because Google’s $2.1 billion purchase of its St. Already, 2021’s number of major investment sales in Manhattan south of 96th Street - a projected 187 - is expected to beat 2020’s total of 160, according to brokerage Avison Young.Īnd that billion-dollar drought is very, very likely to end in 2022. Still, should COVID continue to recede behind vaccinations and New York continue to open up behind renewed tourism and more in-office work (and inflation continue to spook investors seeking a safer hedge against it in real estate), investment sales figures, prices and otherwise, should pick up too. Certain others - especially warehouses, due to the e-commerce boom, and, of late, multifamily - are very much in demand, but not enough to lift the entire market by themselves.
Certain asset classes - hotels, stand-alone retail, office towers, especially of the non-Class A variety - just aren’t in as much demand due to the uncertainty that COVID-19 has wrought upon their sectors. Yes, the story of New York investment sales the past two years is one of volatility and decline, all due to the pandemic. Both pieces were once meant to be continuous, eventually, but never were connected.SEE ALSO: CIM Group Subsidiary Buys Echo Park Office for $51M However, the Canal Avenue the developers hoped to bruit through Coney Island was actually started and exists in two pieces, one at Cropsey Avenue and the Belt Parkway that serves as a handy dandy bus turning venue, and another short piece further west in Sea Gate. The Belt Parkway was built approximately where the canal was going to be built. As FNY Correspondent Sergey Kadinsky explains in the Hidden Waters blog, this was a canal on paper that never existed and indeed, the actual zigzagging nature of Coney Island Creek was the actual reality then and now. I think the thing that sticks out when comparing 1922 to today’s map is Coney Island Creek extending all the way to Sheepshead Bay via the Gravesend Ship Canal. That’s pretty much what has happened with Coney. For the most part, Brooklyn streets, except in outlying regions near the water like Bensonhurst, Coney Island and Bergen Beach have remained the same for decades, except for their elimination by expressways and housing projects. Today, I’ve cropped Coney Island from the 1922 Hagstrom. When digital cameras came along in the 2000s, I had to be content with photographing sections laid flat on the tables, with middling results.Īpparently that scanning problem has been resolved, since here the 1922 Hagstroms are on the NYPL site! The library folks would tell me they couldn’t scan them for me, since the drum scanners would damage the maps. In the 1980s, I worked nights. Often, I would get a train into midtown in the afternoons, head for the NY Public Library at 5th Avenue and West 42nd, head for the Map Room and look over their NYC editions, especially the early edition Hagstroms. I came away with the Philadelphia-Camden folding map (Hagstrom also made a Philly atlas, but I never acquired one until approximately 15 years ago.) Hagstrom later moved to Maspeth, Queens in 1982 I interviewed for a job with them on West 33rd, tried again in 1992 in Maspeth, and came up empty both times. That same fall, my mother and I journeyed to what was then Hagstrom headquarters in the same building on West 33rd near 10th Avenue that the NY Daily News has offices in today. I watched for when the mailman was coming like a hawk if I was home. I saved money and in the fall of 1971 purchased just about every city street map all over the country that Geographia offered in a mail order.
It wasn’t my first map: prior to that, I’d been collecting Geographia’s “Little Red Book” street guides I purchased from newsstands I already had Brooklyn and the 5-Boro editions, both of which came with a folded-up black and white map glued within. We went to a restaurant and he sent the steak back twice because it was pink in the center (on that, at least, he and Donald Trump could talk about something). Mission accomplished: he stuck with what we got to his dying day in June 2003. The old man was there to purchase a wood wall unit for his stereo equipment.
My first Brooklyn map was a Hagstrom purchased at the Gertz Department Store on Jamaica Avenue in the late summer of 1968. I may have mentioned this previously, but I have been fascinated with street maps almost since birth, especially my hometown NYC. I was recently tipped off to the downloadable presence of some 1922 Hagstrom maps of NYC, at least 4 boroughs minus Staten Island, on the New York Public Library website Digital Collections.Īllow me to reminisce.