St. Ann's Warehouse Signs Lease for New Space in DUMBO

St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn theater that has provided a home for highly regarded productions including “Black Watch” and “Misterman,” will itself continue to have a home in Dumbo, not far from its current location in that neighborhood. The theater said on Monday that it had signed a three-year lease for a new space at 29 Jay Street, where it plans to open next fall after leaving its longtime base of operations at 38 Water Street following the conclusion of its current season in May.

St. Ann’s was required to leave 38 Water Street, where it has been since 2001, because the space is scheduled for commercial development. A plan to move the theater into the Tobacco Warehouse, a Civil War-era structure opposite the Water Street building, and provide it with a $15 million renovation had to be abandoned earlier this year when a judge struck down a decision by the National Park Service to remove the Tobacco Warehouse from classification as federally designated parkland.

Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s, said that the 19,000-square-foot space at 29 Jay Street is one that the theater had contemplated at previous junctures in its search but was not previously available. When the Tobacco Warehouse ruling was made in July, Ms. Feldman, who was then in France, said she sent out “an e-blast” to about 50,000 associates and followers of the theater, and got reconnected to Peter Forman, who manages the Jay Street property.

“It took a few months and it worked out,” Ms. Feldman said. “Good for him and good for us.”

Ms. Feldman said that St. Ann’s was still seeking a more permanent home. “When it comes to real estate, to find the property, to have it be available, to actually make a deal — it takes a long time,” she said.

Then again, Ms. Feldman added that when St. Ann’s Warehouse started at the St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights in 1980, “I had no idea how long that was going to last.”

“I didn’t even know that’s what was going to happen,” she said. “Then when we came to Dumbo, we were only going to be at 38 Water Street for nine months, and we’ve been there 11 years. I’m hopeful.”

Mayor Bloomberg Narrows Field For New City Tech Campus

 As reported by DNAinfo

It’s down to four... maybe?

The city has narrowed its choices for a new city-subsidized high-tech university campus, which could end up on Roosevelt Island, down to four, knocking three contenders out of the race, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.

“We had 27 applicants. We whittled it down to seven. I think we've told three that they’re not going to make it and that we’re working with the last four,” the mayor told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tuesday.

But when the mayor was pressed for details Wednesday on the ousted schools, he appeared to backtrack.

“I don’t know that the four is the right number, incidentally," he told reporters at a press conference in Queens.

A spokeswoman for the mayor did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

The mayor refused to say Wednesday which bids are still in the running.

"No," he told reporters, when asked point blank.

But the mayor did provide some hints on who might be left.

“Stanford is desperate to do it, I’m not exaggerating,” he said at MIT. “Cornell is desperate to do it. I'm not exaggerating there. There are a couple of other schools that have a really good chance as well.”

On Wednesday, he said that some of the applications just didn't make the cut.

”There were a couple that just... didn’t meet the criteria. They weren’t going to build the kind of school here that we need," he said.

Still, he reiterated, “It’s a heated competition."

The city received seven bids from 17 institutions to build the city’s next major engineering and applied campus, an opportunity that could come with a chunk of city land as well as up to $100 million in public funds to kickstart development.

Bidders range from engineering powerhouses like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, to dark horse candidates like India’s Amity University.

Cornell University, which has teamed up with the Israeli heavyweight Technion, has proposed a new campus on Roosevelt Island, which would be home to the east coast's largest net-zero energy building — one that creates as much energy as it consumes.

Stanford, which submitted a joint proposal with the City University of New York (CUNY), has also eyed Roosevelt Island, and submitted plans for another green school that would use 50 percent less energy than a level that is already considered efficient.

Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon proposed a new campus on the abandoned Navy Hospital at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it reportedly wants to create a new entertainment technology center in partnership with Steiner Studios, and Columbia University submitted a bid to expand its footprint uptown with a new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering as part of its $6 billion Manhattanville expansion plan.

New York University submitted a proposal to build a new Center for Urban Science and Progress in Downtown Brooklyn’s One Metrotech Center, which would focus on helping cities improve energy efficiency, reduce congestion and pollution, and the New York Genome Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Rockefeller University and SUNY Stony Brook submitted a proposal for a new facility in Midtown Manhattan that would focus on genome sequencing.

The campus bid is part of a larger push by the Bloomberg administration to lure engineering talent and new high-tech startups to the city, in a bid to rival Silicon Valley.

“The bottom line is that a lot of people that come out of these applied science or engineering schools will start companies right where they have spent time going to school. And we’re in a big battle for jobs in the city,” Bloomberg said.

“The future really, to some extent, is going to be technology.”

BQE Rehab - Not Happening Anytime Soon

 As reported by Brownstoner:

The state sent out an announcement yesterday saying plans to rehabilitate the BQE are being abandoned because of lack of funds. According to the notice, estimated costs for the revamp ran from $280 million up to $2 billion. The state was looking to rehab the section of the expressway between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street, and the most expensive proposals involved building tunnels. The BQE, which opened in 1954, was designed to last 50 years. A separate proposal to rehab a stretch of the Gowanus Expressway was also abandoned.

MTA Sells Corner of Smith & Wyckoff. Now Retail and Apartments to Follow

As reported by Brownstoner:

The MTA sold its utility building on Smith Street and Wyckoff for $3,500,000 to an unidentified buyer. The property was named one of the fugliest buildings in Brooklyn a few years ago by AMNY, which called it “a windowless two-story bunker from the ’20s that was encased in concrete a few years ago and now looks like it could withstand a nuclear blast.” The MTA put it up for sale back in 2008. We have a feeling tears won’t be shed if this one is demolished.