Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll start the week with a Brooklyn nonprofit that celebrates a history-making ship and figures in a large proposed real estate project. We’ll also look at whether housing prices in New York would follow London’s lead if Gov. Kathy Hochul’s tax on expensive second homes is enacted.
For 30 years, longer than they have been married, George Weinmann and Janice Lauletta-Weinmann have been enthusiastic backers of a Brooklyn nonprofit. Its mission is to commemorate the U.S.S. Monitor, famous for fighting a Confederate ship known as the Merrimack to a draw in the Civil War.
“We say that’s a victory,” George Weinmann said.
The nonprofit, the Greenpoint Monitor Museum, has never had a building to call its own. But it has one valuable asset: a vacant lot steps from where the Monitor was built.
The Weinmanns have tied that acre of land to a proposed apartment complex that would include a 56-story building. That would be far taller than allowed under the current zoning, thanks to development rights that the museum group is set to transfer. The building and two others would mostly occupy the lot next to the museum’s land, currently the site of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority garage.
Together, the three buildings would have almost 1,150 apartments, 40 percent of which would be affordable. The developers also promise a home for the museum.
But first the project, known as Monitor Point, must be approved by the city.
Last month it won an approval recommendation from Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, though he called for changes that would make at least 100 more units affordable, bringing the percentage of affordable apartments in Monitor Point to just under half. His decision came a month after the local community board voted 24 to 9 in favor of the project.
The City Planning Commission, which held a public hearing on Monitor Point last month, will weigh in next. If it approves the plan, Monitor Point will go to the City Council for another hearing and a vote.
On Saturday, opponents of Monitor Point gathered for a rally at the site. The group that organized the event, Save the Inlet, has collected 5,400 signatures on a petition that calls Monitor Point a “betrayal” of a 2005 rezoning that “promised this land would serve as a buffer and transition zone — not high-rise towers.”
The petition also says that Monitor Point would threaten “a rare ecological treasure,” the adjacent Bushwick Inlet, just as a long-planned city park there is being completed. The developers say that Monitor Point would provide the “missing tooth of connectivity” for a waterfront path from Greenpoint to Williamsburg. Monitor Point would also pay the city $300,000 a year for maintenance of the park.
The developers and the opponents have generated documents outlining why they believe Monitor Point is right or wrong for the site. The developers say that the three apartment towers would step down in height, with the tallest one closest to the waterfront.
Size is only one of many concerns raised by Save the Inlet. “The neighborhood feels like it’s getting crushed with so many people and the runaway cost of living bringing in more and more wealthy residents,” said Steve Chesler of Save the Inlet. The group’s leader, Katherine Conkling Thompson, said that with families in the neighborhood, there was a need for a school that could coexist with an environmental education center.
She and Chesler also questioned putting the project in a flood-prone area. The developers say that the plan would protect the shoreline with a design that would be less vulnerable to flooding.
As for the museum, Chesler said that “everyone thinks their idea is cool.”
The battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, the first between two ironclad vessels, made history by making wooden warships obsolete.
Never mind that the fight played out 380 miles from Greenpoint, off Hampton Roads, Va. The Monitor, Lauletta-Weinmann said, “came from the neighborhood” and should be remembered there, even if the neighborhood had its doubts on Day 1. George Weinmann said that when the Monitor first went into water, many expected to see it sink “because iron ships, they don’t float, right?” he said.
The museum has been a passion project for the couple. Lauletta-Weinmann said that they met when Weinmann — who had been involved with a Civil War descendants’ group — attended the nascent museum’s first event. And for him, there are personal connections to the Monitor. Some of his relatives probably watched the launch, he said, and another ancestor served on the Monitor — not during the famous battle, but later.
“A distant cousin of mine,” Weinmann said. “He was one of the survivors” when the Monitor sank in a storm less than a year after its encounter with the Merrimack.
Weather
Expect sunny skies with temperatures near 66. Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low around 48.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I just feel like it just doesn’t make sense.” — Imani Menard, an occupational therapist who lives in Manhattan with her husband, on why financial pressures have made them rethink their plans to start a family.
The latest New York news
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Her life is as mysterious as her son’s disappearance: The disappearance of Jacob Pritchett, 11, a nonverbal boy with autism, has baffled police officers. His mother refuses to acknowledge that he ever existed.
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A contest between identity and ideology: The progressive South Asian networks that helped elect Mayor Zohran Mamdani are mobilizing against Assemblyman Jenifer Rajkumar as she seeks another term in office.
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Graduation warm-up at Carnegie Hall: Yunchan Lim, the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, tried out his graduation recital in front of a full house at Carnegie Hall.
Is London a cautionary tale for New York?
My colleague Debra Kamin writes that Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for a yearly surcharge on second homes in New York City worth $5 million or more could be shrewd politically — but some economists and real estate agents say it could be catastrophic for the housing market.
They point to London, where new taxes have pushed down long-surging home values and driven away international buyers. “London is no longer a beacon for this kind of buyer,” said Katya Nadirova, a New York-based real estate agent who works with foreign buyers. “We don’t want this to happen here.”
Those taxes had come just as Britain was withdrawing from the European Union, which had its own economic fallout, but research suggests the taxes had a more direct impact on London housing prices than Brexit did. In recent years, the British media has chronicled the departure of several well-known billionaires. One — John Fredriksen, a Norwegian-born shipping magnate — told newspapers “Britain has gone to hell” before selling his $338 million mansion and relocating to Dubai.
In New York, however, Brad Lander, a former city comptroller who is running for Congress, said that fears about an exodus of wealthy people were exaggerated.
“People will pay this relatively modest tax and we’ll have additional resources,” he said. “It is an intuitive concept: Nobody really needs more than one home. If you can afford two, three, four or five, you should pay a little extra so that other people can survive.”
METROPOLITAN diary
For a dancer
Dear Diary:
Fresh out of college in 1990, I moved to the Upper West Side. I became friendly with a former New York City Ballet dancer who lived in my building and mostly went out between dusk and dawn.
Her career had ended in the early 1970s, and because of damage to her knees from dancing, she usually traveled by wheelchair to Fairway or to swim at the Reebok Sports Club.
I took her to Cirque du Soleil and dinners out. She took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she seemed to know every guard and secret passageway.
As the ’90s ended, I moved away, yet she continued to call on my birthday every year for nearly 25 years.
I often let the calls roll to voice mail and didn’t always respond promptly. Still, every year, there would be her same sweet Southern voice.
Three years ago, she was hospitalized after a fall, declined rapidly and wound up on life support. She had never married and had no children, and the family she did have lived out of state.
She did, however, have a constellation of friends like me, and I was ultimately the one who was there when doctors took her off life support.
At the suggestion of relatives and other friends, I played her favorite opera, “L’elisir d’amore,” as she lay motionless and silent. (I also sneaked in some Rolling Stones, including “Ventilator Blues,” which I know she would have snickered at.)
It wasn’t until an email the next day that I learned she was dead, and that her annual birthday call would never come again.
— Mark Garrahan
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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