Scampia "Le Vele" Hudson River Valley Draws Brooklynites. Like almost everything in the Hudson Valley, it’s still a work in progress.
But its owners, Melissa Auf der Maur, a seriously glamorous Montreal native who has played bass for bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Hole, and Tony Stone, a filmmaker, come from central casting as exemplars of the new, hip Hudson Valley. The Basilica is the kind of space and scene that the artist and musician Patti Smith (no stranger to Hudson) had in mind a few months ago when she advised young artists that “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling” and that they should find their futures someplace else, like Poughkeepsie. “A bunch of my friends from Montreal came to visit and they said, ‘You told us you moved to a small town, but you didn’t tell us you moved to a magic David Lynch town. What is this place?’ ” Ms. Hudson, she added, has the feel of SoHo decades ago. Not long ago, Hudson was notorious for drugs, prostitution and post-industrial torpor. Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo is a claustrophobe's nightmare.
Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world's hidden wonders.
Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. Beside an elevated highway in Tokyo's Ginza district is what looks like a huge pile of front-loading washing machines. The 13-story structure is Nakagin Capsule Tower, a residential building consisting of 144 cubic pods. Built in 1972, the tower is a rare example of the Metabolism movement in Japanese architecture, which prized module-based designs in which individual units could be replaced. Each of the 144 Nakagin capsules is its own 8-by-7-by-12-foot apartment. Though tiny apartments are standard in Tokyo, the Nakagin capsules did not herald the dawn of pod-based urban living. If you'd like to experience a Nakagin capsule before it's lost forever, one of the units is currently being rented on Airbnb for $30 per night. Sleep cramped in concrete: Evolution of New York Subway (87 pics)
Pics | 7 Nov, 2010 | Views: 10365 | The evolution of New York City’s Subway from 1919 to 2010. 1910s -1930s 1940s -1950s 1960s -1970s 1980s -1990s 2000s Do you like it? Is 190 Bowery the Greatest Real-Estate Coup of All Time? The building at 190 Bowery is a mystery: a graffiti-covered Gilded Age relic, with a beat-up wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened since La Guardia was mayor.
A few years ago, that described a lot of the neighborhood, but with the Bowery Hotel and the New Museum, the Rogan and John Varvatos boutiques, 190 is now an anomaly, not the norm. Why isn’t some developer turning it into luxury condos? Because Jay Maisel, the photographer who bought it 42 years ago for $102,000, still lives there, with his wife, Linda Adam Maisel, and daughter, Amanda. It isn’t a decrepit ruin; 190 Bowery is a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot (depending on how you measure) single-family home.
“I can’t believe it,” says Corcoran’s Robby Browne, an expert in downtown real estate. Even in the annals of “If only I’d bought that Soho loft in 1974” stories, this is extreme. Interpersonal friction aside, Klein convinced Maisel he could raise the money to buy the abandoned bank. That’s another headache. Baghdad’s Buildings Erupt in Riot of Color. Ayman Oghanna for the New York Times When Iraqis started rebuilding, there was no central arbiter of taste.
Bright colors started appearing, and places like the Trade Ministry were done up in pink and orange stripes.