After renovating their two-story apartment, Barrie Roman and Henry Richardson knew exactly where to put the biggest artwork from their collection. curbed.com/article/cooper-sq…

Birders remember entering the Ramble in Central Park on sunny days and seeing Elise Bainbridge Hill, a 63-year-old unhoused woman, working with watercolors and a coffee-cup-lid palette. “She was there at all hours,” Sandra Paci, a birder who used to work in art galleries, tells me. In recent years, Hill at times slept in a gazebo amid the overgrown woods. She spent her days feeding the birds and making art, creating striking paintings of animals and night skies, pieces of the city that few others really saw. “When you look at the works, the quality was extremely high,” Paci says. “She had a real feeling for nature.” On Sunday, September 27, Hill, also known as Francis Lee Rogers — and several other names, according to those who knew her — was found dead, violently killed in a case that is still being investigated for motive. Her death brought an outpouring of grief. “She wasn’t a gimmick,” says Karen Gehres, who made a documentary about Hill. “She was a true artist. That was her life.” Read more about the life of the painter in Central Park: curbed.visitlink.me/u0wivg

The software engineer Joshua Wolk has crunched MTA data and believes that the L train stop at Third Avenue and 14th Street is by far the least efficient in the system. We talked to him about his proposal to shut it down. curbed.com/article/nyc-subwa…

Elise Bainbridge Hill, a 63-year-old unhoused woman, spent her days feeding the birds and ­making art, creating striking paintings of animals and night skies, pieces of the city that few others really saw. curbed.com/article/artist-el…

Penny Hardy’s ‘Pandemic Architecture,’ out this month from Blurring Books, collects her photographs from the first years of the New York City dining shed and its weird, shaggy amateur architecture. curbed.com/article/pandemic-…

The best NYC apartment listings available for rent this week in neighborhoods including Astoria, Sunnyside, Ridgewood, Ditmars Steinway, Rockaway Park, Maspeth, and Elmhurst. Plus a great house to buy in Boerum Hill. curbed.com/article/best-nyc-…

Every December 31, hundreds of thousands of people gather for hours in the cold to stare at One Times Square and wait for a glittering ball to slide down its flagpole. On every other day of the year, tens of thousands more who work in the neighborhood’s theaters and hotels, at the New York ‘Times,’ Reuters, Olive Garden, or any of the other area’s many employers, walk back and forth in front of the 25-story tower. Yet for much of the last century, the structure marking Manhattan’s most celebrated pinch point at the southern edge of Times Square has lurked, vacant and invisible, behind a patchwork of brilliant screens, writes architecture critic Justin Davidson. Now, finally, Jamestown, which has owned it for nearly three decades, has hit on a strategy for making the square footage earn its keep: Create an indoor simulacrum of the outdoor simulacrum that is Times Square. For decades, One Times Square has suffered from a basic problem: Its cramped triangular floorplates function poorly as office space — by the time you’ve packed in the requisite elevators, stairways, air ducts, plumbing, and insulation, you’re left with scant room to maneuver. Billboards attached to the exterior generate plenty of revenue and add to the square’s famous radiance, but they keep the interiors cryptlike. And so Jamestown has filled it with play spaces rather than workspaces. Read Davidson's review of the reimagined One Times Square: curbed.visitlink.me/D770jA

Andrew Cuomo has purchased a consolation mansion. After departing the governorship ignominiously, then losing last year’s mayoral race to Zohran Mamdani, the former governor reportedly bought a $9.6 million four-acre compound in Remsenburg on Long Island’s South Shore in June. (Politico, which first reported the purchase, noted that he paid cash for the property through an LLC.) It’s quite the spread. The main house, a 19th-century hunting lodge, is today a palatial nine-bedroom, nine-and-a-half bath, according to the listing. There’s a library and sunroom with wood-burning fireplaces and a detached five-car garage with hydraulic lifts Cuomo can fill with his collection of muscle cars. Out back, there’s a pool house and a sauna, a gym, a saltwater pool, and 234 feet of waterfront with docks, a beach, and a boathouse. Also, inexplicably, there’s “an old-fashioned windmill.” Read more: curbed.visitlink.me/A5tQhr

One Times Square, the largely vacant ball-drop tower covered in billboards, has filled its floors with candy, immersive screen experiences, and wedding chapels. curbed.com/article/one-times…

In 2001, the architecture critic and scholar Robin Middleton bought a former tile factory on East 13th Street and remodeled it to match his unconventional life. There were no bedrooms, just sleeping alcoves set into the walls. A kitchen, without cabinets, had only the “minimum equipment necessary for making food,” and everyone ate sitting on floor pillows, sometimes without utensils. It was the second building Middleton had owned and occupied in New York this way, the first one being a former fish-packing plant in Tribeca. In both places, his extensive library of 18th- and 19th-century architecture books were housed in a glass box set off from the rest of the space on an upper floor, which was devoted to living and sleeping, with lower floors designed as art studios. It was a communal existence, shared with two longtime friends, the artists Ruth Lakofski and Billy Walton. In the East Village house, Lakofski had a ground-floor studio painted jet black from floor to ceiling, inspired by Virgil’s Cave of the Sibyl, a passageway to Hades. Upstairs, at the rear, was a reprieve from the darkness: a solarium paneled in reclaimed wood that Middleton jokingly named “The Palm Court.” He might entertain guests there before retreating to the space where he felt at peace, a two-story glass-walled library, painted teal and inspired by the Maison de Verre, which he had visited as an expat in 1950s Paris. Read more from Adriane Quinlan on how Middleton’s communal living experiment came to life: curbed.visitlink.me/ia0AHZ

The disgraced former governor and failed mayoral candidate paid all cash for the Remsenburg property. curbed.com/article/andrew-cu…

Is Herald Square becoming Times Square? A plan for new amusements hints at making it more of a tourist draw, much like its neighbor just up Broadway. curbed.com/article/herald-sq…

After running a large studio operation, designer Fernando Mastrangelo has scaled down and returned to the studio to cast a new collection of furniture made of rare-earth minerals that are often used in tech supply chains and military defense. curbed.com/article/furniture…

The architectural historian Robin Middleton refused to live conventionally. He lived in an East Village factory with a two-story library, where there wasn’t a kitchen or bedroom. curbed.com/article/architect…

Is Bravo trying to make the South Street Seaport happen? We look into why the cameras on shows like ‘Next Gen NYC’ seem to circle the same downtown blocks. curbed.com/article/bravos-ne…

Anna Weyant is sell her Upper East Side co-op on Fifth Avenue for $3.5 million. The painter, who previously dated Larry Gagosian, has attracted attention for her swift rise in the art field and her relationship with the famous gallerist. curbed.com/article/anna-weya…

Once a racquetball court, the climbing gym at the Manhattan Plaza Health Club opened in 1992, when indoor climbing was still a fringe pursuit. The plaza itself is a postwar Hell’s Kitchen complex created to provide subsidized housing for performing artists (notable residents have included Al Pacino, Alicia Keys, Timothée Chalamet, and Colman Domingo). The fitness center there — and the pool and the climbing gym — is open to nonresidents for a fee, which means Sarah Rose Siskind occasionally finds herself sharing a swim lane with a Tony-nominated septuagenarian or runs into comedian Lewis Black at the weekly farmers’ market outside. “The climbing gym, meanwhile, feels unhurried and ad hoc, a relic of another time,” writes Siskind. Rachel Michelson, a UX designer who has been a staffer at MPHC since 2023, attributes the tight quarters to bringing people together. She says headphones are unusual here; you will see someone working on the same route and start talking, or a stranger on the mat will cheer you on from below. “It’s kind of impossible to not make friends,” she says. With its off-kilter routes, cramped space, and ad-hoc culture, MPHC fostered a community that’s mourning the end of something that’s increasingly hard to find. Read more: curbed.visitlink.me/IGs8OG

Manhattan Plaza’s climbing gym, the city’s oldest and also cheapest, may soon be closing. With its off-kilter routes, cramped space, and ad hoc culture, it’s fostered a community that’s mourning the end of something that’s increasingly hard to find. curbed.com/article/rock-clim…

“We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day,” Linda Evangelista infamously told ‘Vogue’ in 1990. It was a spicy claim, but not a total shocker: The Canadian-born supermodel — along with her fellow “Trinity” members Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington — was a constant presence on runways and magazine covers, and the reason countless women asked their hairdressers for pixie cuts. In recent months, as she tried to sell her Chelsea penthouse loft of more than two decades, however, Evangelista faced a set of supply-and-demand forces that were tilted a little less in her favor. After putting the four-bedroom, two-bathroom in the Spears Building on the market for nearly $9.5 million back in 2024, she came down to just shy of $8 million in January. This month, according to property records, she finally sold the apartment for $6.75 million, a nearly 30 percent cut. Of course, that still left her with a huge upside. Evangelista had lived in the 4,000-square-foot loft in the converted furniture warehouse since 2001, when she reportedly paid $2.4 million — or about 140 days of waking up in 1990 — and then fitted it out in the industrial style of the day. The floor is polished concrete, with exposed brick and butcher-block countertops in the pass-through kitchen. A trio of skylights are carved into the 13-foot ceilings, including one in the cavernous great room with its working fireplace. The primary bedroom overlooks the High Line, with an en-suite bathroom that has a separate soaking tub and glass shower stall. As for the 17 (give or take) closets, including the six floor-to-ceiling ones in the (oddly dark) dressing area — well, a model has a lot of clothes. Read more from Matthew Sedacca: curbed.visitlink.me/ov_RGm

Here are some apartments to buy in New York City for under $1 million, including options in Brooklyn Heights, the West Village, and the Upper West Side. curbed.com/article/nyc-apart…