This grand Post War home boasts low ceilings, iron bars, and cinderblock!
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Kate Julian has an amusing piece on the insanity that has become the latest development boom:
…condo and co-op conversions keep getting more creative. (The list includes not only warehouses, schools, and churches but also the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible depot, the old New York Cancer Hospital, and an Ex-Lax factory.) Now developers are poised to break residential real estate’s last taboo: the correctional facility.
She gives six tips on selecting and converting a prison to condos. (Number three: “Remove any fixtures that say ‘penal institution.'”)
Maybe you’re just not the prison-living type. Not everyone is. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in the Danvers State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, or another one of our nation’s many mental institutions that are being converted to condominiums (including a rather well known development on Roosevelt Island).
Just another argument that although New York has a finite amount of buildable space, developers will find ways to capitalize on the condo market, even if that means selling you Al Capone’s lavatory.
