New York University will present a plan to add 3.1 acres of publicly accessible open space in Greenwich Village, at Community Board Two's Parks, Recreation and Open Space Committee meeting tonight. The plan is under the university's NYU Core strategy, part of the university’s 20-year, city-wide plan for growth dubbed NYU 2031: NYU in NYC. Rendering Courtesy of NYU The university's plan calls for the addition of 40,000 sq ft of public parkland, totaling more than four acres to be used by the university community and the neighborhood. It also includes landscape improvements to the university-owned streets bordered by West

New York City released details on Monday of its financial pre-development arrangement with Cornell University that allows the university to jumpstart its $2-billion-plus applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island. Under the deal, Cornell’s first deadline is Jan. 17 for payment of a $5 million pre-development deposit and a $5 million security deposit. The university’s obligations include submission of its Uniform Land Use Review Procedure application by Nov. 10, or it must pay a penalty fee of $1,000 a day for the first two months, increasing by an additional $1,000 a day every two months after that. The university must also

Thornton Tomasetti has acquired Portland, Maine-based Fore Solutions, a seven-employee, green building consulting firm, for an undisclosed sum. The acquired firm will become Thornton Tomasettis’ new Building Sustainability practice, which will expand the engineering firm’s footprint in the green building sector. Photo Courtesy of Thornton Tomasetti The acquisition enables Thornton Tomasetti to “address the sustainability requirements for any client and any project of any scale,” says Joseph Burns, Thornton Tomasetti managing principal. About half of new construction nationwide is expected to incorporate some measure of sustainability by 2015, the firm says.“This is a dramatic expansion of our commitment to sustainability

Construction has commenced on a new $350-million Bronx campus for the New York State Office of Mental Health, the Bronx Psychiatric Center, and the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. The new campus will be located at 1500 Waters Place, between Waters Place and the Hutchinson River Parkway. Rendering Courtesy of the Spector Group Designed by New York-based Spector Group, the master plan calls for a campus that will include three outpatient buildings, a central services building, a central utility plant, and an adult and children’s facility located on 50-plus acres. Plans also call for the preservation of

Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed yesterday that the 9/11 museum at the World Trade Center site will not open as scheduled on September 2012 due to financial disputes between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation. The Port Authority has previously claimed that the foundation owes it $300 million in cost overruns. However, the mayor, who is the foundation’s chairman, says that the Port Authority owes the foundation about $140 million. The foundation declined comment for this story, and the Port Authority did not return calls by press time."There's no

Repair work on the George Washington Bridge's 80-year-old suspender ropes is expected to begin in 2013 and last eight to nine years, says the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Earlier this month, the Port Authority approved a $15.5-million investment in planning funds for the work, only a portion of the $1-billion to $1.2-billion needed for the overall GWB planned project. The $15.5 million is earmarked for engineering and consulting services to prepare the suspender rope project for construction, says an agency spokesperson. "This is a big, important project because those ropes haven't ever been replaced," says Thomas

Area architects may not have had to claw their way in but they recently put their design and engineering skills to the test on an animal-rescue mission to design warm, weatherproof, portable and safe shelters for New York City’s stray cats. The designers volunteered their time and resources to design and build the shelters for the second annual Architects for Animals competition, part of the non-profit Mayor’s Alliance for New York City’s Animals. There are more than 10,000 stray cats in New York City, says Co Adaptive Architecture, a Brooklyn-based design firm that supports socially and environmentally beneficial work for

Cornell University and its partner, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, have won New York City's competition to build a $2-billion-plus applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced December 19. The partnership team beat out seven other bidders for the mayor’s Applied Sciences NYC initiative, launched last winter, which aims to build or expand a state-of-the-art engineering and applied sciences campus in the city. Rendering Courtesy of Cornell University The announcement follows Cornell’s news last week of a $350-million donation made to support the project. Cornell did not initially release the source of the donation, however, it recently confirmed

Area architects may not have had to claw their way in but they recently put their design and engineering skills to the test on an animal-rescue mission to design warm, weatherproof, portable and safe shelters for New York City’s stray cats. The designers volunteered their time and resources to design and build the shelters for the second annual Architects for Animals competition, part of the non-profit Mayor’s Alliance for New York City’s Animals. There are more than 10,000 stray cats in New York City, says Co Adaptive Architecture, a Brooklyn-based design firm that supports socially and environmentally beneficial work for

The number of New York City white- and blue-collar men and women in the construction industry fell 3.8% last year to 224,500, according to recently published New York Building Congress analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey. The construction trades accounted for 165,300 of these positions, down 4.7% from 2009. Image: iStock Photo Both union and non-union labor are included in the study. The data includes both union and non-union labor, as well as management positions, architects, engineers, office support and other service workers connected to the construction industry. Because the survey is self-reported by individuals instead