MANHATTAN

There's ice, ice, baby, at Atelier, the 46-story luxury condo at 635 West 42nd Street in Manhattan, which plans to become the first known building in New York City with a rooftop ice-skating rink.

Condo board president Dan Neiditch told the Daily News, “The outside space has always been wasted during the winter. Now, you’ll be able to skate around while overlooking the city.” The building, which has been home to the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Ricky Martin and Brendan Fraser, plans to debut the 3,000-square-foot rink on Nov. 15 and operate it through March each year. Nice, nice, baby.

The St. Tropez Condominium at 340 East 64th Street in Manhattan appears to be a nice place to live. The historic 34-story building — famous in real-estate circles as the first condominium in New York City and probably New York State, completed a year after passage of the state's Condominium Act of 1964 — sits in the tony Lenox Hill neighborhood of the Upper East Side, and boasts a pool, a gym, a garage, a roof deck and a children's playroom among its amenities. According to one survey, its 301 apartments sell for an average of nearly $2 million each.

So why would its condo association hold a homeowners meeting in a vacant commercial space with uneven floors rather than in a nice, safe community room or somewhere similar? Because it just seems that if the board members had only asked themselves that question they could have avoided all the unpleasantness that followed.

Only four people in the United States have been diagnosed with Ebola: three in Dallas and Dr. Craig Spencer, who is currently being treated in New York. The details of his case have sparked concerns among some board members, who are wondering how they ought to proceed should a resident be submitting him or herself to self-quarantine.

When Ellen Kornfeld took over as manager of 200 East 16th Street about ten years ago, "It was a beautiful prewar building but it looked like a slummy kind of thing," she says, noting that the 80-year-old cooperative's facades, hallways, lobbies, boiler, roof and elevators needed serious repair.

What a difference a decade can make. "It's now a beautiful building," Kornfeld, vice president of The Lovett Group, observes. "I've never been in a building where everything has been done, year after year after year after year," she says. "Over ten years, each project dominated and took over our lives for a year or more."

In a court decision that may shine a light of hope on condo boards — which unlike co-op boards have a huge lack of options when apartments go into arrears or foreclosure — a judge ruled last week there are instances where a board may legitimately exercise "self help" and lock a delinquent owner out of his or her apartment. As the New York Law Journal reports, the family in Penaflorida v. The Copely Condominium and Club was not entitled to return to its foreclosed-on apartment in the Upper West Side's Lincoln Square neighborhood since, the judge wrote, "return would be futile and ... would only forestall the inevitable eviction." As well, none of the immediate family members were living there — a niece was staying — and the owners admitted they were holding onto the place solely to drag out a bankruptcy auction.

The foreclosure had occurred in 2009 and the owners by now owed $100,000 in arrears and $200,000 in interest, the Law Journal said. This is an example, the board's attorney, Adam Leitman Bailey, told the paper, of foreclosed condo owners trying to "game the system" and "live for free" in the apartments. Maybe this ruling is a first step into having that stop.

Sept. 21, 2009 — We don't usually write laundry-industry trade stories, but we're invoking the kids-with-cancer exception. That's the one that says that if a company with some connection to your usual beat does something to help kids with cancer, you write about it.

The company in this case is the Hercules Corp. of Hicksville, N.Y., a longtime laundry-room service provider for co-ops, condos and others. Founded 50 years ago this year, Hercules last week donated 12 new industrial-strength front-load washers and nine similarly commercial-grade dryers to the New York City Ronald McDonald House, a major pediatric oncology facility and a provider of low-cost accommodations to the families of gravely ill children being treated in the many nearby hospitals.

We've previously written about the eight-building co-op on West 50th Street that discovered a termite infestation that threatened a building's structural integrity: how it was discovered, what if signified and the co-op's overall actions. Now we look at the nitty-gritty of exactly what steps the co-op board and its professionals took to do the job.

An eight-building, 54-unit complex in Hell's Kitchen that was built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries recently discovered that it had a major, potentially disastrous infestation of termites. The discovery, belated though it was, may have saved one of the five-story walk-ups from structural collapse.

They say a hard rain's gonna come. And so when the next Irene or Sandy inevitably storms into New York, downtown Manhattan buildings want to be prepared, reports DNAInfo.com. This can involve a lot of things, from surveying residents, so that you know who might need special assistance to evacuate, to installing an emergency generator. And some are actively looking at deployable flood barriers. As Habitat has previously written, flood barriers aren't cheap — Liberty Terrace in Battery Park City is thinking about one that could cost $80,000, DNAInfo says. But when the alternative is displaced residents, no light or electricity, expensive restoration of ruined ground-floor and basement levels and dealing with the paperwork of insurance reimbursement and the like, it well might be worth it.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio today announced that his administration has taken enforcement action against two Manhattan building owners who are operating illegal hotels. This follows the release yesterday of a new report by the State Attorney General showing that nearly three-quarters of Airbnb's rentals in New York City are illegal, violating zoning and other state laws.