GREENWICH VILLAGE

A 40-year fixture of Greenwich Village, the gay bar and lately drag mecca Boots & Saddle, is finding both neighborhood and condo-board opposition to a proposed move to a new home at 47 Seventh Avenue South. At a recent Community Board 2 meeting, reports DNAInfo.com, a half-dozen local residents said the bar would bring noise and disruption to what one called "our enclave." And representatives of the building's condo board said its bylaws prohibit a bar with live entertainment in the ground-floor space, a one-story extension of the building on a commercial strip of Seventh Avenue South. It previously housed the restaurant Soy and Sake (image below).

CB2's State Liquor Authority committee unanimously rejected the bar's application to transfer its liquor license to the new spot, and while the vote is only advisory, the Authority takes Community Board decisions seriously. One resident asked CB2, "What about the kids walking by?" To which one can only suggest, "First, what are little kids doing wandering around late at night? And second, what's wrong with kids seeing drag performers? This isn't the suburbs — it's New York City. Greenwich Village." Or at least it used to be.

"Hell is other people," said Jean-Paul Sarte. And if he'd lived at 166 Perry Street, that other person would be Richard Easton — a condo tenant who, according to a lawsuit by unit-owner Elena Teranina, has been engaged in activities "of such a nature that there is no telling when he might decide to verbally or physically attack someone, or to engage in vile or inappropriate conduct." As she and at least one neighbor told the New York Daily News, this includes tossing knives at deliverypersons, ordering the staff to call him "Prince," walking through the lobby in his underwear and demanding oral sex from a female building employee. So is this the case of some poor soul with serious mental problems, who needs help and not persecution? Given the fact that Easton — who claims it's all a merry mixup — is a high-profile matchmaker who's appeared on The Real Housewives of New York, we're going to go out on a limb and say probably not.

Water can sneak into a building from anywhere. At 40-50 East 10th Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, it was joints in the front sidewalk allowing water to flow in and cause problems."We were worried about flooding damage and erosion, and water-main problems that caused flooding in our building,’ says co-op board president Larry Hohlt. So how did the 114-unit building handle it?

Call it the battle over the bikes. New York City's year-old Citi Bike bicycle-sharing program may be suffering many well-publicized problems with its docking stations, but now some buildings are challenging its very existence. Four co-op and condo boards have taken legal action to get the fixtures removed or modified.

May the city install bike-share terminals in front of your building? That was the issue discussed in Cambridge Owners Corp. v. New York City Department of Transportation.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) decided to install a bike-share station in front of The Cambridge, a roughly 137-apartment co-op at 175 West 13th Street in Manhattan. The Citi Bike program consists of 6,000 bicycles docked in more than 300 self-service share stations around the city. Members of the public can rent the bikes from, and return them to, any station in the system, which is open around the clock.

New York's infamous 1950s white-brick buildings have long been considered white elephants — and at the storied Greenwich Village co-op 2 Fifth Avenue, a $30.7 million assessment to replace such aged and dangerous bricks came out to an elephantine six-figure payment per shareholder. In a four-year odyssey chronicled by The New York Times, old board-members got booted out, new ones came in, building management got replaced and a three-tier assessment plan was created to ensure that all owners could pay and not default. And despite recriminations early on, the building's community wound up bonding strongly. Find out how the residents and board members pulled it off — and what gold cuff links shaped like hardhats have to do with it. 

Disaster never strikes at a convenient time, but the timing of this one was particularly bad.

Butterfield House, a 100-unit co-op in Greenwich Village, had just begun an $8 million capital improvement campaign that will eventually replace all windows and heating and air-conditioning units, redo the hallways, install a backup generator on the roof and increase the electric capacity available to each apartment. But when a City water main broke on Jan. 15, these upgrades and several major apartment renovations were halted. Fortunately, the inconveniences were eased because the building made it a point to keep residents in the loop about the situation — and to follow the playbook it had created for just such an occasion.

I moved to my building, a Greenwich Village co-op at 45 West 10th Street, in the late 1970s. I was drawn to the location. I knew it would be a nice place to live — but it turned out to be a very nice place to live. I never thought about it before, but our board contains six professionals. We have a retired attorney, a professor, a financial executive, a photographer and a real estate executive, and I'm in the textile business. It gives us a professional air; everybody contributes. It also helps that I run my own company — that means I bring a business sense to the board. We don't always agree at first, but we end up agreeing in the end. It's a great co-op board.

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, a co-op board didn't want to let a diabetic senior with Parkinson's disease have air conditioners since, really, what's more important? Your life and health or your building's aesthetic profile? Elsewhere, a hedge-fund giant wants what he wants at his condo's pool — but can he fight the condo's moms and win? In Tribeca a gym is out, in Greenwich Village Philip Seymour Hoffman's last apartment is on sale, and in NoMad — yes, NoMad, that's a thing — there's a high-tech condo called Huys, pronounced "house." Plus, here's what'll happen at your own apartment huys if workers go on strike.

Around 2 o'clock one dead-of-winter January morning, the telephone rang on Asher Bernstein's bedside table. The co-op board president of the 100-unit Butterfield House in Greenwich Village picked up the receiver and found himself listening to the agitated voice of his building's superintendent.

Bill Bissell said, "Asher, there's a flood! You better go take a look at 13th Street — it looks like the Hoover Dam opened up!"