[northbay]

in general, i agree with plinko.

not to take this thread too off topic but here's a article in the nyt from today that touches on this subject:

Still Standing in the Way of Skyscrapers

By CARA BUCKLEY
Published: October 8, 2010

A lonely little red building sits on a short block a stone’s throw away from Lincoln Center. Five stories tall, crisscrossed by fire escapes, it looks as if it escaped from the Lower East Side. Skyscraping apartment towers loom over it like bullies ganging up on an old lady. A parking garage and a flyspeck of green space surround it like a moat.

Billy Cobin, who has lived in the building for 39 years, says it serves as a rare reminder of the neighborhood’s working-class past.

Theresa Pinelli, 29, a pastry chef and one of the newest tenants in the building’s 26 apartments, said she agonized before moving in because it looked so out of place. “It’s just so random — you’re walking along and it comes up out of nowhere,” she said, “this building in the middle of nowhere, yet in the middle of everything.”

The story behind 33 West 63rd Street, long a puzzle to passers-by and audiences leaving the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas across the street, is in danger of being lost to time. Built in the 1890s, the tenement is one of the many dozens of architectural holdouts dotting the city -- among them, the Smith & Wollensky building at Third Avenue and East 49th Street, and the small corner holdout, since demolished and rebuilt, that forced Macy’s to cut a notch out of its flagship at Herald Square. It is unclear, though, whether the West 63rd site still exists out of stubbornness, foolishness, or both.

Less than a handful of longtime tenants remember the building’s previous owner, the colorful and curmudgeonly Col. Jehiel R. Elyachar, and his fateful stand more than four decades ago against a powerful real estate family that wanted to tear the place down.

....

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/ny...ournal.html?hp