Taxi Parts

Recently, a store called Taxi Parts, Inc., moved in to the East Village. It had been up on Tenth Avenue for the past 25 years, on the ground floor of an old tenement building near Hudson Yards.



But it had to leave that spot. "The buildings are coming down," a man at Taxi Parts told me the other day.

The buildings sit alone on the corner of 10th and 35th. Earlier this year, Sean at the 116-year-old Veterans Chair Caning shop, across the street, told me that those tenements were still standing thanks to a holdout, a man who lived upstairs. Who knows what happened to him? (Looks like someone tried but failed to prove last year that the building was rent-stabilized.)

And so the Hudson Yards Effect claims more victims -- and takes more space for its bloated glass construction.



Sean told me that developers want "to knock down those buildings and put up the tallest tower in North America."

That would be the gluttonous "Hudson Spire."

Last year, when it was more or less theoretical, the Hudson Spire was rendered at 1,800 feet -- 4 feet taller than One World Trade Center. Now, with the holdout removed, the businesses relocated, and these little tenements soon to be turned to rubble, there will be plenty of room for a colossal monstrosity to rise on the spot.