Envy Apartment

In the 1930s , every day except Sunday, you could find four dozen or more of Houston’s most cutting- edge artists exhibiting their works. They were part of the Houston Artists Gallery , or HAG, as they referred to themselves. Most were well-off Houston women who assembled, organized and sold their works from two renovated basement apartments , even in the darkest moments of the Great Depression. The gallery found legitimate commercial success from the basement of that still- standing Beaconsfield Apartment Building on Main Street, and artists pushed boundaries , establishing one of the first places in Houston you could sketch and paint from a nude model. Oh, and every artist was white. This was, after all, taking place in Texas, at the time the heart of the segregated South. The combination of Jim Crow and de facto racism meant black Houstonians were barred from HAG, instead relegated to display their work in the “ Colored Carnegie Library ,” a segregated branch of the m...

Why go now? Say you’re off to Fort Lauderdale , and you’ll likely get more than one response along the lines of, “Oh, great! Um… Where is that again?” It isn’t too surprising; this beachside city smack bang in the centre of Florida’s Gold Coast is somewhat overshadowed by its loud, brash next-door neighbour, Miami. If it’s previously gone under the radar though, Fort Lauderdale is about to get a significant boost; British Airways has a new direct route from London Gatwick to Fort Lauderdale that launched in July. FL’s laid-back charm, year-round sun and competitive prices just got more accessible. Get your bearings Forty minutes’ drive north of Miami, Fort Lauderdale is the more demure, less expensive big sister to the blow-out party town. The city sprawls up the coast, with gold sandy beaches and the warm waters of the Atlantic separated from inland FL by a network of intracoastal canals – not for nothing is this city known as the Venice of America. The main strip is Las Olas Bo...

Touring Havana with Legendary Cuban- American Dual Citizen , Attorney Manny Ramos Let’s just say if I had known Manny was a distant cousin of Fidel and Raul’s I might have made it to his daughter Suzie’s wedding in Havana two years ago at the base of the Spanish fort overlooking the Old City. Manny hired 30 vintage American cars and the 102 guests, who had flown in from Belfast and Hong Kong, Paris and New York, San Diego and Charleston, were all chauffered to the La Divina Pastora restaurant for the festivities. Most of Manny’s ex-wives even showed up. He’s had four and is on to his fifth. They still all speak to him, which shows how good a negotiator he may be. Manny Ramos, a founder of the San Diego office of Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith, is the only person I know to hold duel US-Cuban citizenship. At age 8, he was on the last flight out of Havana after the Revolution. His father was the City Treasurer for the Batista dictatorship, his father’s job, to collect the taxes ...

You’re getting the keys to your new apartment, which means it is time to start shopping and decorating your dream home.  Home furnishing could not be easier with Harvey Norman ’s superstores, like the one at Parkway Parade which was recently expanded to two floors.  The retail offering now goes beyond its existing electrical and IT department - there is also a new furniture and bedding section on the ground floor.  As a quick guide to help you navigate the superstore, go to the first floor for homeware, audio visual, cameras, computers, games hub and Photo Centre, where you can print digital photos or customise gifts such as photo coffee mugs or photo frames. Go to the second floor for all your home and kitchen appliance needs.  Let’s start with the living and dining rooms where most of your hosting will take place. You’d want it to look the most presentable and not to mention, effortlessly stylish.  Want your space to look like this?  Photo: Harvey Norman Go crazy at Harvey Norman...

A skyscraper that would be the tallest residential building in California has been proposed for downtown Los Angeles as the neighborhood’s housing boom rolls on. Crescent Heights , a Miami- based developer , submitted a proposal to the city Planning Department this week to build a 70- story apartment building that would stand out in size and design amid the rapidly growing South Park district east of Staples Center. The 810-foot building with 794 units would be the third-tallest in Los Angeles behind the recently opened Wilshire Grand hotel and office tower and the U.S. Bank Tower office building completed in 1989. Last year, Crescent Heights completed Ten Thousand , a 40- story luxury apartment complex on Santa Monica Boulevard on the edge of Century City. It also plans to build two residential high-rises next to the famed Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard. Its latest high-rise plan, for 1045 S. Olive St., calls for eye-catching cutouts two-thirds of the way up the bu...

Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes , 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker . Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago . But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Cur...

Among the residential brokers who take a whack at commercial, there is a steep learning curve . The businesses, everyone will tell you, are extremely different. Success in one rarely translates to success in another, and very few manage the transition. But Sonia Stock, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, is good at taking a whack at things—be it a tennis ball or a client from out of nowhere. Like this one time… In the summer of 2004, Stock (then focused solely on residential) had a dental appointment in Union, N.J. Coming from New York and being a runner, she figured she’d take the train from Penn Station to Rahway (the station closest to her appointment) and sprint the eight miles to her dentist. But when the train arrived late , she knew running wouldn ’t get her there in time. So the experienced world traveler hit the side of the road and stuck out her thumb and was picked up by a woman in a Mercedes. “We got along very well,” Stock said, recalling what would turn out to be one...