BIG HOUSES.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 29-MAY-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

These have been wild years for New York real estate, and with building limited, as ever, to either up or over, instead of out, condo and co-op conversions keep getting more creative. (The list includes not only warehouses, schools, and churches but also the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible depot, the old New York Cancer Hospital, and an Ex-Lax factory.) Now developers are poised to break residential real estate's last taboo: the correctional facility. As Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said this spring, referring to the site of the vacant House of Detention in Boerum Hill, "It would...

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