Apartment Building

Residents of a Tribeca apartment building are fuming over a new exhibition of photographs in which they star -- and which were taken without their knowledge. Some of the residents are considering legal action, the New York Post reported. The apartment building is luxurious, a tower of glass and steel. The photographs, aimed at its windows from afar, are mysteriously muted and voyeuristic. The subjects of the photos? Outraged. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times L.A. native Arne Svenson's “The Neighbors,” which opened at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea on Saturday and had showed at L.A.'s Western Project earlier this year, feels a little more like Hitchcock's 1954 “Rear Window” than contemporary photography.

Residents of a Tribeca apartment building are fuming over a new exhibition of photographs in which they star -- and which were taken without their knowledge. Some of the residents are considering legal action, the New York Post reported. The apartment building is luxurious, a tower of glass and steel. The photographs, aimed at its windows from afar, are mysteriously muted and voyeuristic. The subjects of the photos? Outraged. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times L.A. native Arne Svenson's “The Neighbors,” which opened at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea on Saturday and had showed at L.A.'s Western Project earlier this year, feels a little more like Hitchcock's 1954 “Rear Window” than contemporary photography.

A rare example of the work of famed Pasadena architects Greene & Greene has been moved, carefully restored and put up for sale at below-market rates to first-time home buyers. Herkimer Arms is the only Pasadena apartment building designed by Charles and Henry Greene, designers of Gamble House and other Craftsman-style masterpieces in the area, according to Timothy Sales of Heritage Housing Partners. Herkimer Arms originally was built as a commercial venture for a local landlord, Parker A. Earle, on what was then Herkimer Street and is now Union Street, Sales said.

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. -- As the probe into the Boston Marathon bombings continued, investigators on Monday removed items from an apartment here where authorities had arrested two foreign nationals on immigration violations.  The two foreign nationals, who are students, and a third student who was not arrested were questioned by FBI agents on Friday about bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, said a law enforcement source. The arrests came on Saturday. The official said investigators know the three were acquainted with Tsarnaev, but don't know if they have any connection to the bombings.

In a case that highlights a "gray area" of city regulations, a Los Angeles landlord was ordered Wednesday to restore utilities and stop eviction proceedings against tenants in a building that he is renovating pending a further court hearing. Superior Court Judge Ricardo A. Torres issued a temporary restraining order against Daniel Lerner of DL Investments, owner of an apartment building at 706 S. Normandie Ave.

Three years ago, landlord John Callaghan was granted city permits to enlarge a South Los Angeles single family home, creating three apartments. But he didn't stop there. He crammed as many as 44 rental rooms into a warren of narrow hallways, tiny, shared bathrooms and communal kitchens. Now, as the holidays approach, dozens of renters who paid as much as $500 per unit are being ordered to vacate the burnt orange three-story complex, in a neighborhood about a mile from the Coliseum.

You might have noticed that the cranes are back.  Real estate editor Nancy Rivera Brooks explains that's because commercial real estate is making a comeback in Southern California as developers break ground for offices, warehouses and stores. But the star of the show is apartment construction, with several new projects on track that will deliver more than 6,000 units this year in Los Angeles County, experts say. There are several reasons for the rebound. Land is relatively cheap these days, and interest rates are near historic lows.

Sutton Place, 136-unit apartment building at 1616 N. Fuller Ave., has been sold for $11.8 million by Spielman-Cohen Builders of Beverly Hills to JMB Realty Corp. of Chicago.

A four-unit apartment building in Tustin suffered $30,000 damage Monday morning when sparks from a chimney ignited the roof and attic, authorities said. Orange County Fire Department Capt. Patrick MacIntosh said 22 firefighters responded to the 10:48 a.m. blaze in the 16600 block of Alliance Avenue. MacIntosh said there were no injuries resulting from the fire, which took 15 minutes to extinguish. Two apartments suffered water damage, while the other two were damaged by smoke, he said.

A candle set a fire in a Mission Viejo apartment building Saturday, causing $250,000 in damage. The fire started about 12:47 p.m. at 26222 Los Viveros. Firefighters extinguished it in 14 minutes, said Dennis Shell, a spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority. One person suffered a cut foot and was going to a hospital for stitches after being treated by paramedics. Four people were displaced.

Moments after a flaming fertilizer plant exploded in the town of West, Texas, two women immediately leaped behind the wheels of their cars. Alicia McCowan, 24, had just completed a shift at the local Sonic drive-in Wednesday night when the blast struck. Her boys, 2 and 4, were with a baby sitter in McCowan's apartment near the fertilizer plant, where an enormous mushroom cloud had materialized. She raced for her car. At Gladys Quilter's home on the other side of the small town, “Criminal Minds” was just coming on the television when the explosion shook her house.

Some of the most extensive damage and loss of life from recent earthquakes in California have occurred in apartment houses where dwellings sit on top of a ground-level parking garage or a storefront. The shaking undermines the bottom floor, causing the buildings to collapse and in some cases to pancake. After years of study and debate, San Francisco on Thursday formally adopted a new law requiring owners to retrofit thousands of these so-called wood-frame soft-story buildings, marking the most sweeping seismic regulations in California in years.

Foes of a planned Wal-Mart grocery store in Chinatown filed a lawsuit Thursday against the city of Los Angeles seeking to bar the chain market from opening. The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance L.A., working with the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, said the city's Community Redevelopment Agency board failed to review the Chinatown project before building permits were awarded for the planned supermarket. The nonprofit groups contend that a redevelopment vote was required and are seeking to have the building permits rescinded.

Two luxury apartment buildings are under construction in West Hollywood aimed at mobile, creative tenants who make a living on the go, often tapping on their laptops in coffee bars and other hangouts. The goal of developers Essex Property Trust and the Monarch Group is to rethink apartments for people who don't work 9-to-5 in a traditional office - a generally younger demographic found in abundance in West Hollywood. Named the Huxley and the Dylan, they are being built on two busy intersections on La Brea Avenue at a cost of more than $150 million.

On a tiny sliver of land in Harbor Gateway, the city is beginning construction on what officials believe will be the smallest park in Los Angeles. At one-fifth of an acre, the pocket park will barely have room for two jungle gyms, some benches and a brick wall. But the enjoyment the park will give children is a secondary concern for officials. They are building the park for a different reason: to force 33 registered sex offenders to move out of a nearby apartment building. State law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school.

Recognizing the high cost of treating homeless patients, Los Angeles County plans to open a health clinic inside a skid row apartment building. Residents of the 102-unit building, scheduled to open this summer on 6th Street, will be carefully chosen based on their health needs and their regular use of the emergency healthcare system. "We're looking at our folks who are at risk of further deterioration and death and who are seen frequently in our expensive emergency rooms," said Marc Tortz, who directs the Housing for Health office for the county's Department of Health Services.

The downtown Los Angeles apartment building know as the Pegasus has been sold to Chicago real estate investment trust Equity Residential for $100 million. It was one of the largest residential property sales ever in the central business district and a sign that downtown's revitalization has caught the attention of national institutional investors, said real estate broker Marc Renard of Cushman & Wakefield. "Equity Residential's purchase is a tremendous endorsement of downtown L.A.," Renard said.

A hotly contested plan to transform the way much of the garbage in Los Angeles is collected won backing Wednesday from the City Council, but the city's trash wars are far from over as opponents immediately threatened both a lawsuit and a ballot initiative. After a raucous hearing, the council voted 11 to 3 in favor of a plan backed by environmentalists and organized labor that would carve the city into 11 new and exclusive hauling franchise areas for waste pickup from commercial properties and large apartment buildings.

The developers of a proposed $31-million hotel near Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles are ready to seek city approval to construct an indoor-outdoor complex in the brick shell of a condemned apartment building. Plans call for gutting the empty three-story building at 1130 S. Hope St. that was erected more than a century ago and is no longer structurally sound. The developers would build inside the perimeter of the old exterior walls, creating a landscaped open-air courtyard leading to a new tower with 44 guest rooms.