MadParkNews.com, covering New York City's Madison Square Park & Flatiron

According to DNAInfo and other sources, plans for the Foundling Elementary School seems to be moving forward in the Flatiron at 590 6th Avenue (at 17th Street). This would be the first public elementary school in Community District 5 (our district). It would be called PS 340 according to the article, and would serve approximately 500 students from pre-kindergarten to 6th Grade.

The school would be on 6 floors, and have specialized classrooms, a library, a cafeteria, a lecture hall and performance stage, a professional dance studio, a multi-purpose room, a rooftop playground, and an outdoor terrace for younger kids with rubberized floors and jungle gyms.

It is unclear if this will be a ‘zoned’ or ‘choice’ school, but considering there are no public elementary schools in district 5, it looks like it should be a zoned school, but this is to be determined. Completion is slated to be 2014.

The leaves are mostly still green (and are on the trees) but yet we had our first snow of the season today in New York City and over Madison Square Park. It’s even cold enough to stick. Real-time photo below.

Starting November 1st, New York City’s ‘Taxi of Tomorrow’ will be on display across from the flatiron building near Madison Square Park. The contract was awarded to Nissan and will apparently be used for all NYC taxis starting in late 2014. Older models could remain in service but would eventually be replaced by this one. Some of the key features:

• Panoramic sunroof throughout the whole back seat
• Passenger charging stations – one outlet and two USB ports
• Passenger airbags
• Sliding doors with lights (no more opening doors into bikers)
• Anti-bacterial, non-stick seats
• High fuel efficiency
• Ability to be manufactured with fully electric power
• Independent passenger climate controls with filtered air

Here is a video of the taxi.

You may recall that our community board for the area (CB5) voted to ban both the Big Apple BBQ and the Madison Square Market/Eats events. But they instead set up a task force to better understand the impact of these events on Madison Square park and the neighborhood before taking such a drastic measure.

Be heard- Take the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MadisonSquarePark

For those of you who saw smoke over Madison Square Park on Saturday coming from the top of the building at 11 Madison Avenue, the city says it was a transformer fire that they were able to get out pretty quickly.

Nobody was reported injured and the cause of the fire was not released.

The Madison Square Park Conservancy found this link, but I have to re-post it. It’s basically time-lapse video of Hurricane Irene from Friday August 26th at 11pm to Monday August 29th at 7pm looking East to Madison Square Park from 24th Street. See the whole storm in 4 minutes!

With the eye of the hurricane already gone, the Madison Square Park area seems in reasonable shape post storm. There is still light rain and a light light wind, but no flooding of note or other damage that I can see. If anyone has seen anything, send it in and I will update the post. [...]