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Red Scare host Dasha Nekrasova has apparently left downtown and its conservative contrarians for stodgier Midtown East, where she has started showing up to community-board meetings. But rather than, say, advocate for a new tax cut for podcasters or the end of zoning or 24-hour bars, she seems to have adopted the position of any Upper East Side grandma.
“I’m not a NIMBY,” she said. “But for the record, I don’t see why people don’t like NIMBYs.” At a meeting last week of Community Board 6, Nekrasova spoke in opposition to a 35-story skyscraper that has broken ground at 303 East 44th Street. In a Zoom recording of the meeting, she told the audience that she lives next door at the Beaux-Arts, a 1929 complex of mostly studio apartments, all rentals, that was landmarked in the 1980s. After she moved in a little over a year ago, she said the building next door was razed and contractors started drilling the foundation — making her unit unlivably loud during the day. (The podcast, recorded at night at Anna Khachiyan’s apartment, was unaffected). “It’s spoiled of me, sure,” she said. “But this is not about my personal inconvenience.”
Instead, she told the board about her concern for the “imminent safety risk” at her building — a reasonable concern — given how another new tower cracked its neighbors on Fifth Avenue, while a project on Gay Street was so destructive it took down its neighbor. And Nekrasova’s building, the Beaux-Arts, is now in the middle of repairing its façade, work she worried would be undermined. Delivered in her trademark deadpan, it wasn’t immediately clear if she was a hostage reading a script written by her neighbors. Then she seemed to come alive when describing the new tower as a “cartoonishly skinny high-rise” that’s “not appropriate to the character of our neighborhood.”
“I just think these super-skinny high-rises are extremely stupid and doomed, and I don’t think they belong in New York,” she said. “I don’t know who this even appeals to — it’s not Dubai. It’s not Tel Aviv.” She added, “One of the things I like about New York is the architecture. I guess it’s uncool.”