Articles from the June 29th Print Edition

Amid all the snickering about the Plaza’s conversion into mega-haute condominiums, all the guessing about what will happen to its re-listed apartments (which, The Times said this weekend, are asking more than $250 million in all) and all the gasping about Russian billionaire Andrei Vavilov’s suit over his penthouse triplex, awfully little attention has been paid to a third-floor drama that may be the most lip-smacking of all.

There, according to two sources, the troubled...

It was a disappointing spring at City Ballet. Part of the problem was no one’s fault: Two of the company’s crucial dancers were out for almost the entire time. The absence of Ashley Bouder, the strongest and most brilliant of the younger women, and of the always interesting Sara Mearns meant that the rest of the ballerina contingent was stretched beyond its capacities. Nor could the entire blame be laid to uneven programming—the revival...

Public Enemies
Running time 143 minutes
Written by Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann and Ann Biderman
Directed by Michael Mann
Starring  Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Channing Tatum, Stephen Graham, Giovanni Ribisi, Billy Crudup

America's enduring obsession with the folk-hero outlaws and gangsters of the 1930s is about to get ratcheted up a few notches. Ace director Michael Mann’s  Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp as an unlikely but undeniably mesmerizing John Dillinger, opens on July...

While the State Senate dithers, the State Assembly passes, and among the bits of legislation approved in the lower house in recent days was a bill that would extend mayoral control over the city’s public schools. Credit Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver of the Lower East Side for recognizing the importance of this measure and not pandering to critics who apparently pine for a return to the bad old days of Fortress Education at 110...

Designer Zac Posen was peeking out from under a red-carnation-adorned brown fedora, trying to pick out his favorite item in the new design boutique Haus Interior on Elizabeth Street at an opening party on Monday, June 22. “It’s hard to see anything with so many people!” he said.

The store is the brainchild of Nina Freudenberger, 29, an alumna of the design firm Costas Kondylis and Partners (responsible for outfitting Lindsey Lohan’s luxury high-rise...

My Sister’s Keeper
Running time 109 minutes
Written by Jeremy Leven and Nick Cassavetes
Directed by Nick Cassavetes
Starring Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric, Abigail Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Sofia Vassilieva

A less talented director than the sensitive, polished and mature master craftsman Nick Cassavetes might fail to lift My Sister’s Keeper above the level of suicidal depression. It’s about  a 14-year-old girl dying of cancer, but don’t let the subject matter deter you from experiencing a...

The Claremont Preparatory high school is negotiating for about 200,000 square feet at the Cunard Lines Building at 25 Broadway, according to sources familiar with negotiations. If inked, it would be one of 2009’s biggest commercial leases.

Claremont, one of educational firm MetSchool’s handful of for-profit private academies in New York City, earlier this year was on the verge of signing a lease at the Sapir Organization’s chandelier-bedecked 100 Church Street. Sources say there was...

Thomas Frank is reviving The Baffler, the beloved left-wing magazine of business and culture he started in Chicago in 1988. The Baffler, which helped launch the careers of such journalists and editors as Chris Lehmann, Rick Perlstein, James Surowiecki, Tom Vanderbilt and Matt Weiland, was last published in the spring of 2007; before that, it had been lying dormant since 2003.

Now, with a new publisher in place named Conor O’Neil—a relative youngster who in...

Deutsche Bank blindsided real estate investors George Comfort & Sons and RCG Longview on Monday, June 22, when they learned—just hours before the Wall Street Journal ran an item leaked by Deutsche through their broker Eastdil Secured—that the bank was backing out of its deal to sell a controlling interest in Harry Macklowe’s old Worldwide Plaza. Sources involved said even some Deutsche players were taken aback.

George Comfort and his partners had already made a...

Last week, the Plaza announced a pair of special packages in honor of their most famous fictional resident: Kay Thompson’s Eloise.

The Live Like Eloise Slumber Party Package accommodates six guests and includes a suite, a copy of The Eloise Guide to Life, Eloise DVDs, Eloise postcards, Eloise snacks, rollaway beds, and a trophy party for elementary schoolers, or, the hotel hopes, a “girls night” for adult women. It starts at $3,595.

The regular Live Like...

According to sources at HarperCollins, the author Sheila Weller has decided not to write a planned biography of Michelle Obama for the Collins division.

Ms. Weller, a contributing editor at Glamour and author of six other books (including one about the marriage of O. J. Simpson and Nicole Brown and a best seller called Girls Like Us, a three-way biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon) was able to back out of the...

You don’t often read the names of David Paterson and Harry Truman in the same sentence, and for good reason. New York’s governor has developed a reputation as something of a passive, low-key figure since taking the reins in Albany; the man from Independence, Mo., was known for his feisty, in-your-face style of populist politics.

But the crisis in the State Senate apparently has inspired Mr. Paterson to put aside political niceties...

In late 2006, the Ecco Press imprint of HarperCollins acquired a novelization of the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, by McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, conceived as a companion piece to the forthcoming Wild Things movie that Mr. Eggers co-wrote with Spike Jonze. The deal was announced a year later, with much fanfare, at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Talking about the project, Mr. Eggers seemed a little squeamish about having...

The real estate gods look kindly on Mark Feinstein, partner at defense litigation firm Aaronson, Rappaport, Feinstein and Deutsch.

It was back in the early 1990s, in the days when the Manhattan office market had too much product and too few tenants (sound familiar?), that his firm signed a lease for 36,000 square feet at RFR Realty’s 757 Third Avenue. The firm now pays about $35 a square foot for one-and-a-quarter floors of contiguous space...

Last fall, Mark Turner, the most influential jazz tenor saxophonist since John Coltrane, nearly sliced off two of his fingers while cutting firewood at his home in Flatbush.
It seemed as if fate couldn’t have been crueler to Mr. Turner. He has long been celebrated by the jazz cognoscenti as a unique talent. But he doesn’t suffer from overexposure. The 42-year-old jazz musician hasn’t made a record under his own name since the...

Last month, Michael Thomas went to see his doctor for a routine checkup. At the end, he joked that the biggest problem he was having these days was finding the damn thing.

“It’s actually a real problem,” he explained, on a recent afternoon at his loft in Dumbo.

He had made himself comfortable in a leather chair, one leg flopped over an armrest, the other pushed up against his thigh. He was wearing...

On the one hand, if a Fifth Avenue apartment couldn’t sell six years ago when it was asking $15 million, and then suffered a flood that damaged walls, ceilings, floors and furnishings, it’s slightly disconcerting that the place would hit the market again for $25 million.

But the seventh-floor condo at 817 Fifth Avenue is no mere apartment. It is a Steve Wynn experience.

“I will tell you,” said Roger Erickson, the casino magnate’s broker, “it...

Location: You once complained that 2002, when you sold $62 million of real estate, was ‘a relatively slow year.’ How is 2009 comparing?

Mr. Erickson: Well, last year was about $200 million. This year, sales for me have only just started significantly. … Unfortunately I’m terribly optimistic by nature.

What’s your goal? You can’t do $200 million again.

When Paramount Pictures decided to remake Footloose, the 1984 teen romance that made a young, lanky actor named Kevin Bacon famous, the studio looked to Zac Efron of the High School Musical trilogy. He could sing. He could dance. And most importantly, he could summon the teenage girls to theaters with one strategic toss of his swoopy hair.

But then Mr. Efron abruptly ditched the picture. He didn’t want to be typecast as the...

It seems to me that the First Couple—of date-night fame—represent great news for theater lovers. They not only enjoy going to the theater; they do it together.

Were the Bushes ever theatergoers? Or the Clintons? Once in a blue moon, when absolutely necessary. True, Bill Clinton is known to recite entire chunks of Macbeth by heart (“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me …”). I actually saw him...

James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903) is the poison-tipped flower in the hothouse of American art. A publicity crazed poseur fired by self-fictions and “art-for-art’s-sake” ambition, he was naturally a dandy, a serial dater of actresses and artist’s models. But he was also a mama’s boy who fell out with everyone who knew him, except his mother, to whom he was devoted and whose noble Presbyterian brow Whistler painted in one very famous picture.

Whistler’s personality...

On the morning of Monday, June 22, television producers across the city grappled with a difficult question—how much of Neda’s death do we show on TV?

Over the weekend, Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old Iranian woman, was shot and killed in the streets of Tehran, nearby clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators. Her tragic final moments were captured on a cell phone video and soon disseminated rapidly across the Internet, transforming the young woman into...

“Everybody said I was crazy,” said Young Woo, 56, the developer in contract to buy AIG’s two Lower Manhattan skyscrapers. “But I said no, New York has a lot of originality, and we have to create.”

He had just presented an animated video about the SkyGarage. In the video, an elevator carries a car up to a personal garage adjacent to the driver’s condo. Mr. Woo’s architectural partners said that it would be impossible, according...