Lockhart Steele

The creators of real estate blogs like Curbed, Brownstoner, and Apartment Therapy hosted their second annual Design Blogfest holiday party at the Henrybuilt furniture store at 79 Wooster Street on Thursday night.

“Last year we promoted the hell out of the party on our blog,” said Lockhart Steele, the creator of Curbed. “We had 400 people in a tiny room like this.”

A couple of dozen family, friends, “hangers-on and groupies” showed up Thursday, Mr. Steele joked.

Five years ago none of the five bloggers attending the party knew each other, but since the medium began to explode, an informal, uncoordinated “blogger ecosystem” has emerged, explained Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, the co-founder of Apartment Therapy. “When we all met [around 2003] starting a blog was like living in a small town; they linked to you, you linked to them, then eventually we said, ‘Hey, let’s get a drink,'" he said.  read more »

Adam Moss stood with a glass in champagne in one corner, Look Book's Amy Larocca was in another, and social princess Ally Hilfiger was sitting on a plush couch catching up with old high school friends ("We took retarded math!" exclaimed one. "Like, we did decimals" she replied). But as for familiar editorial faces, there was only a handful last night at the Bowery Hotel, as Mr. Moss' New York magazine celebrated its newly published Look Magazine with a party for fashion and advertising types.

New York publisher Lawrence Burstein, who went much of the night without a drink, and didn't look to be having much fun, said that his magazine goes without any competition, but also said that he reads Vanity Fair, The Economist and The New York Times Magazine.

Lockhart Steele and Nick Denton were sitting at the bar as the free drinks came to an end around 8:30. Asked about the lack of familiar media faces, a New York spokeswoman said, "Well, we can't invite everyone."

• Budding blog emperor Lockhart Steele (best name in the biz) has started a site for "shopping, stores and the retail scene of New York City." And it's pretty cool so far--especially the sexy Bowery Whole Foods "shelf porn". [Racked]
• Ohio real estate has completely and magnificently crushed Manhattan real estate (at least in one instance): LeBron James' new 35,440-square-foot palace will have "a recording studio, a two-lane bowling alley, a casino, a 26-by 63-foot theater, a sports bar, an aquarium and a barbershop." Take that, Fifth Avenue. [Beacon Journal, via Luxist]
• Sadly, the LA-based studio Ball-Nogues has won MoMa/PS1 's 2007 Young Architects Competition. [The victorious installation "Liquid Sky" is above.] [Architectural Record News]
• The 100-mile voyage from NYC to the pre-Revolution village Kent, Conn., is apparently one of the Great American Drives. Why? It has to do with permeating "self-reliant Yankee spirit." [Travel + Leisure] - Max Abelson
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“Didn’t I see you at another blogger party recently?  read more »

This morning, two men staked out the Gawker offices at 89 Crosby Street, according to Lockhart Steele, managing editor of Gawker media.

A man named Michael, owner of Tungsten Properties, wouldn't give his last name when we called to ask him about it, though he admits he showed up at the door of the company looking for Steele.

Steele said Michael called the Gawker offices and sent him a text message and called him, asking him to take down a post on the real-estate blog Curbed. (In addition to being managing editor of Gawker media, owned by Soho web titan Nick Denton, Steele is a founder of Curbed and a group of related sites devoted to architecture and food.)

The item of contention was a reader's comment, actually, on a post Curbed did about Time Out New York's cover feature, "The 50 Best Blocks in New York."

The reader wrote Curbed an email, purporting to work at Tungsten Properties, located at 13 Crosby, and said of the block of Howard Street between Broadway and Mercer Street (No. 19 on the Time Out list): "Number 19 is a fucking atrocity" and "a blight to Soho."

"This somehow triggered Armageddon for him [Michael]," Steele said.

And when Michael didn't get a response from Steele, he took it one step further and walked down the street to the offices to look for him--asking Denton and other Gawker employees for Steele and generally giving off a creepy, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" kind of vibe.

(Or weirder? One passerby said Michael "said he was furious he couldn't get a hold of anyone at Curbed ... that you can't just say someone hates black jews.")

Steele got the message they were there and called Michael, and asked him to go back to the Tungsten offices and draft a response to the post that was steaming them up.

"We've spoken to just about all of our agents at Tungsten Properties and none of them have written this," a source at Tungsten tells TRE. "This is very unlike us and not only do we love our neighborhood and we're working on investment site around the corner. We're very proud of our neighborhood and we wouldn't write it like that."

Steele refused to take the post down but has updated the contentious item with a statement from Tungsten (here).

- Gillian Reagan

So for a minute there, we kind of thought that blogging had made us famous. We were invited to sit on a mediabistro.com panel tonight with such NYC blogging celebrities as Gawker founder Elizabeth Spiers and Lockhart Steele, of Curbed fame, as well as people from Razor Magazine, and Engadget.com.

Audience members were actually expected to pay $29 to hear us ponder such weighty themes as "Is blogging journalism? Is journalism blogging?"

We suppose we should have expected this email from the mediabistro folks this morning:

"I'm sorry to drag you into this and now report that tonight's panel is going to be cancelled, but, alas, this is the state of affairs. Our enrollment numbers weren't high enough to run it."  read more »

Oh, right. We forgot. Who cares?