Extell Development Company

It’s been 23 years since the Upper West Side first gasped at Donald Trump’s plans for a series of soaring towers that would contain 7,600 apartments and a 150-story headquarters for NBC on the 75-acre Penn Central rail yards.

The battle that followed was an epic one—Mr. Trump this week recalled it as a “war to the death”—with politicians making and breaking careers on the issue. The project, first dubbed Television City, then Trump City, and ultimately Riverside South, underwent a series of permutations and eventually was scaled back and approved, gradually rising in an undulating row of apartment towers just east of the West Side Highway.  read more »

Plans for a soaring new hotel across from an expanded Javits Center have now gone the way of, well, an expanded Javits Center.

With expansion plans scaled back months ago, the Paterson administration earlier in June refunded the deposits of the three bidders vying to build the Javits Hotel, a tower planned to hold at least 1,200 rooms along 11th Avenue at 35th Street. Plans for the site and hotel are now unclear, and the state would need to undergo the lengthy process of a new environmental review, then a new request for proposals, before awarding the job to any developer.  read more »

Extell Development, which is planning a 40-story tower in the Diamond District, has just acquired a 55,000-square-foot building on the same block for $50 million, according to city documents posted today.  read more »

As the Moondance Diner moves westward, there are big plans in store for its former address.

According to city records, 23 Grand Street, the address where Moondance sat, along with 27 Grand Street and 74 Sixth Avenue were part of a package that closed recently for about $33.5 million.  read more »

After years in which one architect--Costas Kondylis--has dominated the 13-block-long Riverside South development, the new kid in town, Gary Barnett (Extell Development), has commissioned the Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc to design the next three buildings, according to George Arzt, a spokesman for the developer.

Monsieur de Portzamparc's Web site says the program consists of three buildings with 3.2 million square feet of office, hotel and residential space between 59th Street and 61st Street. Well, that's the proposal. Mr. Arzt says a rezoning proposal will go to the Department of City Planning in a few weeks--and it doesn't sound like it will be the easiest rezoning.

According to figures from the Coalition for a Livable West Side, that amount would represent about 35 percent more built space than that envisioned under the original Riverside South master plan.

- Matthew Schuerman

This just in, Marc Shaw will be taking over as Executive Vice President for Strategic Planning at Extell Development Company.

His statement:

"I was honored to serve Mayor Bloomberg and appreciate his giving me the opportunity to serve the citizens of my hometown," said Shaw. "After 25 years in public service, I'm now looking forward to a new challenge with the Extell Development Company."

—Nicole Brydson

City Realty has the goods on 135 West Fourth Street, the site of the former Washington Square Methodist Church currently being converted to eight condominiums by FLAnk Architects.

Demolition is underway in the interior of the 1860 Romanesque Revival church designed by Charles Hadden. According to City Realty, the two-bedroom and three-bedroom duplex units will fetch $2.3 million to $6 million, and the building's lobby will have 50-foot hight ceilings and the church's old stained-glass windows.

The building's name will be changed to "Novare," which means "to be reborn" in Latin. Who says it's a dead language?

(Previously reported here.) City Realty (Second item; see also the first item about rezoning parts of the Upper West Side above 96th Street. Community Board 7's West 96th-110th Street planning task force is looking at possibilities in response to Extell Development's two apartment buildings going up at Broadway and 99th and 100th streets.)  read more »

-Matthew Grace

The MTA board will vote Wednesday on whether to sell air rights over one of its rail yards in Brooklyn to Forest City Ratner for its Atlantic Yards project. A memo to board members makes it official: the MTA managed to wheedle $100 million out of the developer. That's twice what Forest City originally wanted to part with, though still lower than the other bidder, Extell Development, was offering and what the appraiser thought the parcel was worth.

We are taking bets from anybody who thinks the board will say no.  read more »

--Matthew Schuerman

The Times reports that Forest City Ratner has doubled its offer for the MTA rail yard on which it wants to build part of its Atlantic Yards complex in Brooklyn--basketball arena, offices, retail and housing. The story cites unnamed transportation officials who doubted whether Ratner's rival, Extell Development Company, included a new rail yard as part of its bid. The funny thing is that Extell's July 6 bid clearly did. Though the company would not spend as much as Forest City, Extell President Gary Barnett wrote at the time that his proposal "fully respects" the requirements "concerning MTA and LIRR transportation uses, which must be maintained during construction and permanently thereafter." As we reported before, the bid estimates that up to $42 million would be needed for relocating the tracks.

The MTA board could vote as early as next Tuesday.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

This morning after an M.T.A. committee meeting, supporters of Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project took every opportunity to push the class-war angle.

A local group called BUILD, created a year ago to support the Ratner project, sent at least one person to the meeting, and The Real Estate asked him whether more supporters would be out in force on Wednesday.

He didn't want to raise expectations too high.

"Our members are working people," he said. "Some on the opposition have independent sources of income--you know, trust funds and such."

BUILD members might not have lots of money, but the group does have a public relations agency working for them now.

The MTA real-estate committee didn't discuss the two bids (the other comes from Extell Development Co.) this morning but the full board could nonetheless vote on them at its Wednesday meeting.  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

This is getting interesting. The MTA released the bids for the Vanderbilt Yard (a.k.a. Atlantic Yards) over in Brooklyn and it looks like the maverick Extell Development Co., run by Gary Barnett, outbid the Mayor's favored player, Forest City Ratner. Extell is offering $150 million in cash, compared to $50 million offered by Forest City.

Forest City is using the number $329.4 million, though, in a press release, which includes money for environmental clean-up, construction of a new train yard to which the MTA would move its operations, and the sales tax that the development will bring to the MTA over the long haul. (A portion of your sales tax goes to the transit authority, but Ratner may be exempted from sales tax on construction materials, per a deal with the city and state reached in February.)

Forest City would also use $200 million in public subsidies for its sprawling residential-commercial-retail-basketball complex, about half of which would be used for the blocks surrounding the rail yard, versus $150 million for Extell's more modest residential and retail set-up, which would be confined to the area over the yard itself.

Both bids low-ball the official MTA appraisal of the property, also released today, which comes in at $214.5 million, which takes into the account the $56 million or so the appraiser expects would have to be spent to make that rail yard, which is really just a trench in the ground right now, worthy of development.

"We submit this proposal with full awareness that the city of New York has conditionally, and to our mind, prematurely, designated another developer for construction of a massive arena on a portion of this site," Barnett wrote in his cover letter to the MTA.

Forest City's bid opens with quotes from Pataki, Bloomberg, and Marty Markowitz, and letters from Chuck Schumer and many others.  read more »

More on this coming...

- Matthew Schuerman

UPDATE: Full subway service has been restored.

A Harlem building that was on a controversial development site (see post below) collapsed this morning.

At least five people were injured at West 100th Street and Broadway, where the building came down shortly after 9 a.m. One, an infant taken to St. Luke's Roosevelt, is injured critically according to New York 1.

The collapse occurred at the site of a former Gristedes, which was being torn down to make way for a residential tower. The Extell Development Corporation currently plans to build two residential towers, 31 and 36 stories tall, respectively.

Firefighters are now sifting through the rubble; it's unclear whether anybody might be trapped inside.

The MTA has announced service changes:

-- The No. 1 train is suspended from 42nd Street to 137th Street.

-- The No. 2 train is running on the No. 5 line from 149th Street Grand Concourse in the Bronx to Nevins in Brooklyn.  read more »

-- No. 3 service is suspended between Chambers Street and 148th Street.

-- The M104 bus is running on West End Avenue above 96th Street.

All those protesters who have trailed Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz over the past 18 months chanting "Not a done deal" were right. A surprise bidder, Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Corp., made an offer today (Wednesday) on the MTA’s Atlantic Yards and might bump off Frank Gehry’s Crystal City.

Barnett--not to be confused with the Gary Barnett of college football infamy--joined with the Carlyle Group to buy out Donald Trump (and a whole bunch of other people who probably held a greater stake but who don’t count because they’re nobodies) on the West Side last month. Extell’s also building a 60-story condo building at 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue.  read more »

The MTA press office wouldn’t say how much they were offering, or what Extell had in mind, but somehow we don’t think he’ll want to put in that organic dairy farm the neighbors pitched.

--Matthew Schuerman