Gary Barnett

John Catsimatidis told The Observer today that Extell Development chairman Gary Barnett was one of the two buyers of his commercial building at 516 East 14th Street.

A spokesperson for Mr.  read more »

We sat down with Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, to talk about his firm's bid for the West Side rail yards. Mr. Barnett also talked about Extell's failed bid for Atlantic Yards and its plans for building a 57th Street hotel and condo.

The interview can be read here. It will also be in The Observer's print edition tomorrow.

Location: Could you generally talk about what you tried to accomplish with your bids for the West Side rail yards?
 read more »

Extell Development’s architect, Steven Holl, came up with the idea of building a very low suspension bridge over the West Side Rail Yards instead of a deck that would be supported by piers scattered among the tracks. That way, workers would only have to tinker along the north and south edges of the site, leaving the rail yards to function normally underneath them.

“I think we are the only project that is really minimally invasive with the Long Island Rail Road, with the MTA operations, and I think we will have a much lower cost of construction as a result,” said Extell’s founder Gary Barnett. “You know you don’t have to put a billion dollars or more into a platform up front.”  read more »

Extell Development Co.’s proposal for the Western Rail Yards, which is the first of five that the public and press can get a look at, really revs up the amount of green space on the ground by building tall. Really tall. The tripled-legged tower pictured to the right would stretch 1,238 feet into the air, rivaling the Empire State Building’s 1,250-foot height, and outdoing that icon in total square footage and the size of its observation deck.

Other buildings in the Extell proposal are quite a bit smaller, but still considerable: at around 700 feet tall, the so-called “sun slice” buildings proposed for 30th Street orient their narrow sides to the south to cut down on shadows cast over the open space behind them.

According to the plans (PDF), the footprints of all buildings will take up just 25 percent of the property, compared to 52 percent in the plans proposed by the city and the MTA, leaving an extra 7 acres or so of open space. Also, the plan would eliminate any discharge of storm water by funneling it into a reservoir that would run through the center of the park, and the plan claims to reduce energy consumption by 50 percent thanks to a geothermal cooling system and cogeneration.

The development company, led by Gary Barnett, also proposes a Long Island Rail Road station along 33rd Street between 11th and 12th avenues. After all, you never know how long it will take them to build this No. 7 line.

On Sunday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be showing the proposals for the West Side Rail Yards to the press, and either shortly before or shortly after, images of these urban utopias will begin appearing in the media.

But Extell Development Co., one of the five bidders, could not wait. It put up on its Web site six images and a brief description, and a 59-page PDF outlining their presentation (PDF).

The lead architect is reportedly Steven Holl and you can see his influence everywhere.

The plan, according to the copy, “maximizes public space and creates a porosity and openness for the site from all sides and approaches, connecting Midtown, the Chelsea Arts District, and the convention center with a grand public park open to the Hudson River; and its innovative structural system for spanning over the Rail Yards will minimize the impacts of development on the Caemmerer Yards and allow it to offer more for the right to develop.”

See the jump for pictures.

 

Maverick developer Gary Barnett and his Extell Development Company have closed on a sliver of Port Authority-owned land at 31st Street and 10th Avenue for about $17 million, property records show.  read more »

Five developers have bid on the Western Rail Yards. The bids came into the yards' owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, by 5 p.m. on Thursday, and they include the usual heavyweights of New York City building.

1. Extell Development Company
2. Brookfield Properties Developer LLC
3. The Related Companies
4. TS West Side Holding, LLC (A Joint Venture of Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley)
5. Hudson Center East LLC and Hudson Center West LLC (A Joint Venture of Vornado Realty Trust and The Durst Organization, Inc.)

For the MTA's statement on the selection process, which should drag on toward at least spring, click here.

For earlier Observer coverage of the architects who could get to shape the yards, click here.  

The Extell Development Corporation is taking it to a new level when it comes to raising money for charity.

A source recently told The Observer that the real estate development firm is sponsoring The Extell Wall Street Boxing Charity Championship, a series of boxing matches this fall that will pit various finance types against one another. Each fight, sponsored in conjunction with DoubleDown Media, will benefit a different charity.  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

Today was the day the Empire State Development Corporation was supposed to name the preferred developer for the Javits Convention Center hotel, a supposedly sought-after trophy that no one much ended up caring about. Even though there are but three bidders--Joseph Moinian, Gary Barnett and FaulknerUSA--agency spokesman A.J. Carter told The Real Estate it will be a little bit longer before the winner is announced.

"Responses to the RFP are still being evaluated," he said. No new deadline has been set.

- Matthew Schuerman

Who says Gary Barnett's subsidy-backed 47th Street tower will poach all the Diamond District's big tenants?

The New York Diamond Dealers Club announced on Monday its intention to remain at the existing World Diamond Tower at 580 Fifth Avenue for another 20 years.

"After more than 20 years, the Club is virtually synonymous with 'The 580 World Diamond Tower'," noted Kenneth Kahn, the Fifth Avenue building's executive manager, in a press release.

Will that partnership still ring true in 2027? Stay tuned--er, try to remember to check back then.  read more »

Full release after the jump.

- Chris Shott

Charlie Bagli writes today on the dispute between former Belgian diamond merchant Gary Barnett, now a real-estate developer, and the diamond merchants on the crowded strip of West 47th Street where Mr. Barnett wants to build a 30-story tower that would serve as a global diamond exchange.

He says the building could help reinvigorate the dowdy, low-scale block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, an important international diamond center that is under siege from low-cost producers, Internet sales, suburban diamond exchanges, Wal-Mart and Costco.

What's the problem?

They fear that Mr. Barnett's tower will steal all the best tenants and leave the rest of the 60-year-old district a "ghost town," if he is successful in lobbying the city for tax breaks and other incentives.

Incidentally, those subsidies would be an important part of the plan to get the building up.

- Tom McGeveran

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

Yesterday, Corcoran's elite brokers and executives mixed it up with a few hundred burly construction workers on the 51st floor of The Orion, Gary Barnett's recent development that will soon be the sixth-tallest residential building in the city. Guests were nervously transported up a rickety elevator to the "topping out party," an event staged when the highest point is reached during construction.

CEO Pam Liebman and new marketing COO Jeff Yamaguchi--who just arrived from Las Vegas this week--were among the real-estate big-wigs on hand.

And to let the workers know their sweat was not excreted in vain, Ms. Liebman informed the crowd that she bought one of the first apartments available. "I know where I'm going," said one brawny guy while giving his friend an elbow in the ribs.

Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff spoke, too, and received thunderous applause every time he flashed his union cred. Mr. Doctoroff enthusiastically proclaimed that New Yorkers would soon witness "one of the greatest building booms in the city's history." What West Side Stadium?

Mr. Barnett, whose Extell Development Company is popping up everywhere lately, appeared jubilant with his 60-story building topping out after breaking ground only 15 months earlier. Afterwards, he dodged a reporter's question about the M.T.A. overlooking Extell's proposal for a development in downtown Brooklyn on the spot where Bruce Ratner wants to build Stadiumland.

People came here to party, not answer uncomfortable questions!

After the speeches, brokers and starving real-estate reporters took off their bright-white hardhats and headed toward the potato salad and star-shaped brownies ("Far above the city lights, right below the stars!" read the invitation to the event). One floor below, the workers chowed down together and presented each other with various awards.

For about an hour or so, we felt some real unity. This must be what it's like to build in Des Moines!  read more »

- Michael Calderone Orion construction photo courtesy of Edward Sudentas (Wired New York)

There was a time when politicians and civic groups would beat up on guys who wanted to build sports  read more »

Michael Calderone charts the entry of the Mellon mansion onto the Manhattan real-estate market, harbinger of the $20 million townhouse trend.

And he and colleague Matthew Schuerman pierce the diamondlike glow of Gary Barnett to find a seasoned real-estater--with a history of coming to blows with developer Bruce Ratner--behind the Atlantic Yards counterbid.  read more »

Also, Jessica Bruder puts her eye on the danse macabre known as Quiet Disco, a Netherlandish import where radio-controlled headsets carrying feed from a DJ move hipsters like marionettes across a Williamsburg dance floor.

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

Real-estate kingpin Gary Barnett gets mixed reviews from neighborhood types this week.

Activists, led it seems by City Councilman Bill Perkins, are protesting a tower development proposed by Extell for Harlem.  read more »

The firm recently won praise from activists across town for countering Bruce Ratner's Nets arena plan for downtown Brooklyn.

The Daily News and New York 1 both covered the story.

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

For nearly a third of his life, ever since he filed his first lawsuit against the state Urban Develo  read more »