Earlier today the Real Estate Desk talked to Mr. Steele about his plans for world domination, vis-a-vis the expansion of his Curbed Web sites from New York, L.A., and San Francisco to a national edition, as well as two more locals in Chicago and, fingers crossed, Miami. But isn't the economy in the shitter? Read More
As you're sitting down to your Reuben or Caesar salad today, allow the Real Estate Desk to direct you to some new lunchtime reading--after you've finished everything at Observer.com, of course--Curbed National.
Maybe grab a drink while you're at it. "I've been telling people it's like Architectural Digest after a three-martini lunch," Curbed Network founder Read More
Listen to Your Real Estate! Every New York building has a story—here's some we told.
When a city's momentum is relentlessly upward, it's the things at the margins—outcasts and dormant mythologies, secrets and barely conscious desires—that get pushed below ground. Hubert's Museum was one of those things, a continuous theater of the grotesque and the uncanny stirring beneath 42nd Street. When it shut its doors at 234 West 42nd Street Read More
St. Vincent's vanished in pieces—the ambulance service went first, and the maternity ward, oddly enough, was among the last, departing with a rousing 6-pound, 15-ounce yowl. "The Wall of Hope and Remembrance," as it's come to be called, disappeared years earlier, but the pasted words remain, slightly cryptic in all their weighty grandiosity, testifying Read More
On Palm Sunday, the Coney Island Cyclone will clank, sputter and tilt into motion, careening its shrieking cargo around clattering curves and ushering in the new season. The whole neighborhood, rusty gears and all, will churn into motion, the same way it has for years. And like every other season in recent memory, the Read More
April 13, 1945, and a 16-year-old kid in the Bronx snapped a photo of a newsstand vendor, his face hemmed in by headlines. "F.D.R. Dies!" and "Roosevelt Dead!" they read. The boy wonder with the 35-millimeter was the quiet, brooding sort with an impossibly deep-set gaze, and he went by the name Stan Kubrick. Read More
Koreatown unfolds like a blip in the consciousness of midtown. It's where the city abruptly departs from its staid brick assonance and, for a span of roughly three short blocks, digresses into a frenzy of barbecue and lights. Koreatown has somehow at once managed to wedge itself smack in the middle of everything and remain Read More
In 1906, Stanford White, the red-mustached playboy starchitect of his day, was shot and killed on the roof of what was then Madison Square Garden, a lavish amphitheater he himself had built. It was already something of a fateful jab at White that some years later the New York Life Insurance Building supplanted his Read More
Harlem is a place that provokes the kind of grand, sweeping proclamations usually reserved for dying social movements or God. Harlem is nowhere (Ralph Ellison); Harlem is heaven (Bill "Bojangles" Robinson); Harlem is the new black (T-shirts hawked on 125th Street). It is a physical place as much as an idea, roughly determined by Read More
The same year that Times Square became Times Square, the Astor Hotel opened for business. It was 1904, and The New York Times had just arrived in the neighborhood, erecting its headquarters on West 43rd Street. Like the paper of record of that day, The New York Herald, The Times wanted to paste its Read More
Building tops in downtown Manhattan offer little in the way of eye-catching spectacle—imagine, for a minute, that you're staring down, not up, at one of those gargantuan fortresses of steel—and 77 Water Street is not a structure that readily distinguishes itself from its Financial District cohorts. It's an oversize air-conditioner of a building, vents Read More
Just 11 years ago, the space was a massive loading dock. Now huge screens dominate a comfortable-looking sunken meeting space, the conference room where "Google NYC" video-chats with other offices of the Internet giant. The room in Google's Manhattan office at 111 Eighth Avenue is itself emblematic of changes in New York in the Read More
Lord & Taylor, one of the most successful and enduring department store brands, was known for its female elevator operators at one time. The operators on one side of the building were redheads, while those on the other were brunettes.
The (clearly innovative) retailer's third instantiation in New York City was at the gorgeously Read More
In recent years, the Forbes family sold its palace in Tangiers, its island near Fiji, its copy of the Gettysburg Address and many of its Fabergé eggs. Its notable Fifth Avenue building may be next.
In June, New York Times’ media columnist David Carr lamented that “if there ever was a bad time to be named Read More
