While he may be headed for one of Britain's largest divorce settlements, moneyman Pierre Lagrange seems to be doing just fine on this side of the pond. The former Goldman Sachs trader has just purchased the penthouse at new Chelsea hotspot HL23.
Mr. Lagrange, who paid $11.29 million for the pad, made headlines last fall when, after separating from his wife, he came out. He has since been linked to fashion designer Roubi L'Roubi. Read More
A few minutes before Lil Wayne and his entourage walked into El Privado, a low-lit basement space beneath Chelsea’s Hotel Americano, a fellow attendee turned to The Observer and said what the rest of us were thinking.
“You know what would make this party even better?” she said. “If they were playing Aaliyah ... and I had some weed.” Read More
The High Line is turning into the new Park Avenue. On the northern end are luxe apartment buildings, some of the finest in the city, and to the south, cutting edge office towers. While it is not quite Seagrams or Lever House, 837 Washington and the High Line Building are nothing to sneeze at. Now Read More
College Humor founder Ricky Van Veen is known for his love of West Village restaurants. The comedian turned rising media mogul will have to soon refine his palate, as the funny man has moved uptown. Well, to Chelsea, anyways.
Ricky, nee Richard Raphael Van Veen (no, that is not a joke), just bought a $2.45 million condo, according to city records. The two-bedroom, two-bath place is located in tony development The Campiello Collection on West 17th Street, a surprisingly conventional choice for the comedic wunderkind. Read More
The battle to expand Chelsea Market has once again come to a head—a giant glassy head. Neighborhood residents are none too pleased with Jamestown Properties' plans, which call for 250,000 square feet of office space to be added to the existing Ninth Avenue structure and the construction of a neighboring twelve-story hotel. Among the Read More
The Upper East Side's Leila Heller Gallery, which once went under the name LTMH, has announced that it will open a second gallery, in Chelsea, next week. The new space is located at 568 West 25th Street, which puts it on the same block as Marlborough Chelsea, Yossi Milo Gallery and two branches of the Pace Gallery. Read More
Although it is doubtless a busy time for fashion showroom owner Joey Giuntoli, the president of the eponymous Joey Showroom has managed to sell his apartment. Read More
A source just informed The Observer that Chelsea's Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is currently hiring attendants to monitor its space during its upcoming Haim Steinbach exhibition, titled "Creature."
Thank goodness. Read More
Short of Bond Street, the High Line has created the highest concentration of high quality architecture in the entire city. The Standard, Jean Nouvel's Vision Machine, Frank Gehry's IAC Building, the canted HL23, the work of Morris Adjmi. But The Journal finds that +Art, a faux factory condo project on the once bawdy 28th Street, is only full of minuses. Read More
Nina Kaminer, the founder of Nike Communications—she represents Burberry, Amex Platinum and Jimmy Choo, but not the shoemaker of the same name—and her husband, Allan Cohen, have unloaded their luxury Chelsea duplex. They sold their penthouse in the Chainworks Building at 144 West 18th Street, and although the buyers purchased under an LLC, the names on the deed are Michael and Jennifer Glassman. Mr. and Ms. Glassman won’t have to hire a van to move into the new space, as they live in the unit just below. Read More
Come September, Chelsea galleries such as Leo Koenig, Inc. and Daniel Reich Gallery will have a new neighbor on their stretch of West 23rd Street.
The newcomer is the Vicky David Gallery, which will open at 522 West 23rd on Sept. 15, and will focus on postwar European art with a particular emphasis on French artists who were active in the Nouveau Réalisme, Figuration Narrative and Figuration Libre movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Read More
At about 6 p.m., on Thursday, Aug. 4, a young man in a beige baseball hat, a green hoodie, blue jeans and running shoes entered an elevator in a Chelsea office building and stared directly at the security camera inside. He had a poster tube in his hand, and a thin mustache across his upper lip.
Police now believe that man snatched an artwork by KAWS—the pen name of Brooklyn street artist Brian Donnelly—from a second-floor hallway, ducked into a nearby bathroom, smashed its frame and slipped it into that tube. Read More
In 1965, the artist Haim Steinbach, then 21, took a hiatus from his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and went to Paris for a year. One day, walking through the city, he saw something strange. “There was a big window, and there was art—well, it didn’t look like art, but there were these paintings, of Read More
Real estate investor Joseph Chetrit closed on his nearly $80 million Chelsea Hotel buy early last week, and now information has trickled out about how he and junior partner Clipper Equities paid for it.
They got an $85 million, 36-month loan from Paris-based banking behemoth Natixis. The loan has a 12-month repayment extension option, and was brokered for the borrowers by Meridian’s Ronnie Levine and Aaron Birnbaum. (Real Estate Weekly has more news on the loan.)
Clipper, incidentally, was the controversial would-be buyer of the massive affordable-housing complex in Brooklyn, Starrett City, offering $1.3 billion in 2007. Read More
Here is the reassuring letter, obtained by The Observer and dated Aug. 4, that several local politicians, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Congressman Jerrold Nadler, sent to tenants at the Chelsea Hotel. A lot has been going on there.
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