In a transparent effort to combat the bad publicity accrued in the wake of the shopping-cart incident, Harlem's Target store is hellbent on making sure New Yorkers know it truly, deeply, honestly and sincerely cares about the community. A Daily News article , which reads suspiciously like a PR statement, reports that the 117th Street Target is working to have a more "local feel." Read More
The cause of the elevator accident at 285 Madison is still being investigated, and it looks like faulty maintenance may have been the cause. Not so for Post real estate sage Steve Cuozzo. He blames the city's bureaucracy for saddling us with outdated building stock. Read More
Well, our jobs just got a lot harder. The Times's Charles Bagli, dean of the development beat, filed his second story today since mid-June, when he went on book leave—he is working on a tome about the rise, fall and rise of Stuyvesant Town. The last article he wrote was about 9/11, Read More
499 Park Avenue resembles a giant block of obsidian, perfect but for the even more perfect bluntings made to the corners of the obelisk. Running down one-third of the tower’s facade, the width of a single pane of glass, this is the one design flourish of the building. They were made with sculptor’s precision by the celebrated I.M. Pei some 31 years ago.
Inside, workers have been busy putting the finishing touches on the office duplex. The space atop this modernist ziggurat was being white-boxed, stripped back to its bare steel columns, a fresh coat of paint on the floors, grotty insulation still clinging here and there to a few beams. Light streamed in from all sides, the recently rechristened Ed Koch Bridge directly to the right down 59th Street, Central Park up and to the left. Everything had been cleaned and shined to make way for the brokers who would be streaming through the space, trying to find a new tenant for office space that had not been vacant since the building was finished in 1980.
The showstopper is the upper floor, where drop ceilings had been stripped out to expose a soaring 18-foot cathedral of steel and glass. It felt like Soho-on-Park. Read More
As The Observer reported in this week's paper, Hines Interests has been one of the foremost developers in New York of the past generation. Even as they have employed some of the most cutting edge architects in the industry, the firm, founded in Houston but now very much global, has managed to keep a Read More
The sun had not quite broken over the rowhouses and warehouses of Greenpoint Monday morning when The Observer arrived at the new concrete pier jutting out into the East River at India Street. The dock seemed barely finished, its concrete planks not entirely even, the sides of the structure lined with chain-link fencing. Whole sections were torn up and surrounded with orange construction netting.
When the ferry pulled up, ghost decals clinging to the foredeck, the passengers filed on, handing over their $4 tickets, joining the nearly 3,000 New Yorkers who have ridden the ferry each weekday since its launch in mid-June, according to the city—more than double the number officials had expected.
After ordering our locally brewed fair-trade coffee and a pain au chocolat, we turned to see a gay couple smiling across a starboard table, sharing a quiche, a floating picnic. On the port side was a pretty biracial pair staring out the window at Long Island City, its gleaming towers pulling into view. The woman held a breastfeeding baby on her lap.
The subway this was not. Read More
Two weeks ago, the unthinkable happened. A new tower is coming to the Williamsburg waterfront, the first since the bubble burst three years ago. It is the biggest news in the neighborhood since then, both figuratively and literally: the third tower at North Side piers will house 500 luxury rental apartments in a 40 story tower, the largest project of its kind yet in North Brooklyn, arguably the entire borough, if the neighboring towers are included.
But really, that is nothing—at least next to the development Park Tower Group has planned. Read More
Since it opened in 2006, around this time each year, a press release would shoot out from Governor's Island, a torpedo blasting across the harbor, trumpeting the latest attendance numbers. The ice-cream-cone-shaped island, for most of its life an off-limits military compound, had reason to crow. It's visitor's numbers were soaring, putting to rest questions of its viability as a new public park—purchased for all of $1 from the U.S. government in 2005. From 26,000 visitors that first year, attendance jumped to 443,000 last year, 60 percent what it had been the year before.
This year, there has been no press release, no champagne. Read More
Everyone hates apartment hunting. Spending precious Sundays crisscrossing the city to look for the perfect place is certainly not The Observer's idea of a good time, and it seems that others agree. More and more renters are putting down deposits without even seeing their future digs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Read More
It's funny how a rent-dispute can change plans.
No sooner was it revealed that Park51, the so-called ground zero mosque and Islamic community center, was facing an almost $2 million rent tab from Con Edison than Sharif El-Gamal, the developer behind the nascent project, revealed that maybe a condo or a hotel might be better than a glorified Y. Read More
When the Forbes 400 list of richy rich Americans came out last month, the richest New York developer was, as it's long been, Richard Lefrak, with a net worth in excess of $5 billion. That is as much oil and natural gas wealth as it is development wealth—it's all real estate, when you think about it—but perhaps Mr. LeFrak is feeling nostalgic, because he has decided to return to his home turf of Queens, according to The Journal. 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
It took decades for the New York Coliseum to be torn down and replaced by the Related Companies' Time Warner Center. While most of that time it was a different developer trying to build the damn thing, the fact remains, Related's president Jeff Blau has his work cut out for him. "At Hudson Yards, we're looking at about 2.5-times the Time Warner in that first phase, and the key to getting financing will be getting the office space leased," Mr. Blau said yesterday at the Masters of Real Estate panel hosted by The Observer.
Until he can find tenants for at least a portion of the 4.5 million square feet of office space planned at the megaproject, it will be all but impossible for Mr. Blau to start building. That had been a challenge ever since the economy collapsed in late 2008, not long after Related won the bid to redevelop the rail yards—O.K., so that deal wasn't finalized until 16 months ago, but whose counting—but Mr. Blau said the firm had seen a surge in interest in the past six months, and there are now nine companies actively looking at relocating into offices at Hudson Yards, and they are all looking at leases over a million square feet. Read More
Hudson Yards. Atlantic Yards. The Williamsburg waterfront. For the past decade, residential development has been defined by the creation and conversion of soaring condo towers across the city. From Extell’s Ariel twins on the Upper West Side to so many of the Financial District’s former office buildings, this was the way we built, the way we were to live. But the era of the condo project is over Read More
Even if the city could be headed for further construction slowdowns, developers are still readying themselves for the (eventual?) recovery. The MoMA Tower, Hudson Yards, East Coast Number 4—all are showing signs of life. And they all have something in common, as well: their developers have their sights set on the first site at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Read More
