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Harry Macklowe

1 By Daniel Geiger 1/03 3:00pm

power broker

Richard Baxter.

Richard Baxter Dishes on the Drama Behind the Deals at Casa Lever

It was lunchtime at Casa Lever, the high-end restaurant in the iconic Lever House, and Richard Baxter was on his BlackBerry negotiating.

It was a busy year for Mr. Baxter and his colleagues at Jones Lang LaSalle. His four-man team comprised some of the city’s most prominent brokers of large-scale commercial office buildings, and as the Manhattan sales market’s post-recessionary thaw continues, Mr. Baxter estimated that the group had tallied an impressive $1.3 billion in deals this year.

Three days before Christmas, however, it wasn’t one particular skyscraper Mr. Baxter was bargaining over from his plum seat at Casa Lever. In a year-end rush, his group had loose ends to tie up, deals to close and transactions still in the works. And so, on this particular Thursday amid a bustling lunch crowd, Mr. Baxter was not negotiating with a buyer or a building owner, but rather one of his own assistants, whom he was asking to stay late to receive critical documents and to help get the team through the rest of the day.

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By Daniel Edward Rosen 12/20/11 1:30pm

power broker

David E. Green

The Repositionist of 2 Park Avenue

Even in Manhattan, a building can go stale.

In Midtown South, for example, a commercial property can amass a litany of blue-chip legal practices and financial services firms in one decade, and then, 10 years later, watch as its tenant portfolio withers in prestige.

Take 2 Park Avenue. The building once served as the base of operations for Newsday and Times Mirror Inc. back in the 1980s and 1990s and more recently for The Hartford, the Connecticut-based insurance company.

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By Daniel Geiger 12/07/11 2:00pm

ICSC

red ICSC cover FOR WEB

The White Whale of West 57th Street: Nordstrom appears poised for NYC

It’s the great white whale of Manhattan retail.

Aside from Walmart, Nordstrom is the store every retail broker in the city dreams of harpooning and reeling into a new home. One prominent broker familiar with the store, the amount of space it needs and the rents it would probably be willing to pay estimates that the commission for handling its lease would be around $10 million.

But like a leviathan lurking beneath the waves, the department store has offered only fleeting glimpses around the city, most notably at several development sites and a few existing assets with the capacity to accommodate its sprawling footprint.

The scuttlebutt nowadays: Nordstrom is contemplating one of two leases, one at the West Side rail yards with the Related Companies or another at the base of Extell Development’s soaring new residential tower now rising at 157 West 57th Street.



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By Matt Chaban 10/25/11 10:13am

Machers

It's a swell deal. (Getty)

DEAR SIR! Harry Macklowe Requests the Benificence of Your Honest Investment in Bangladesh

Those email scammers sure are clever. Instead of continuing to make up foreign kings and dictators who have miraculously and mysteriously chosen you—yes, you!—for the riches they must now dispose of, they are using real, honest to god Americans, if slightly embellished, to attract patsies, err, investors.

Today, The Observer received one such email, with an offer to join "Mr. HARRY MACKLOWE, Biggest Land Owner of United State & Founder Chairman & Owner of Macklowe Properties" in an investment to establish a real estate investment in Bangladesh. Biggest Land Owner of United States? How could you say no! Still, something tells us Mr. Macklowe is plenty busy here at home, but in case you have a spare $2 million, we've included the details below. Read More

1 By Matt Chaban 10/19/11 11:15am

Love the Drake!

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's 432 Park Avenue! (WSJ)

Drake Tower Will Not Top Empire State Building, Still Tallest Apartment Tower Ever

In July, renderings of the most watched development site in the city leaked out. They were unofficial, the work of some avid architecture geeks, but it turns out the designs of the condo-tower planned for the Drake Hotel site were not that far off. The Journal gets the first official look at CIM, Harry Macklowe and Rafael Viñoly's new project, and while it will not rise to 1,420 feet, as first expected, the 1,300-foot tower would surpass every apartment building in the city by a few hundred feet. Read More

1 By Matt Chaban 10/07/11 5:38pm

Tales of Retail

Two American corporate giants. (MacRumors)

Hip to Be Square: How Harry Macklowe and Steve Jobs Built the Iconic Apple Cube

It is a POPS done right.

The Apple Cube on Fifth Avenue managed to transform a windswept plaza at one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan into a destination known the world over—one that became a shrine to its creator when Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week. The Journal's Eliot Brown (an Observer alum!) talked with reclusive developer Harry Macklowe about how the cube came to be. Like all things Apple, it wasn't his idea but Jobs'. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/24/11 11:32am

Love the Drake!

9 Photos

tv005

Harry Macklowe, CIM and Viñoly Planning 1,420-Foot Toothpick Tower on Park Avenue?

For years now, the Drake Hotel site at the corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue has been one of the most closely watched developments in the city. A historic hotel was destroyed to make way for a mystery project that has grown all the more intriguing as it actually looks like it might get built. Mysterious California developer CIM teamed up with Harry Macklowe, the site's former owner and fifth-act maestro, and now details are dribbling out that make for some jaw-dropping possibilities. Read More

By Elise Knutsen 8/16/11 6:48pm

Shindigger

Baldwin and Schumer.

Art and Auction in East Hampton

The swans in Town Pond paddled on serenely, unfazed by the crowds filing up James Lane toward Guild Hall. The birds, evidently, are accustomed to such revelry. The event, last Saturday, was a celebration of Richard Prince’s exhibition “Covering Pollock,” currently on display at the Hall’s gallery. The work, Mr. Prince’s latest, consists of black-and-white photographs of Jackson Pollock obscured by images of models, ’80s punk stars and various forms of old-school erotica. Inside, groups of curious viewers—some of them peering over their spectacles at the prints—made polite banter about the graphic images. Read More

3 By Laura Kusisto 6/07/11 9:00pm

Features

Mentor and prodege.

Unmasking Three Mismatched Heavies Who Won and Lost the Drake

In the early summer of 2008, Arthur G. Cohen rode the elevator to Harry Macklowe’s 21st-floor office in the G.M. Building wearing a black suit and bright pink dress shirt. Mr. Macklowe, sporting navy blue pinstripes and a multibillion-dollar real estate empire under siege, signed away his beloved Drake Hotel site to an enterprise called CMZ for $850 million.

CMZ is one of the more bizarre development teams ever assembled in the city, yet its existence has remained hidden until now from all but a handful of insiders. One-time top developer Mr. Cohen joined Washington lobbying czar Paul Manafort and Brad Zackson, a scrappy former righthand man to Fred Trump Sr., in a baffling boom-time enterprise. They looked at billions of dollars’ worth of properties such as the Drake, the Manhattan House, the Helmsley Hotel and two Bahamian islands—but with some of the world’s best real estate almost in their grasp, they never bought a single trophy property.

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