Remember Remember the 15th of September
The Journal examines the state of the national office market in today’s newspaper. The prognosis: tepid. Asking rents are, in some places, stabilizing (not rising, just stabilizing). Investors like Mort Zuckerman are once again investing. And while the national vacancy rate is still rising, it’s doing so more slowly.
Which is to say, commercial real Read More
William Macklowe rubbed the bridge of his nose and said he was suffering from a sinus headache. It was the first sign of human frailty he’d allowed during the interview, and the interview was almost over.
The nose where he pressed his fingers was aquiline, like the beak of a barn owl. Below, his thin Read More
Forbes just came out with its 400 richest people list, and guess who isn’t on it? Even so, Manhattan developer Tamir Sapir–presumably because his demise has proven so intriguing–still merits an article. And Forbes digs up some dirt.
First, the magazine estimates the developer’s worth at about $700 million, “still wealthy indeed but not nearly Read More
We talked to Sam Zell, the grave dancer himself, this afternoon. It was short and sweet, and mostly about a profile The Observer‘s working on. But, Mr. Zell, whose Equity Residential recently bought three apartment buildings in Manhattan, did have this to say about the New York real estate market:
“I think Read More
Prospect Park’s administrator–under whose nose the city and federal government culled Prospect Park’s beloved goose population, in the dark of early morning, without public notice, in early July–is trying to make amends.
This afternoon, the Prospect Park Alliance, a nonprofit that operates Prospect Park on behalf of the Parks Department and of which administrator Read More
A talk given by Jan Gehl, the profanity-loving Danish urban planner, cult figure and rarely recognized inspiration behind the pedestrian plazas and bike lanes popping up throughout the city, is profiled in this week’s Capital New York.
The talk gives a fairly good sense of Mr. Gehl’s urban planning philosophies, and, ergo, the philosophies driving Read More
When we read the news that the famously literary Algonquin Hotel was partnering with the famously colorless Marriott hotel chain, our first thought was, Oh, the homogenization of New York City continues apace! Our second thought was what will become of our favorite hotel cat, Matilda?
For those unfamiliar with the feline-friendly ways of Read More
It was in 1982–just six years after the legalization of gaming in New Jersey, when Atlantic City was a broken-down, burnt-out community betting its future on Americans’ insatiable appetite for gambling–that Bruce Springsteen released the song “Atlantic City”: “Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”
The Boss Read More
David and Jed Walentas, the father-and-son real estate moguls whose Two Trees Management got its start decades ago in Soho, before abandoning it to craft Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood almost wholecloth, are buying a Manhattan office building, the only one in their portfolio.
The family is in contract to buy the 340,000-square-foot 50 West 23rd Street, Read More
On Aug. 11, real estate blog Curbed posted a seemingly innocuous scoop: Rachel Maddow and her partner, Susan Mikula, had bought Michael Stipe’s old apartment at 130 Jane Street for a cool $1.25 million.
The blogger, Sara Polsky, also posted photos and a floorplan for the apartment, apparently attained from Corcoran’s Web site. So Read More
