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Stephen Jacob Smith

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/24 2:31pm

Manhattan Transfers

23beekman

Snug Like a Bug With Panoramic East River Views: Paul Rudolph’s Penthouse Finds a Tenant

Tucked away on the far east side, a few blocks north of the global headquarters of the powerful and geriatric (i.e., the United Nations) and across the East River from the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, Beekman Place is arguably New York’s most centrally out-of-way enclave.

A waterfront neighborhood once blighted by industry, Beekman Place’s fortunes were buoyed by a booming real estate market and a new-found respect for the water in the 1920s, and the micro-hood became one of the most exclusive in the city. “They sit in their co-ops,” the mayor in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities said, ”Park Avenue, Fifth, Beekman Place, snug like a bug. Twelve-foot ceilings, a wing for them, one for the help.” Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/23 2:14pm

Manhattan Transfers

Corten steel: it's not just for Barclays!

Sandy Who? Red Hook Townhouse Tries To Set Neighborhood Record With $2.15 M. Pricetag

“The slum that faces the bay” is what Alfieri, an Italian lawyer in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, calls Red Hook. Wedged in a subway-less corner of South Brooklyn, hemmed in by the docklands and Robert Moses’s Gowanus Expressway, Red Hook was for years—as late as 1988, LIFE magazine called it “the crack capital of America”—Brooklyn’s most notorious slum.

But that was then. Buoyed by an unrelenting wave of gentrification sweeping eastwards across the borough, Red Hook has been enjoying the runoff of demand from neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, which has turned the neighborhood into any other in brownstone Brooklyn: that is, too rich for our blood (and that of most other New Yorkers). Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/23 8:15am

Troubling Developments

A lesson for future developers: probably just best to let your building rot.

5Pointz Backfire: Developer Blasted For Taking Back Building He Let Artists Use for Decades

During his opening remarks at the 5Pointz redevelopment hearing, developer David Wolkoff, whose father Jerry bought the Long Island City property in the 1970s, told the audience, “We’ve been members of the community for over 40 years.” Though they certainly tried (26 years! 29! 33! 4!), none of the speakers in opposition could quite top his time in Long Island City.

“I have fond memories of crawling in the basement of this building” as a child, he told the hostile crowd.

Normally the Wolkoffs wouldn’t have to grovel—it is, after all, their property. But the city dangles extra density as a carrot to developers— a tantalizing 60 percent in the case of this site— if they agree to build extra parking and plazas and to endure the public review process. (Amenities that Court Square has in abundance, including the surprisingly dense thicket of trees by One Court Square. If Jane Jacobs were still alive, we can’t help but wonder if she’d question the number of trees and the paucity of people.) Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/22 3:42pm

Manhattan Transfers

101 CPW's mismatched windows might irk a purist, but Mr. Adams' will surely enjoy his gleaming glass grandfathered-in windows.

Nice Apartment If You Can Get It: Gershwin Heir Sells $5.4 M. Central Park West Pad

Completed in 1930, 101 Central Park West is about as famous as the Gershwins’ most famous productions. And for the past three decades, it’s also been home to Marc Gershwin, the son of George and Ira’s brother Arthur. The songwriters’ less-well-known brother was, according to his son, a minor composer who “had the misfortune to be the brother of a dead genius.”

When Mr. Gershwin took over trusteeship of the famous Gershwin music trove—estimated to bring in $5 to $10 million a year—he told The Telegraph that “it was not being well minded: Ira had been very passive and trusted everyone.” Mr. Gershwin has been warier, turning down an all-white Finnish version as well as a more insidious apartheid-era South African production of Porgy and Bess. (That said, they haven’t been as faithful to the original productions as Stephen Sondheim would have liked—he penned a sneering and sarcastic letter to The New York Times decrying a recent adaptation of George Gershwin’s operatic magnum opus.) Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/20 3:30pm

Hotels

Parking today, healthcare tomorrow. (Photo courtesy Property Shark.)

$90 M. Hotel Worker Health Center Coming to Downtown Brooklyn

From the BAM Cultural District to Williamsburg, Brooklyn is undergoing a hotel boom. And pretty soon, all of those workers—or at least, the unionized ones—will have a new place to go for check-ups.

The New York Hotel Trades Council & Hotel Association of New York City, the city’s leading hotel workers’ union, and its Employee Benefit Funds just picked up a $19 million parking lot at 620 Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn, on an irregularly-shaped lot bounded by Fulton Street, Ashland Place and St. Felix Street. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/17 3:18pm

the planning game

Who will follow in Amanda Burden's (very stylish) shoes?

Who Will Be New York’s Next Chief City Planner? And Does It Matter?

With the New York City mayor’s race not even past the Democratic primary, it’s a bit early to be handicapping the city’s next chief city planner, but where’s the fun in being coy?

Crain’s has taken a look at who might fill the post, which it calls “perhaps more important than any deputy mayor position at City Hall,” arriving at a short list that includes names ranging from Vishaan Chakrabarti, a consummate real estate industry insider and former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning, to the more community-minded Anna Levin, a member of the City Planning Commission and the chair of Manhattan Community Board 4′s Land Use Commission during most of the 2000s. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/16 4:06pm

Manhattan Transfers

We're more than a little jealous of the views.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop $14 M. On an UES Penthouse

The Park Regis at 50 East 89th Street isn’t what normally comes to mind when one thinks of $14 million penthouses. Built in 1974, it lacks the classical prewar touches of its Park and Fifth Avenue neighbors, and the standard unit sizes range from studios to two-bedrooms—not quite the palatial spreads that one expects from an eight-digit Upper East Side tower.

But what it lacks in outward beauty, the co-op makes up for with its interior and its views. Perched on the 32nd and 33rd floors, the unit has jaw-dropping views of Central Park, with just enough city in the frame to give it a Manhattan flavor (“Located in historic Carnegie Hill, The Park Regis offers the atmosphere of a small town,” the building description claims—unconvincingly, if you ask us, the UES being one of America’s densest neighborhoods), but not so much that you can’t make out every feature in the park. The Central Park Reservoir is especially prominent. The grand prewar apartments on Fifth and Park may have stately exteriors, but they generally top out at around half the height of the Park Regis. Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/16 2:40pm

Manhattan Transfers

Good luck.

$100 M. CitySpire Listing: The Most Expensive For Sale By Owner in History?

Long Island real estate scion Steven Klar was obviously not having much luck offloading his massive, octagonal condo at CitySpire Center with Douglas Elliman. The much-maligned “trophy” vanished from the market in January, when Mr. Klar  dumped the brokerage—a win for Elliman?—and decided to lick his wounds for a few months and/or get fired up for another try.

At $100 million, more than any home in New York City has ever sold for, the price was widely mocked. Why, people asked, would Mr. Klar think he could best One57′s penthouses, which have reportedly entered into contract for more than $90 million, in a late ’80s building and a unit that he bought for only $4.5 million in the early ’90s (and hasn’t renovated since)? Read More

By Stephen Jacob Smith 5/15 2:20pm

Manhattan Transfers

6 Photos

80 Washington Place

Sousaphonic Village Townhouse Boasts Waterfall, $28.9 M. Pricetag

After watching their townhouse sit on the market for a year without a sale, the owners of 80 Washington Place have decided to take a cue from the previous owner, composer and conductor John Philip Sousa: they’re marching on. They’ve selected a pair of new brokers—Town’s Robert Dvorin and Clayton Orrigo—and cut the ask by a million dollars.

Built in 1839, the 22.5-foot-wide Greenwich Village townhouse has only been owned by only three families over its 175-year life. Its most famous owner, John Philip Sousa, invented the sousaphone and penned marching ballads, including Marine standard “Semper Fidelis” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and was also a committed technophobe. “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country,” he testified to Congress in 1906, presaging the rise of Skrillex. Read More