It happened a lot in 2010, as literally dozens of firms, employing millions of people, took advantage of a commercial real estate market weakened by the Great Recession, and either moved to new spots within the city or announced their intentions to do so in the near future.

MEDIA & THE ARTS (Red)

1. WNET, 825 Eighth Avenue

The public-television producers of Worldfocus and Bill Moyers Journal moved into a 95,000-square-foot headquarters, plugging part of a giant hole at George Comfort & Sons' Worldwide Plaza.

2. Daily News and U.S. News and World Report, 4 New York Plaza

Mort Zuckerman's Daily News and U.S. News & World Report Media Group will move downtown to a new FiDi home mostly occupied by JPMorgan Chase. The pubs will leave behind their Death Star on West 33rd.

3. Xinhua, 1540 Broadway

The Chinese broadcaster landed on an 18,600-square-foot perch atop the Times Square tower with some enviable double-height ceilings. First order of business: The landlord had to sound-proof the space.

4. TED Talks, 250 Hudson Street

The pep-talk peddlers found an inspiring new 9,000-square-foot home at 250 Hudson Square, a loft building that features a rooftop garden.

5. Marvel Entertainment, 135 West 50th Street

The comic-book king leaped tall buildings to a 60,000-square-foot space in the Sports Illustrated Building. Marvel, recently acquired by Disney, was formerly headquartered at 417 Fifth Avenue.

6. Meredith Corporation, 805 Third Avenue

The publisher of Ladies' Home Journal moved from two buildings near Grand Central into a svelte new space at Third Avenue and 50th Street. The 212,594-square-foot lease marked one of the year's biggest transactions.

7. Radio One, 850 Third Avenue

The radio station, which caters to African-American listeners, moved into a 39,000-square-foot New York headquarters, in a building also occupied by the Discovery Channel.

8. Newsweek, 7 Hanover Square

The ailing news magazine left 395 Hudson and moved into these dingy quarters just after a merger with the Daily Beast. It will likely move again--to Frank Gehry's IAC building--by April.

9. The Daily, 1211 Sixth Avenue

Rupert Murdoch is readying a high-tech spread, including television studios, in the News Corp. building on Avenue of the Americas for his iPad-only newspaper, which launches in early 2011.

10. W magazine, 1166 Sixth Ave.

The redesigned fashion magazine left its Fairchild brethren at 750 Third Avenue for a chic space here. Editor Stefano Tonchi helped with the design.

11. Condé Nast,
One World Trade Center

The publisher of such titles as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair signed a letter of intent with the Durst Organization to move from 4 Times Square into what will be North America's tallest tower by 2013.

12. The New York Observer,
321 West 44th Street

The fab salmon-colored paper moved from suite digs at 915 Broadway to parts of two floors near Times Square in the recently renamed The New York Observer Building.

13. Horizon Media Inc.,
One Hudson Square

The international media consulting group consolidated its New York operation from three midtown office buildings into three floors, 14 through 16, in Trinity's 1 Hudson Square.

14. Hachette Filipacchi,
1271 Avenue of the Americas

Elle publisher Hachette Filipacchi tightened its belt, moving its stateside offices from 1633 Broadway to space less than half that size, on three floors in the Time & Life Building formerly occupied by Lehman Brothers.

15. Carnegie Hall, 1633 Broadway

When the hall began a four-year renovation last winter, administrative staff were pushed six blocks south to 50,000 square feet in the Paramount Group's 48-story 1633 Broadway at 50th Street. After the renovation, staff will return to the Carnegie Hall towers on 56th Street, formerly living quarters and studios rented by artists.

16. Publicis Modem,
4 Herald Square

Publicis Modem, the digital advertising arm of the Publicis Groupe--headquartered in 200,000 square feet at 4 Herald Square--consolidated from offices split between there and 75 Ninth Avenue into space at 85 10th Avenue, subleased from CBS College Sports.

17. Whitney Museum of American Art, 820 Washington Street

After getting kicked out of the Marcel Breuer building on Madison at 75th and into townhouses around the corner to free up the fifth floor for gallery space, the Whitney's curatorial staff will once again share a roof with the galleries, in the museum's new Renzo Piano building in the meatpacking district, scheduled to open in 2015.

LAW FIRMS (Teal)

1. Proskauer Rose,
11 Times Square

A shiny tower at Eighth and 42nd got its first tenant when the prominent law firm agreed to take 400,000 square feet. Proskauer's moving expenses were certainly taken care of when its previous landlord, Morgan Stanley, offered tens of millions of dollars for the firm to vacate 12 floors at 1585 Broadway.

2. Desmarais LLP,
230 Park Avenue

The fledgling IP boutique opened its first-ever office on the 22,408-square-foot 26th floor of the Helmsley Building. John Desmarais, a former top-earner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, broke away to found his own patent firm in 2009.

3. Klestadt & Winters,
570 Seventh Avenue

Times have been good to these bankruptcy lawyers, who left 292 Madison and took 8,870 square feet at 570 Seventh Avenue for 10 years.

4. Freshfields Bruckhaus
Deringer LLP, 601 Lexington

The Brit law firm handling the 2012 Olympic Games moved into 108,000 square feet at 601 Lexington Avenue, 50 percent more space than it occupied at 520 Madison.

5. Ladas & Parry LLP,
1040 Sixth Avenue

The IP lawyers took 24,000 square feet at Skyline's newly refurbished building. They were formerly located at 26 West 61st Street.

6. Hargraves McConnell &
Costigan, 230 Park Avenue

This law firm, specializing in insurance, leaped from gray to gold this year, making the move from SL Green's Graybar Building at 420 Lexington to 10,000 square feet in the Helmsley Building at 230 Park.

7. Molod Spitz & DeSantis,
1430 Broadway

The insurance defense firm with a dozen attorneys signed a 12,500-square-foot lease for the 21st floor, moving from 104 West 40th Street.

8. Purrington Moody Weil,
414 West 14th Street

The entertainment lawyers are grooving in 7,968 square feet in the meatpacking district, just a hop away from their former spot on 13th Street.

9. Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith,
77 Water Street

The L.A.-based lawyers took 75,716 square feet, more than doubling their Manhattan office space, moving down the street from 199 Water into space owned by Goldman Sachs.

10. Haynes & Boone, 30 Rock

This Dallas-based law firm considered staying at 1221 Sixth Avenue but was lured to a 75,000-square-foot space on the 25th and 26th floors of the unmistakable black behemoth.

11. Dorsey & Whitney,
51 West 52nd Street

This international firm with 700 lawyers took 70,000 square feet at CBS' Black Rock for its New York headquarters, moving from 520 Park Avenue.

12. D'Amato & Lynch,
2 World Financial Center

The law firm was forced to find new digs after its old landlord, AIG, sold its headquarters at 70 Pine Street last year. Now it occupies 63,065 square feet at an office megaplex also occupied by Bank of America.

13. Susquehanna International Group, 140 Broadway

The trading outfit jumped to the other side of the Stock Exchange from 40 Wall Street to the 47th and 48th floors of the HSBC Bank Building at 140 Broadway, the home of Isamu Noguchi's Cube.

REAL ESTATE (Green)

1. A.C. Lawrence,
228 East 54th Street

The residential firm moved into shuttered Century 21 NY Metro's 13,000-square-foot office.

2. Dattner Architects,
1385 Broadway

The architects gave up artists' lofts at 130 West 57th Street to move into 23,500 square feet, the entire 15th floor, in the so-called Bridal Building.

3. Halstead, 499 Park Avenue

The residential brokers landed a prime 17,000-square-foot location at Park and 59th Street. The company's flagship was most recently located at 1356 Third, between 77th and 78th streets, after it started out in a Madison Avenue townhouse.

4. Cooper Square Realty, 622 Third Avenue

The city's largest residential property management firm scored its own fancy digs at Charles Cohen's bustling 622 Third. The 66,000-square-foot leasehold is just east of its former space, at 6 East 43rd Street.

5. Studley, 399 Park Avenue

The firm, specializing in tenant representation, played the tenant itself, relocating its corporate HQ to 61,000 square feet. The expanding brokerage moved just up the street from its 20-year home at 300 Park.

6. Jones Lang LaSalle, 330 Madison Avenue

Even the experts took a while to find 82,000 square feet in Vornado's glass box. One of the city's largest commercial brokerages will leave Mort Zuckerman's trophy at 601 Lexington. Score one for Steve Roth.

FINANCE (Orange)

1. Natixis, 1251 Sixth Avenue

The French money managers will fill the 180,000-square-foot space at the base of Rockefeller Center left behind by Avon. 

2. EisnerLubin LLP, 1411 Broadway

The accountants strode into the garment district with a 19,000-square-foot lease that helped them expand their space by 50 percent from a former Madison Avenue home.

3. Senator Investment Group, 510 Madison Avenue 

The hedge funders signed the first lease at Harry Macklowe's former building, for 11,500 square feet, with a starting rent of $100 a square foot.

4. Société Générale SA,
245 Park Avenue

France's second-biggest bank signed the year's largest lease, taking a 442,000-square-foot chunk of space vacated by Bear Stearns. The space was like a "needle in the haystack," said one broker for the bank, which will move its U.S. HQ from 1221 Sixth.

5. Mizuho Securities USA,
320 Park Avenue

After vetting every top-tier space in midtown, the traders settled on 69,000 square feet at Mutual of America Building, subleasing from JPMorgan. The firm was formerly located at 1251 Sixth Avenue.

6. Arsenal Capital Partners, 100 Park Avenue

This private-equity firm, with offices in Shanghai and New York, was determined to stay on Park Avenue, and so it did with an 11,000-square-foot lease, migrating down the block from 320 Park.

7. Elliott Management, 40 West 57th Street

The hedge fund was lured to a consolidated 75,000-square-foot space from its home in a high-end midtown tower at 712 Fifth Avenue.

8. Ares Capital Corporation, 245 Park Avenue

The investors took 66,656 square feet in the building, joining Société Générale.

9. Dahlman Rose & Company, 1301 Sixth Avenue

This small investment firm, focused on the shipping industry, set sail this year for an additional 65,888 square feet in the midtown building also occupied by Barclays. 

10. Piper Jaffray & Co., 345 Park Avenue

The Minneapolis-based investment bank decided that one headquarters is indeed better than two. It left behind two other addresses in favor of 65,000 square feet in the Rudin-owned building also occupied by the Blackstone Group.

11. First Eagle Investment Management, 1345 Sixth Avenue

The firm quietly leased 63,000 square feet.

12. MF Global Holdings, 55 East 52nd Street

Former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine took the lead of the small, struggling investment firm and promptly moved it to 62,000 square feet between Madison and Park. The company will keep the 65,000-square-foot space it has at 717 Fifth.

13. New York Liquidation Bureau, 110 William Street

The New York Liquidation Bureau, which handles insolvent insurance companies for the state, took floors 15 through 17, plus some space on the 18th floor, in Kent Swig's 110 William Street.

14. PineBridge Investments,
399 Park Avenue

AIG sold its building at 70 Pine, along with the eponymous asset-management business, PineBridge Investments. The company, which was bought by the Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Group, took over the entire fourth floor and part of the sixth at Boston Properties' 399 Park. Former AIG head Hank Greenberg's C.V. Starr & Co. is just an elevator ride away.

15. Deloitte & Touche LLP,
World Financial Center

After losing space in the World Trade Center, the accounting and consulting giant subleased space in Merrill's building in the World Financial Center. This fall, the company added 100,000 square feet in 30 Rock.

NONPROFITS, UNIONS & GOVERNMENT (Purple)

1. Planned Parenthood,
125 Maiden Lane

International Planned Parenthood Federation made a short jump from its headquarters at 120 Wall Street and a big leap to owning 26,000 square feet. It paid around $9 million.

2. AIDS Vaccine Initiative,
125 Broad Street

The nonprofit leased 37,404 square feet for its New York headquarters in Mack Cali's nonprofit haven, where the American Civil Liberties Union also resides.

3. Innocence Project,
40 Worth Street

These defenders of the wrongfully convicted expanded to 20,289 square feet at Jeff Gural's downtown nonprofit refuge, joining the Legal Aid Society and Public Health Solutions.

4. U.N. Population Fund,
605 Third Avenue

The U.N. folks took 130,740 square feet of Pfizer's former space at 605 Third. The population fund was formerly at the original Daily News building at 220 East 42nd, but the new location brings it a lot closer to the U.N. headquarters.

5. Healthfirst, 100 Church Street

The nonprofit brought life back to SL Green's downtown building with a 172,000-square-foot lease, moving its headquarters from 25 Broadway.

6. New York Blood Center,
125 Park Avenue

The largest independent blood center in the country subleased the entire 21st floor from fame-averse billionaire Chuck Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies Foundation.

7. Farber Center for Radiation
Oncology, 100 Church

The health care center signed a 20-year, 21,965-square-foot lease, the first since SL Green took over troubled 100 Church from the Sapir Organization.

8. Bowery Residents' Committee, 127-131 West 25th Street

The affordable-housing provider found its own 104,500-square-foot home, moving uptown from Lafayette Street.

9. M.T.A., 333 West 34th Street

The transit authority arrived at a recently refurbished 113,000-square-foot spot at 333 West 34th Street with 18-foot glass walls. Perhaps that will inspire them to finally renovate a few stations.

10. DC 1707,
414-422 West 45th Street

The union signed a major 67,706-square-foot lease, with an option to buy. The reps for 25,000 members of the day care, health-care and nonprofit sectors are moving uptown from 75 Varick Street.

11. International Multiple
Sclerosis Management Practice, 521 West 57th Street

In a large-scale expansion, the largest MS research and treatment facility in the world brokered a 48,000-square-foot addition in July to create a stem cell research lab and wellness center with two new MRI machines.

12. Metis Associates,
120 Wall Street

The nonprofit consultant landed among friends in 19,500 square feet at 120 Wall, which has tenants like the National Urban League, the United Way of America and the United Negro College Fund. The company relocated from nearby 90 Broad.

13. GHMC, 450 West 33rd Street

After being turned away from several properties ("I was surprised and disappointed in my real estate colleagues," one Cushman & Wakefield broker told the Post), the Gay Men's Health Crisis signed a sublease for the sixth floor of 450 West 33rd Street from Thirteen/WNET, which is transitioning to space on Eighth Avenue.

14. City University of New York, 395 Hudson Street

Following an aborted move to downtown Brooklyn, CUNY renewed its lease in SL Green's 555 West 57th Street and added some extra space in 395 Hudson Street, former home of Newsweek.

OTHERS (Brown)

1. Noven Pharmaceuticals,
Empire State Building

Moving from one iconic building to another, the company signed a 25,346-square-foot lease for the entire 37th floor, leaving behind the Chrysler Building.

2. JetBlue,
27-01 Queens Plaza North

After winning impressive concessions, including some rights to the "I ♥ NY" slogan and an agreement to emblazon its name on Long Island City's Brewster building, the airline will sublease 200,000 square feet from MetLife.

3. Ford Models,
57 West 57th Street

The agency took 11,239 square feet on the top three floors of 57 West 57th Street, which includes a terrace with some sweet cityscapes--though hardly the most beautiful sight in the office.

4. Avon, 777 Third Avenue

The beauty product peddler went door to door from 1251 Sixth to 246,500 square feet at 777 Third. The mega-move has been credited with inspiring a flurry of deals and helping to revitalize the block in the far east.

5. Telehouse International
Corporation of America,
85 10th Avenue

The co-location specialists did some relocating of their own, to 59,383 square feet on 10th Avenue.

6. Kohl's, 1400 Broadway

The discount clothiers doubled their design space to 60,000 square feet, moving from 1395 Broadway to 1400 Broadway. Expect to see more from such lines as Candies, Simply Vera and Chaps in the coming year.

7. Hartmarx Corporation,
125 Park Avenue

The Chicago-based tailor to Barack Obama has faced financial trouble of late, but it moved its New York offices into 56,772 square feet at 125 Park Avenue.

8. Diageo North America,
530 Fifth Avenue

Well, at least we know what they'll be drinking at the office-warming party. The Connecticut-based booze juggernaut, which makes Guinness, Johnny Walker and Red Stripe, leased 56,156 square feet. 

9. Tiffany & Company,
200 Fifth Avenue

The jeweler consolidated from 17 floors spread across three midtown buildings to four and a half floors in the former International Toy Building, home of Mario Batali's new Eataly.

10. National Football League,
345 Park Avenue

With NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell looking to cut costs, the league took over three full floors in Rudin's 345 Park, two blocks north of their former home.

11. Innovation Interactive LLC,
32 Sixth Avenue

The Japanese-owned Internet marketing technology company moved from Chelsea to join up with Dentsu, its parent company, in space formerly occupied by AT&T at Rudin's 32 Avenue of the Americas.

12. AECOM, 100 Park Avenue

The Los Angeles-based Fortune 500 tech company AECOM, owner of Tishman Construction, signed up for 106,000 square feet, anchoring SL Green's repositioning of the building as Class A office space.

Information on the above moves was culled from The Observer's original reporting over the past 12 months and that of other media, and from data prepared by brokerage CB Richard Ellis (stats current as of Dec. 16). 

Observer Manhattan Map

Graphic by Peter Lettre

SL Green is used to cozying up to troubled developers--the Sapirs and the Macklowes of the world--as well as to healthier ones like Mr. Ross of the Related Companies (he declined SL Green's check, and litigation over 3 Columbus Circle drags on).

If confidence is at a premium in New York's post-recession real estate market, SL Green's size and stability are in demand. It is difficult to overstate the rapacious company's reach into the nuts and bolts of buildings where hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers spend most of their waking hours.

See SL Green's tentacular empire. >>

The company controls 25 million square feet of office space in the city, occupied by some 900-plus tenants. The company's total holdings include close to 90 buildings, when you consider everywhere SL Green owns debt; everywhere the company has entered into a mezzanine lending agreement; everywhere the company owns development rights; and all the land the company owns under buildings, including the former home of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, Phillip Johnson's Lipstick building on Third Avenue, whose owners filed for bankruptcy protection in November. All told, SL Green has more than $14 billion of assets in New York. (The Observer, in the accompanying map, set out to document this tentacular reach using information from the trust itself, interviews, media reports and other research.)

At the end of 2008, with all that year's uncertainty, CEO Marc Holliday told SL Green investors that "I can now confidently say that the worst is behind us," and everyone in the industry breathed a sigh of relief. Two days later, SL Green began buying up debt on Harry and Billy Macklowe's 510 Madison Avenue. At the time, the building, which was supposed to replace the Seagram Building as the go-to for the city's hedge funds, was barely occupied, with only two tenants, both of which were suing to break their leases after construction troubles. Eight months later, SL Green walked away with $66 million after stabilizing the building's future and selling it off to Boston Properties.

Mr. Holliday, who joined SL Green just 10 years out of college, in 1998, after advising the company's IPO earlier that year, took over as CEO in 2004 from founder Stephen L. Green, older brother of former public advocate Mark Green, and turned the company's attentions to gobbling top-shelf real estate in Manhattan.

He has insisted that his trust will lead the market, not follow. The company's bread and butter has been acquiring embattled office buildings, many of them of so-called Class B quality (solid bones, but nothing spectacular), and repositioning them for top-tier clients. Or, as one broker told The New York Times, "SL Green does a good job of fixing up buildings and jacking up the rent." Their largest tenants include some of the city's lifeblood companies: Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Viacom, Polo Ralph Lauren, Random House and BMW.

During the tougher times, which hit just after the company started its acquisition spree, SL Green employed a "Nobody Gets Out" approach to retaining its tenants. "All of our agents are under strict instructions that nobody gets out--nobody--unless there's just nobody there. But if they're there, they don't get out," Mr. Holliday told a Citigroup-organized conference of real estate CEOs last spring (the bank, by the way, leases almost 4.5 million square feet from SL Green citywide).

Last week, in SL Green's most recent presentation to investors, Mr. Holliday said that he was ready to start pursuing more competitive rents again. "Writing off the relevancy of New York was a bit premature," he said. "Those arguments have been a bit marginalized. And in a macro sense, that's why we remain very excited about the prospects for this city over the next two to three years."

See SL Green's tentacular empire. >>

zturner@observer.com

Map Final Upload-1

Graphic by E.F. ANGEL

After more than five years of owning the brownfield, discovering different biohazards and revising construction plans, the Austin, Texas-based company announced last week that construction will begin in 2011, as soon as the city approves its plans. A scaled-back 52,000-square-foot version of the store will open late in 2012 (the company originally broke ground in 2006). The canal, which has approximately 10 feet of black sediment the consistency of mayonnaise festering at the bottom, likely won't be clean for another 10 years.

It was only a matter of time before big-box brown rice capitalism landed in Brooklyn, which in the last four years has welcomed Fairway, Ikea and Trader Joe's. Whole Foods has opened six stores in New York since 2001, all in Manhattan. But proximity to Park Slope, the epicenter of purpose-driven, pseudo-suburban family life in Brooklyn, opens a whole new can of worms. Residents have so far staved off high-end retail, other than the odd boutique, despite being a branch office of Manhattan economically. One cannot even find a Gap in its increasingly lily-white environs.

This is Park Slope Food Coop territory, after all.

"I have concerns about the politics of the Whole Foods founder," said Mary Crowley on Saturday morning, walking through the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market with her husband. John Mackey, the company's co-founder and CEO, is a self-taught businessman who believes in small government, and he once compared working with unions to living with herpes--"It stops a lot of people from loving you." In August of last year, he wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal arguing that the government should not interfere in the health-care business. "He's very conservative," Ms. Crowley continued. "And we have good stores here already, so I don't know if we need another one."

Ms. Crowley's husband, John Denatale, walked over with their tall, long-haired dog. "I think people in the Slope get over things quickly," he said, their dog pushing his snout between his legs.

"I think they'll be upset. I disagree," said Ms. Crowley.

There was a strong wind blowing down Eastern Parkway. "People in Park Slope don't like change," explained Mark Germann, a young attorney standing over his son in a stroller while his wife, Beth Aala, a filmmaker, looked at yogurt drinks in the Ronnybrook Farm Dairy stall.

"Chains or change?" she asked, coming over to secure an extra blanket over their son.

"Change," he said.

"Maybe both," she added.

Whole Foods is more of an ideological challenge to the Park Slope Food Coop, the headquarters of arch-Park Slope living, than it is a threat to business. The cooperative, which is 15,000 members strong, was, foot by foot, more than three times as profitable as a Whole Foods in 2010, according to Fortune. Member attrition increased with the arrival of Fairway in Red Hook in 2006, but long checkout lines continue.

"I'm not a member of the co-op," Mr. Germann continued. "It's a little bit like a right-wing regime. They force you to do things, right? ... It's not a democracy; it's a totalitarian regime." He talked about friends getting "blacklisted" for missing shifts.

How will the Whole Foods stack up to the venerable Park Slope Food Coop? The Observer did some comparison shopping! >>

The arrival of Whole Foods is also a benchmark of the gentrification that newer Park Slope residents have wrought: It's now creeping across Fourth Avenue into Gowanus. Two women waiting in line for organic meat on the other side of the farmers' market, both with babies bundled against the cold strapped to their chests, said they would definitely not be going to the new Whole Foods. It was too expensive and too far out of the way. They don't own cars, and besides, they were members of the co-op. They declined to give their names. "Are you a member of the co-op?" one of the mothers asked, glinting at The Observer with a taut smile. "Just wondering."

"Oh, you're talking about Brooklyn! When you said Third Avenue and Third Street, I thought Manhattan," said writer Gary Shteyngart, who rented an apartment on Seventh Avenue and First Street, in the traditional heart of Park Slope retail, in the mid-1990s. "Third Avenue and Third Street, holy crap. Wow," he said. He had just returned from Santa Fe, where he was promoting his latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, and was talking over the phone on Monday afternoon from his apartment in Manhattan. He said he moved back to the city to be closer to his shrink.

Mr. Shteyngart moved to Park Slope when he was working on his first book, and he expected it to be "edgy." There was a Connecticut Muffin on Seventh Avenue then. "Well, you know, there's an Ikea in Red Hook. Nothing is sacred anymore," he said, adding that in 25 years, no part of Brooklyn will remain untouched. "This elite group of people must be served one way or another," Mr. Shteyngart continued. "These kids need to be fed! Two-point-four kids per person there, so they need organic foods."

Mr. Shteyngart was proud to report that he never joined the co-op, "and I went to Oberlin, where working in a co-op was the cool thing to do."

Mr. Mackey of Whole Foods told Reason magazine this year that the most important variable in selecting a new site for stores is the number of college-educated people living within a 16-minute drive. Hello, Park Slope!

Novelist Amy Sohn, a co-op member and Brown alumna who grew up in Brooklyn Heights, compared Gowanus to downtown Providence before it was cleaned up. "It was dirty video stores," she said, "and now they have this whole festival of candles on the waterfront. I feel like Gowanus is heading in that direction. It's a little bit frightening. I love the gritty feel." She now lives in Park Slope, and her latest book, Prospect Park West, satirizes the neighborhood.

She said she would not shop at Whole Foods but hoped some of the riffraff at the co-op--the type of people who don't have their hearts in the movement, the type who wind up on the blacklist--might.

"They probably come from another part of the country where Whole Foods is very fetishized, and they have been waiting," Ms. Sohn said. "They want to replicate their sort of Mall of America experience in New York City, so they love that you can have a Whole Foods in Brooklyn."

On the other end of the spectrum was a "crazy fringe" of Park Slopers who may object to the presence of the store, she said. "They're just not going to like that it's this massive chain experience, even with progressive values. They're not going to buy into that."

"I guess I put myself in the 'sure, but I won't shop there' category,'" Ms. Sohn said when we asked if she would allow Whole Foods to build on the site if it was entirely up to her. "I mean, they're creating 350 jobs. There's gonna be the greenhouse. It's very ecologically conscious. There's gonna be stations for electric cars.

"They're the devil," she said. "They've made it too good to turn down."

There will also be bike parking and a waterfront esplanade, in the model of Ikea and Fairway in Red Hook. According to a letter sent by Mark Mobley, an executive who oversees construction for Whole Foods, the rooftop garden "will grow fresh, organic produce right on-site!" Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for the company, added that produce grown on the roof will be sold in the store. "The stores that are built in Connecticut use reclaimed wood from torn-down farms in Connecticut," Mr. Sinatra said, "and hopefully this one will feature brick from old torn-down Brooklyn buildings."

No bricks, however, will come from the landmarked Coignet Stone Company, constructed in 1873, on the corner of the Whole Foods lot. The structure will sit just behind the new store.

"I don't know. I just don't want them to tear it down. Do you? Maybe they should. What do you think?" asked artist Dustin Yellin on Sunday afternoon, after a flight back from Art Basel, talking about the Stone Company building. "They should donate it to artists to have a small museum there! I want to build a museum."

He was eating dark chocolate and sitting cross-legged in his office, off the studio, living space and gallery he opened in Red Hook. There were photographs tacked to the wall above his desk, including reproductions of Pieter Bruegel winter-scene paintings, studies for a 24-by-36-foot glass piece he is working on. Mr. Yellin and his close friend, Charlotte Kidd, bought the building on an isolated street in 2007 after his work became too heavy for the floors in his Manhattan studio. Now he finds himself down the street from Fairway, and neighbors with the new cruise ship dock and Christie's new warehouse in the New York Dock Company building. It's a short walk to Ikea.

Mr. Yellin described Whole Foods as a "weird art installation, a postmodern clusterfuck of like 55 kinds of the same kind of granola and 55 kinds of the same kind of chocolate." He doesn't like grocery shopping very much.

"If it's not going to be a museum, and it's not going to be a park--'cause those are two things that I think enhance communities--then I say to myself, 'Well, a Whole Foods isn't terrible because a strip mall would suck. And Whole Foods isn't terrible, because don't they have good stuff?' I could definitely shop there to cook dinner for my friends. It's not Wal-Mart."

Outside the co-op on Monday morning, the attitude was live-and-let-live. Doug Ashford, who teaches sculpture at Cooper Union and has belonged to the co-op since 1983, was waiting with his groceries for a ride home. He reached into his cart and tore off a piece of olive bread.

"The practices that are involved with the co-op have more to do with overall lifestyle choices that we all make," he said. "The only problem is that if that creates an economic shift in the neighborhood, where people get replaced. But we've been through so many waves of gentrification--I've been here since the '70s--that I'm not that worried about that, either."

"I doubt I'll shop there. It's too expensive. All of their products have way too much sugar," said Hilda Cohen, another co-op member, as she bungee-corded a cardboard box of groceries to the back of her bicycle. She comes over from Fort Greene to shop.

Ms. Cohen had heard all about Whole Foods' green roof and said she thought the company was doing a good job listening to the neighborhood's concerns. "They're wanting to do the right thing. And for how many times Atlantic Yards doesn't want to do the right thing ..." she said. "So, you know, it feels like they're trying."

Erin Jones, who commutes from Chinatown to the American Can Factory across the street from the Whole Foods site, was conflicted about the new store. She likes the view from her office the way it is. "I like the signage, the big open lot. That's something that I enjoy on my walk to work," she said over the phone on Monday afternoon.

Ms. Jones and her coworkers at Lite Brite Neon make custom neon signage in rented studio space. They keep bees on the roof, but they haven't been able to harvest any honey yet. The office normally orders in lunch together, or everyone brings from home, because there just isn't that much nearby in Gowanus. She wondered whether their bees would like the Whole Foods roof garden better than what's there now. "There's sort of an outlaw nature to it," she said. "It's a great open expanse. I feel like it's sort of a Texas of Brooklyn."

How will the Whole Foods stack up to the venerable Park Slope Food Co-op? The Observer did some comparison shopping! >>

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

The gallerists hammered out the details over pizza with the architect on the Swiss mountaintop, according to The New York Times' Alex Williams, who described the eight-story tower in today's edition as a "Trumpian expression of ambition."

Ealier The Times' Linda Yablonsky described Lord Foster's building as an "eight-story shaft thrusting its metallic black, milky-glass way up." But Angela Westwater, in her third interview with the newspaper about the space, was pretty reserved — not Trumpian, not thrusting shaft–like. “It’s the burgeoning spirit that we’re more interested in, rather than creating any kind of mausoleum," said Ms. Westwater, a former managing editor of Artforum in the 1970s. "There are enough museums out there to do that.”

zturner@observer.com

Mr. Ross swept past his opponent, Joe Moinian, the building's owner and chairman of his own development firm, sitting upright on a front-row bench closer to the entrance. A big knot in Mr. Moinian's baby-blue silk tie hugged his neck. Mr. Ross sat down on a bench of his own, front and center, and crossed his legs, knees stacked. "Mr. Ross, I haven't seen you in years," said Judge Charles Ramos from the other side of the room. His robe hung open below his bow tie. "It's like an old-folks home."

The city's most powerful developer grinned and arched his eyebrows. "Thank you," Mr. Ross said. A black ribbed sock and black hand-sewn leather loafer with tassels dangled from below the right cuff of his navy pinstriped suit. His plan to take over Mr. Moinian's building by controlling the debt is unusual for Mr. Ross, but Columbus Circle is his home turf: He keeps a condo and office in the Time Warner Center, which Related co-developed after helping demolish Robert Moses' Coliseum. Knocking down Mr. Moinian's building could be the next step in remaking the area.

But at 3 Columbus Circle, Mr. Ross owns only the $250 million mortgage, which collects $70,000 in interest every day. After Mr. Moinian stopped making payments in January, Mr. Ross and his financier, Deutsche Bank German American Capital Corporation, accelerated the mortgage, demanding full payment and an additional $54 million as a prepayment penalty. It was the first step toward foreclosure and taking the building away from Mr. Moinian, who has already seen his 20 million-square-foot empire shrink during the Great Recession (Barclays Capital seized 475 Fifth Avenue from Mr. Monian and a partner in 2009).

FOR A LOOK AT THE TEMPESTUOUS HISTORY OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE, SEE THE CASTLES AND CLASHES OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE. >>

Mr. Ross appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box on Sept. 10 to talk about the real estate market and the Dolphins alongside Richard LeFrak. Mr. Ross' picture floated onscreen above the title "KING OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE."

"We bought a note on a property that was kind of adjacent to Time Warner Center," he told the show's host, Carl Quintanilla, just after noon. "We saw that there was a higher and better use and we bought the note hoping to do something there." CNBC cut to B-roll of 3 Columbus Circle with the Moinian Group's "M" logo on the scaffolding in clear view.

When Mr. Moinian bought the building, a homely red-brick tower built in the 1920s at 1775 Broadway for General Motors, for $130 million in 2000, it was mostly full. Newsweek kept offices there until 2009. Before credit dried up, Mr. Moinian began a bold plan to raise the building's profile, investing $175 million for renovations, including a fresh sheath of glass. He changed the name to 3 Columbus Circle and raised asking rents.

It's not the ugliest building in the area, but the glass, which catches the reflection of Lord Norman Foster's Hearst Tower across the street, isn't fooling anyone. According to media reports, Mr. Ross would like to demolish Mr. Moinian's tower and replace it with one designed by a famous architect; he is planning to move the city's first Nordstrom's to retail space on the lower floors to anchor the tower, and fill the upper floors with 140 condominiums; and the company began shopping for architects in September. Related declined to comment.

"It's just not something that I think a lender should be saying," Stephen Meister, Mr. Monian's lawyer, told The Observer over the phone on Monday. Mr. Ross has stipulated that any new tenant in the building would have to agree to a six-month demolition clause with no provision for reimbursement.

Between Mr. Moinian's raising rent in the building and the lenders' attempts to scare off new tenants, 3 Columbus Circle is now less than 20 percent occupied. On Monday, a leasing advertisement on the building's black scaffolding read, in big white letters, "contiguous block of up to 650,000 RSF"--that's in a 770,000-square-foot building. From CNN's 10th-floor cafeteria across the street in the Time Warner Center on Monday afternoon, The Observer counted four construction workers painting sealant around a drain and installing glass sheathing on the fourth-floor balcony--perhaps dutifully polishing the Titanic's banister.

In court earlier this month, Mr. Meister, a litigator's litigator wearing a dark pinstriped suit that offset his razorback brown hair, told Judge Ramos that he wants to perform what he calls "a Ross-ectomy." There was hushed laughter. The judge slouched and gazed through half-moon spectacles at the tip of his nose.

"It's not that there are bad vibes," Mr. Meister continued later.

Judge Ramos was amused: "Bad vibes?"

"It's that there is a cancer in the building!" Mr. Meister bellowed on from a podium next to the lawyers' table. "I have to get rid of Mr. Ross. I have to get rid of Mr. Ross, O.K.? I have got the money; he's right here." Mr. Meister slapped his right hand down on the shoulder of a plump man in a gray suit sitting at his hip. The only way that Mr. Moinian can take the scalpel to Mr. Ross is by paying off his $250 million mortgage.

The gray suit was a representative for SL Green, the publicly traded real estate company, run by Marc Holliday, that controls more than 30 percent of the office space in Manhattan. Mr. Holliday agreed in October to help Mr. Moinian refinance the building as part of a joint venture.

The biggest sticking point for Mr. Moinian is the $54 million prepayment penalty. Lawyers for both sides spent the majority of the 63 minutes in court arguing over the language that describes it in the mortgage document. Do 10 words between two commas on page 99--"provided that the Loan has not been accelerated by Lender," which it has been--modify the words ahead of the first comma or behind the second? And so on.

Halfway through the hearing, Judge Ramos examined the documents in front of him, head in chin, and sighed. He pushed his glasses up his nose. There was silence for one minute and 15 seconds as he stared at the mortgage. At the back of the room, an executive sitting to Mr. Ross' right wrapped his arm over the developer's shoulder and began whispering in his ear. Mr. Ross stared down at his dangling right loafer and nodded gently. At the end of the silence, Judge Ramos scratched his head and read the clause aloud. "... And then there's a comma."

"I am not going to try to argue with your logic," the judge said, "but I have to deal with the document as written."

Later, when discussion of existing examples of foreclosure practice came to a head, Mr. Meister gently hip-checked the skinnier Mark Walfish, Deutsche Bank and Related's lawyer, away from the podium to get a point in. Mr. Walfish was not amused: "Judge, this is great--this is like The Jerry [Springer] Show."

"I want to talk to the two of you in the back," the judge said. Mr. Meister continued to press his point forward. "In the back, right now!" The lawyers followed the judge out of the room.

Twenty minutes later, the lawyers emerged from the judge's chambers. "I need Joe. Is Joe here?" called Mr. Meister. Mr. Moinian and Mr. Ross, still yet to acknowledge each other, returned with their lawyers to see the judge. Twenty minutes later, they left without a word.

Nothing was settled.

On Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving, a representative for Mr. Meister's office dropped off at the State Supreme Court a Bank of America cashier's check signed by SL Green Management for $258,550,838.52. The numbers run to the edge of the paper. If Mr. Ross picks up the check by Dec. 6, the dispute is over and Mr. Moinian will have a new financier. If they leave the check in the court's vault, litigation over the prepayment penalty will continue, with Mr. Ross losing more than $70,000 in interest daily.

Nobody has any idea what Mr. Ross' next move will be.

"By the way, why would any lender turn that down?" Mr. Meister asked The Observer, referring to an earlier offer turned down by the lenders that included the prepayment penalty in escrow. "Think about that! Why would any lender whose real goal is to get repaid turn that down? That proves that they're predatory! The only reason to turn that down is because they want to steal the building. That's the only reason, O.K.?"

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

The 1984 Emery Roth & Sons-designed building hosted ad-sales offices for The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, the Dow Jones Newswire and the publisher's other business-to-business products for more than a decade before Rupert Murdoch moved the Dow Jones newsrooms into News Corp. headquarters, three blocks north at 47th Street in June of 2009.

This time around, Dow Jones negotiated with the Durst Organization for renovations of the third-floor bathrooms as part of the renewal. The company is planning to do some work of its own too. "We are doing some updates in the space to make it a more efficient workplace for us, but nothing major," said Howard Hoffman, a spokesman for Dow Jones. "No major renovations are planned."

Tim Dempsey, Ken Rapp and Mary Ann Tighe at CB Richard Ellis, who represented the tenant, declined to comment.

The Dow Jones floors at 1155 Avenue of the Americas were never listed publicly by the Durst Organization, but other spaces in the building are on the market. The entire 11th floor is being listed now for $60 per square foot. Suites on the fourth and 10th floors are listed for $55.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

Mr. Gosling's performance was "close," but "not as good as the real thing," Mr. Durst told The New York Times' Charles Bagli and Kevin Flynn, who have covered the Durst case since the late '90s. “Parts made me cry,” added Mr. Durst, who showed up on set during the filming and saw the movie at a private screening arranged by Magnolia Pictures.

During production of All Good Things — "part researched docudrama that claims to point to the truth," according to Messrs. Bagli and Flynn — the lawyers for the Durst Organization promised to sue upon the film's release. At issue was Mr. Jarecki's depiction of Seymour Durst as an instrument for criminal businesses in old Times Square. "[The filmmakers] can do whatever they want, but to misrepresent somebody's life story when there are live relatives around strikes me as—um—his right, but hitting below the belt," former Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger told The Observer earlier this month.

With the film slated for theatrical release this week, the Durst Organization has pivoted away from legal action. “Fortunately this movie will be seen by so few people that litigation would be superfluous,” Douglas Durst told The Times.

Earlier: Seymour Durst Did Play Tennis: Otherwise, New Film Gets Lots Wrong About Real Estate Lore

The museum's idea in the 1960s was to plant a flag on Madison at 75th Street and then expand down the block. The act was Marcel Breuer's granite zig, completed in 1966 with knock-out panels on the south elevation to simplify expansion into the adjacent lots. The Whitney proceeded to buy up the six brownstones next door (943-933 Madison Avenue) and, later, two townhouses around the corner on 74th Street. Even when the museum's offices moved into the townhouses, opening up the fifth floor to galleries, the Breuer building had only walls enough to display less than 1 percent of the museum's permanent collection.

SLIDESHOW > THE WHITNEY THROUGH THE YEARS

For the past 30 years, the quiet row of townhouses next door, now resting behind a black net to protect pedestrians from unstable brownstone, has been the stage of one failed starchitect-conceived expansion after another, all set to the chorus of medieval Upper East Side chest-thumping. Last month, the museum sold the family of townhouses for $95 million to Daniel Straus, a part-time real estate investor with money from the assisted-living business in New Jersey. Revenues between Mr. Straus' companies broke $3.5 billion in 2008, according to an interview he gave at N.Y.U. Law School upon endowing the school's Straus Institute for the Advanced Studies of Law & Justice in the name of his parents.

On Madison Avenue, the museum tried and failed, and now Mr. Straus will attempt to redevelop the brownstones for residential and commercial use--likely a tower. Developer Aby Rosen battled for more than two years to get approval for a tower on top of the limestone Parke-Bernet Galleries at Madison and 76th Street, just two blocks north of Mr. Straus' brownstones. Expressing outrage at a community board hearing that ended in a vote to reject the plans, one resident described Mr. Rosen's tower as "a glass dagger plunged into the heart of the Upper East Side."

HATING THE TOWNHOUSES around the Whitney has become a hallmark for the museum's architects. Breuer notoriously commented to Newsweek in 1966 that they "aren't any good." When a city Landmarks commissioner suggested to Renzo Piano--the third architect to attempt a workable expansion on the block--that he build an entrance through one townhouse instead of demolishing it, the Genoese architect said he would first drown himself in the river. "It is the opposite of the idea of creating a welcoming entrance," he said.

If the museum's problem is space, the architects' problem has been working around the brownstones. In 1981, the city established the Upper East Side Historic District, crippling the museum's options for expansion along the block. All of the Whitney's townhouses were deemed "contributing buildings" and awarded protection within the district, except for 943 Madison Avenue--the plainest of the sisters, a stripped, "no-style" house set flush against Breuer's building. The house may be demolished as long as it's replaced, but none of the other brownstones can be knocked down without Landmarks' permission.

While the district was in its infancy in the early 1980s, Princeton architect Michael Graves planned to demolish the brownstones and add a second Breuer-size building down the block with a recessed penthouse structure perched over both. Neighborhood activists stymied the plan. Breuer's widow, and no fewer than 700 Upper East Side residents, wrote to the chair of the museum's board to say how disappointed they were with the plans.

On the Whitney's second attempt to expand across the brownstones, Rem Koolhaas accepted the houses' right to remain but dominated them with his design: a gigantic fist of a building punching diagonally into the sky over the Breuer. It was "The Whitney, Fuck Yeah," with a Dutch accent. The $200 million expansion became too expensive and aggressive for the museum after 9/11.

Then came Renzo Piano. Renowned for his ability to put his clients at ease, he planned to demolish the lone no-style brownstone and build a tower behind her sisters on the same scale as the Breuer. The two buildings, squatting side by side over Madison, would connect through glass bridges in the sky. After some revisions, Mr. Piano's plan got past the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, but then a lot became available beneath the High Line. Mr. Piano will design the new building there.

THE FUTURE IS less than certain for the brownstones, dirty from the ashes of 30 years of torched blueprints and huddled in the shadow of what has been called "New York's most bellicose work of architecture"--"Breuer's Brutalist bunker!"

Mr. Straus, the new owner, has opted for privacy. "He just bought the place," said Kathy Cudahy, a lobbyist and spokesperson Mr. Straus hired to shepherd the purchase through the early stages of development. "I don't know what he's going to build there. He doesn't know yet. He's exploring all options and, you know, meeting with the architects, but they don't have any solid proposals."

The largest of the houses, a red-brick mansion on 74th Street that connects from behind to the Breuer, will likely be renovated as a single-family home. The mansion was designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, the architect behind Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, where Mr. Straus' wife grew up. What makes sense for the rest of the brownstones at the price Mr. Straus paid, according to one broker who deals townhouses on the Upper East Side, is to build a 100,000-square-foot tower in back.

"There must be some sort of understanding here that Landmarks will give at least what they gave the Whitney in terms of permission," said the broker. "For him to actually pay $95 million and to have no idea what landmarks will let him do would be kind of foolhardy."

"I bet somehow the lawyers had it all papered up so that he knows he's not gonna get a worse deal than that," the broker added.

Mr. Straus secured Richard Metsky, who is also overseeing the renovation of the Art Deco lobby at the Empire State Building, as his project architect. Mr. Metsky's colleague at Beyer Blinder Belle, Fred Bland, was appointed by the mayor to the Landmarks Commission in 2008, and will have to recuse himself from Mr. Straus' hearing.

"If he wants to rehabilitate them within the scale that's there now, he'll have no problem," said Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia's architecture school. He knows the brownstones well through research for his last book, The Rowhouse Reborn. "If he is going to propose to build a significant large building behind them, then there's gonna be a lot of outcry in opposition. And the neighborhood's very organized, so."

Facing Mr. Piano's plans in 2005, the neighborhood mustered by the hundreds into groups like Coalition of Concerned Whitney Neighbors and Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side. "The previous plans, we felt, were totally inappropriate, so we hope that a new proposal will take into account the historic character of the Upper East Side Historic District," said Tara Kelly, executive director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District, another activist group.

Ms. Kelly told The Observer that she has already heard murmurs that Mr. Straus would like to demolish the no-style brownstone. Ms. Kelly said that Valerie Campbell, a land-use lawyer at Kramer Levin hired by Mr. Straus, called her as soon as news of the sale was published. "I think they have a friendly intention toward working with us at this point," she said.

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, wondered if the Landmarks Commission's prior approval for a tower on the site would grease the wheels for Mr. Straus' supposed plans. "That plan was"--Mr. Bankoff sighed into the phone--"a disturbing plan in that it proposed to demolish a building and not replace it with anything.

"I found the rationale behind it to be basically specious, but the fact of the matter is, they did get approval," he continued. "They got permission to do something I don't think they should have been allowed to do, but it was based on the fact that it was the Whitney and part of a larger concept." But, before the Landmarks Commission, there aren't different rules for private investors and museums.

"We don't regulate how a building is used; we regulate how a building is designed and how a building looks," said Elisabeth de Bourbon, a Landmarks spokesperson. "There's really just one standard," Ms. de Bourbon continued, "and I know this sounds vague: appropriateness."

She noted that the tower that was approved by the commission in 2005 created harmony with the Breuer building. Museum or condominium aside, a tower that connects one building to another with glass bridges may be more appropriate than a stand-alone residential tower, even of the same scale.

THE OBSERVER REACHED out to one of the museum's curators, offering anonymity, to speak about the space inside the townhouses. "I'm afraid this isn't really something that I can discuss, since I'm sure you realize it's a rather sensitive topic at the museum," the curator wrote in an email, directing us to the museum's press officer. "I have no information to share other than to confirm that the buildings were sold," the spokesman wrote in an email. O.K.!

Paul Liebowitz at CB Richard Ellis, the broker who managed the sale for the Whitney, declined to comment on the state of the property at the behest of the museum.

From the street, the townhouses appear desolate behind their net, a vista of dreariness, as Gertrude Whitney might say. Besides a Calypso St. Barths women's store and the estate jewelry store Michael Ashton, whose storefront features Patek Phillipes from the '30s and '40s and a "James Bond" Rolex, the other commercial space along the row sits empty. The apartments upstairs look vacant and unkept. The Whitney went to State Supreme Court to evict the tenants in the late '80s and lost. 

But the buildings are special. There is only one other stand of six connecting Neo-Grec townhouses--a style that emerged in the late 19th century when archaeologists started to get their hands on the best artifacts from Herculaneum and Pompeii--on Madison Avenue. Designed by S.M. Styles in the 1870s, the brownstones recall a time when single-family homes were built speculatively to house the city's growing middle class, a moment increasingly invisible in the East 70s.

Everyone expects Mr. Straus' plans for the buildings to bubble up in January. In the meantime, the Whitney has raised $475 million of the $680 million it expects to spend on its new location downtown with the sale of the townhouses. The museum cannot afford to run two locations, and, after a conditional gift of $131 million from the Whitney's chairman emeritus, Leonard Lauder, the Breuer cannot be sold for a period of time. Only the board knows how long. But in keeping with the spirit of Gertrude Whitney, groundbreaking in the meatpacking district is slated for May.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

SLIDESHOW > THE WHITNEY THROUGH THE YEARS

"Inspired by the story of Robert Durst, scion of the wealthy Durst family," according to the film's production notes, All Good Things is director Andrew Jarecki's telling of the murder and disappearance of Kathie Durst, Robert's wife, "the most notorious missing person's case in New York history." The word "inspired" here will be the subject of a lawsuit between the Durst Organization and Mr. Jarecki when the film is released Dec. 3.

In making a film about Mr. Durst, who may have killed as many as three people--his first wife, his friend Susan Berman and Morris Black, an older man he became close with while living as a cross-dressing mute woman in Galveston, Texas--Mr. Jarecki also produced a sensational, fun-house rumination on the psyche and internal politics of the Durst family, one of the city's most established real estate dynasties. Bobby's brother Douglas and first cousin Jody are the third generation of Dursts, an Austrian family that's been in New York since 1902, to run the Durst Organization, which controls more than 12 million square feet of property here, including 4 Times Square and One Bryant Park, and a major stake in the rising One World Trade Center.

Mr. Gosling's David asks the taxi driver to pull over in front of the Luxor Hotel on 46th Street. "What are we doing? What is this place?" Ms. Dunst's Katie asks. On the sidewalk, fat cops in musty cornflower blue NYPD uniforms herd prostitutes into a paddy wagon. A middle-aged man buttons his overshirt, blue-balled.

Seymour Durst, Douglas and Bobby's father and a giant in New York real estate into the 1990s, owned the Luxor until 1976, when he sold it to a group that the city feared would turn it into a "lavish massage parlor and house of prostitution," according to a New York Times item then. Following the sale, Mayor Abe Beame asked Durst to resign from his Midtown Citizens Commission, a group aimed at cleaning up Times Square.

From a phone booth, David calls his father, Sanford Marks, a character supposedly based on Seymour Durst and played by Frank Langella. "I'm at the Luxor. There's cops everywhere."

"Listen to me, go over to the Avon--they may be next," Sanford growls on the other end of the phone from his desk. His son says he has his hands full with his wife. "David, get your ass over to the Avon and pick up the cash!" Sanford slams the phone down. A henchman sitting on a sofa in the background of the office pulls his head away from a second telephone to tell Sanford that the mayor isn't available to stop the Luxor raid.

The film suggests vaguely, here and elsewhere, that the Dursts were the kind of family that had City Hall in their pocket--and that Seymour drove his son Bobby insane.

David heads to the Avon, a hard-core pornography theater in the Studebaker Building at 48th and Broadway that the Durst family never owned, and shuffles around by the concession stand waiting for an envelope of cash. Meanwhile, Katie sits alone in the waiting room of an abortion clinic watching another couple, who hold hands and smile, waiting gleefully to have their own pregnancy terminated. Historical fidelity aside, the movie is weird.

The couple are reunited at dinner that night. Katie leaves the table to snort cocaine off a silvery toilet-paper dispenser in the bathroom. She snorts coke again later, this time off a toilet seat, and smokes five Parliaments while clutching a ledger she has just stolen from David's office at her in-laws' business headquarters. The viewer is left to believe the ledger, which Katie plans to use as a bargaining chip in a divorce settlement, catalogs money collected illegally, as rent and protection money, from the pornographers and pimps of old Times Square.

"To see a long record of hard work and civic accomplishment so casually maligned in the film is simply intolerable for the family," wrote Richard Emery, counsel for the Dursts, in a letter to the director in July 2008. Mr. Emery suggested Durst representatives and Mr. Jarecki meet to discuss the film's veracity (that never happened). In a second letter, in September of this year, the counsel said the Dursts would sue Magnolia Pictures upon the film's release.

Nobody is concerned about the way Bobby Durst is portrayed in the film. Mr. Durst is an avowed psychopath who served a total of five years in Texas for tampering with evidence--using a hacksaw to dismember the body of Morris Black before dumping his remains in Galveston Bay; the Durst family keeps Robert under 24-hour surveillance whenever he comes to New York from Florida or Texas, where he now spends most of his time. The Durst Organization is first and foremost concerned with the depiction of Seymour Durst and the company's role in helping develop Times Square under his watch.

Responding to the film is a tricky matter for the real-life family and firm. "It's a work of fiction," a spokesman for the Dursts told The Observer. To say anything beyond that would only create more buzz around the film.

"The notion that he was wedded to bad buildings and bad tenants strikes me as absurd," said former Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, who got to know Seymour Durst during more than 20 years in city politics. She described him as a grandfather figure who loved to share knowledge about New York with younger friends. His was one of the most complete libraries of books about the city, and, upon his death in 1995, he donated the collection and $2 million to the graduate school at CUNY.

In business, Durst is best remembered for his policy of not buying anything that he couldn't walk to. He would dress incognito, some say, and appraise properties himself. "He was a small person," Ms. Messinger said. "He was compact, in a sense. He conveyed that he was a powerful real estate owner really by being able to have a powerful presence without throwing his body or his voice or his arms around." Another longtime friend described him as "small, thin--nothing like Frank Langella." Everyone who The Observer talked to about Seymour Durst said it was difficult to imagine him cursing at all.

"They can do whatever they want," Ms. Messinger said about the filmmakers, "but to misrepresent somebody's life story when there are live relatives around strikes me as--um--his right, but hitting below the belt."

Mr. Jarecki, the director, won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2003 for his last film, Capturing the Friedmans. Relying heavily on the Long Island family's home movies, the documentary embraced complexity and nuance and honored the audience's right to ponder. Mr. Jarecki co-founded Moviefone in 1989, and ran it as CEO before selling it in 1999 to AOL for nearly $400 million. He later wrote the theme music for Felicity with J.J. Abrams. He declined to speak with The Observer because of an arrangement with The Times to run a story about All Good Things closer to its release.

In the winter of 2005, Mr. Jarecki and his co-producer and screenwriter, Marc Smerling, who also worked on Capturing the Friedmans, invited Matt Birkbeck to meet them at the Tick Tock Diner off Route 3 in Clifton, N.J. Mr. Birkbeck wrote about Bobby Durst for People in 2000 and Reader's Digest in 2003, and expanded his reporting in a book, A Deadly Secret.

Mr. Jarecki came to the meeting with a copy of the book dressed in "1,000 Post-It notes," according to the author. The director wasn't interested in optioning it, but he did want to hire Mr. Birkbeck as a consultant. "What that is is basically a cheap way to get somebody's research," Mr. Birkbeck said over the phone last week. He and his wife had watched All Good Things on pay-per-view the weekend before.

"How can I be kind?" Mr. Birkbeck said. "It was just bad. It was! I was surprised, too." Ultimately Mr. Birkbeck had nothing to do with the film, but he said that Mr. Jarecki acquired the NYPD's file on Kathie Durst and drew heavily from testimony given by Bobby Durst in a Texas court.

"He's trying to do a Durst movie, and yet he's changing things around to the point where it just becomes implausible, you know?" Mr. Birkbeck said. "It made no sense. I had no idea what he was doing. For a guy who did so much research, it looked like he didn't do anything." Mr. Birkbeck hesitated to identify any elements of the film that were accurate, aside from a scene in which Mr. Gosling's David drags Ms. Dunst's Katie out of a party by her hair. Also true: Seymour Durst, like Frank Langella's character, played tennis.

Mr. Birkbeck wondered why Mr. Jarecki felt compelled to fictionalize Bobby Durst's story. "I didn't understand how you could screw up a story in which you got a guy who's a nutball; two or three murders; he's a cross-dresser; he hacks up a guy. And you got a superwealthy family." In all of his research, Mr. Birkbeck said he never found anything about the Durst family harboring or receiving payoffs from the underbelly of old Times Square. "I can see why they were upset," he said.

Mr. Jarecki had his own beautifully oblique way of explaining the film's mission in press materials: "[B]y treating a story as a piece of art, we may have gotten closer to the truth of human emotion. Filling in the inexplicable gaps, probing the humanity underneath." The press packet for All Good Things uses some form of the word "authenticity" four times--but never in reference to the film's portrayal of the Durst family it's supposedly based on.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

"You know, the real estate business is a very tough business, and you have to be patient and persistent, and aggressive," Mr. Gamal told The Observer in August, sitting in his former office. "Thank God I have all those qualities."

Mr. El-Gamal's SoHo Properties was leasing space on the sixth floor of 552-556 Broadway, between Spring and Prince, for $7,100 per month from landlord Royal Crospin, until the last day of summer, Sept. 20. Mr. Crospin is now suing the developer for $39,000, including $18,000 per month in default charges that Mr. Crospin wants from Mr. El-Gamal.

The developer's lawyers say that the landlord did not serve the default notice properly through overnight mail, and therefore the charges can't be collected. Mr. Crospin plans to take the matter to civil court. "We have no doubt we will prevail," wrote the developer's lawyer in an email to The Real Deal.

zturner@observer.com