The global media company has leased 68,000 additional square feet of pristine space at 120 Park Avenue on the heels of a client data breach that has reportedly infuriated its Read More

Read More

The 50-story, 907,000-square-foot, 500-foot-tall building at 43-25 Hunter Street will not only be the tallest, but it will Read More

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

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.

The site will soon be home to a new health, pharmacy and dental facility for the union's workers and their family members, which "will cost approximately $90 million to complete," Hotel Trades Council political director Josh Gold told The Observer, "and, like our state of the art facility in Harlem, will include first floor retail to generate income for the funds."

The new healthcare center will sit just one block east of a new 30-story hotel development at 95 Rockwell Place, in the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cultural District, to be developed by the Gotham Organization and DT Salazar.

...but what of the Hotel Trades Council's old downtown Brooklyn health center? (Photo via Property Shark.)

The Hotel and Trades Council has had a number of victories in Manhattan recently. Rezonings in North Tribeca, the Fur District north of the Meatpacking District and Hudson Square have all included provisions that mandate City Council approval for hotels, widely seen as a way of pressuring developers into making sure the new lodgings are union-run, and the union is pushing hard for a similar provision in Midtown East.

But though many of its workers likely hail from the borough of Kings, the council has seen less success in Brooklyn. Toll Brothers and Starwood have not committed to using union labor at the hotel planned for Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Brooklyn is already home to a number of limited-service hotels that don't use union labor, the cheapo McSams scattered across the borough being the most prominent.

The sale does leave us with one question, though, for which Mr. Gold did not provide any illumination: what does the council intend to do with its existing health center at 68-80 Schermerhorn Street, in a ritzier part of downtown Brooklyn near Brooklyn Heights? Currently housing a three-story prewar structure, the old health center has over 50,000 square feet of residential or commercial development rights.

Given the apartment buildings that have cropped up around it, we wouldn't be surprised if the old health center meets the same fate as its neighbors. And if it does, we hope they'll keep the façade, which adds some character that the booming neighborhood is otherwise lacking.

Oh, One57! Don't just lie around moping.

Poor, lonely, luxury condo tower! Unlike the co-ops lining Central Park to the East and the West, whose residents really love them, it seems like One57's new residents are only interested in it for its money. Or, more precisely, how their money might become even more money if they buy apartments there.

As the condo's top-floor units go into contract, New Yorker's real estate community has been speculating on who the super-secretive billionaires buying there are. Tantalizingly, Extell confirmed two contracts for more than $90 million, but for months and months and months, there's been no indication of who the buyers might be. So imagine the collective glee when The Wall Street Journal revealed that one of the buyers was billionaire hedge funder William Ackman. Sort of.

Mr. Ackman, leading a group of investors, is buying the 14,000 square foot duplex on the 75th and 76th floor, not for personal use, but as an investment, much like his Pershing Square Capital Management bets on J.C. Penney. Every property is an investment, of course (words that all real estate brokers murmur in their sleep), but this one is nothing but an investment. Mr. Ackman doesn't plan to live there, according to sources. He didn't study the renderings, look at the glittering glass walls and the high-end appliances and think the happy life they would lead together. He did not, in other words, fall in love—what every home, even luxury condo towers dream of.

Nor, apparently, have many (any?) of the other suitors studying the mock-ups and One57's pinstriped under-construction exterior. Nick Candy's overtures were reportedly rejected by Gary Barnett because Mr. Candy wanted to flip his unit before the building was even completed. Michael Holtz, the owner of the SmartFlyer Travel Agency, is one of the few other buyers who have been identified, but it's unclear if Mr. Holtz plans to live there either—he never moved into the apartment he bought at 15 CPW. And then there's the Chinese couple who bought a condo for their 2-year-old—to live in when he's a college sophomore, which they optimistically assume will be at either Columbia or NYU.

Of course, high-end luxury condos are often bought as investments, infrequently visited pied-a-terres. One broker estimated that only 10 percent of Plaza residents lived there full-time and 15 CPW's $88 million penthouse may have fetched more money than any other residence in the city, but as far as anyone knows, it's still sitting empty.

Still, One57 has been having a tough time of it recently—rendered a laughingstock by Hurricane Sandy, hated by its neighbors and not even the tallest residential building in the city (an honor claimed by 432 Park). All it really has is the promise of the highest closing prices in New York City history. But money can't buy happiness, and there's no sadness like having the finest things in the world and no one to share them with.

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

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.

But when we spoke to Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's Andrew Berman about who might be the city's next chief city planner, he threw cold water on the speculation.

"I think that the choice of who the chair will be, while it certainly tells you something, who the mayor is tells you more," Mr. Berman said.

He cited the evolution of Amanda Burden, widely heralded as driving the relatively radical rezonings—radical, at least, for the staid post-war planning years; there hasn't been a major revision to the city's code since the 1961 overhaul—of the Bloomberg years. Under Burden, development rules for a third of the city's land were changed in one way or another.

"Amanda was a very, very different member of the City Planning Commission when she was Mark Green's commissioner"—Mr. Green appointed Ms. Burden to the commission as the city's first public advocate—"than when she was Mike Bloomberg's."

"Some would argue," Mr. Berman continued, "that the Amanda Burden who served on the City Planning Commission [under Mark Green] wouldn't even recognize [today's] Amanda Burden."

Back before she became the face of Michael Bloomberg's Big Real Estate-friendly rezonings, Ms. Burden was not so well received by the industry. “I think there’s a concern about the prejudices she may bring to the position,” one developer told The Observer back in 2002. “I don’t think she was at the top of [our] list. But I think we feel that we can work with her, since we have no choice.”

Dapper though Mr. Chakrabarti may be, don't expect New York City's next chief planner to make the cover of Women's Wear Daily.

Of the candidates identified by Crain's, Mr. Chakrabarti and Ms. Levin sit on opposite sides of the pro- and anti-development spectrum.

"Folks from the real estate industry feel that they are entitled to more or less choose who the next chair is," Mr. Berman told The Observer. He wouldn't single out any candidate, but we can't help but think he was referring to Mr. Chakrabarti, who has been an unfailing advocate for density around New York's many transit hubs.

"Mr. Chakrabarti's group at Columbia University," wrote Crain's, "is expected to release a report soon showing that the city does not have the zoning capacity for the 1 million new New Yorkers expected by 2030 and is short about 300,000 residential units. As commissioner, Mr. Chakrabarti would likely support the upzoning of neighborhoods like Long Island City and the South Bronx that are one or two subway stops away from midtown."

Mr. Levin, on the other hand, has shown herself to be much more interested in affordable housing, and less interested in increasing the size of the city's overall housing stock, often expressing that distinctly West Side antipathy towards density.

She was, for example, the lone vote against Extell's Riverside Center project, saying the project was "too big."

And Ms. Levin and Mr. Chakrabarti stood on opposite sides of an early debate over the future of Hudson Yards back in 2003.

"We feel that the amount of growth planned for the area is essential to the long-term growth needs of the City of New York," Mr. Chakrabarti, then with the Department of City Planning, told The Observer.

Ms. Levin felt differently. "The city wants to create five World Trade Centers’ worth of new development. We feel that this is just too much," she said at the time, arguing that "the city must proceed without crushing the existing neighborhood."

Documents viewed by the Huff Post indicate that as part of the owners’ $782.8 million mortgage deal, financed jointly by Citigroup and Deutsche Bank and being marketed to investors via commercial mortgage backed securities, bankers expect management at the property to begin charging the The Four Seasons market rents, which according to the documents are determined to be $125 per square foot.
Read More