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By Kit Dillon 10/17/12 5:18pm

building stories

Keep digging. (DumboNYC)

Billionaire Boys Club: Bloomberg Produces $1 B. Out of Thin Air For City Infrastructure

Remember shovel ready projects? Thought they were so 2009? Well, you’d be wrong, at least here in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg, Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the ever financially creative City Comptroller John Liu have done some juggling with the city’s capital construction program to fast track $1 billion worth of infrastructure work. These projects will begin in the coming months, rather than in the coming years. Let’s hear it for putting people to work. Read More

By Pamela Engel 7/27/11 12:19pm

building stories

Photo: Halstead

Morningside Hi! An Uptown Condo’s Neighborly Angle

“We decided to prioritize the public amenities here,” Beatrice Sibblies, one of the developers of the new condo, 88 Morningside, said at its opening party last night. “There’s a larger lobby, media room, gym and roof deck. We did that to create a sense of community in the building.”

That sounds familiar. Just last week, the ultra-trendy Aloft Brooklyn hotel opened, and we heard the same refrain: smaller units were swapped for bigger common areas in which people are encouraged to congregate. These hip new developments lean on a quaint suburban notion that seems to have been lost here: get to know your neighbors! Hang out with the people you (perhaps awkwardly) share elevators with! Who would have thought? Read More

By Tom Acitelli 6/24/11 10:09am

building stories

The old dame on Eighth.

Caught Between the Moonies and New York City: The New Yorker Hotel’s Office Idea

It was July 1, 1982. Approximately 4,000 followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon were entering and exiting the second-floor Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue. There they entered into marriage contracts with strangers whom the reverend, the Korean-born founder and head of the Unification Church, had picked for them. Then, the same day, they walked barely a block and entered Madison Square Garden—most in formal wear—where they were declared husband and wife en masse by Reverend Moon.

Photos of the Moonie marriage ceremony were distributed worldwide. It would be hard to forget—though the New Yorker Hotel would prefer that you did.

The venerable old hotel, once the largest inn on earth, with 2,500 rooms and 1 million square feet over 43 floors and the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Benny Goodman swinging by, has tried mightily to shake off the Moonies’ shadow ever since the church, which reveres the reverend as the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ, bought it in the bad, old Beame days of 1976, and started using it exclusively for church housing (the Moonies still own it, through their Holy Spirit Association).

The latest gambit: marketing the largest contiguous block of Class B space in New York City, 287,000 square feet over five floors now occupied by egg-salad tenants like insurance firms and the Barbizon Modeling School. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 3/08/11 10:58pm

building stories

Hefty Price in East Harlem

A recent East Harlem deal shows that the average prices per square foot in the neighborhood are surpassing those of 2010, brokers say. To be sure, a 34-unit Upper Manhattan walk-up building with ground-floor commercial space sold last week for a whopping $3.81 million.

The price achieved for the building, at 124-128 East 107th Street, Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 3/02/11 6:03pm

building stories

How to LEED a 100-Year-Old Building Into the 21st Century

Last month, the Argonaut, the landmarked turn-of-the-century building at 225 West 57th Street, achieved something very few 100-year-old buildings have been able to achieve: LEED Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. James Dempsey, a managing director at Colliers International, spoke to The Commercial Observer about the many complexities of bringing the building into the Read More