Mr. Flood. (MTA/Flickr)

It's beginning to feel a bit like the letters section of the New York Review of Books around here.

Yesterday morning, The Observer published a post highlighting another outlet's revelation that developer and civic leader Bill Rudin was somewhat pleased that the Hugh Carey Brooklyn Battery Tunnel had flooded, thereby protecting some of his buildings downtown. (Some experts agree that the tunnels should actually be designed to do exactly that.)

Unexpectedly, Mr. Rudin's office sent a statement from him to The Observer in the afternoon, speaking generally about the need to plan for the future, but not directly addressing the issue of the tunnel or MTA Chief Joe Lhota, who had told Capital New York, "I wasn’t particularly pleased with the comment.” Now, unbidden, The Observer has received a statement from Mr. Lhota that praises Mr. Rudin.

Bill Rudin is one of New York City’s most ardent champions, and the Rudin Family has long been at the forefront advocating for the city’s future and for all New Yorkers.  Bill and I witnessed the horrific damage of Superstorm Sandy and we both concluded that we must have a comprehensive effort by the federal, state and local governments and the private sector to prevent such water surge damage to property in the future.  I have no doubt that Bill will be an exemplary leader of this effort.

The real lesson here seems to be: Be careful what you blog about.

These success suggest that even though Mr. Doctoroff is no longer in command, might it still be possible to see a gondola stretch across the East River between Lower Manhattan, Governors Island and Brooklyn? Or a light rail line running the entire length of the waterfront from Astoria in Queens to Brooklyn’s Red Hook? Or, most audacious of all, tearing down the Javits convention center and moving it to yet another decked-over rail yard, this time in Sunnyside, where it would be surrounded by apartment and hotel towers and a sizable retail complex?

These were among the proposals Mr. Doctoroff put forward on Friday during a speech at the Municipal Art Society’s MAS Summit 2012. They were meant as examples for the next mayor to latch onto in order to “extend the achievements of the Bloomberg Administration by knitting new connections among emerging communities, amenities and institutions.”

Among the 90 speakers—including quite a few probable mayoral candidates—at last week’s cities conference, Mr. Doctoroff was asked to address what New York would need to do in order to succeed in the coming century. He decided to build his speech around the importance of the mayor and the priorities he believes any mayor (but especially those looking to succeed his boss) should have.

“I decided to frame it in terms of leadership because I have watched Mike Bloomberg over the past 11 years be a great leader and I do believe that mayors (for better and worse) truly make the biggest difference in the fate of the city,” Mr. Doctoroff wrote in a follow-up email. “I also believe that we can lose what we have gained quite quickly, as we saw in the 1970s.”

Mr. Doctoroff said he had three central questions that New Yorkers should ask of their would be mayors:

• "Does he or she truly understand what makes New York unique in an increasingly competitive world?"
• "Does he or she fervently believe in what I call the 'virtuous cycle of the successful city?'"
• "Does he or she have the vision to fuel the imagination of this stunning city and then the courage and decisiveness to get things done?"

Of course Mr. Doctoroff himself had an answer, often lengthy, to each of these questions. To the first one, of uniqueness and global competition, he stressed that the city should not pine for the past, for legacy industries like manufacturing, for outdated ways of thinking, building and taxing. “If we begin to send signals, any signals, that we are not going to remain the most open city in the world, we will surely lose our edge,” Mr. Doctoroff said.

Mr. Doctoroff explained his “virtuous cycle” thusly: “We are a remarkably compassionate city. We believe that we need to help those in need, that we have to make the city more affordable, that we have to provide the tools for people to capitalize on opportunity. All of that requires money. That's why our leaders have to have to truly get―and then they have to effectively manage―the virtuous cycle.”

He then, only half in jest, copped what sounded like a line from Gordon Gecko. “It starts with the core belief that growth―growth―is good,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “That the additional resident, business, or visitor generates net new revenues, which, if invested wisely, enhances the quality of life, which, in turn, helps to attract more residents, businesses and visitors, thereby perpetuating the cycle.”

This growth, this net new revenue, naturally leads to the visions Mr. Doctoroff was so famous for cooking up, and where he outlined the plans previously mentioned.

"Over the past 10 years, we have rebuilt, rezoned, and refashioned huge swaths of the city," he declared proudly. "Rail yards are becoming New York's next great neighborhoods. A rail line has become New York's newest great park. A military base will become New York's next great park. We have reclaimed our formerly decrepit waterfront for housing and recreation. Roosevelt Island will become the intellectual center of a burgeoning tech industry. We are not a city that plays small ball."

In his email, Mr. Doctoroff explained the ideas, some new, some old, some variations on the old, were all designed to connect the progress that had come before. The gondolas would provide more reliable access to Governors Island, allowing it to become a 24/7 community, one that Mr. Doctoroff suggested would become "a hub for another emerging industry, like global health." As for the light rail line, it would run along Kent Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, among other generally quiet waterfront thoroughfares. "Brooklyn is hot," Mr. Doctoroff intoned. "It is Queens' turn next."

But the clincher was Sunnyside, demonstrating the kind of big-picture, nothing-is-impossible thinking that characterized Mr. Doctoroff's tenure at City Hall. He called it "a huge swath or rail yards," repeating the phrase three times, to laughter from audience, before pointing out that it "forms a scar through the middle of Queens." Indeed, this project, bigger than Hudson, Atlantic and the Hoboken PATH yards combined, reminded people all too well of the Doctoroff days.

Proposals for such a project have been in the works for four decades, but Mr. Doctoroff brought some new innovations to the table. For starters, he believes the time is finally right to justify the massive investment such a project would entail. The starting point would be dividing the plan up into parcels, so the entire yards would not have to be decked at once but could instead be done progressively. And the timing for that first parcel could not be better, Mr. Doctoroff suggested.

"Let's borrow an idea from Governor Cuomo and move Javits to Queens, this time, though, to a location that is one or two subway stops from Midtown," Mr. Doctoroff explained. "You could pay for a big part of it by selling Javits' land on the West Side, which is more valuable today because of the No. 7 extension, and we could draw a wider array of conventions to less expensive hotels in Long Island City are built."

He pointed out that while some might complain that the location is not Manhattan, it is close enough and has its clear advantages, including space and affordablility, an approach that Mr. Doctoroff said he witnessed this summer at the London Olympics, where a new convention center had been built in a formerly industrial part of the East End.

The final slide of the presentation, a joke, Mr. Doctoroff later insisted, was the one missing piece from his legacy realized at Sunnyside Yards. "You know, it could even be the site for a temporary Olympic Stadium," he said, to more laughs, "but I leave that to future visionaries."

The whole affair left us feeling dizzy. Many in the city, particularly in the business class, have been hungering for a candidate who could be the successor to Mike Bloomberg. Could this be the one? The rhetoric was certainly there, as Mr. Doctoroff's final words on stage made clear.

"Big visions like this are what have defined New York," he said. "But they don't happen by accident. They take guts and imagination. They require an intuitive understanding of what are New York's unique advantages in a competitive world. They demand the skill to generate the revenues so we can afford to be the kind of city we aspire to be."

Now who could have those qualities? Perhaps Dan Doctoroff?

"Just to be clear, I have zero interest in running for Mayor, so, if the premise of the story is that I am somehow putting myself out there, then I don't want to engage," Mr. Doctoroff said in response to the first email The Observer sent him asking him as much. "If it is about what I said on Friday, then I am happy to talk."

In a follow-up email, he explained that he gave the speech because he was asked, though he also admitted to constantly be thinking up new and far-out plans for the city.

"I visit all of the leading cities of the world on a regular basis, so it is hard to avoid what they are doing and I have always been fascinated with cities anyway," Mr. Doctoroff explained. "That said, I am quite focused on Bloomberg, so it is probably best to characterize my thoughts as musings."

For better or worse, bigger or badder, the city could use more of these kinds of musings.

He's Stiller got it. (YouTube)

A last-minute phone call from a source revealed an exciting tidbit about the man behind the world's largest ferris wheel, Rich Marin. While Mr. Marin may have come to fame (or infamy) for blogging about movies as the Bear Stearns division he ran imploded, he is unapologetic about his love of cinema—so much so he even relaunched his movie blog last year. "I decided you can't pretend to be who you're not," he said.

But it turns out before he was blogging about movies, he was writing them. Here's what we wrote in today's cover story.

The blogging imbroglio was not the first time The Times has written about Mr. Marin's flare for film, either. Before there was blogging, there was screenwriting. In 1996, Mr. Marin submitted a script to an HBO competition called Subway Stories. It was a project produced by Rosie Perez. Out of the thousands of submissions, only 10 were selected for production, and Mr. Marin's was one of them. "It was the most highly reviewed by both The Times and the Daily News," he said. He did not mention which of the 10 shorts was his, but it is almost certainly 5:24, which is about a banker's reckoning with a wise old man as they ride the Lex downtown before dawn. The Timescalled it "the most successful example" of "eerie psychological confrontation" that suffuses many of the shorts, a "succinct study of the traps of financial ambition" starring Steve Zahn as the banker and Jerry Stiller as the wise guy.

Since all of the Subway Shorts have been posted to YouTube, we thought it best to share his contribution with you here. But they guy who posted them (without HBO knowing?) has turned off embedding, so if you want to see Mr. Marin's work, you will have to watch it over there.

(Victor Juhasz)

Rich Marin is big. For more than three decades, he dominated Wall Street, creating some of the industry’s most exotic investments, making billions for his clients, and millions for himself. One of his minions blew a hole in the side of Bankers Trust, a firm Mr. Marin helped transform into a derivatives powerhouse, and still he held on for the ride, becoming the youngest managing director ever at the bank. It all came crashing down five years ago, when the hedge funds he oversaw at Bear Stearns imploded. The rest of the world followed within the year. But there was Mr. Marin, standing amid the wreckage, helping rescue an overzealous Israeli diamond magnate who had plowed $3 billion into prime U.S. real estate just as the frothing market froze over. He rescued the firm, only to be unceremoniously fired two years to the day after he joined.

Now Rich Marin wants to build the world’s largest ferris wheel—in Staten Island, naturally—and the mayor just gave him his blessing.

Did we mention he is big? At the announcement of the project last Thursday, Mr. Marin absolutely dwarfed Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer, along with the other dignitaries gathered at the ferry terminal. But despite his imposing size—he stands 6-foot-5 and is built like an offensive lineman—Mr. Marin is probably one of the gentlest people on the Street. Were he a real bear, rather than having worked for one, Mr. Marin would be not a grizzly but a teddy. This may help explain his turbulent career.

It is said that no one of any import on Wall Street goes by their given name. Nobody calls Ace Greenberg “Allen.” Nobody calls Dick Fuld “Richard.” Nobody calls Jimmy Cayne “James.” On the trading floors and in the boardrooms, it was never Richard Marin. It was always Big Rich.

"There were a lot of characters on the street," said one former rival who now teaches alongside Mr. Marin at Cornell's Johnson School of Management. "Very few were as big as Big Rich."

And yet nobody outside of Wall Street would probably have ever heard of him if it were not for a June 28, 2007, story on the front page of the Times’s business section. In his personal time—what little of it remained after long days at Bear Stearns—Mr. Marin ran a blog called Whim of Iron (subtitled: "impulsive ramblings from a motorcycling alpha dog"). It was a mix of notes to friends, ruminations on life in banking, travel writing and a catalogue of Mr. Marin’s weight-loss efforts. But most of all, it was home to his movie reviews. Cinema had been a passion since Mr. Marin was a high schooler in Rome.

As The Times recounted it, on June 17 of that year, Bear was scrambling to bail out two hedge funds that two of Mr. Marin’s traders ran, one of the key plot twists in the demise of the firm. “In the midst of the turmoil,” wrote Julie Creswell, “Richard Marin, the head of the Bear unit that ran the troubled funds, ‘stole away’ from the ‘crisis-hedge-fund-salvation-workaholic weekend’ to see the new Kevin Costner thriller Mr. Brooks. His advice on the film? Take a ‘pass,’ Mr. Marin wrote in a review he posted that day on his blog."

He was out of a job two days after the story ran.

Big Rich Marin has the personality to match his outsized name and reputation, though little of the ego one often associates with bankers and other Wall Street types. “If the worst thing I ever do in my life is go to the movies, I think I’m O.K. with that,” he said over lunch Saturday at Battery Gardens.

He lives in the same 1,600-square-foot penthouse in the South Street Seaport that he bought for $1.35 million in January 2004, seven months after he joined Bear Stearns as CEO of its asset management division. A motorcycle fanatic (a habit also picked up in Italy), he recently “broke down” as he put it, and bought a Vespa. Used. “It makes getting around town so great, it’s easier than the subway,” he said. If you see a stout guy in a navy blazer wedged onto a silver scooter zip by on the streets of Lower Manhattan, it is probably Rich Marin. At a lunch, he jokingly asked that we not mention it if he dribbled any of the bolognese he had ordered on his nice pink-and-purple tattersall shirt. (So we won’t.)

His plan, then, to build a 625-foot ferris wheel next to the Staten Island Ferry is not some Spruce Goose, Master of the Universe complex acting itself out in New York Harbor. It’s just business. He got a call, many calls, actually, within days of again being fired, on December 10, 2010, from Africa Israel USA, the real estate firm he had helped rescue after the bubble burst. One was from a small investment outfit that had tried repeatedly to get a giant observation wheel built in New York, most recently on Governors Island or in the Seaport. “They wanted someone with experience, and I had been a CEO in numerous capacities, I knew real estate, I knew finance, they thought I could get the job done,” Mr. Marin said.

And so he has. In less than two years, Mr. Marin lined up financial backers to realize the $250 million project while convincing the city to embrace the idea—not much of a challenge, really, given the Bloomberg administration’s flamboyant streak, along with its anxious rivalry with London, where the first modern observation wheel opened in 1999. If it opens on New Year’s Eve 2015, as is currently the plan, the New York Wheel could help cement tourism downtown and usher in a new era for sleepy Staten Island.

It will also be the latest triumph for Big Rich, whose career has seen a number of breathtaking ups and downs of its own in recent years. The big question is not whether he can get this thing done, as he almost certainly can, but whether he can stay on top long enough to enjoy his success.

Rich Marin in his office at 17 State Street. (Matt Chaban)

"I chose this place for two reasons,” Mr. Marin said, sitting at a patio table at Battery Gardens,  one of those overwrought banquet halls scattered about the city (cf. Tavern on the Green, Water Cafe) with killer views (in this case, of the harbor) but terrible food. “The first reason is you can see the site. The second is you can see all the tourists. Right now, we have 50 to 55 million tourists a year. Only 10 million of them are coming downtown, but that is a lot, and we expect it to grow as the World Trade Center reaches completion. It is a natural, captive audience.”

Fishermen gathered in clumps along the shore. The esplanade was thick with joggers and sightseers posing for photos in front of the sweeping panorama of the harbor. Just before our lunch began, a wedding was taking place on the patio, Lady Liberty serving as witness, along with many of the tourists who snapped away. Throughout the meal, the heavy bass of a dance party could be heard thumping from the second floor of the restaurant. Where the rivers converged beyond, hundreds of boats passed by, water taxis and pleasure cruises, behemoth container ships moored off the Port of Elizabeth, Circle Line tourist boats, tugs galore, and of course the giant orange Staten Island ferries.

Mr. Marin, who was wearing a navy blazer, light blue jeans and brown leather loafers, explained that the Statue of Liberty alone draws some 4 million tourists a year while another 2 million ride the Staten Island Ferry. The city has always struggled with how it might get tourists, and their wallets, off the free boat ride and beyond the St. George Terminal. The Staten Island Yankees have a stadium here, but aside from a few historic buildings, the borough's 9/11 memorial and a nice view of Manhattan, that’s about it.

“The New York Wheel will be an attraction unlike any other in New York City—even unlike any other on the planet,” Mayor Bloomberg said at last week's press conference. The new attractions "will put Staten Island right in the center of travel plans for millions of visitors to our city."

Mr. Marin believes the appeal of his wheel will be impossible to resist, even at $20 a pop. “Do you have kids?” he asked (not yet, but in three years, who knows?). “So you’re on the ferry, and the wheel is getting bigger and bigger. Your 5-year-old, he’s barely tall enough to reach past the railing, but he sure can see this wheel, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. He starts asking, he’s begging, ‘Can we go? Can we go? I wanna go on the ferris wheel!’ I think daddy is going to have a harder and harder time not going on that wheel.” (On second thought, why rush parenthood?)

And if the wheel isn’t enough of an attraction, the Bloomberg administration has fallen back on that most reliable of tourist activities: shopping. The city encouraged the New York Wheel team to partner with BFC Partners, a developer that has made a habit of getting in on the ground floor of most of the city’s development waves of the past few decades: the East Village, East Harlem, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn. Now, the firm has plans to bring New York City its very own outlet mall.

The idea for building the wheel in the “forgotten borough” started with the city. According to Mr. Marin, he approached the Bloomberg administration in March 2011, wanting to give a giant ferris wheel another go on behalf of his investors. It was NYC & Co. tourism czar George Fertitta who told him, “Go to Staten Island, young man.”

From then on, that was the plan. “What’s the old saying about the 800-pound gorilla? Where does it sit? Wherever it wants,” Mr. Marin noted. “Well, when the city wants you to build a 600-foot ferris wheel somewhere, that is where you build it.”

The wheel is being designed by Starneth, a boutique Danish firm responsible for the London Eye, as well as the Singapore Flyer and one of two competing wheels in Vegas.

But Mr. Marin said the Staten Island wheel is just the beginning—a flashy beacon meant to draw people to his real attraction, a sustainability museum, located in an 11,000-square-foot lot on his half of the 14-acre site. Indeed, Mr. Marin conceives of the entire project as a giant lesson in building a cleaner planet. And not just through green roofs and solar arrays. In summer, the observationpods—which operate on proprietary gyroscopes to remain level—will collect condensation as they make their 38-minute circuit, depositing two gallons each into the grey water system that runs the site’s toilets.

“This will be a world-class exhibition,” Mr. Marin said intently. “This is more than just the wheel. I think of this as a world heritage site in the making.”

Big Rich's big wheel. (NY Wheel)

Mr. Marin knows a thing or two about world heritage. He grew up in Latin America, traveling around with his mother, who did development work for the United Nations. He did not know his father much growing up, a man his mother met in Venezuela who left when little Rich was eight to became a real estate developer in California. Mr. Marin said not to read into his father’s profession and his own. “I know it makes for a good soundbite, but that has nothing to do with what I’m doing,” he said of his more recent forays into development. When Mr. Marin was a teenager, the family moved from Maine to Rome, where he fell in love with movies as well as motorcycles.

Mr. Marin later wound up at Cornell, his mother's alma mater (as well as that of Mr. Marin's three kids). He spent a year studying engineering—all those years spent fixing up cheap Ducatis and Lambrettas in Italy were among his inspirations—before switching over to economics and government, which he deemed “less antithetical” to the countercultural times of the early 1970s. After undergrad, Mr. Marin finished his MBA in a year, a rare feat. He left Ithaca at 22 for the job at Bankers Trust.

The year was 1975, and Wall Street was about to transform itself from a sleepy but prestigious workaday industry into the fabulous global wealth engine it has come to resemble today. Junk bonds, LBOS, million-dollar bonuses—all of that was still on the horizon, along with the canonical works that would come to define Wall Street for Main Street: Barbarians at the Gate, Liar’s Poker, a movie or two by Oliver Stone.

To some, Rich Marin might resemble one of Mr. Stone’s villains. After all, he helped create the derivatives that laid the foundation for the alphabet soup of financial instruments that many critics argue have corrupted finance. Mr. Marin does not see it this way. “I liked the creative aspect going through the industry at the time,” he said. “And these products, they have to be used responsibly.”

In 1981, Mr. Marin moved from the corporate finance division, where he’d spent a very successful if unexciting few years, to commodities. There, he got his first taste of the futures business—the buying and selling of contracts on the predicted outcomes of various markets. Futures are typically used as a hedge against losses, bought in a short position. Mr. Marin identified demand for more long-term insurance—inflation was a serious concern at the time. He took a strip of Euro-dollar futures contracts across a range of prices, bundled together about $10 million worth to create his very first derivative and then encouraged the sales team to offer it up. Mr. Marin said he did not expect to hear back, but within the hour, the sales guys had returned, wondering how many more of these deals he could put together. He quickly created a $100 million swap and sold that, too.

Mr. Marin spent a few more years coming up with new financial products until he was called to help out in Latin America in 1985. The firm had $4 billion being sucked into the vacuum of the region’s debt crisis. “When I told my mother that, she was horrified,” Mr. Marin said. “She said, ‘I spent my career putting money into these countries and now you are going to spend yours taking it out of them?’”

In 1989, Mr. Marin was put back in charge of derivatives, now a fully formed global operation, as well as the newly created emerging markets desk that had grown out of the Latin American crisis (mom was right, this was good business). The following year, his career almost ended, and not for the last time. The commodities desk had issued futures contracts on more than $100 million in cotton from a company run by a Tennessee wildcat named Julien Hohenberg. The cotton had never been picked, never even really existed. To pull off the scheme, Mr. Hohenberg had partnered with a bonded warehouse to vouch for the phantom fibers. The fraud was eventually uncovered, but not before costing Bankers Trust 45 percent of 1989’s fourth-quarter profits. “I loved Julian’s quote in Forbes,” Mr. Marin recalled, his voice growing gruffer. “I can recall it verbatim. ‘I treated Bankers Trust like I treated my wives. I told them what they wanted to hear and then I did what I wanted to do.’”

That is not how Rich Marin sees himself. He prepared his resignation within days of the bad deal being exposed. It wasn’t accepted. Instead, he was sent to run the Canadian business out of the Toronto office—American Banker referred to the posting as “Siberia”—but he returned to New York after only two years to take over the retirement services division, the bedrock of Bankers Trust’s business, where he oversaw some 4,000 employees handling pension funds, 401(k)s and the like.

Michael Walsh, a managing director at Deutsche Bank whom Mr. Marin hired from Chemical Bank in London to head up the Latin American desk in 1985, said his old boss had more courage and acumen than anyone else he had met in the business. “Most people would run from the situations he has found himself in,” Mr. Walsh said, a Welsh accent still poking through after two decades in the states. “Rich stuck with you, he stuck with the company, and sometimes he paid the price, but just as often he was rewarded for his loyalty.”

When the firm merged with Alex Brown in 1997, he ran the combined private banking operation, his first foray into asset management. When Bankers Trust was bought by Deutsche Bank, Mr. Marin was kept on to ease the integration. His reputation recovered, he decided instead to strike out for new territory, golden parachute in hand.

“I’ve never seen a guy like Rich land on his feet so many times,” one former Bankers Trust executive said. Indeed, this was only the beginning.

The mall is on the south side, the ferris wheel on the north. (NYC EDC)

It was a new millennium, so Mr. Marin and a few colleagues decided to start Beehive Ventures, a venture capital firm—everybody with a bronze nameplate was doing it, as Mr. Marin jokes. It was nearly another loss for Mr. Marin when the tech bubble blew, but after more than a decade of churning, Beehive anticipates a 6-10-fold return thanks to a good bet on eMarketer.

In the meantime, he got the call to run Bear Stearns Asset Management, the bare-knuckled firm’s mutual and hedge fund business. “We wanted him there,” said Alan Schwartz, the executive chairman of Guggenheim Partners, who at the time was co-president and COO of Bear Stearns. “He had a lot of knowledge of the industry and he was very creative.”

Creative indeed. During the first meeting of the executive committee that Mr. Marin attended, as an ice breaker he asked the 20 or so other power brokers in the room if anyone had a tattoo, according to one person who was present. After going around the room, no one answered in the affirmative. Except for Mr. Marin. When asked about the incident, he said he did not remember it, but he did not deny the existence of the ink. "That's personal," he said when asked what and where his tattoo is. "But hey, when you ride motorcycles for 46 years, what do you expect."

It was in his first sit-down with Warren Spector, the other co-president who ran Bear along with baronial CEO Jimmy Cayne, that Mr. Marin hatched the plan for 10 in 10. The idea was to ramp up BSAM’s share of the company business tenfold by 2010, a nearly impossible task, yet one he almost achieved. “We had a great 47 months,” Mr. Marin said. “We were actually ahead, at about 6 percent, when all was said and done.”

When all was said and done, there would be no more Bear Stearns.

A pair of BSAM’s most successful hedge funds were run by Ralph Cioffi, one of the firm’s top traders, and Matthew Tannin. The funds traded in the kinds of exotic assets Mr. Marin and Bear Stearns were experts in, collateralized debt obligations. When the housing market on which these bundles of mortgages were based seized up, the funds tanked and Bear Stearns had to spend $3.2 billion bailing them out, the second-largest intervention in Wall Street history (though it would pale in comparison to what was coming).

When asked about these events, and how Mr. Marin comported himself, Mr. Schwartz was insistent. "I do not want to talk about that," he said from his car Tuesday morning, on the way to a meeting. "If you want to talk about the ferris wheel and Rich, great. Every article doesn't have to be dredging up what happened at Bear Stearns. Rich is a good guy, a creative guy, a good business man. I don't want to reminisce about what happened at that time. It's frankly a disservice to drag it back up."

Two years before the BSAM crisis, Mr. Marin began keeping his Whim of Iron blog. It is unlikely its revelation, three months after his division began to unravel in April, led directly to Mr. Marin’s downfall at Bear—that was inevitable—but it didn’t help. “Nothing mattered to Bear more than its image,” Mr. Marin said, “and there was no hesitation to throw someone under the bus if they thought it might slow things down.” Mr. Marin agreed to stay on with Bear Stearns for six more months after stepping down as the head of BSAM. He found an empty office on the lower floor. “I put myself in the corner,” Mr. Marin said.

He said those six months were the low point of his life. “I take my fiduciary duty very seriously,” he said. “To me, it is a sacred trust. To watch my clients, my colleagues and my firm go under was devastating.”

Messrs. Cioffi and Tannin were eventually prosecuted by the government, the largest case so far brought against any bankers following the financial collapse. They were exonerated, an effort in which Mr. Marin played a small role, testifying on their behalf. "I would have testified for the government if they would have called me, but they didn't," he said. "You know why, because these guys didn't do anything wrong, they were just doing their job, and that is what I said on the stand." He has since served as an expert witness in numerous such cases, something he sees as his way of giving back and healing the system. He is also extremely proud of the fact, even occasionally bragging to others when the subject comes up, that he has never once been implicated in any wrongdoing throughout his career.

"There were two small things after everything happened on my record, and they were immediately expunged by FINRA," he said with a beaming smile (FINRA is the big independent securities regulator). "They even gave me a letter saying I had done nothing wrong, and my attorney, he said, 'Rich, that's a very special thing you've got in your hands there.'"

After everything that happened, guys like Ralph Cioffi and Alan Schwartz (as well as numerous colleagues who did not wish to go on the record) still cannot speak highly enough of Mr. Marin. “Rich Marin is how do you say a Mensch,” Mr. Cioffi wrote in an email. “He was one of the nicest warmest individuals I ever worked with. Smart business man had big visions, a quick wit and quick mind. Just a wonderful man.”

Mr. Marin spent the next year trying to keep a low profile, doing some consulting work and riding his motorcycles. He was invited to come teach at the Johnson School at Cornell in the fall of 2007, which he continues to do, driving up to Ithaca once a week while class is in session. Mr. Marin points to the invitation as proof that even at his lowest point, he was still valued by a lot of people. He also increased his involvement in CARE, the global anti-poverty non-profit to which he has long donated time and money. "It is my way of giving back since I never followed directly in my mother's footsteps," Mr. Marin said.

By the fall of 2008, the economy was following Bear into oblivion. “Maybe we built our bungalow too close to the beach, and we were the first to get hit,” Mr. Marin said, “but even if we had built it halfway up the mountain, we would have gotten slammed. This was a tsunami and there was no escaping it.” Though it cannot be ignored that Mr. Marin and Bear caught a lot of fish before the wave hit, and it wasn't just the bungalows on Wall Street but also homes and businesses around the world that got wiped out.

That November, Mr. Marin got a call from Izzy Cohen, the chairman of Africa Israel. The two had worked together on a joint venture in Israel, where Mr. Cohen oversaw the global real estate investments for the diamond magnate Lev Leviev. In 2007, at the height of the market, Africa Israel went on a madcap buying spree, picking up 22 marquee properties throughout New York, Vegas, Miami and L.A. for about $3 billion.

Among the projects here were the old Times Building, the MetLife clock tower and the Apthorp, where Africa Israel had initiated probably the most contentious condo conversion in a decade full of them. When Mr. Marin got to the portfolio, it was worth around $2 billion. By the time he had finished refinancing everything one, two, three times over, the debt load had reached a manageable $1.2 billion. “We never went into bankruptcy, we never lost a single building,” said Laurie Golub, Africa Israel USA’s former chief counsel. “Rich was always really proud of that.”

One of the outside attorneys who worked with Mr. Marin on the project was equally impressed. "None of us, none of us thought Rich could do it," the lawyer said of the rigorous restructurings. "And he did it, every single one." Among the things powering Mr. Marin through the long nights was junk food. He has a soft spot for Pirate Booty and Riesen Chocolate Chews. Ms. Golub said she even kept a spare piece of the German candy in her back in case of emergencies. "During those long nights, he would throw them at me and say, 'Keep working. This will help.'" Another coworker describes him as a "Diet Coke addict."

For all his hard work, Mr. Marin was fired on December 10, 2010, with none of his $1.25 million bonus. The explanation most often given is that Mr. Marin wanted to start growing the business, but Africa Israel had given up on America. Mr. Marin said he was not surprised, given what he sees as Africa Israel’s track record of mistreating its employees. “Maybe I should have been more careful about who I went to work for,” Mr. Marin said. “I went to work for Izzy, because I liked Izzy. I also welcomed the challenge. I didn’t do this for anybody else.”

“He took this huge steaming pile of shit,” said one colleague who worked with him at the time, “and got it down to a nice manageable size so it could be pooper-scoopered away. And how do they repay him? By tossing him into the pile.”

The mayor can't wait to take a ride. (Irving Silverstein/SIA)

One of the things that rankles Mr. Marin so much about the incident in the Times is that among the blog posts the paper quoted was one from June 23, in which he jokingly suggested he and his team were “trying to defend Sparta against the Persian hordes of Wall Street. Nothing like a good dog fight 24X7 for a few weeks to remind you why you chose the life you chose,” he wrote. What the paper failed to mention or pick up on was that he was riffing on the recently released 300, in which the Greeks are routed in a hail of arrows.

“I would get all these comments on my blog, people were outraged I had compared myself to some Greek warrior, but, as is the average IQ of the typical blog commenter, they totally missed the point,” Mr. Marin said. “If you know the Battle of Thermopylae, you know the Greeks lose. We were fighting a war you cannot win, but you fight it anyway, because that is the right thing to do.”

Ms. Golub thought the whole thing was absurd. "Rich doesn't drink, Rich doesn't smoke, he goes to the movies, that's his release," she said. If he had gone to the club, bought some bottle service to unwind after back-to-back 16-hour weekend work days, as the caricature of a banker might have done, it probably never would have drawn any notice. Instead, he wrote a blog post. Mr. Marin is not shrinking from the whole affair, though, even invoking it in his bio on his new movie review website, PickingYourSeat.com (yep, he's at it again, relaunching Sept. 16 2011). "When the crash hit in 2007 he got 'deuced' by the NY Times for going to see Evan Almighty and Mr. Brooks 'while Rome burned,'" the bio proudly declares. Among his new reviews, he liked HBO's To Big to Fail but wrote of Arbitrage that he found "the finance, well…. purely simplistic."

The blogging imbroglio was not the first time The Times has written about Mr. Marin's flare for film, either. Before there was blogging, there was screenwriting. In 1996, Mr. Marin submitted a script to an HBO competition called Subway Stories. It was a project produced by Rosie Perez. Out of the thousands of submissions, only 10 were selected for production, and Mr. Marin's was one of them. "It was the most highly reviewed by both The Times and the Daily News," he said. He did not mention which of the 10 shorts was his, but it is almost certainly 5:24, which is about a banker's reckoning with a wise old man as they ride the Lex downtown before dawn. The Times called it "the most successful example" of "eerie psychological confrontation" that suffuses many of the shorts, a "succinct study of the traps of financial ambition" starring Steve Zahn as the banker and Jerry Stiller as the wise guy.

Next year marks the 120th anniversary of the Ferris Wheel, the work of a Pittsburgh builder of the same name. His work opened to great acclaim at the Chicago's World Columbian Exhibition, a rival to the Eiffel Tower. But the ride turned out to be a commercial disaster, as people began to copy it without compensating George Ferris. He became obsessed and died a penniless man.

The same hallmarks seem to haunt Rich Marin: the vision, the drive, the downfall. The difference is, more than anything, Mr. Marin has an uncanny ability to move on from his failures, no matter how grand.

Of course Mr. Marin, as he so often does, would reference a movie to make his case: “It’s like Alfred says in Batman Begins. Why do we fall? So we can just pick ourselves back up again.”

Businessweek describes Mr. Rovt as a man with "a bearish physique, slicked-back black hair, thick mustache, and a fondness for cigars."

We learned a lot in the Businessweek profile on Alexander Rovt, the Ukrainian fertilizer billionaire who's been making huge, all-cash investments into American real estate lately (he spent $303 million to acquire a majority stake in the Banker's Trust building this April). Mr. Rovt should not be confused with Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who spent $88 million on a penthouse at 15 CPW.

First of all, Mr. Rovt hates to be called a Russian oligarch—he's actually Carpathian, a border region that is now part of the Ukraine. And while he did make the bulk of his fortune in connection with the purchase of an old, formerly government-owned Ukrainian fertilizer plant, he is adamant that he is not the kind of Eastern European billionaire who has capitalized on Post-Soviet privatization. 

Also, FYI, while fertilizer might put some people in the mindset of a stinking piles of crap, the kind that became incredibly lucrative during the Post-Soviet privatization that Mr. Rovt absolutely did not capitalize on, is a nitrogen-based chemical product primarily derived from natural gas.

A few other surprises: Mr. Rovt has lived in Brooklyn for nearly 30 years (he left in the 1980s under a program that gave Jews special dispensation to emigrate) and continues to live there despite owning not one, but two townhouses on the Upper East Side. One of these townhouses, currently on the market for $21 million, includes reinforced walls of concrete (hidden beneath brick), a screening room and a basement banya with a swimming pool.

Mr. Rovt also sits on the NYC Board of Correction (no museums for him, thanks) and is a trustee of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He's really into these hobbies—he happily gave a Ukrainian dignitary a tour of Rikers Island—so you know he's not just on the board of the correction for the prestige that comes with the position. Obviously, this also means that he is totally law-and-order and not involved in any shady Eastern European intrigue.

Plus, he thinks he's worth a little more than the $1.2 billion that Forbes estimated his vast fortunate at, but doesn't want to quibble. He really doesn't need the publicity. Of that vast fortune, he's planning to spend between $300 and $400 million more on New York real estate. Not that he'll be spending that on any apartments. He thinks Mr. Rybolovlev is an idiot.

"I would not pay $88 million for an apartment," he tells Businessweek. "For $88 million, I would buy a house."

kvelsey@observer.com

V is for vegetables, not victory, in 2013. (TRD)

John Catsimatidis sat down with The Real Deal to talk about just how great Downtown Brooklyn is (who knew?!) and while that topic dominates the discussion, the real estate rag couldn't help but bring up next year's mayoral elections. After all, the grocery store magnate and billionaire developer has been bandied about as a possible Republican candidate in the race to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While he may no longer be interested in that job, he's not sure the woman widely considered the most-pro-business candidate in the pack of potential Bloomberg successors is ready for it either.

You announced your candidacy for Mayor in 2009, but eventually endorsed Mayor Bloomberg. Do you have any interest in the position this time around?
They’re trying to get me to do it again, but I don’t need it. I don’t have an ego. I just want to do the right thing for the city. I said I’d rather find somebody qualified to run. In the last 12 years, [Mayor Bloomberg’s] leadership has led to billions and billions of dollars of investment by Europeans and by the international community. We need somebody that’s going to provide confidence to the international business community to keep supporting New York City. We are looking at people; we are talking to people, but we haven’t made any decisions.

What do you make of Christine Quinn as a candidate?
I’ve met with Christine. She’s a very lovely lady, but she has to prove that she’s capable of being tough enough to be mayor.

Hey, at least he called her lovely. Then again, maybe an ambivalent endorsement from Mr. Catsimatidis is just what the City Council speaker needs. Snide remarks from a conservative supermarket mogul could help her in her quest to shore up her business support without seeming too pro-business and losing points with her liberal base.

The sun rises over Downtown Brooklyn. (DBP)

At the ready. (Andrew Hill/OSC)

When Tucker Reed finally stepped up to the lectern inside the new BAM Fisher Building on a Thursday morning at the end of July, the crowd could barely handle any more news about just how stupendous Downtown Brooklyn was, is and will be.

Karen Brooks Hopkins, entering her fourth decade at BAM, welcomed the crowd into the brightly lit practice space on the third floor of the two-month-old red brick theater, tucked in behind BAM’s original performance hall. This would be the linchpin of the latest, greatest cultural district in the city. Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president and cheerleader-in-chief for 11 years now, warmed up the crowd with his typical act. "Everywhere you look, things are looking up in Downtown Brooklyn," he barked. This was, is, will be the center of the universe.

Next came State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, whose grandmother grew up on Albany Street in Crown Heights. He had made sure to wear his Brooklyn lapel pin, a gift Mr. Markowitz bestows on everyone he meets. Though he was a Long Island guy, Mr. DiNapoli was an adopted son of this former outer borough, at least for the day, for the good news he was bringing: economic growth in Downtown Brooklyn had outpaced the rest of the city over the past decade, according to a new report prepared by the comptroller’s office. This was, is, will be an economic powerhouse.

On the same streets where Jay-Z had once slung crack (and would soon be headlining the Barclays Center he ostensibly helped build), legitimate businesses had replaced illicit ones, and they were thriving. Thousands of new residents had moved in, filling the striking and unspectacular condo-turned-rental-in-the-downturn towers along Flatbush Avenue. National brands including H&M, Sephora, Target and Shake Shack were replacing the pawn shops and cellphone outlets on the Fulton Mall.

It’s not your bubbe’s Brooklyn anymore. It’s Tucker Reed’s.

Having just turned 32, Mr. Reed has been making a name for himself since the middle of the last decade, when he launched the DUMBO Business Improvement District (BID). The event at BAM was his big coming out. Since January, Mr. Reed has run the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a BID of BIDs, overseeing the MetroTech office park, Fulton Mall and the Court-Livingston-Schermerhorn corridor, an L-shaped spine of older office buildings, mostly filled with government agencies and legal firms. It is the city’s third-largest business district, after Midtown and Lower Manhattan, but it is still trying to define its identity after decades of fitful, relentless redefinition and rebirth.

On this day, Mr. Reed was the man with the plan. After a little over six months on the job, he had developed a strategic framework for Downtown Brooklyn, the first major vision statement since the Bloomberg administration’s rezoning of 22 blocks along Flatbush Avenue in 2004. The partnership, with its $6 million annual budget, was created in part to oversee the development on the horizon

“Just look out this window and you can see the changes to the built environment,” he said, gesturing through the floor-to-ceiling glass. “If the first phase of the partnership was focused on facilitating the execution of public-private projects, the next phase will be on synthesizing these disparate investments into a Downtown Brooklyn mosaic.” (He has a soft spot for management speak.)

Mr. Reed smiled his broad, boyish grin, his handsome blue eyes glinting. He wore a navy suit that barely contained his impressive bulk, still in good shape a decade after his time as a defensive end ended with two torn ACLs. Under this was a white shirt, pink houndstooth tie and a crimson pocket square with blue trim. Put together, dressed to impress.

It is hard to believe that three years earlier, Mr. Reed, with his quick smile and charming character, was instead donning a flak jacket and fatigues every day to go to work. It was not the streets of Brooklyn but Baghdad he was rebuilding as an adviser for the State Department. He had traded in a war zone for lofts and brownstones. Still, the job was basically the same, except for the IEDs.

Tucker Reed grew up in Newtown, Conn., trading on both his physical and mental intelligence. When not practicing his blitz on a tackling dummy, he was practicing for the coming season’s play. Junior year, he played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

Newtown is a town of about 25,000 just outside of Danbury, where Mr. Reed spent most of his time growing up except for regular trips down to Manhattan to catch a Giants game or go to the theater or a museum. It was a journey his 94-year-old grandfather made seven days a week until about six months ago, traveling to the Illustration House, a small Chelsea gallery that he ran for the past four decades with Mr. Reed’s uncle. It was through him, and a Brooklyn-bred grandmother “who never left the city too far behind” that Mr. Reed gained much of his appreciation for New York and for the arts.

“It makes for a richer life a more well-rounded experience,” Mr. Reed said. “I never deluded myself beyond the karaoke floor that I’d have a future in the arts or entertainment, but it certainly informs a bunch of the fun work I get to do now with cultural organizations.”

Mr. Reed was raised by his mother, a fact he credits with stoking his self-reliant spirit. The family lived what he calls a modest, working-class life, which drove Mr. Reed to overachieve in his pursuits but also to want to give back. “You like to think that if you are a good person, and you are trying to do the right thing, that there are people out there to help, and for government to help as well,” he said. “That wasn’t always my experience, so I’d like to think that I have a responsibility to improve people’s lives.”

He decided to attend nearby Wesleyan, which, in addition to all the artsy kids from afar there to start electronica bands and celebrate Zonker Harris Day, attracts a number of locals looking for a good school (which is not to say that Mr. Reed shied away from the more-than-occasional drink, as a former member of the football team, who now works at a financial firm in Downtown Brooklyn, explained).

Mr. Reed not only played football to help pay his way through school but also joined the National Guard. After those two torn ACLs in sophomore year, Mr. Reed was given a medical discharge, a stroke of bad luck that may well have saved his life—Mr. Reed graduated in 2002, which would have almost certainly have put him on the front lines in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Still, Mr. Reed found time for his other pursuits, taking a role in the student government and acting in, among other pieces, 7 Minutes in Heaven, the first original piece by his dormmate Lin-Manuel Miranda, who later achieved fame with In the Heights. During the summers, he ran an ice cream shop on an island off the coast of Maine with another college buddy.

After graduating with a bachelors degree in government, Mr. Reed spent a year on the island teaching high school social studies while also making time to travel to India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The following year, Mr. Reed arrived in New York on a Coro public service fellowship, which took him through a number of internships at City Hall and the community lending division at JPMorgan. In 2004, Mr. Reed officially joined the Bloomberg administration in the Department of Small Business Services. He spent a little over a year there integrating two older departments that had now been combined into one while also focusing on expanding and reforming the Workforce1 career centers.

It was Rob Walsh, commissioner of the department, who recommended Mr. Reed to Jed Walentas, the DUMBO scion and up-and-comer in his own right taking over his father’s empire in DUMBO. The Bloomberg administration had become staunch advocates of businesses improvements districts—their number has nearly doubled in the past decade—and Mr. Reed was tapped to launch this latest effort. “He has this rare understanding of both the public and private sector and how to get them to work together,” Commissioner Walsh said.

Mr. Reed used to jog over the Brooklyn Bridge many mornings from his apartment in Carroll Gardens, and he was always struck by how many tourists would walk over from Manhattan and immediately turn back around. “My goal was to put DUMBO on the map,” Mr. Reed said. In the span of two years he had, converting a nonexistent advocacy group into one of the foremost BIDs in town.

He built the first pedestrian plaza in the city, at Pearl Street, opened the archway under the anchorage to the Manhattan Bridge, formerly a DOT storage lot, and launched a program to install free wifi in the neighborhood. He presided over a landmarking of DUMBO that preserved its character, then pivoted to a rezoning that carved out room for new development.

“He just has an instinctual understanding of how urban spaces work,” Mr. Walentas said. Meanwhile, a tech sector blossomed and a residential market boomed into the poshest in the borough.

For all the good Mr. Reed had done in the city in his five years here, he still had a longing for greater fulfilment. “I felt like everything that was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan was really the challenge of my generation, and I wanted to be a part of that in some way,” Mr. Reed said. He found a posting for an adviser to a provincial reconstruction team, a small group of 100 civilian and military experts assigned to Division Headquarters in Baghdad.

Mr. Reed arrived in Iraq in May 2008. After five years of war, the situation on the banks of the Tigris was unspeakably worse than along the East River, yet both had undergone a considerable building boom that now needed managing.

“The mandate was, get as many projects built as possible, and let's really start to demonstrate that the tide was turning and and conditions were improving,” Mr. Reed said. “But it was like community development gone wild.” He said it was common for a local battalion commander to be out on patrol, run into a sheikh, ask him what they needed, and voila, a school or hospital would materialize out of nowhere—with no one to run or even necessarily fill it. This not only created underutilized resources but a new vulnerable infrastructure that if not defended and put into could use could become a nest for insurgents.

“There was a lot of the best intentions that were meeting just a kind of discoordinated effort, and not through the fault of anyone specifically, but, I think, through the fault of being in a war zone,” Mr. Reed said. It was a year after the military surge, and things had begun to improve, but untold amounts of work remained to be done. Mr. Reed makes mention of 18- to 20-hour workdays.

“He’s kind and generous, but holds people accountable for their actions,” Lou Ann Linehan, a diplomat in the Basra consulate who was Mr. Reed’s superior in Baghdad, said in an email. “He fills up the room with his personality. He does not suffer fools.”

One of his fondest projects—something only a New Yorker could cop to—was helping to rebuild the sanitation network. “You’re working on trying to restore the most basic level of service where you’re training people to follow a set route, come at a dependable time each day to build the trust of the customer so they know if I go and put my garbage out at 5 o’clock it’s going to be picked at 5 o’clock, and that’s the most basic level of service because the place had evolved into complete chaos,” Mr. Reed recalled. “People aren’t really caring about garbage when you’re worrying about if you’re going to get blown up.” Yet that is part of the reason regular trash removal was so important—the ubiquitous piles of garbage were a popular hiding place for IEDs.

This was a matter of personal import, as well, since Mr. Reed was venturing out into these same streets three to four times a week from the relative safety of the Green Zone. In talking about his time in Iraq, Mr. Reed is careful to be matter-of-fact, not wanting to sound boastful or self-important. His posting is something he felt obligated to do, but it was also just another job to do and do right. “There was the physical danger aspect to it, which, when you're in the situation, you kind of push to the back of your mind, because if you don't, it will drive you crazy,” Mr. Reed said of the challenges of working in a war zone.

When he got homesick, he would watch Rick Burns's New York documentary, and it helped inform his view of the city when he returned. “I watched the whole series while I was over there again, there is some quote in there from Fitzgerald talking about how New York burns with all the effervescence of the sun,” he said. “With all that ligh,t how could you not want to be a part of it?”

After only six months, Mr. Reed had been promoted from an adviser to chief of staff, but after seven more, he found himself exhausted. It was time to return home to the bright lights.

The day after his big announcement, a clear, muggy Friday morning, Tucker Reed was giving a tour of his downtown domain, strolling through the leafy confines of the MetroTech Plaza, having just walked over from the noisy scene on the Fulton Mall. The two are closer than even locals realize, and in many ways they remain worlds apart, though upscale developments on both sides—a French bistro recently opened in MetroTech—draw them ever closer. Mr. Reed considers this his top priority.

“For me, one of the big things is the Downtown Brooklyn experience,” he said. “We want to create a destination, with everything so close together, but it can be very confusing since there’s not a grid, there’s no easy path.” Everything from smartphone apps to digital kiosks is in the works.

After returning from Iraq, Mr. Reed spent a few wayward months figuring out exactly what to do with himself. He moved into his girlfriend’s Midtown studio—she had departed their Carroll Gardens apartment when he headed overseas—and mostly spent his time decompressing, visiting with family and friends and traveling around the country. He passed the foreign service exam and considered moving to Washington, but eventually took his old friend Jed Walentas up on an offer to join Two Trees.

He spent two years as a project manager working on everything from the new Mercedes House project on the Far West Side to liaising with City Hall and managing philanthropic efforts on behalf of the Walentases. Much as he enjoyed his work in the private sector, he jumped at the opportunity to take over the partnership when Joe Chan, its founding director, stepped down last fall.

“I had met him during a tour with Jed once, and I remember being impressed, but when he came in for an interview for the job, we knew immediately he was our guy,” Forest City Ratner executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said. “His resume just blew us away.

It was a tumultuous time at the BID, where competing interests among the areas long-time developers often ran up against each other. On top of that, a scathing report from City Comptroller John Liu charged the partnership with mismanagement of funds, spending lavishly on executives while local needs were ignored.

Much as he did in Iraq, Mr. Reed focused on finding common ground among the competing parties, stressing their shared interests: let’s capitalize on the 56,000 college students, more than in Cambridge; better wayfinding, connectivity and open space are key; tech, tech, tech. He made of point of meeting with all 120 partnership members, not just the big shots on the board, though he has also conscripted them into monthly one-on-ones.

If there are any skeptics, they are among the groups that have long been critical of the partnership, most notably Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. Mr. Reed met the group within the first few months of taking over and even agreed to go on a walking tour of the neighborhood, which impressed the member of FUREE. But when he released the strategic plan, they were disappointed. "We worry it's largely lip service," Patrick Gomez, a FUREE board member said. "So far these policies have mostly benefited the luxury developers, and the elite business interests that dominate the boards of the Partnership. We look forward to working with the Partnership to promote development that uplifts the long-time residents, local small business owners and workers who have contributed to the area's success."

While Mr. Reed is willing to work with local groups, he was clear that it is not his first priority. “We are not a city agency, a housing advocate, a workforce development provider or an enforcement organization,” he responded

Despite such objections, Mr. Reed is upbeat. At the end of the tour, standing in front of Shake Shack—regarded by some as the clearest sign of the changes to Downtown Brooklyn—Mr. Reed surveyed his domain. “Within 10 or 15 blocks, it’s really all here, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the BAM to the Barclays Center,” Mr. Reed said. “We have to think about how to knit it together. It’s not about going to the office or going to the Fulton Mall anymore. You’re coming here to see a show, to shop, to work, to live. You really don’t have to leave the area—you can do it all.

Stick to your back yard. (Durst Organization)

Leonine developer Douglas Durst might not be quite the public presence than his father Seymour once was—a regular in the letters to the editor column and on local talk shows, among other outlets for his restless mind—yet he still very much knows his way around a podium. Last week, he found himself in China, talking about New York, and he even seems to admit that the one investment his firm recently made just across the Formosa Strait might not have been its best.

"My experience is almost completely New York centric," Mr. Durst said at the China Alliance's US-China Investment Summit: Focus On New York Real Estate in Shenzen. "Our one experience outside of New York convinced us to stay in New York. Real Estate is always local."

He also, naturally, talked about his kids—it’s now a fourth generation business!—and how building sustainably not only provides better buildings, and thus better income, for them, but also a better world. There was talk of 4 Times Square and 1 Bryant Park, but nothing about the widely anticipated, mildly concerning West 57th Street pyramid. The full speech is below.

My grandfather and father were in real estate and my father had a strict policy of not buying anything that wasn’t within walking distance of his house.  I had the good fortune that he lived in mid-town Manhattan.

My experience is almost completely New York centric. Our one experience outside of New York convinced us to stay in New York. Real Estate is always local.

While some prefer to be diverse geographically, our diversity is over time. Our lease expirations are spread over time so that usually only 5 to 10 percent of our office portfolio expires each year, and the good years make up for the bad years.

This is not to say that one cannot invest over a diverse geography, but that to do so successfully you must have local talent involved.

I am very lucky to work in one of the most dynamic and challenging real estate cities.  My dad said to build in New York you need an architect, an engineer and two psychiatrists.

Today you need 2 architects, 2 engineers and 6 psychiatrists. The risk, competition and regulation is intense, but so is the reward.

New York has a unique formula for success.  For the past 400 years, from the earliest Dutch settlers to the 21st Century, the best and the brightest have come from across the globe to New York to make their fame and seek their fortune.

The city’s tolerance, openness, acceptance of newcomers and insatiable appetite for innovation and creativity has insulated New York from the stagnation that has plagued many of the older US cities.

In the past, workers moved to where the jobs were, but New York’s ability to attract young, educated talent has meant companies relocate here because New York is where the qualified employees are.

New York has always been a center for financial services, but the city also has thriving media, education legal, art and cultural sectors as well as a newly energized tech and new media sector.

The area south of the central Midtown business district was once a clothing manufacturing center, as these businesses left the area entered a dormant phase.

A few years ago, as tech start-up firms needed inexpensive office space they began populating South Mid-town.  Now vacancy is near zero, and rents are high.

This is the quintessential New York real estate success story.  Neighborhoods are transformed by the creative, talented and driven people that populate them creating opportunity for development.

New York’s critical mass of talent also provides opportunities for traditional development—more along the lines of “build first and the people will come.”

This is what my father and uncles did in the 1950s along Third Avenue and in the 1970s and 80s along Sixth Avenue.  Both thoroughfares were beyond the central business district when we began developing, but are now considered the heart of midtown.

Four Times Square and One Bryant Park are the Durst Organization’s two most recently completed projects comprising more than 3.7 million square feet of office space on the block bounded by 6th Avenue, Broadway, 42nd Street next to Time Square.

The site sits atop nearly a dozen subway lines and is within walking district of three of the largest intermodal transportation hubs in North America.

Besides the environmental benefits of locating close to public transportation these building will remain desirable for decades because of the simple fact that they are easy to get to.

***

We are a family-run company in a business that is well suited for family-run operations.  Our freedom from the disclosure dictates and need to demonstrate quarterly profits of a public company allows us to develop for the long-term.

We rarely if ever sell our assets and plan for our children and grandchildren, not for the next earnings report.

Our long-term investment strategy compliments our commitment to sustainability.

We build more efficient buildings not only because they use less energy, are less expensive to operate, and provide a more productive work environment, but because we are focused on providing not just an economic future for our children, but a healthy one as well.

Our latest investment epitomizes this policy.  Two years ago we purchased a $100 million equity position in One World Trade Center and also became the buildings’ manager, leasing agent and development adviser.

The short-term prospects for the building were challenging.   The building is perhaps the most complex ever built, the real-estate market has yet to recover and the competition for large tenants is intense.

When we became involved, the single tenant was Vantone’s China Center for less than 10% of the 3.1 million sqft. Despite these risks we believed that New York and Lower Manhattan is a great bet and the benefits of new and sustainable construction provide a critical edge.

With the recent signing of a lease by the US Government, the building is now over 50% leased 2 years before it opens.

The real estate investment world is rapidly changing. My father’s generation avoided partners and outside investors, but all of our recent developments include partners: The Port Authority at 1 World Trade Center, Bank of America at 1 Bryant Park, and Vantone at 855 6th Avenue.

In closing, I would like to say that wherever you invest, it is important to remember that real estate is a service industry, not a commodity.

Thank you for the opportunity to address you. I wish you good luck and am sure we will have a constructive and productive conference.

The lucky lady. (NYU)

You know them, you love them, and now they have a kid on the way. EDC president Seth Pinsky let slip in an interview with The Real Deal, that his wife Angela Sung Pinsky, a big over at REBNY, is now pregnant.

Do you have kids?
No. We’re expecting [at the end of November]. I haven’t told a lot of people, so this is my way of letting everyone know.

Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?
No. My preference would be not to find out. Angela’s preference would be to find out. And, as I’ve come to learn very quickly, in a tie, the mother’s vote is the one that counts. So we’ll find out in a couple weeks.

Naturally, the couple lives in Park Slope, but it does not sound like they are brownstoners.

Where do you live now?
We live in Park Slope. We’re in the process of moving to another apartment in Park Slope. We’re going to totally change scenery and move about a block and a half away.

Do you own any other homes?
No, we don’t. We’ll be lucky if we can afford our new home.

But what religion will they be raising the kid?

Are you religious?
This is dangerous. Can I plead the Fifth on this? I am religious in my own way. … I don’t eat pork, I don’t eat shellfish. I belong to a synagogue; I attend that synagogue from time to time.

Woody Allen couldn't have said it better. From all of us here at The Observer, mazel tov.

The new towers. (Wikimedia, TRD)

The boom is back on the Far West Side.

In addition to the Related Companies and Brookfield's work at Hudson Yards, and now Extell's reappearance on the scene, Larry Silverstein is moving forward with a new 60-story residential tower on West 40th Street, according to The Real Deal. It will be on the same block as Mr. Silverstein's twinned Silver Towers, which also rise to 60 stories, which should make for an interesting trio on the skyline.

The Real Deal takes a particular interest in the retail space:

The new project at 514 11th Avenue, between 40th and 41st streets, is in the early stages and has not been formally announced, a source familiar with the development said. While the overall size of the building has not been laid out, the retail portion of the project is expected to be between 150,000 and 250,000 square feet, a source familiar with the developer’s discussions said.

Those ground floors are important to driving development, apparently, because Mr. Silverstein is also eager to get his old friends at the Port Authority to take space in another neighboring tower project, where he hopes they would park their buses, and presumably provide some money to help get the project of the ground and persuade banks in making the necessary construction loans.

The project is also down the block from the 62-story MiMA, meaning things sure are getting crowded by the river. If only they could open that extra 7-Train stop.