Park Avenue Armory.

Art world heavy hitters Agnes Gund, Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder, Lisa and David Schiff, and Aby Rosen and Samantha Boardman are a few of the hosts of the preview of The Art Show, which is celebrating 25 years at the Park Avenue Armory and benefiting the Henry Street Settlement. The show represents over 70 of the nation’s leading galleries with paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photographs, all under one big roof. Dorsey Waxter, the president of the Art Dealers Association of America, promises pieces in “all price ranges,” but don’t expect a Damien Hirst dot painting for pennies. This is where deep-pocketed collectors convene to freshen up the walls of their Park Avenue pads with big-ticket masterpieces.

Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, (212) 616-3930, 5:30pm-9:30pm, tickets range from $150 for a “Sponsor Preview” to $2,000 for a “Millennium Circle Preview.”

Going, going, gone at a 35 percent discount!

They say that staging an apartment is a sure way to fetch a higher price. So imagine the markdown that Aby Rosen would have taken on his penthouse at 350 West Broadway if he hadn't decorated the walls of the building with his personal art collection.

Records show that the 5,912-square-foot spread has sold for $17.56 million, which looks impressive by itself and not bad compared to the most recent $20.65 million asking price. But consider that the sponsor-unit was asking $26 million when it came on the market in December 2009. Either Soho's appeal is dwindling in inverse proportion to the hordes of shopping bag-toting tourists mobbing the streets or real estate there isn't quite as valuable as Mr. Rosen had hoped.

It's not the first time that Mr. Rosen's ambitious asking prices have gotten the better of him. His townhouse at 22 East 71st Street lingered on the market for four years being listed for $75 million. It's in contract now, reportedly for $47 million to the Qatari prime minister. The deal has yet to close.

Who will this discounted paradise atop the building of glass and champagne aluminum (their words, not ours)? Why, an LLC of course! Weston Capital Partners will enjoy not only the sophisticated, modern layout, but 360-degree views and a huge rooftop terrace. A structurally reinforced rooftop terrace, we might add, which can accommodate a "future Jacuzzi or substantial art piece." Because what limited liability corporation doesn't love Jacuzzis and fine art?

kvelsey@observer.com

Fancy!

Now that all the neighborhood galleries have fled to Chelsea, one of the few places that you can still count on to view art is developer Aby Rosen's Soho condo development at 350 West Broadway.

Mr. Rosen outfitted the lobby and model unit of the high-end seven unit building with paintings from his own private collection. In the midst of a recession, not even staging the space with valuable art and sculpture was enough to move the pricey units. But what a difference a few years and a $6 million discount make: the penthouse, which was last asking $20.65 million, is now in contract.

The 5,912-square-foot penthouse, which first hit the market for $26 million back in 2009, is the kind of sleek, pared-down space that the first few waves of Soho gentrifiers would probably have felt a little too self-conscious to embrace. There is no rough hewn or reclaimed wood, no slightly scuffed floors, no exposed brick or slightly-off kilter layouts of the neighborhood's converted lofts. No, this is a building of glass and "champagne aluminum," fumed oak floors, Vermont Cold Spring Granite and lacquered wall panels, with interiors by William T. Georgis.

It's been a face-saving fall for Mr. Rosen, who also had his townhouse at 22 East 71st Street go into contract after four full years on the market. That one also saw a price cut—with a contract reportedly signed for $47 million, a steep discount from the $75 million that Mr. Rosen was asking when the unit hit the market.

Four other units at 350 West Broadway have also closed, according to Streeteasy, leaving the now-in-contract penthouse and the floor-throughs on the sixth and seventh floors (currently listed for $8.2 million and $8 million). Corcoran Sunshine, which is handling the sales and marketing for the development, did not return a request for comment.

As we've noticed lately, many of the condo conversions that hit the market in the days, weeks and months before Lehman are now disappearing from the market at a respectable rate. Although most are not commanding the optimistic figures they tried and failed to get in headier times.

The buyer of the duplex penthouse (let's hope it's not 350 West Broadway LLC or somesuch when the sale closes) will get a three-bedroom, 4.5-bath condo with 360-degree views (until the next building project comes along, that is) and a huge rooftop terrace structurally reinforced for a "future Jacuzzi or substantial art piece." Why not add both?

"Bill Georgis is one of the best out there right now. It's nice to see his design work affirmed," said Donna Olshan, of the eponymous boutique brokerage, when we called her to chat about the impending sale. Ms. Olshan also noted that Mr. Georgis did the interiors for another Rosen project at 530 Park, which is selling briskly right now.

Sales are booming in waning days of 2012, she added, with 16 contracts as of Thursday morning, six of them above $10 million.

"The market is doing very well this month in the face of the fiscal cliff," Ms. Olshan said.

kvelsey@observer.com

The Sheik's next home? We'll know for sure when the moving trucks arrive.

Has the Prime Minister of Qatar finally found a home in Manhattan? The New York Post is reporting that after a seemingly endless search and several heartbreaking rejections Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani has purchased Aby Rosen's townhouse at 22 East 71st Street.

In some ways, it seems like a match made in heaven—the townhouse has been languishing on the market since 2008, when Mr. Rosen listed it for $75 million (the most expensive listing on the market back then, now it practically seems like a bargain)—and Mr. Hamad has been on a seemingly endless hunt for a Manhattan home. A sale would mean a happy ending for these two seekers.

But we've been sheiked out by the Post before, when they reported that Mr. Hamad was the buyer of the One57 penthouse, a claim that Gary Barnett immediately refuted. Now that Steve Wynn has finally settled down at the Ritz Carlton, Mr. Hamad seems to be the first guess anytime a big ticket item goes into contract. After all, there are only so many fabulously wealthy, well-known house hunters to watch.

Home at last?

Still, the Post speaks with a source who assures them that the sheik is indeed the buyer, with a bid of $47 million.

“The deal was done in huge secrecy without a broker. The house has been purchased through an LLC, Tower Management Holdings, to protect the identity of the buyer, Sheik Hamad, who has been looking to purchase a New York property,” the source tells them.

Neither the townhouse nor Mr. Hamad have had an easy time of it in the real estate marketplace. After spending years looking for a buyer and hosting the occasional party for Mr. Rosen, who never moved in, the townhouse recently dropped its asking price to $50 million. As for Mr. Hamad, he was reportedly rebuffed by the co-op board of 765 Fifth Avenue when he tried to buy Denise Rich's spread and the board 907 Fifth Avenue when he went for Huguette Clark's eighth-floor apartments.

Rumors abounded at the time that Mr. Hamad's wives, numerous children and sizable entourage did not sit well with co-op boards, but other sources have told The Observer that such claims are greatly exaggerated.

Mr. Rosen purchased the neo-Italian Renaissance mansion for $15.6 million in 2004, undertaking an extensive renovation to transform the upper levels of the five-story mansion from office space to a single-family home.

International buyers looking for New York pieds-à-terre are not usually drawn to townhouses—a condo is the natural choice for a house hunter tired of groveling before boards—but we suppose it does have one clear advantage. At 22,000-square-feet, Mr. Hamad can have any size entourage he wants.

kvelsey@observer.com

Still, the central staircase, faced in warm marble, has to be one of the finest in the city, reason enough to put the place back on the market, as Mr. Rosen did in 2008. The blushing price was $75 million, the most anyone dared to ask for a home at the time. And there it has sat ever since. Though the place, now asking a mere $50 million, has been far from quiet.

In the intervening years, it has become a boîte of sorts, like so many of Mr. Rosen’s properties--he’s put the house party in Lever House--host to galas, fundraisers, after parties, product launches and, as was the case last night, art shows.

Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, the society fixture, was hosting an opening for Nicholas Pol's Neverlodge—not a bad name for the mansion, either. Even if the art was not all that great, various splatters of paint with clever names (Goat After An Orgasm was one, and not entirely inaccurate) and unusual sculptures of cobbled together ephemera, it all served as a pleasant reminder that townhouses are still lovely, intimate places to show art.

Too bad they command so much more as homes and have thus have become an endangered species uptown.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Rosen just as he was leaving. Before we got a chance to say hi, another guest beat us to the big man. He looked like Mr. Rosen's fellow friend and art dealer Alberto Mugrabi, though it was hard to tell in the faint street light. In the course of the conversation, we overheard the Maybe Mr. Mugrabi remark, "You know, I've talked to two or three people tonight who really want to buy the place."

"Oh yeah?" Mr. Rosen shot back. "I've spoken to more than three. It's great. Everyone wants to buy the place, nobody wants to pay for it."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

One of the lesser works of the monolithic Emery Roth & Sons—they of GM and Look and Pan Am buildings fame—757 Third is the typical wedding-cake office building. A banded obsidian glass curtain wall with those I-beam mullions, it is the sentinel we’ve seen before, cast ever so slightly anew in a thousand business districts the world over. Seagrams lite with a splash of Chase Manhattan.

That is why walking into, or really out of, 757 Third is such a dramatic experience. The 28-story building may have the nicest revolving doors in the entire city. Set into two curving, scythelike glass panels, the building’s egress does not really have an edge, and so when stepping out onto the street through those spinning doors, it is as though the building suddenly disappears. You have left the warm confines of this sleek building and are back on the cold New York City street. You might even stop to gasp at the trick if the door were not coming up behind you, about to deliver a smack in the toosh.

It should come as no surprise that the man responsible for the transformation of one of Midtown’s many dowagers is that slick rick of midcentury Manhattan, Aby Rosen. Having worked his magic on Andy Warhol and Lever House, he is using the same touch on his lesser projects, as well, as his firm, RFR Realty, sets about retrofitting and retenanting 757 Third.

“It’s an RFR building, and this is what we do,” Sheldon Werdiger, director of marketing and design at the firm, said during a recent tour of the building. He was standing on the sidewalk, just come out from those revolving doors, and was gesturing at the facade, which had recently been cleaned. Instead of peeling back the skin of the building, as has been done on so many other aging Midtown towers, RFR decided its was in good enough shape to keep intact. “It has the right look and the right feel, and we didn’t want to diminish any of the work that Emery Roth had done,” Mr. Werdiger said.

The storefronts have been refaced to create a fresher appearance at the sidewalk and greater curb appeal for retail tenants. Wells Fargo has already taken the corner. Over the magical revolving door hangs a new canopy, where Steve Morrows, RFR’s co-director of leasing, said a major tenant’s name could go, one of many name-branding opportunities offered by the developer. (The building is also being represented by Jones Lang LaSalle.)

The inside is pure RFR, as well. “We have a very clean, I don’t want to say minimal, but our aesthetic is very sleek,” Mr. Werdiger said. The lobby floors are black granite, the walls white marble. A signature artwork—rotating through Mr. Rosen’s collection—hangs behind the welcome desk. Warm tropical woods encase the elevator core.

Upstairs, nearly half the 500,000-square-foot building is available, including a 193,000-square-foot block spread between lower and upper floors catering to a marquee tenant. The building stretches along 47th Street, with numerous setbacks alongside shorter buildings providing light on almost all four sides, and a narrower floorplate offering a brighter workspace than some deeper buildings. The space has been configured for financial, legal or media tenants. Other corners of smaller space have been broken down into prebuilts, which RFR has designed in-house, doubling as a showcase for its own designers, who will help clients fit out the space, always in the RFR style. “You won’t find anyone else doing it this nice,” Mr. Werdiger said.

The buildings unusual stepped backs and cutout create a number of unique opportunities, allowing for six different corner offices and terraces on five different floors, all clever uses of space that had once been ignored as ancillary.

Mr. Morrows points to this as the last great opportunity on Third Avenue, as 777, 807 and 600 have all filled up. “In the balance of the recession, a substantial amount of space on Third Avenue has turned over,” Mr. Morrows said. “If you want to be here, in a quality building at a good price, this is it.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The move is expected to happen at some point in 2012.

Neighbors in the Senate and at 780 Third Avenue

“Our lease has come to an end, and with the building being upgraded it made more sense for us operationally to relocate,” said Mike Morey, the spokesman for Senator Schumer.

Sen. Schumer had been in the office–legendary for its Sunday morning press conferences inside suite 1702—since 1999.

RFR Realty LLC, a joint venture between Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, has been refurbishing the nearly 500,000-square-foot 757 Third Avenue building into a Class A office tower. The asset ran into trouble last year when a $126 million loan on the property faced "imminent default."

Repeated calls and emails to Steven Morrows and Oliver Katcher, both of RFR Realty, were not returned yesterday. Calls to Joe Barnes, the manager of 780 Third Avenue, were not returned.

Mr. Morey did not know the square footage of their new office, but said that it was "comparable to the current space we're in."

In addition to Sen. Gillibrand, the AARP has its New York City offices at 780 Third Avenue.

drosen@observer.com

It was reported this morning in The Journal and confirmed a few hours ago by a press release that Mr. Rosen has just purchased the Paramount Hotel, the second of Ian Schrager's now infamous boutique hotels. The announcement made no mention of price, but the business rag reports RFR is paying $275 million. Furthermore, it "had an incentive for the acquisition: taking advantage of a tax law by reinvesting proceeds from a recent sale to defer a capital-gains payment, say people familiar with the matter."

But is there an upside here beyond taxes? From the release:

Under the direction of Aby Rosen, the RFR Hotel Group has enjoyed extraordinary success in repositioning its lodging properties into award-winning destinations for the global traveler. Both the W in Miami’s South Beach and the Roomers Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany won prominent design awards last year.

Conspicuously absent from this list are his two New York hotels. Mr. Schrager split from the Gramercy Park Hotel a few months ago amid acrimony, and it has not been the same since. And last month a judge ruled that the foreclosure on 610 Lexington Avenue, the site behind Mr. Rosen's beloved Seagram Building, could continue. It was planned to be a 61-story Shangri-La Hotel designed by Norman Foster, so luxurious that each room would cost a half-million dollars.

Will re-treading a dowdy Times Square dowager really revive Mr. Rosen's hospitality rep?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

“Man,” said Alberto Mugrabi as he approached Aby Rosen. “This came out great, huh?”
Mr. Rosen nodded and gestured at a collection of nude men in crucified positions on the wall. “Lots of dicks,” he said.

It was Thursday and the two were feting a collection of work by David LaChapelle. Lever House was packed with swarms of people who, for whatever reason, weren’t at the Venice Biennale. The bar was so crowded even Mr. Rosen couldn’t get a drink.

“Transvestites should always be around,” Mr. Mugrabi continued. “Warhol was a great fan of the drag queens and it’s great to see them back ‘in.’”

Among the guests was Amanda Lepore, a favorite subject and friend of Mr. La Chapelle’s. Ms. Lepore recounted a Courtney Love shoot. “I remember they made her up, like, so beautiful, she was sort of like Madonna.” she said. “She was four hours late, and she wanted a boatload of glitter and she passed out in the glitter like this”—Ms. Leopore threw her arms out and fell forward into an invisible pile of glitter—“and the makeup artists were going out of their minds.”

As for the art itself, it was meager. A raft-themed collage greeted visitors at the entrance, there were the aforementioned male anatomy pics, and kindergartenlike paper chains of nude bodies hung from the ceiling. That was mostly it. In aviators and shorts, the gallery owner and Work of Art judge Bill Powers decided to “go crazy with the deconstructionist readings,” as he put it.

“I think this raft is based on Raft of the Medusa, right?” he said. “So if you think of that as Raft of the Medusa, you could almost think of that”—the chains—“as netting.”

He let the sentence hang. And then shrugged. The penises were self-evident. —Dan Duray

This week, lunch at the Grill was totally booked, except for Friday when everyone disappeared for the long weekend. Pete Peterson was here only one day--he must have been too busy talking about the deficit! I'm surprised we're so busy for the time of year, but all of our events have sold out, too. On Thursday we held a private tasting for Brunello di Montalcino by Mastrojanni, a delicious Italian red wine. We had a lovely time--too much of a good time, with all that wine!

Ralph Lauren was here on Wednesday. So was Ms. Stewart and the actor Chris O'Donnell. Geraldo Rivera, who did his last wedding with us, also came in for lunch, and on his way out, he hugged Bill O'Shaughnessy, who was looking very charming as usual (but still no haircut!). On Thursday Tory Burch was here with a guest I didn't recognize, who was very stylish, of course.

We hosted a breakfast for Henry Kissinger, where he spoke at length about China and his new book. It was fabulous--the most well-attended breakfast in Four Seasons history. It shows that Mr. Kissinger is still in charge. Mr. Obama, you should listen to him!

Over the weekend, MasterChef Australia filmed at the Four Seasons, and I was one of the judges along with Paul Liebrandt and David Chang (Wylie Dufresne was supposed to come but he got sick!) We didn't even start filming until eleven o'clock at night, and were there until six a.m. but it was a lot of fun. The people who won made a chocolate gold cake.

I also got outside the restaurant this week--can you believe it? On Tuesday night someone invited me to Elaine's, two days before it closed. We drank bottles of 1996 Cheval Blanc that were outrageously inexpensive, and there were so many people I knew that I started to go around taking their orders--I was playing the maitre'd, and everyone thought I worked there! The best part about the night was the food. The last time I was at Elaine's was ten years ago, but the food was excellent. I had a steak that's as good as the one we serve in the Grill (don't tell anyone). I'm sad Elaine's closed--it's the end of an era. But at least I got to be there.

editorial@observer.com