The old place was swanky.

It has a 24-hour doorman and river views, but the real appeal of 377 Rector Place—a building that is about as bland as a luxury tower can be—lies in its name: Liberty House. Particularly if one is about to start a 10-year prison sentence.

The New York Post reports that Peter Madoff and wife Marion have moved into a $3,200-per month one-bedroom rental in the Battery Park City building. For someone who has agreed, as part of plea bargain, to the criminal forfeiture of $143.1 billion, including all real estate and personal property, a rental is definitely the way to go.

The new place: not bad. Way nicer than prison.

Of the couple's vast, ill-begotten fortune, Marion was allowed to keep $771,733, an amount that still seems like a fortune to most of us, if not a vast one.

Madoff frère pleaded guilty in June to helping his brother bilk investors out of out billions, although he maintained that he had no idea that by falsifying business records he was helping to perpetrate what may go down in history as the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time.

A claim that was dismissed by US District Judge Laura Swain as “frankly, not believable,” according to the Daily News

The Madoffs needed someplace to stay, having just sold their 7-room co-op at 975 Park Avenue for $4.6 million.

While the provenance of Mr. Madoff's former pad might bother some potential buyers, all proceeds of the sale go to victim restitution. Sources have said that the Madoffs weren't even allowed to keep their dishes and other basic household items. Time for an Ikea run?

Mr. Madoff has less than a month to enjoy his liberty, Liberty House or the view of Lady Liberty in the New York Harbor. He's scheduled to start serving his sentence on February 6, thanks to a delay he was granted to attend his granddaughter's Bat Mitzvah.

As for the properties belonging to the rest of the Madoff clan, they will likely hit the market in the not-too-distant future as prosecutors and trustees make their way through the massively complicated fraud case. These include Andrew Madoff's $4.3 million apartment at 433 East 74th Street and Mark Madoff’s $6 million Soho apartment at 583 Broadway Avenue, where he committed suicide. Both of the brothers' Greenwich homes are also in the mix.

kvelsey@observer.com

Yum! (Gothamist)

Battery Park City. Like the Upper East Side or Mill Basin, it's the sort of out-of-the-way neighborhood you never visit unless you live there, or maybe there's a concert going on at the Winter Garden?which feels more like the Financial District anyway, so does it count?

Well, NY1 has a report out about how Battery Park City has finally come into its own, and it is indeed a place worth visiting. Much of the credit is given to Danny Meyer for spicing up the food scene, but really, credit is due Lloyd Blankfein.

From NY1:

The growing demand is generating growing interest from businesses who are realizing this is an untapped market. Restaurateur Danny Meyer recently opened three restaurants -Shake Shake, Blue Smoke and the North End Grill - which has quickly become a hot spot. Now people from all over the city are coming to the area to dine.

"The decision was made to open in this neighborhood because we felt it was underserved. It?s a growing community and we just really wanted to be a part of it," says North End Grill General Manager Kevin Richer.

Ah, but the real reason Mr. Meyer is here? Because Goldman Sachs kicked out all the crappy retailers when the investment bank moved in next door and brought on Union Square Hospitality to bring a little more flavor to the neighborhood.

You want an Applebees or Chevy's, try Mill Basin.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Battery Park City's Visionaire recently became the city's first LEED Platinum-certified apartment building. In fact, it's the first residential building of its kind on the East Coast. Yet it is not only the earth-friendly features of the building that will attract the environmentally conscious (and well-to-do, surely) New Yorkers. There are also the amenities -- a skylit pool, a social club, a sauna-and-yoga-studio-equipped fitness center -- and best of all, those incomparable Battery Park City views of New York harbor.

Nowhere do they look better than in this three-bedroom, three-bathroom penthouse, just listed by the sponsor for $4.455 million. One of only five top-floor units, it is on the south side of the building, offering not only the best light, but also the best views of Lady Liberty. Hurry before a greeny with more green snaps it up.

Slideshow: The Visionaire

On Wednesday, Community Board 1 received an update on the latest details of the plan: an upgrade to the Embassy Suites hotel near its headquarters, and the addition of restauranteur Danny Meyer and his Union Square Hospitality Group, which is currently expanding its franchises around the city. 

Those new restaurants will be filling the void created by the departure of restaurants in the neighborhood, including Applebee's and Chevys.

"If we as a residential neighborhood can benefit from it, that's wonderful," said Linde Belfer, chairwoman of the board's Battery Park City committee. She added, though, "If all they're going to do did increase the cost of everything, then it's not so wonderful." 

slevin@observer.com

This is the 12,000 fifth Shake Shake for Manhattan, joining the Madison Square Park, UES, UWS and new crazy-busy West 44^th Street locations that have either opened since 2004 or in the works. (Plus, there's another on Lincoln Road in Miami, and a few dotted elsewhere, with Kuwait City next year.) Not that we're complaining, but the silver logo is threatening the yellow arches for ubiquity.

In the area of the old twin towers, several restaurants have closed since 9/11, but some promised new tenants (The Daily News among them) may boost traffic in the neighborhood. Still, the new eateries will be nearer the North end of Battery Park City,  near Stuyvesant High School, than the harder-hit South end.

No word yet on whether the downtown Blue Smoke will mimic its namesake by adding a Jazz Standard club downstairs.

apeers@observer.com

Operating under the code name “Project Repo,” aides to Mayor Bloomberg’s right-hand man for development drew up a clandestine list of where the city could seize control of major initiatives it shared with the state.

Among those considered for a city takeover, according to multiple people familiar with the plan, were the sprawling Queens West housing development near Long Island City; Battery Park City; Roosevelt Island; Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Governors Island.

In theory, muscling the state out of the picture would have stripped away tangles of bureaucracy and set up the city for a speedier groundbreaking.

Alas, the plan never amounted to much more than a memo of aspirations, filed away after city officials encountered a new Spitzer administration reluctant to cede control.
Still, it was representative of the Bloomberg administration’s underlying desire to assert more control over the assets within its borders. And now, more than three years later, under a new deputy mayor, a new governor and a cash-strapped state, the spirit of Project Repo is improbably thriving.

After months of negotiating, the city just announced tentative deals to grab full control of Governors Island and Brooklyn Bridge Park, two waterfront parkland and real estate development projects that have languished under city-state efforts.

The latest venture: Battery Park City. While no official city play for the 92-acre extension of Lower Manhattan has yet been announced, the mostly completed development complex is in the cross hairs of administration officials, particularly Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, Mr. Doctoroff’s successor, who is pushing for the takeover within the administration.

In classic Bloomberg administration fashion, Project Repo had at its roots a strong distaste for sharing control, particularly with a bureaucracy. On the shared city-state economic development projects, officials involved on both sides had long complained of constant bickering and slow decision making that left city-state projects with a similar legacy: progress at a snail’s pace.

“There’s no mystery that in economic development, the best thing you can do from a city perspective is get the state out of the picture,” said a former city official involved with Project Repo.

Of course, a major barrier always faced the plan’s implementation: There was little in it for the governor. The trade, essentially, would have given the mayor the ability to get the projects moving and then lead the ribbon-cuttings, leaving the state only as a bystander with a bit more cash to put elsewhere. Officials in the Spitzer administration, with an empire-building mentality of its own and not eager to cede control on legacy projects, declined an offer by the Bloomberg administration to take over some of these projects. And that, it seemed, was that.

That is, until the landscape shifted. Now, with a politically weak governor and a fiscally emaciated state government, the Bloomberg administration is whisking away assets co-owned with the state, a gambit they have been able to execute without being asked to give up much, if anything, in return.

Battery Park City, should the mayor indeed make a go at adding it to the list, would not even need the consent of the governor, as the city has long had an option allowing it to purchase the entire property for $1 so long as the debt is paid off. (It would, however, need the consent of City Comptroller John Liu, who has taken a few actions opposing the mayor, and has said he is studying the concept. Fearing political backlash, the Bloomberg administration likely would also be reticent to take control without a nod from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.)

Charles Urstadt, the recently retired vice chairman of the Battery Park City Authority and a founding chairman, has been beating the drum on the issue, urging the city to take control now that the complex is built out and the authority is tasked only with managing, not developing.

“It’s a perversion of the original intent of Battery Park City,” he said of the authority’s putting $30 million a year toward management of a completed development. “The job is finished, and the profits, which are enormous, should be used for affordable housing.”

The attraction to the takeover’s backers is a treasure chest of money that would be available to the city, if not immediately then in future years. In addition to the efficiencies that could be had from streamlining management, the city could save on borrowing costs for the authority’s $1 billion in debt (city bonds currently cost less than authority bonds, generally). That, and the city would not have to go through a sticky political negotiation with the governor and the city comptroller every time it wants to use some of the tens of millions in surplus rents that are created every year by Battery Park City’s buildings (the last negotiation, for $860 million, took more than a year).

For all of the projects, the Bloomberg administration clearly sees now as its best time to strike.

“In past severe economic downturns, the city’s fiscal woes forced it to cede a lot to the state,” a spokesman for the mayor, Andrew Brent, said in a statement. “Today, after eight years of responsible fiscal management, infrastructure investments and planning, the city is in a much different position and can afford to take over and manage the future of certain key sites like Brooklyn Bridge Park and Governors Island.”

ebrown@observer.com

As for Battery Park City bondholders? They have less to applaud.

Credit ratings giant Moody's last week put $1 billion in Battery Park City funds bonds "on watch" for a downgrade, sounding the alarm on what it apparently views as a challenge to the agency's stable financial footing.

Bond Buyer had a story on the issue Monday.

The announcement from Moody's said that while the money the city and state took was not specifically a reserve fund for the bonds, it was a factor in the bonds' high ratings:

Moody's has considered the balance of residual funds that could be used for BPCA purposes if necessary (subject to City agreement) to be a factor in the BPCA's credit strength and a contributor to the high levels of ratings assigned to the Bonds. Moody's is placing the Bonds under review for downgrade pending assessment of the impact of the withdrawals on the ratings.

ebrown@observer.com

Speaking at a Crain’s New York breakfast Thursday morning at the Hyatt on 42^nd Street, the Democratic nominee for mayor offered a blast from the past as his standard-bearer for how the city should get giant real estate projects built: Battery Park City.

Unlike many of the Bloomberg administration’s signature development initiatives—Willets Point, Coney Island, the West Side rail yards, Atlantic Yards—the 40-year-old project, started in the Lindsay and Rockefeller administrations, was developed parcel-by-parcel, with developers gradually building up the site to the point where it’s just getting fully built out today.

“The tale of the Bloomberg administration has been failed mega-development projects: Hudson Yards, Atlantic Yards, Willets Point and on and on and on,” the comptroller said.

“Rather than giving it to one developer and saying, ‘Here, you run with it,’” he said, “what we’re seeing now is people treading water, sitting there hoping the economy turns around.”

The solution?

“We should have done more staged development,” Mr. Thompson said. “If you look at models that have worked in good and bad economies, look at Battery Park City. It’s been better-planned growth; you’ve seen building and construction moving forward and developing in good and bad times.”

Of course, this isn’t a new idea; planning and neighborhood groups have been urging this for years. Giving a big site to a single developer all at once—such as the 22-acre, $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project—could bring a higher bid given, among other reasons, that the developer would benefit from economies of scale and increased values as it fills out the site. But, as has been seen in these strained times, these projects are also quite prone to failure or renegotiation as the developers struggle to get off the ground amid the cyclical economy.

On the mayor’s mega-projects such as Atlantic Yards, the 26-acre West Side rail yards, the Coney Island amusement district, and, to a large extent, Willets Point in Queens, the administration has doubtlessly struggled to show anywhere close to the project it wanted. Officials had previously said their goal was to get all the administration's projects to the point where they were irreversible before the end of the mayor’s second term.

The only one that’s close to that point is Atlantic Yards, where developer Bruce Ratner is close to starting construction on the centerpiece Nets arena, though most of the project has been pushed off for years. 

ebrown@observer.com

A lot of different Battery Park ferry terminal developments have happened in the past eight years, but the five-slip, upgraded terminal had yet to appear—until this weekend. A trio of tugboats will finally bring a permanent, “state-of-the-art,” terminal from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to the Battery Park City promenade on Saturday morning where final installation will begin, the Port Authority announced today.

The press release issued by the agency is similar to the one from 2000, except the cost of the terminal has grown to $50 million and ridership has dropped to 7,400.

Managed by private ferry operator BillyBey Ferry Company, the terminal will begin service later this summer, in anticipation of a passenger influx from the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in Battery Park City and the yet-to-be completed World Trade Center site.

It will be able to accommodate more commuters with a 22,000-square-foot passenger waiting area and improved amenities like gangway separations for arriving and departing passengers, restrooms, concession kiosks, additional seating and improved lighting.

While installation work is completed, the temporary terminal will be moved further north.