Well, the tower that towers above them all—432 Park Avenue—has officially hit the market (a development first reported in The Wall Street Journal) with more than one-third of its 126 units already in contract. Apparently, the 1,396-foot Rafael Vinoly-designed tower has been quietly marketing units since last summer. We're not sure how we feel about a project that makes its market debut with so many units already spoken for—it's a little like a debutante attending her coming out ball when she's already engaged to be married. But, you know, congratulations.

Since last summer, 432 Park has also been quietly hiking the prices for apartments—not once, or twice, but three whole times. The building's total asking price is $2.7 billion, according to a filing with the New York attorney general, The Journal reports. Which means that 432 Park won't only be Manhattan's tallest condo tower (and the tallest residential building in the Western hemisphere), it will also be the condo tower with the highest total asking price.

The units themselves, however, while very ,very pricey, will not be the city's most expensive. Currently availability is $20 million to $82 million—significantly less than the more than $90 plus million that a few of the units at Extell's One57 are said to be in contract for. Maybe Harry Macklowe and the CIM group didn't want to steal all of Gary Barnett's thunder?

Alas, the sales launch did not include the release of interior renderings (the building isn't expected to be completed until 2015), although there are some sexy renderings of the building's exterior plus a lot of views shots. And at least we got some details on building finishes, features and amenities: every window will measure an "expansive" 10 feet by 10 feet (expansive indeed) and there will be private elevator landings, separate staff entrances, master bedrooms with his-and-her bathrooms and dressing rooms, 12.5-foot ceilings, solid oak flooring, Italian statuario marble in the bathrooms and (regular?) marble in the kitchens.

Downstairs there will be a private restaurant, a garden, a 75-foot swimming pool, a library, a billiards room, a boardroom, a performance venue and "handpicked staff."

Of course, right now, the building is still a construction site and will be for some time. Although you can watch the tower rising, on the videocamera set up by the developers—a feature that has been a little embarrassing given the recent stop work orders following two construction accidents. Videos and renderings are, after all, the closest most of us will get to the top of an under-construction skyscraper.

kvelsey@observer.com

Prices may rise in tandem with the tower.

With everyone else tacking on millions to the asks for their apartments, we guess 432 Park Avenue wanted to get in on the action, even if the most soaring of soaring residential towers has yet to break ground. Why should One57 and 15 Central Park West rake in all the cash? Especially when 432 Park Avenue is set to be the tallest residential building in the city at 1,395 feet?

In her weekly luxury market report, Donna Olshan of Donna Olshan Realty writes that sources tell her that the blended average asking price in the building will be about $5,800-a-square foot. Last we heard (when The Wall Street Journal snagged a brochure for the luxury high-rise this June), the average ask was at $4,500-a-square foot. One57 is still more expensive even with the price increase, offering some bargain prices of around $3,500-a-square foot on the lower levels, but charging as much as $13,000-a-sqaure foot for the penthouse (which is currently in contract for somewhere north of $90 million).

Of course, we'd expect some more price adjustments before sales start at the Harry Macklowe/CIM project (although Ms. Olshan said that the building is due to come on the market as soon as this fall!). Even One57, which just recently topped out, scrambled to bump their asking prices up after Sandy Weill sold his 15 CPW penthouse for $88 million last December.

So what kinds of luxuries and amenities can residents at the 117-unit building expect? Designed by Rafael Viñoly with interiors by Deborah Berke, the building is set to offer residents onsite housekeeping, valet parking, a 75-foot pool, a yoga studio, a fitness center, a billiards room, a children's playroom, a screening room, six elevators, a landscaped sculpture garden and a 64-seat private restaurant that opens onto a huge terrace. Also, owners will be able to buy offices below the 34th floor for those who hate to walk/take a Town Car to work.

Not that anyone will be seeing any of these touches anytime soon. The building is not expected to be finished until 2015.

kvelsey@observer.com

Hello Midtown.

Those are some views.

Last week, The Journal got its hands on a 67-page marketing packet for Harry Macklowe and CIM's soaring tower at 432 Park Avenue, the former Drake Hotel site where the developers are working on the tallest tower in the entire city, apartment or otherwise.

In their write-up, Journal journalist Eliot Brown and Craig Karmin mentioned that inside the packet "are a collection of striking images of what would be the tallest residential tower in the U.S. at 1,395 feet as well as a number of other interesting factoids about the tower, called 432 Park."

Those factoids are below, but what obviously whet The Observer's appetite most was the promise of "striking images" (we have a thing for those) that were sadly absent from The Journal's report. But no more.

The Observer put out a call for some of the renderings and got lucky with two. Our understanding is there are more, basically all showing the building through the day from diffferent angles. What may be as striking as the height and the views is how singular it looks from all sides--quite the contrary from its rival One57, which with its waterfall-like facade looks different from all sides. It almost reminds us of the Trump obelisk near the U.N.

Now, for those factoids, courtesy The Journal:

The tower, designed by Rafael Viñoly and developed by Harry Macklowe, is expected to cost $1.2 billion; when everything is completed, CIM projects it would net $2.5 billion from sales of residential units and and other space, which is mostly retail.

Its 128 units would vary in size from 1,390 square feet to more than 8,000 square feet.

The expected average sales price is $4,500 per square foot, which would be below recent resales at the Time Warner Center and asking prices at One57.

CIM expects to pre-sell 40 of them, and then sell four per month; closings are expected to begin in October 2014, and the building is planned to hit “substantial completion” in April 2015.

There would be 25 studios “to house residential support staff.”

The retail would run along 57th Street with 101 feet of frontage.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Going up. (original image:Dave Hogarty/Curbed, with additions by NYO)

Last night, The Observer got a glimpse of the super-tall residential tower Gary Barnett has planned for Broadway and 57th Street, just one block away from his already very tall One57.

Our good friends at Curbed picked up on this and were brilliant enough to photoshop the two onto the same skyline. It is quite the striking image, but not quite complete.

After all, rival 432 Park is already underway—and looking for more investors, if you're interested, as The Journal revealed yesterday—so we figured, what the hey, let's put them all together.

Welcome to your new skyline, circa 2015.

Going up... and up and up and up. (Matt Chaban)

To infinity, and beyond. (CIM)

The Observer was wandering along 57th Street today when we saw an unexpected sight: a cement truck backed up to the old Drake Hotel site. Two of them actually, one dumping its payload into the maw that Macklowe built while another waited to do so.

And so, a new era for our ever-more-spindly skyline begins, thanks to Harry Macklowe and his secretive partners at CIM. See what the future holds after the jump.

To those not in the know, 432 Park Avenue will surpass Gary Barnett's One57 as the tallest residences in the city, which will surpass the current title holder, Frank Gehry and Bruce Ratner's Eight Spruce Street/New York by Gehry. And while the 400-foot spire will technically make 1 World Trade Center taller, does that really count?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's 432 Park Avenue! (WSJ)

In July, renderings of the most watched development site in the city leaked out. They were unofficial, the work of some avid architecture geeks, but it turns out the designs of the condo-tower planned for the Drake Hotel site were not that far off. The Journal gets the first official look at CIM, Harry Macklowe and Rafael Viñoly's new project, and while it will not rise to 1,420 feet, as first expected, the 1,300-foot tower would surpass every apartment building in the city by a few hundred feet.

The plans for the project, named 432 Park Ave., call for 128 condos with more than 12-foot high ceilings; a 5,000 square foot, partially covered, driveway to ensure privacy; and amenities like golf training facilities and private dining and screening rooms. The total price tag: more than $1 billion.

There is no scheduled completion date, and the project still faces challenges amid an uncertain economic and market environment. Crucially, CIM needs a construction loan of as much as $700 million. That isn't an easy type of financing to obtain these days, with European banks cutting back because of their debt problems and only a small handful of U.S. banks willing to lend.

Avi Shemesh, a CIM founding principal, said the firm is confident it will get a loan. "We have longstanding relationships with lenders," Mr. Shemesh said. "We anticipate our construction financing to be in place well in advance of any sort of deadline."

The Journal casts a great deal of doubt on the project, given the continued difficulties for builders to find lending. Competing towers are already in the works, though, like Extell's One57 and Hine's MoMA Tower, both of which surpass 1,000 feet, so anything is possible these days. At the very least, we have this first, official rendering to keep us warm at night.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The crack team over at Curbed turned up some zany renderings of a 1,420-foot tower for the Drake site. At that height, the new tower would become the second tallest building in the city, surpassing the Empire State Building and even 1 World Trade Center, if you don't count the 400-foot antenna that drives its height to the symbolic reaches of 1,776 feet.

Granted they are not the work of the project's architect, Rafael Viñoly, but instead of intrepid Wired New York listservers."Quick and dirty model based on the mystery renders," notes their author. The Observer dove into some of the 48 pages on the site but could not divine where these numbers and dimensions came from. There was no indication of this in the limited number of DOB documents online, and previously we'd seen a tower at 65 stories, not almost twice that.

Seems mighty ambitious, but these are strange times.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Safe?

Mid-tier developer Ziel Feldman has pledged $200 million to rescue the city's most troubled residential tower from bankruptcy and take full control of One Madison Park.

According to MarketWatch, Mr. Feldman will team up with the CIM Group (a rumor we've heard flying around for several weeks).  The California-based fund is also developing the Drake Hotel site with Harry Macklowe and is working with the Sapir Organization on William Beaver House and the Trump Soho.

The Observer previously reported that Mr. Feldman had bid $165 million to take over the tower. Similarly, according to this plan, the iStar debt will be split into two components: a $162 million secured note and a $69 million unsecured claim that could possibly be waived.

Months have passed since Mr. Feldman emerged as the leading bidder for the tower, with multiple delays in filing the rescue plan. Nonetheless, Mr. Feldman is far from home safe. Steve Ross' Related Company and Amalgamated Bank, a junior lender, are also vying to take control.

Even if Mr. Feldman and his powerhouse partner, CIM, succeed in taking over the unfinished tower, it will require millions of dollars of renovations, including finishing the lobby, pool and spa. Experts say they will need to fetch on average $2,500 a square foot for the condos to turn a profit.

Using that same knack for unorthodox investments, the trio started  the CIM Group in 1994, and its investment funds have spread across the country, buying up thousands of apartment units, as well as malls, hotels and theaters in second-tier markets such as L.A., Las Vegas and Dallas.

"They are a vulture," said Scott Adams, chief urban redevelopment officer for Las Vegas, who has worked with CIM. "I mean that in a good way." With the country's glitziest strips littered with victims of the worst real estate bust in at least a decade, we need scavengers to feed off the wounded.

Now the vulture has landed here too. CIM bought Harry Macklowe's distressed Drake Hotel site for $305 million in cash last January. More recently, it's bought Sapir's William Beaver House and a stake in 11 Madison, and partnered with the troubled developer on the Trump SoHo.

What happens in Vegas, a kingdom of slapdash hotels and casinos where by Mr. Adams' admission "almost anybody could be a developer," once stayed in Vegas. But New York is now littered with ailing condo and hotel projects once owned by some of the city's most prominent real estate figures.

"They came in like a white knight," said Dan Fasulo, managing director of research at Real Capital Analytics. Well, sort of. "They play behind the scenes," he added. "They are obviously pursuing a strategy not to compete with the big boys that are getting involved in controlled auctions."

A COUPLE OF days after The Observer began working on this story, before we had called CIM, they called us. "I hear you're working hard on a profile of CIM," said a company spokesman. He also knew our deadline and word count, and quietly kept tabs on us throughout, but the company, of course, refused to comment. So we went to CIM's offices on the 41st floor of a Madison Avenue tower, filled mostly with dentists and physio's offices. Half-a-dozen windowed offices rim the perimeter, piled high with documents and used coffee cups. But early on a Tuesday morning, the office was quiet, its only inhabitants a receptionist and a silver-haired man in a pale blue shirt and slacks pacing back and forth with a stack of papers in hand. They glanced at The Observer perching in the waiting room, but said nothing.

As CIM became more active in New York, they brought in Justin Rimel and several others from Los Angeles, say people who have worked with the company. A graduate of Berkeley's business program and a former member of Ernst & Young's real estate group, Mr. Rimel is the closest thing to a local face for CIM, but even he remains mostly hidden.

While in New York, CIM is still a shadowy outsider, they've long ago learned to navigate L.A.'s narrow channels of power. "L.A. is a tight little town, where there are relatively few power players," said Ron Kaye, the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. "The influence just spreads through a very narrow power system ... It's so light and dark." To wit, Mr. Ressler’s sister is married to fellow Drexel alum Leon Black, who commands Apollo Management; he owns a stake in the Milwaukee brewers thanks to his college roommate, Mark Attanasio; his brother, Tony Ressler, is the head of Ares Capital, which manages billions of dollars of capital.

CIM has also received substantial investment from different California pension plans and millions of dollars from L.A.'s development agency. "Most of what they've done is in L.A. or in smaller communities," said Mr. Kaye provocatively, "where they can just go in, throw around a lot of money and get what they wanted."

But CIM's success lies much more in its willingness to take over a sites so pockmarked with problems few will touch them, and transform not only an individual property but the neighborhood around it. They're credited, for example, with reviving the Hollywood & Highland, a complex in which the Oscars are held-which until they took over, was such a warren of unreachable and over-priced stores that not even tourists would shop there.

Without the flash of other local developers, such as Rick Caruso, the skilled turnaround artists have become the largest commercial landlord in Hollywood in not much more than a decade. New York could be their next conquest.

CIM HAS BEEN circling the city for more than a decade, waiting for an opportunity to land. Much like they once did in L.A., they've moved quickly. "They've been very aggressive on good locations," said Alan Miller, a top broker at Eastern Consolidated, "and made a splash."

But rather than going it alone, in a savvy move, they've also partnered with prominent local developers, such as the Sapirs and Harry Macklowe.

"You're a New Yorker," said Mr. Fasulo, of Real Capital. "It can get complex here, and it can help to have someone with local expertise to navigate you through the project."

But it remains to be seen how much the locals are still in it, said other people, or if CIM is instead just the puppet master. At the Drake site, for example, CIM has privately dismissed one-time owner Harry Macklowe as "a good architect." Publicly they call him a "consultant" on the project. But keeping local fallen stars like Mr. Macklowe and the Sapirs involved has worked brilliantly so far, capturing the hearts of local media anxious for a dramatic comeback story.

Whether CIM, one of the most active newcomers in the incestuous world of Big Real Estate, can pull it off is anyone's guess. Said Mr. Fasulo: "Their strategy is not for the faint of heart."

lkusisto@observer.com

An inside source passed along these sketches of Mr. Macklowe's planned development, which show a tapered 65-story tower starting with three stories of retail, followed by offices until the 20th floor, topped by a 10-story hotel and 33 floors of residential above that. We reached out to the creators, ubiquitous architects-of-record SLCE, but received no comment.  

This offers a snatch of that far-off era called Early 2008, when ambitions for the site were at their most staggering. These drawings, according to a source knowledgeable with failed negotiations to purchase the site that year, were being pushed as "the Valentino, then Armani hotel/office/residential site before both of them backed out and Bulgari stepped in. Bulgari loved the idea and wanted to fully brand it but wouldn't fund any of it." Ah, what a boom it might have been if it had lasted.

The intricacy of the designs is also quite stunning, with a jigsaw of retail space and office lobbies set off from an addition fronting Park Avenue, which residents and hotel guests would have used to enter the building. These are surrounded by interlocking plazas--a puzzle-piece designe necessitated by zoning constraints, as well as two townhouses that, at least for now, Mr. Macklowe is required to build around.

The designs also show a tapering tower, where the base floors start at 20,000 square feet before rising, after five setbacks, to a mere 5,500 square feet on the upper residential floors. Mr. Macklowe is said to be overseeing the new Drake designs (with little or no financial stake in the project), so these architectural scribbles provide some insight into what might be taking shape inside the heads Rafael Viñoly and the septuagenarian genius.

lkusisto@observer.com

Slideshow credit: Matt Chaban.