One of the character-stripping branches. (DNAinfo)

In recent years, the Upper West Side has been besieged by bank branches, with countless TD Banks and Citibanks, Chase Banks and Banks of America gobbling up once-vibrant street corners, the dull gleam of their ATM screens casting an eerie glow on the empty sidewalks late at night.

There has been hand-wringing, there have been outcries, there is even a zoning ordinance that prohibits banks from having storefronts wider than 25 feet. And unlike the cancerous spread of Duane Reades across every corner of our fair city, which for all their colonial tendencies offer a certain languorous refuge for the stressed city dweller, no one can quite understand what is driving the bank branches' spread. Aren't we always told that people are doing more and more banking online? Other than withdrawing cash from the ATM, how often do most of us really visit the bank?

But now there is some good news for bank-beleaguered Upper West Siders: the number of bank branches in the United States is falling and is at the lowest it has been since 2007, according to the Wall Street Journal. Last year, 2,267 branches closed, bringing the number of hopelessly bland, generic outposts to 93,000. Best of all, the number of U.S. bank branches is expected to drop to 80,000 over the next decade, which should put us somewhere close to 2000 levels.

The change, The Journal reports, is a reversal from the wild expansion that was seen over the last three decades, when the number of bank branches doubled. The industry has reduced branches only three times in the last 77 years, when the FDIC started monitoring such changes.

Maybe now the Upper West Side will finally be able to accommodate more of the children's boutiques and the sad, weird bars that have been longing to move there? Alas, it seems unlikely that the most-missed establishments, the dives and the hardware stores and eclectic, reasonably-priced restaurants will be able to return to the neighborhood. Although a decrease in the number of deep-pocketed national companies eager to sign leases might help some beloved institutions stay—retarding rent increases—it's not as though the neighborhood would or could revert back to its former self. Broadway is increasingly home to other upscale, dead-souled national retailers and Columbus is blighted by cookie-cutter cafes with book-like wine lists and prices that start at $11 a glass.

And, while the decrease in the number of bank branches is ostensibly connected to the increase in online banking—it now accounts for 53 percent of all banking transactions, compared to 14 percent for in-branch visits, according to the AlixPartners statistics quoted by The Journal, ironically, it's the more rural, less-connected towns that are losing their banks rather than iphone-cluttered urban centers.

The closures are concentrated in small towns like Athens, Michigan and in the states that were hardest hit by the mortgage crisis—Nevada, Georgia. The kinds of places where communities not only like, but treasure their one bank branch. Athens even sent letters to 20 different banks and threw a pizza party to try to attract a new bank after losing its branch.

Meanwhile, in places like the Upper West Side, despite the high costs of retail space, online savvy and general hostility to them, banks continue to open new branches, at least for now. Last spring—during the time frame when other areas of the country lost more than 2,000 branches, four banks announced plans to open Upper West Side branches within a 20-block radius of one another. And at least now the new branches will be limited to 25-feet on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues.

kvelsey@observer.com

Edward Skyler never hesitated to jettison a good opportunity for a better one. After rapidly rising through the ranks of the Bloomberg administration to become the city's youngest Deputy Mayor, Mr. Skyler did not hang on to the hard-won post, but, rather, jumped at the chance to become an executive vice president for global public affairs at Citigroup in New York.

Thus, it should surprise no one to learn that Mr. Skyler has swapped his one-bedroom SoHo condo for a sleeker two-bedroom pad just down the block.

Skyler and new wife Jennifer Yuille (Patrick McMullen)

Mr. Skyler offloaded a well-lit (a gently-curved wall of 8-foot windows) but small (768 square feet) condo on the third floor of 210 Lafayette Street. Dubbed "Mr. Bloomberg's pitbull press secretary" by the New York Daily News during his earlier days as the mouthpiece of the administration (he is said to have thrown a napkin in the face of a reporter who asked about Mr. Bloomberg's vacation plans), it should come as no surprise that Mr. Skyler gave only a courtesy budge on the $1.25 million ask. He yielded to buyer Jamie Kreindler for$1.24 million, according to city property records, making a modest profit on the $941,000 he paid in 2005.

Ms. Kreindler, who may be the wardrobe assistant and native New Yorker who had a brief fling with Kanye West last year, or just a woman who shares her name, will get a spa-like bath and a kitchen with a Sub-Zero fridge—nice, relaxing features to come home to after a long day running multiple city departments or watching your ex parade around town with Kim Kardashian. The condo was listed with Corcoran brokers Nick Gavin and Michael Sarg and spent just under a month on the market.

Mr. Skyler traded up for a $2.4 million for a condo on the eighth floor of 225 Lafayette Street—a sun-drenched loft in the recently-converted 1924 Beaux Arts former Bank Building with oversize tilt and turn picture windows. And although the sale hit the records just now, it looks like it went through a little more than a year ago. The property, for sale by owners Michael Mufson and Michal Fromer, was on the market for just two months at $2.45 million.

But the new apartment, although perhaps paid for with a salary more lavish than that of a city employee, is not all about money. In fact, we suspect it had quite a bit to do with love. Just a few weeks ago Mr. Skyler married Jennifer Yuille, the head of consumer communications at Facebook in New York.

We're sure that the wedding was announced with the most exquisitely concise, carefully worded invitations.

kvelsey@observer.com

And the prices?

Well, Mayor Bloomberg says they're free (for the city, and taxpayers, technically):

As for what they'll cost users?

There are two short-term access options: 24-hour or 7-day. Short-term access pass holders get the first 30 minutes of each trip free and pay additional charges for every 30 minute period thereafter.

And here's the rate sheet:

Also of note: it'll cost you $1,000 if you lose one, so don't do that. The sparkly new website also has a schedule of demonstrations for the new program, coming up next week:

Flatiron
(Broadway btw 22nd and 23rd)
May 10, 2012
12-4 pm

Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market
West 39th Street between 9th & 10th Avenues
May 12, 2012
12-4 pm

Auto-motorists, you've been put on notice: New York City is about to become a bicyclists town, and you just drive in it. Also, here's hoping Citibank can sponsor something more fruitful than the baseball field they had named after themselves, because bikers crashing and burning with distinct ritualism every early September would be bad.

Also, because they should be called Taxpayer Bikes.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Probably not.

Still, it’s possible to lose track of just how many deals Fried Frank partner Meyer Last inked in 2011. Call it the Jon Mechanic effect.

Meyer Last. (Photo by Kiki Conway)

Mr. Mechanic, the head of Fried Frank’s real estate practice, is a staple of industry social and speaking events as well as host of the firm’s annual holiday party, one of real estate’s biggest gatherings of the year.

On top of it, Mr. Mechanic is often the attorney on the city’s largest leasing and sales deals. As a result, he has become the city’s most recognized real estate lawyer and, in a business where brokers and landlords usually get the credit for arranging transactions anyway, tends to overshadow the rest of his ilk.

“Jon is this incredible combination between being a brilliant marketer for the firm and also an exceptional lawyer. Very few really can combine both the way he does,” Mr. Last said. There isn’t an ounce of rivalry in the way Mr. Last speaks of his colleague; he’s genuinely in awe.

After a year like 2011, however, Mr. Last may give Mr. Mechanic a run for his money. While Mr. Mechanic was one of the lead attorneys on the year’s biggest and most prestigious leasing transaction, Condé Nast’s one-million-plus-square-foot deal at 1 World Trade Center, Mr. Last has tallied his own dizzying array of high-stakes deals.

He represented the landlord George Comfort & Sons in its 900,000-square-foot lease with the Japanese financial company Nomura at Worldwide Plaza. He also was the attorney for Brookfield Properties, one of Fried Frank’s biggest clients, in its 750,000-plus-square-foot renewal at the World Financial Center with Bank of America.

The two deals caused something of an awkward situation for Mr. Last.

Nomura was one of the World Financial Center’s largest tenants and for a time Brookfield was competing fiercely with George Comfort & Sons to hold onto the company. So while Mr. Last was negotiating to keep Bank of America on the one hand, he was simultaneously arranging to have Nomura go elsewhere.

Such is the balancing act of being one of the city’s most successful real estate attorneys.

“Needless to say, I never mentioned the word Nomura during the Bank of America talks,” Mr. Last said. “Brookfield is an incredibly sophisticated owner and they’re able to recognize that I’m not the one deciding where Nomura is going. I’m working for my client. In theory sometimes every attorney has to watch out for conflicts of interest. Usually my connections facilitate deals though.”

Mr. Last said he wasn’t even sure the Nomura deal was going to go through until only days before the lease was signed during the summer—a revelation that shows just how uncertain the world of big-time dealmaking can actually be. Though it takes many months to arrive at a deal, last-minute decisions, even whims, can unwind or seal even the most carefully planned transactions.

George Comfort & Sons, Mr. Last said, was also in serious negotiations with another tenant, which, though smaller than Nomura, was in talks to do a deal for higher rents.

“The final week, the week before the Nomura lease was done, I would have guessed the other deal,” Mr. Last said. “We had a meeting with Nomura on a Sunday. All day we met and were able to close a lot of the points and get it near completion and Peter Duncan [George Comfort’s chief executive] decided to go with it.”
Mr. Last sat with The Commercial Observer at the company’s Midtown conference center high in the Seagrams Building, one of Midtown’s most exclusive towers. The space is small, purposely so, to assure that the location is strictly a place for meetings and doesn’t evolve into something more akin to a small Midtown branch where attorneys begin to regularly hang their hats. Fried Frank’s main offices are downtown, in 1 New York Plaza, an office building owned by Brookfield Properties.

“We felt like it was important to be downtown, that if we moved to Midtown, we probably wouldn’t come to lower Manhattan as much,” Mr. Last said.

There’s no denying the building’s elegance. Even the original amber-tone lights, hardly within the spectrum of a typical office environment but that by landmark regulations must be left untouched near the building’s windows so that they continue to produce the building’s signature bronze glow, have a charm.
“I’ve grown to love the building,” Mr. Last said. “It’s a calm environment, the lobby, the way the building is in the middle of everything but at once also removed because of the plaza area.”

Mr. Last came to Fried Frank in the 1980s. By the 1990s he was made a partner. Large leases are nothing new to him. Last year probably wasn’t even his biggest year. Years ago he arranged a million-plus-square-foot deal to have Standard & Poor’s take space at 55 Water Street, which, at a staggering 3.8 million square feet, is the city’s largest office property. He also worked on the deal to have Citibank sell 1 Court Square, the large office building it owned in Long Island City, and lease back about 1.4 million square feet of space there.

Still, if 2011 wasn’t the biggest, it missed out only by a hair and it easily could have been even bigger. Mr. Last represented the Swiss bank UBS in its talks to take 900,000 or more square feet at the World Trade Center. The deal would have anchored a whole new tower at the site, 3 World Trade Center, and would have allowed the bank to relocate staff there from Stamford, Conn. The lease was in talks for months, but when the European debt crisis boiled over, the bank eventually canceled the plan.

Mr. Last said it wasn’t hard juggling all the deals during the year.

“When you’re in the middle of it, it’s adrenaline, the deals are exciting and when you’re in the thick of negotiating them, there’s definitely that adrenaline factor,” Mr. Last said. “I can get going a lot quicker on three hours sleep during an exciting period than on a full night if there’s not much going on.”

His pipeline doesn’t show signs of flagging. Already, in the opening days of  2012, he helped arrange a deal in China outside of Shanghai, representing the New York-based development company Tishman Speyer in a 600,000-square-foot lease to have the apparel giant Nike anchor a new office complex Tishman is going to be build in the area.

“To me there is nothing more fun than working on development deals,” Mr. Last said. “You’re transforming an empty hole in the ground into a new structure or piece of infrastructure. They’re always the most interesting deals.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Help us identify this undercover officer

Last weekend's arrests at Citibank have been thoroughly documented. The demonstrators have their side of the story (as they are told by the white shirt officer who arrives on the scene), and the police/Citibank have theirs. But before now we had not seen the footage of the undercover detective that Marshal Garrett, one of the men arrested that day, had spoke of. This officer infiltrated the protesters' group, made the largest scene out of the whole occupation, and then barred protesters from leaving.

Well, now we do. (H/t @NewYorkist)

Since the undercover officer on duty won't give his name (clearly he is not just making a citizen's arrest: when the police arrive they immediately turn to him and ask "Is this them?") and can be seen shoving an older woman who is trying to exit the bank, we're putting the call out: Can someone identify this man so he can give his side of the story? Let us know!

Update: In case anyone was unconvinced that he was an undercover cop, an eagle-eyed tipster pointed out that you can see his badge around 1:55 of the video. Screenshot below.

Cops arrest protesters inside Citibank

Updated at bottom

Well, this is sort of a scary story: Marshall Garrett, one of the protesters who was arrested during Saturday's Occupy Wall Street march for trying to hold a General Assembly in Citibank, told the Village Voice what went down that day. Apparently a plainclothed cop had been very well informed of the situation ahead of time and hidden himself in the crowd.

Here's what Mr. Garrett told the paper:
But what was unknown to us and to a lot of people that day, including those in Times Square, was that there were undercover cops already there, paid to be disruptive and to be loud. One undercover cop present [at Citi] was louder than the entire group.

How did you know he was an undercover cop?

He arrested one of the protestors outside, and slammed her into the wall, and pushed her back into the bank. We all saw him at the precinct with us. He was laughing with the fellow white shirt cops, telling them about what we'd been saying, basically. It was a bit startling how inside their information was - how they were being paid to go to these protests and put us in situations where we'd be arrested and not be able to leave.

Now, it didn't require a lot of researching to figure out Occupy Wall Street's plans for Saturday. They had broadcasted a lot of the information out on their website, OccupyWallSt.org. But when it came down to which banks would actually be targeted for protests, you would have needed to be in Washington Square Park that day in order to be given instructions. (Protesters were split into groups and told to go and close their accounts in either Chase or Citibank.)

So either the Washington Square Park police were able to find out and radio ahead to plainclothes detectives which locations to situate themselves in, or the Occupy Wall Street movement has a couple of NYPD detectives moving inside of their ranks already. Or, Option C, as presented in the blog Red Green and Blue: the kids that were planning the runs on the bank just talked too much about it on social networks.

Update: Or, you know, the cops could have figured it out from Thomas Ryan, who has been forwarding all the Occupy Wall Street listserve information to the FBI, NYPD, and Andrew Breitbart.

(twitter.com/celakabat)

Around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, the Occupy Wall Street Livestream captured about 20 people being arrested outside a Citibank at La Guardia Place in New York. A protester announced via human mic that people had gone inside Citibank to close their accounts. They were asked to leave and complied, he said, but the bank's security guards locked them in until the N.Y.P.D. arrived.

"Some wanted to close their accounts with Citibank," he read from a cell phone. "When asked to leave, they began to exit but were locked in by security. When cops arrived, Citibank security came outside and dragged two individuals back inside to hold them under arrest."

The protesters were loaded into the back of a police van as the crowd shouted, "Let them go! Let them go!" as 10,000-some people watched the scene on Livestream. "Liberate the unlawfully arrested!" one man shouted.

Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit, who was on a list of tycoons the protesters identified for a home visit last week, recently said he'd be happy to talk to protesters if they'd like to come by the office. Their sentiments are "completely understandable," he said at a recent breakfast hosted by Fortune.

Video was taken by a witness, Logan Price:

By now accustomed to such interruptions, the protesters continued their march after the arrests with the customary chants. "The people, united, will never be defeated," and so on. "OBVIOUSLY THEY NEED TO GO BACK AND RESCUE THE PEOPLE IN THE TRUCK!!!" one viewer said in the Livestream chatroom.

OccupyWallSt.org says 22 arrested, as of 3:43 p.m. Other protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the protest's headquarters in the Financial District, to the Citibank at 555 La Guardia Place in solidarity with the arrestees, the website said.

Update, 5:04 p.m. Another video, uploaded to the #OccupyWallStreet TwitVid account, more clearly shows a woman being arrested after telling the police that she was a Citibank customer.

Citibank opened The Bank of the Future in Union Square today, a flagship branch featuring technology from Singapore and Hong Kong that makes simple financial transactinos look  like something out of Minority Report.

Customers can browse banking products at one of six touchscreen "sales walls" or watch TV on one of the "media walls," Mashable reports.

And whenever a certain amount of people check in to the branch on Foursquare, a video panel shows which users are inside the branch.

"We want this branch to be more than just a bank," Brad Dinsmore, Citigroup's head of retail banking in North America, said in a speech at the opening ceremony. "We want this branch to be a place where customers view it as a hub, a center of the community, if you will. A place where they feel warm and welcome, that they can come in and experience our free Wi-Fi access."

Sounds cozy--we're adding Citibank to the list of places to get free Wi-Fi.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

First there were all the threats from preachers and right-wing bloggers. Then El-Gamal was pursued for back-rent at his old Soho offices and attacked for an application for 9/11 recovery funds to help build Park51. Now, Citibank is suing El-Gamal for nearly $100,000, according to The Real Deal.

El-Gamal's Soho Properties took out a line of business credit at an unspecified date, and is looking to restructure it, though the bank appears unwilling to play along:

El-Gamal told The Real Deal in a statement through a spokesperson that Soho Properties was attempting to restructure the debt used for general operating expenses, and was not experiencing a cash-flow shortfall. In a common practice in today's environment, borrowers are halting payments to put a loan in default, which allows them to begin negotiating with the bank.

El-Gamal escaped his last suit, over the rent, so maybe he can get out of this suit, too. After all, if you can survive a media firestorm, you can survive anything, right?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

"People have shipped dead rats," said one Citi employee, by way of explaining the pervasive secrecy surrounding the full name of the supposed customer service representative.  They go to great lengths to carry out the charade, going so far as to give him or her differing fake titles. 

Asked what year Citi mailed its first S. Larson letter, [Public Affairs Vice President Jerry] Nachtigal said, "I don't think I can tell you that." Is S. Larson a woman? "I can't tell you that, either," said Mr. Nachtigal.

But it's innocuous! Especially for a lie coming out of Wall Street. There wouldn't have been a story if they'd been honest, and now it's on the front page. We should probably just be grateful that there weren't any references to dragon tattoos.

Update 11:47 a.m.

Citi has sent us a statement, which they apparently also sent to The Journal, reiterating their stance that S. Larson exists but that its identity must be protected.

"In order to protect the personal privacy and security of our employees and in the interest of fairness, we do not discuss non-public information about any of our employees.  While we are proud of S. Larson, we are also proud of all of our more than 25,000 customer service colleagues who are focused on serving all of our Citi customers every day."