A real-life version of the infamous Bluth’s Frozen Banana stand has been touring the city to coincide with the fourth season of Arrested Development—and The Observer managed to get a real inside scoop.

Heading down to the Columbus Circle location on Tuesday, the queue was so long it had its own security guard. We quickly made friends.

“It’s been crazy all day," he said. “Some people have been here since like six in the morning.”

The show that revels in its cult status seems to have the fans to match: director Ron Jeremy and NFL player turned White Chicks actor Terry Crews both stopped by.

“People yesterday were bringing their babies up for photos. It was like we were the Beatles or something,” divulged an impossibly helpful lady called Rebecca. “Loads of people were doing the chicken dance. It’s like we started an Arrested Development Harlem Shake”

“So a Banana Shake?” we chipped in, overly satisfied with ourselves.

Charms applied, we managed to get inside the hallowed wooden hut. Kitted out in a flawless replica yellow shirt and blue apron, we happily handing out the b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

We held up banana after banana for photos with fans who seemed less interested in the show and more in the possibility of free stuff. (Who could blame them?)

We enjoyed every second; our TV-fueled dreams fulfilled. We ignored request after request to step down, pretending we didn't hear them ask "You had enough?" Sneaky frozen banana in hand, we finally said adieu.

The actual product? Quite nice.

If you build it, they will come. (Public Art Fund)

“When you want to do something crazy, you go to your friends,” said Susan Freedman, the long-time president of the Public Art Fund. “You go to someone who won’t think you’re so crazy.”

Ms. Freedman was sitting on one of the granite benches that encircles the plaza of Columbus Circle on a recent morning. Fall was in the air, the chill of the granite seeping through our pant legs. Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus, Ms. Freedman’s latest commission, had just opened, and the customary lines snaked by behind her.

Some 70-feet up in the air, Gaetano Russo's sculpture of Christopher Columbus was comfortably at home inside a living room built by Mr. Nishi. Or, rather, conceived of by him. Like he has done in cities around the world, the Japanese artist had created an unusual environment for a popular statue to reside in and invited the public to come for a visit. But he did not build, did not construct, the structure in Columbus Circle, his biggest yet. That job fell to one of Ms. Freedman’s friends, Dan Tishman.

Mr. Tishman’s eponymous family firm has been developing and building office towers, hotels and more in the city and across the country for three generations. Mr. Tishman’s father built the first World Trade Center, and it has fallen to Tishman Construction to rebuild those 16 acres, along with erecting such contemporary icons as One Bryant Park and Hudson Yards.

In the meantime, Mr. Tishman has developed a niche as the go-to builder for some of the city’s most ambitious public art projects—a portfolio that continues to grow. “The Public Art Fund and the artists they work with have a vision, in a way it is similar to working with top architects on jobs we build around the world,” Mr. Tishman said in an email. The art projects do present their own unique challenges, though. “Building freestanding scaffolding over a subway line or waterfalls in the harbor give our engineers and builders a unique opportunity to stretch their problem solving muscles,” Mr. Tishman explained

It was Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls in the East River that first inspired Ms. Freedman to call her old high school friend from the Upper West Side, to see if he knew anyone who might be able to execute such an audacious project. He volunteered himself. Since then, they have worked on Sol Lewitt's retrospective in and around City Hall Park last year, where Tishman fabricated two giant concrete sculptures, and now Discovering Columbus.

The first piece of the project was assembling the scaffolding to reach an appropriate height to create Mr. Nishi's living room. As they talked about the project, Mr. Tishman and Ms. Freedman realized it also presented the perfect opportunity to allow for the conservation of the statue, as well. Wooden platforms were brought in at first to allow for the initial restoration work and will return after the show closes to finish the conservation project. When the wood was removed, it revealed an interesting metal lattice work. "At first, people thought they were just working on the plaza again," Tishman senior vice-president Pamela Friedlander said during a tour of the project. "Only when we started to take out the wood and put up the signage did a lot of people figure it out"

The team built a fairly conventional construction scaffolding system, even recycling bars and joints that had been used during repairs to the George Washington Bridge—reduce, reuse, recycle! Still, in this unusual configuration, it creates a web metal that is not only functional but visually striking.

The site posed some unusual challenges. As Mr. Tishman pointed out, a subway line runs underneath Columbus Circle, the oldest in the city in fact, making for an incredibly shallow foundation. This meant the scaffolding had to rest on the ground, rather than being drilled into it, which would have also necessitated repairs to the recently renovated plaza, a step the builders wanted to avoid. Their solution was four massive multi-ton concrete anchors, one at each corner, set onto neoprene pads to protect the plaza.

The other issue the subways presented was the cars rumbling along underground, along with the winds blowing in off the avenues and Central Park, would cause the pillar and statue to sway slightly. That is why Christopher Columbus appears to rest atop a large circular coffee table in the middle of the living room. But it is more than just a table. The black ring not only serves as a buffer to keep zealous visitors at bay, it also hides the hole built around the statue to accommodate its movement. The coffee table is then affixed to the statue with a neoprene gasket and is fitted out with rolling casters so that it can imperceptibly move each time a train passes or the wind blows.

"Our goal is to create this beautiful room," Ms. Friedlander said. It may be a different set of design constraints, but the goal is the same as on any Tishman project."

Mr. Nishi was astonished by the work. "While I didn't see much difference" from other projects, he said through an interpreter, "I was expecting, just from my experience from other things, that American people are very sloppy." Mr. Nishi himself broke in here and blurted out "Sorry! Sorry!" and began bowing repeatedly, but the interpreter insisted it was a story with a happy ending, as Mr. Nishi began to smile. "But this turned out to be the most precise project I have ever done," the interpreter continued on Mr. Nishi's behalf. "It was amazing."

Ms. Friedlander said Tishman is already fielding more requests, including from the Public Art Fund. She acknowledged that working with artists is not always easy, but that can be part of the fun. "It can be tough going back and forth with the artist, especially when you're working under a compressed time frame," Ms. Friedlander said. "Our guys are like, 'Just pick a crown molding.' But it does matter because this is an aesthetic piece and working that into what we do is very rewarding."

Ms. Freedman said having a firm with Tishman's capabilities in the city will only further push the boundaries on what kind of public art the city can expect. "It's wonderful to know we can pick up the phone and say 'We have an artist dreaming a big dream, can you help us make it a reality?' and the answer will be yes," she said.

Correction:An earlier version of this post called Ms. Freedman the Public Art Fund's director. She is its president. It also said that Tishman had performed the renovation to the George Washington Bridge. It did not, simply boring the scaffolding from a project performed by another firm to use here. The Observer regrets the errors.

The answer? Not much!

This is not One57's fault. Blame the skyline. The building is indeed impressive, especially with those Klimt-ian glass panels snaking up the facade. It will look amazing when it's finished, no doubt.

But this is still Midtown, the middle of Midtown, no less, where it can be hard to stand out. The Time Warner Center even kind of looks bigger, with its imposing twin towers, but perhaps that is a credit to One57, with its slender, sleek looks. And there is still the matter of the neighbors. Both former tallest towers the Trump International and current title holder New York by Gehry look bigger because there is nothing approaching their stature around, even though both are a good hundred feet lower than this building.

That doesn't mean the views won't be as high as billed, which may be all that matters.

Anyway, have a look at the building and decide for yourself.

The Dollars, preachers of the prosperity gospel and leaders of Georgia-based World Changers Church, have sold the two-bedroom condo on the 67th floor of the Time Warner Center for $3.75 million, according to city records.

The two bedroom condo, listed with broker Tytus Ciechorski at CMB Realty, doesn't look as opulent as we'd expected for a couple that motors around in not one, but two Rolls Royces, but then again, it is a pied-a-terre. And while the rooms are boxy and kind of meh, the views are stunning and the address is swanky.

The Dollars—and yes that is their real name—have been expanding their foothold in New York over the last half-decade, holding services at jumbo venues like Madison Square Garden, Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the Hilton, Manhattan Center, the New York Marriott at Brooklyn Bridge, Tribeca Performing Arts Center and the Javits Center. There were even rumors that Mr. Dollar had his eye on buying the Kingsbridge Armory for a mega-church.

Although Mr. Dollar has taken some heat over pricey possessions like private jets and a million-dollar Atlanta home—Congress is probing the non-profit status of World Changers and several other major televangelists—his followers have hailed such opulence as signs that Mr. Dollar is living the prosperity gospel that he preaches.

And the condo, although it sold under the $4.15 million ask to buyers Carl and Elyse Eckhaus, still proved a nice investment for the Dollars, who bought it for only $2.48 million in 2005. Yet another example of Mr. Dollar's talent for turning godliness into gold!

We wondered if the sale might mean that the Dollars are abandoning the stronghold of sin and unholiness that is New York. But World Changers insists that the Dollars are here to stay.

"We will always have a church in New York!" exclaimed one of the faithful when she was reached on the phone.

kvelsey@observer.com

Skyline, here we come! (Matt Chaban)

Leaving the Building Congress luncheon today, The Observer looked up to notice something we had never seen on the Midtown skyline before: One57! Garry Barnett's Central Park-towering apartment building is now totally a part of the city skyline, unavoidably peeking down on Columbus Circle.

Wavy gravy. (Curbed)

It will only continue to grow, inexorably, until the multimillion-dollar foreigners can move in, pushing the rest of us out to the Rockaways.

This is not the only interesting look we've gotten of the building lately. Just last week, Curbed noticed that some very funky glass panels had arrived at the base of the cloudbusting building, as well. This thing is going to be finished, and glorious, before we all know it.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Protest art!

Robert Lederman, a crusading artist and a bit of crank who was a frequent antagonist of Mayor Giuliani, thinks the Bloomberg administration is being two-faced in expelling the Occupy Wall Street protestors tents from Zuccotti Park. He points to tents set up for holiday markets as the unjust, commercial expropriation of public space.

The holiday vendors have permits, of course, and a portion of their proceeds goes to the parks they occupy, so there appears to be a public good here, whatever your opinion of overpriced tchokes. Mr. Lederman has his own agenda, as he has run afoul of the city for trying to sell art in parks without permits. Still, his thoughts, which he just emailed around, are intriguing in light of last night's events.

Mayor Bloomberg claims that tents are not allowed in NYC parks. Ask him to explain the giant tents being set up right now in Union Sq Park and in Central Park at Columbus Circle for the corporate run Holiday vending Markets. These tents are set up for more than a month straight, 24 hours a day. They completely displace pedestrians, residents and park visitors for a fee of millions of dollars.

Mayor Bloomberg says generators are not allowed in NYC parks, yet the Holiday Markets operate huge generators as do most of the Greenmarket vending stands in Union Sq Park. There is even a weekly Greenmarket set up right outside the Mayor’s office with huge tents and generators.

Mayor Bloomberg says protestors cannot sleep in parks, yet he allows more than 100 homeless people to sleep in Union Sq Park every night. Instead of pretending that the Mayor is a defender of free speech, perhaps the media can ask him to explain these totally inconsistent policies.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

To the ramparts. (Matt Chaban)

The sun was glistening off the blue glass of 3 Columbus Circle last Thursday. A clutch of nattily dressed real estate executives standing on the 19th floor terrace had to squint against the strong light, reflecting off the high-tech carapace of the building formerly known as 1775 Broadway. Once the headquarters of Newsweek, and before that General Motors, the building began life in 1928 as a sturdy Art Deco brick box towering over Columbus Circle. One of the biggest buildings in the city at the time, it was a show of emerging industrial might in the heart of Manhattan.

But that was before GM moved to the other end of 59th Street, erecting its glass and marble monolith. That was before the arrival of the Trump International, the Time Warner Center and the Apple store on Fifth Avenue. Glass has become big business across the city, where brick and steel still sometimes rules—the Empire State Building is still our most recognizable landmark. Glass was what Joe Moinian, the Iranian-Jewish developer, former cook and now master of some five million prime square feet, decided to go with, then. It was the boom-boom new millennium: Why tear down a perfectly serviceable building when you could simply sheath it in a slick new suit, ask those $100-per-square-foot rents (the standard for a top-of-the-line tower) and cash the checks?

Well, those days are long gone. All over New York, office towers sit empty, with a vacancy rate around 12 percent, considerably higher than the 7 percent of 2006, when Mr. Moinian laid out his ambitious plan to remake the building. Since then, he has been forced into a partnership with the city’s largest landlord, SL Green, which has recently been feasting on dozens of buildings across the city, buying up hefty stakes and entire properties.

Take a tour of 3 Columbus Circle with Joe Moinian >>

Together, they had to fight off a hostile takeover by Steve Ross, whose Related Companies owns the gleaming Time Warner towers across the street. Mr. Ross had wanted to tear down 3 Columbus to build apartments and a Nordstrom’s. He reportedly called it ugly, among other epithets. Even after SL Green cut a check last November for $258 million—the largest ever cashed by the county clerk’s office, according to The Real Deal—to cover the mortgage note on which Deutsche Bank and Related were trying to foreclose, they still took the pair to court, and settled only this March.

Asking rents at 3 Columbus Circle are almost half what they once were, and a number of brokers questioned whether Moinian and SL Green would be able to realize even that.

Still, there was Mr. Moinian, standing on the terrace, gesturing around Columbus Circle, giving The Observer a tour of his trophy, tarnished as it may be. "We have spent a lot of money and time and effort to get this property to where it deserves to be," Mr. Moinian said. He raised his hands, as if making an offering, and gestured up and down Eighth Avenue. "It now fits into a class with the Time Warner and Hearst. It sets a new standard."

"That is a rather extreme statement," one leasing agent told The Observer days later. "If you put lipstick, or a new glass facade, on a pig ..." He trailed off, his point conveyed.

The grand old dame. (Getty Images)

It was in night school that Mr. Moinian first heard about 1775 Broadway. In the fall of 1998, he had been in the business two decades, but was hoping to learn more about the buildings he built, so he studied part-time at N.Y.U. One of his classmates gestured to an older gentleman sitting in a nearby desk. "Do you know who that is?" the classmate whispered to Mr. Moinian, as he recalled the events on our tour. "That’s Lester Weindling. He owns 1775 Broadway."

Mr. Moinian shrugged it off, until he was in a uptown-bound cab a few weeks later and he passed the property, which still dominated the southern side of the roundabout. "I said, ‘Oh my god, this is the building," Mr. Moinian recalled. He reached out to Mr. Weindling, who had purchased the building in 1969 with the proceeds from the sale of his family’s apartment holdings in Queens. The then-71-year-old developer said no. Six months later, when the city revived plans to redevelop the Robert Moses-built New York Coliseum convention center, he changed his mind, Mr. Weindling didn’t want to deal with the headaches of a major construction project, according to Mr. Moinian. They sealed the deal with a handshake over lunch at Le Bernadin. The price was $130 million, the deal closed Sept. 15, 1999, almost a year after those classroom whispers.

It was exactly because of those apparent headaches that Mr. Moinian said he was interested in the project. He saw a boom coming to the West Side, and above all else, the opportunity to own Central Park views was too good to pass up. "You can never take these away," he said, then pointed to Extell’s One57 rising a few blocks away. "You see that? They have to go up 30, 40 stories to get these views, because there are buildings in front of them."

While that may be true—and even Mr. Moinian’s views are blocked on the lowest floors by the Museum of Art in Design—the vistas at 3 Columbus are through the same three-foot-wide punched windows that have been here for almost a century, as opposed to the sweeping floor-to-ceiling glass that has become the standard at towers like the Time Warner Center. Up close the panoramas are spectacular, but they begin to disappear a few feet back.

Ironically enough, it was Steve Ross who prompted Mr. Moinian’s decision to revamp his property. At a city planning presentation a few months after he purchased the building, Mr. Moinian saw Mr. Ross’s proposal. "That’s when I knew things were about to change," Mr. Moinian said. "There is no question he has revamped the entire area." (Asked if there was any bad blood remaining between them, Mr. Moinian said, "Business is business. That’s all behind me.")

Throughout the tour, Mr. Moinian’s Blackberry rang out, and the Alicia Keys hook from "Empire State of Mind" would echo through the empty office space. Mr. Moinian smiled the same toothy grin he always wears with his expertly groomed suits. He is eternally bullish.

The spruced up goose. (Moinian Group)

And so it goes at 3 Columbus Circle. The main focus now is on finding tenants, the construction having wrapped up earlier this year. With 600,000 square feet of vacant space—all but the top three floors are occupied—Mr. Moinian said there was a rare opportunity available. Even with all the other available offices in the city, few are as big. He was effusive about the Class-A amenities of his revamped building, which are unquestionably updated. The mechanical systems have been modernized, the lobby has doubled in size and moved to Broadway, that new curtain wall, while not providing bigger views, does improve the efficiency of the building. Mr. Moinian said he expects the project to receive LEED certification. We asked if it might be Gold or Silver, one of the higher levels of sustainability recognition. He responded that was impossible for a retrofit like his. And yet the Empire State Building got its gold just last week.

At the same time, the newest technology can do about the low ceiling heights, the tight quarters and the building’s irregular trapezoidal layout. "Looking back on it, it seemed like a logical thing to do, but now it is a very hard sell," one real estate executive said. "Then again, a lot of people made mistakes a few years ago." The going wisdom today is that it would have been better to tear down the building rather then recast it anew. "It is probably the most talked about building in the city, and not in a good way," another broker said. Everyone wants to know what might happen, who will take the space—if anyone—and what SL Green might see in the building. Are they just waiting to tear it down?

Even Mr. Moinian’s partners are circumspect about the project. SL Green had to take it off the market for five months, redo whole floors add some bathrooms to help agents and tenants appreciate the potential of the space.

"It’s Class-A quality, but it’s not a marquee building," said Steve Durels, an executive vice president and director of leasing at SL Green. Still, he said there are no plans to do anything but lease up the building. "We would not have made the huge investment we did in this building if we did not believe in it,” he explained. In fact,

Mr. Durels said this was the firm’s specialty, repositioning buildings to maximize profits. Every building cannot be a marquee property, nor can every firm afford such properties. While 3 Columbus may no longer command the top dollar its developer had hoped for, the $60 to $80 a square foot is good for Midtown, especially in these times—the local average has hovered around $55 for the year.

Grade-A, Class-A. (Matt Chaban)

Of late, it appears 3 Columbus may finally have turned the corner. In the past two months, Mr. Durels has entered into negotiations for at least 400,000 square feet, or about two-thirds of the building’s empty space. “Because of the building’s previous struggles, we had to take some time off, but we really stepped up the marketing, and I think it’s paid off,” Mr. Durels said. “In this case, we felt we really had to over-developer, but it was worth it.”

There is also the fact that with SL Green in control, “we’re well capitalized,” as Mr. Moinian kept putting it, almost as a mantra. On top of its $258 million stake, SL Green has invested another $100 million in equity matching what Mr. Moinian had already put into the building. It is hard to top two of the city’s top landlords. “People immediately respect the changes, it’s like night and day,” Mr. Durels said.

And in many ways, this is simply the reality of building in New York today. Dozens of retrofits and reclads are taking place in the city, from 330 Madison to 1095 Avenue of the Americas, none with the scrutiny faced by 3 Columbus. Perhaps this is because of the challenges Mr. Moinian faced, his bad timing, or simply that he has the best location of them all, and so everyone was watching. The fact remains, there are only so many buildings that can reasonably be torn down and rebuilt without wreaking havoc on the city's busy streets.

As for Mr. Moinian, in a email on Tuesday he said he would do it all again if he had the choice. "We are very happy with the end result of our redevelopment of 3 Columbus Circle—and we wouldn’t do anything differently,” Mr. Moinian said. "We are proud of our investment in this building and for perfectly executing our vision for its redevelopment. If the market isn’t $100 per square foot, we are fine."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

On March 1, they sold a three-bedroom on the 26th floor of the Zeckendorf-developed limestone wonder for $16.5 million, according to city records—more than twice the $7.13 million StreetEasy says the attorneys paid for the 2,761-square-foot condo in January 2008. They doubled their money in just three years, and got very nearly the $16.995 million they had been asking since December 2009. The home had been tenanted until the date of the condo's close, according to an old listing from Trump's Debra Stotts.

Ms. Stotts' listing brags about a potential buyer's pedigreed neighbors: "Famous residents include(d) actor Denzel Washington, NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon and chairman Brian France, musician Sting, director Norman Lear, real estate developers Aaron & William Zeckendorf, Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill and many high network financial executives"

Could the buyer, listed as Odysseus NY LLC, be one of the above? Or perhaps yet another one of those Greek shipping magnates has bought up another of our premier apartments.

Read past Manhattan Transfers here. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Mr. Brady earned a few yards on the deal, selling the 74th floor spread for $17.5 million, city records show. That is a good bit more than what he paid in 2006, $14 million--or as The Observer likes to think of it, a pair of million-dollar touchdowns . The difference between the two prices is about what the Patriots pay Mr. Brady to play two football games. (Last month, The Journal reported that the unit had gone to contract, but not how much or to whom.)

The buyer of the 3,000-square-foot pentagonal spread is, according to city records, Robert Stiller, the richest man in Burlington, Vt., and the entire state for that matter. 

The purchase is a homecoming of sorts. Mr. Stiller made his first fortune right here in Manhattan, where he and a fellow ad exec endeared themselves to an entire generation of hippies through the creation in 1971 of E-Z Wider rolling papers, the first double-wide papers designed explicitly for smoking dope. They sold the company a decade later to a British tobacconist and split the $6.2 million. 

His next success came through another drug, caffeine. While hitting the slopes in Vermont, Mr. Stiller had his first taste of Green Mountain Roasters coffee. Addicted, he took over the company and saw it through a not-quite-Starbucks-sized expansion. (Full disclosure: The Observer stocks rather despicable Hazelnut-flavored Green Mountain Roasters coffee in its pantry.)

Should Mr. Stiller be bringing his coffeemaker to his new Central Park redoubt, there is certainly plenty of room for it. "The impeccably-designed 3bd 3.5 bath home that awaits atop this soaring 5 star residence will captivate even the most discerning NYC luxury-seeker with its sweeping Central Park & River to River views," declares top-selling Douglas Elliman broker Raphael DeNiro in his listing. "Its gracious 7-room layout affords ultimate style & comfort, while its ambiance is flooded with in-pouring light from a generosity of 10ft floor-to-ceiling windows."

The northeast-facing great room alone measures more than 700 square feet--almost big enough to play football in or set up a roasting plant.

Read past Manhattan Transfers here. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

SLIDESHOW: The Castles of Columbus Circle

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo