It would be a tragedy of biblical proportions if the most epic New York superstars stopped buying New York’s most epic real estate. So, is it a bad sign that former New Yorker Madonna came and left Manhattan this month without grabbing a French limestone townhouse or a 17-room co-op? Apparently not.

A source with knowledge of the chameleonic diva’s real-estate dealings told The Observer that she’ll be back in a few weeks to finish up her New York purchase.

Two weeks ago, her Madgesty hit the Upper East Side with hopes of finding the appropriate domicile for her return to the Big Apple. She toured four different townhouses and fell in love with a 14,700-square-foot mansion on East 62nd Street, according to the New York Post.

The six-floor mansion lives up to Madonna standards: It has seven bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, three kitchens, a gym with a sauna, and a garden. (Unclear if there’s a yoga studio or a Kabbalah meditation room.)

The price tag for the townhouse is $35 million. An exorbitant price for most, it represents just a fraction of the $175 million that the legend pulled in last year, according to Billboard magazine.

Madonna’s primary residence for the past few years has been a 1,000-acre estate in the British countryside in Wiltshire. (Better to match the Detroit-area native’s, um, English accent.)

—Max Abelson and Mark Wellborn

Riverside South Goes French

After years in which one architect—Costas Kondylis—has dominated the 13-block-long Riverside South development, the new kid in town, Gary Barnett of Extell Development, has commissioned the Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc to design the next three buildings there, according to George Arzt, a spokesman for the developer.

M. de Portzamparc’s Web site says the program consists of three buildings with 3.2 million square feet of office, hotel and residential space between 59th and 61st streets. Well, that’s the proposal. Mr. Arzt says a rezoning proposal will go to the Department of City Planning in a few weeks—and it doesn’t sound like it will be the easiest rezoning.

According to figures from the Coalition for a Livable West Side, that amount would represent about 35 percent more built space than that envisioned under the original Riverside South master plan.

—Matthew Schuerman

Serious Drinkers Gather For Blind Tiger Reopening

Some guys just really like their Brooklyn Smoked Dunkel.

A line of roughly 15 men had gathered outside the Blind Tiger in Greenwich Village at 4:01 p.m. last Thursday, when the renowned beer-lover’s mecca finally reopened its doors—this time, with actual beer.

“People have been waiting for, like, a year for this,” noted the last guy in line, who added that he’d taken the day off from work.

After 10 years at Hudson and 10th streets, the much-beloved Tiger was forced to move in late 2005 in order to make way for a new Starbucks.

Perhaps taking a hint from the caffeine giant, the venue reopened last fall at the corner of Bleecker and Jones streets—primarily as a coffee bar, however, on account of a little liquor-license brouhaha with neighborhood politico Deb Glick, a State Assemblywoman. Earlier this month, the bar finally got its license to swill.

By 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, the crowd inside easily exceeded 50, predominantly made up of burly-looking dudes; but at least three females were present.

—Chris Shott

Head of Javits Expansion Leaving

Mike Petralia, the state official overseeing the increasingly convoluted Javits Convention Center expansion, is leaving his job by the end of March, according to sources. Appointed by the Pataki administration less than two years ago, he was not expected to last long once Governor Eliot Spitzer took over, especially given the fact that the new Governor is pushing for a new design for the $1.7 billion expansion.

Mr. Petralia’s boss, Patrick Foye, the co-chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, said he would not comment on personnel matters, nor did Mr. Petralia return a telephone call.

—M.S.

A Manhattan Co-op Under $200 K.? Oh, Those Were the Late 1990’s

How far Manhattan’s come! A report out this week says that the average sales price for a condo or a co-op in the borough has increased more than 200 percent in the last 10 years.

The average price in 1997 was $430,927, and in 2006 it was $1,295,445, according to the report from the appraisal firm Miller Samuel and the brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The median sales price for a Manhattan co-op apparently jumped 244.4 percent from 1997 through 2006, traveling from what now seems a very affordable $196,000 to the decidedly-less-so $675,000. The median price for Manhattan studio co-ops was under $100,000; now, it’s nearly three times that.

The prices per square foot for Manhattan apartments in the late 1990’s seem especially quaint now.

An Upper East Side co-op sold for an average of $315 a foot 10 years ago, and sells for $988 a foot now. Along Central Park West, co-ops went for an average of $524 a foot; now, $1,548. Chelsea condos in 1997 sold for an average of $319 a foot—just about one-third of what condos there sell for now. In Harlem and East Harlem, the price per square foot increased 340 percent, from $145 to $639.

Despite such price increases, the number of Manhattan home sales stayed steady year to year over the last decade, according to the report, going from a valley of 7,316 in 1997 to a peak of 9,522 in 1999.

—Tom Acitelli

Tenant Exits at 120 Wall Street: what’s a nonprofit to do?

The Association Center, the office building at 120 Wall Street once dedicated to nonprofit organizations, is getting more profit-oriented.

Two of the roughly 40 nonprofit tenants have announced that they are leaving, in part because the building’s tax breaks, and the one-time cheap rents of the financial district, are disappearing.

The 78-year-old, 600,000-square-foot office building, owned by Larry Silverstein, was designated the Association Center 14 years ago, when the Dinkins administration was trying to revive Wall Street real estate. The city agreed to forgive nonprofit tenants real-estate taxes, worth about $4 a square foot, but those original leases, and tax breaks, are now expiring. The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-research think tank, bought an office condo at 125 Maiden Lane this month, while the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions moved to John Street in February. Together, they rented about 23,000 square feet.

“We found that the prices for leasing were much more than we could bear,” said Robert D. Rosendale, the vice president for administration and finance at the Guttmacher Institute. “We were paying right around $23 [a square foot], and that was going to go to $35.”

He added that the institute needed more space because of a growing staff, and that staying in 120 Wall Street would have required renting on non-contiguous floors.

Both Mr. Rosendale and the credit-union association said that there were rumors the building would eventually be converted to residential condominiums. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, said, “There are no present plans to operate 120 Wall as anything other than an office building.”

He added that the company had been renewing leases for as far ahead as 2017 or 2018, and that the building’s 100 percent leased.

“The project was developed to stop the exodus of associations from New York, and it did that,” said Joel Dolci, the president of the New York Society of Association Executives, which helped secure the tax breaks. “We are hoping that that does not recur. We are trying to make every effort to assist the organizations with other space.”

The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which last year established a separate desk to serve nonprofits, is talking with other priced-out tenants and encouraging them to consider places like Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn—which also happen to be areas where great hopes for satellite-office districts have so far floundered.

“The Bloomberg administration is committed to helping New York City’s not-for-profits locate and expand in all five boroughs,” said E.D.C. spokeswoman Yonit Golub.

—M.S.

It was doing less than 1 percent of the Port Authority’s business. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff wanted to replace its orange cranes with cruise ships. And real-estate developers were gnawing at the edges, trying to convert onetime warehouses into market-rate condos with splendid views.

But fierce reactions from neighbors and politicians who want to hold tightly to the “working waterfront” of Red Hook’s storied past spurred the city’s Economic Development Corporation to temper this condos-and-cruise-ship formula.

So the E.D.C. has proposed a little bit of everything in the 150-acre waterfront that’s now going through a rezoning. The map that E.D.C. put forth in September of piers 7 through 12 shows a beer garden, restaurants, warehouses, a hotel with a conference center, offices, light industrial buildings, a marina, a boatyard, a hotel, art galleries and artist studios, retail shops, offices and something called a “Dynamic Maritime Marketplace.”

Oh, and two piers for break-bulk cargo, container ships and a second cruise-ship terminal. (The first cruise-ship terminal opened last April.)

“The city’s plans would effectively preserve the industrial nature of the piers and combine it with recreational and commercial uses as well,” said Craig Hammerman, the district manager of Brooklyn’s Community Board 6. “I think that it has been quite a challenge to fit all the pieces together.”

At first, it looked so simple.

In 2003, the city began planning for the super-huge post-Panamax ships (pop. 4,000) that would need larger berths than those available at the 1970’s-era Passenger Ship Terminal on Manhattan’s West Side. Before it could announce any plans, Royal Caribbean International decided to start berthing two of its ships in Bayonne, N.J., because the West Side was getting too crowded.

Hell, if a cruise line was willing to move to New Jersey, convincing one to move to Marlon Brando’s old turf would be a cinch, wouldn’t it? (In fact, around the same time, Carnival approached the city with an offer to build a terminal in Red Hook.)

The E.D.C. commissioned a consulting firm, Bermello, Ajamil & Partners, which predicted 1.5 million passengers sailing into and out of New York each year within a decade—triple the number in 1998. The report, which The Observer obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, called for three super-sized berths in Red Hook. The piers are owned by the Port Authority and run by a cargo operator, American Stevedoring, that has been doing a respectable business since taking over 13 years ago (even if most of the cargo must be shipped via barge to Newark, where it can be put onto trains).

The only problem with cruise ships is that they don’t employ a lot of people on land. What’s more, those jobs tend to be weekend jobs. In fact, according to the Bermello report, the main reason why the city needed to build two or three extra cruise-ship berths in Red Hook, in addition to modernizing the ones on the West Side, was because “all of the sought after weekend slots will be committed from 2005 forward.”

Carnival said that it would bring the equivalent of 863 full-time jobs, according to a 2004 report by another consultant, HR&A. The city’s later estimate of 600 was more modest, although even then it was counting spin-off jobs. Then E.D.C. cut the job number down to 290, but most of those were just porters and others who showed up the 40-odd days a ship called in port. Finally, the E.D.C. coughed up this number: Just eight to 10 people work full-time at the current cruise-ship terminal.

“That’s the nature of maritime jobs,” said Janel Patterson, an E.D.C. spokeswoman. “They work on berthing days. These include unionized stevedoring jobs as well as ticketing agents and other support staff.”

But eight to 10 full-time jobs, or even 53 to 55 full-time-equivalent jobs, on 15 acres of land doesn’t look good when one is trying to milk a precious resource like New York real estate.

Even the E.D.C.’s rezoning proposal, relying on Port Authority numbers, counts 330 jobs at the Red Hook cargo and warehousing operation on an average day, which comes to about 5.5 jobs per acre. (The cargo operator, American Stevedoring, says it employs 765 people, including drivers, which puts the yield at 12.75 per acre.) The current cruise-ship terminal yields about 3.7 jobs per acre.

The way the E.D.C. gets its job numbers up has very little to do with cruise terminals, like hosting a beer-distribution company that would move 400 jobs from Queens and hire another 100. Together with the part-time cruise-ship jobs, E.D.C. can boast of creating or retaining 1,300 jobs in its plans for piers 7 through 12, though it’s unclear how many are full-time.

What’s more, these are “water-dependent uses” that nostalgists and pragmatists alike agree will conform to the essence of Red Hook.

But when it comes right down to it, the future of cargo at Red Hook—specifically containers, those 20-to-40-foot-long train cars that are raised and lowered from ships via 100-foot-tall cranes—is the crux of this debate. And industry leaders, community members and elected officials—particularly Congressman Jerrold Nadler and City Councilman David Yassky—have all come to this shaky future’s defense.

“My view is, the container port is an important source for good-paying, blue-collar jobs,” Mr. Yassky told The Observer. “My sense is that shipping in Brooklyn could be providing many, many more jobs than what it is today. The policy for the Port Authority, and unfortunately the city, is more directed at getting rid of the container port than expanding it.”

When it comes to the E.D.C.’s plan to push the cargo and warehousing operation, now occupying five piers, onto two, Mr. Yassky said: “I don’t think anybody thinks that seriously would work. That’s just a way of saying that they are maintaining cargo operations without really doing so.”

Matt Yates, a spokesman for A.S.I., the private port operator, said that the E.D.C. plan would convert the company’s best container berth, Pier 10, into the new cruise-ship terminal. The one pier left for break-bulk and container operations would be too small for many vessels, he added.

All this is not to say that the cargo operator enjoys universal support on the ground. Red Hook is sparsely populated and poorly linked by public transportation, and some residents see more retail and housing as the key to making the neighborhood livelier.

“I think the container ships could in fact operate more efficiently with a smaller site,” said John McGettrick, co-chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association. “The cruise ships have not employed as many residents as we would have liked, but they have employed more Red Hook residents than A.S.I. has. Also, the cruise ships are complementary for a commercial and residential revitalization of the area.”

But the miniaturized cargo operation would not remain for long. The E.D.C. says it wants a third cruise-ship terminal at Red Hook, but hasn’t specified which use outlined in the new plan it would displace. On the other hand, even the port’s supporters say that cargo cannot remain in Red Hook forever, but will have to move a couple of miles further south.

“From any long-term perspective, the major port should be in Sunset Park,” Mr. Nadler told The Observer. “But you should not shut one and not bother to open another one.”

And so the E.D.C. has begun talking up a plan to modernize the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a series of underused piers between 25th and 65th streets, expanding the rail system to permit sea-to-land connections. A chart produced by the E.D.C. and distributed to local officials shows this plan costing $100 million, on top of the $330 million that the city would have to invest to make its plans for the Red Hook piers work.

The Sunset Park plan wouldn’t entirely replace the space lost in Red Hook, however, but it does call for two cranes (instead of Red Hook’s six) that would permit the 39th Street pier to dock 200 vessels annually, according to the chart. And a cement company has begun unloading barges on another pier, with another contract for a similar operation in the works, according to the E.D.C.

Mr. Yassky considers the Sunset Park plan “not for real shipping” and asserts that it came only in the face of fierce opposition to the Red Hook plan. (The E.D.C. spokeswoman said the plan had long been in the works.)

At this point, both he and Mr. Nadler have set their hopes for Red Hook on the Port Authority. So far, of course, the Port Authority has played along with the city’s cruise-ship plans, in the name of greater economic development for everyone. (It also pays money to maintain the piers.)

But Mr. Nadler sees a fresh opening: Governor Eliot Spitzer has control over half of the Port Authority’s board and the executive director.

“We talked to [Spitzer’s] transportation people before they took office, and they said they wanted to review everything,” Mr. Nadler said. “One thing they said for sure is that we will have a freight policy. Red Hook is just a small part of that, but that’s what we need—some sort of freight policy, whether it be in Red Hook or in Sunset Park. They cannot just look at piers 7 through 12. I understand that.”

The lease for the cargo company, American Stevedoring, comes up at the end of March. The city expects to take over all the piers at that point. But, through the E.D.C., it has been negotiating with the Port Authority for more than a year, without reaching—as of yet—an agreement on the takeover.

She started on the first day of the transit strike last year. She walked across Central Park to the Upper East Side to hitch a ride with her new co-workers in an S.U.V.

“On my first day, I was given a list of companies and told to call them all and ask them what they wanted from the city,” she said. “It was a very bonding experience.”

Ten months later, Ms. Ho, a vice president for international business development at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, has landed her first deal: a 128,000-square foot exhibition center in East Elmhurst, Queens, for Chinese home-furnishing companies to show off their wares to U.S. retailers. It is expected to open in June.

Modest though it is—1,000 jobs by the second year—the Grandland New York Expo is supposed to be the harbinger of all the Chinese investment that could come into the city as the world’s fastest-growing economy seeks toeholds in the world’s largest one. The Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Ms. Ho acts as Mayor Bloomberg’s foot soldier, warding off London, the West Coast and New Jersey to get as much capitalism as the People’s Republic will offer.

New York is starting at what seems to be a disadvantage: Despite a large immigrant community, the city hosts just about 60 Chinese companies, while 250 have chosen the British capital, with more than half putting their European sales and marketing headquarters there, according to official counts by the respective cities. Think London, a 12-year-old private-public partnership, has had a Chinese speaker on staff for six years and opened a three-person bureau in Beijing in the spring. Ms. Ho is the first person ever to lobby exclusively in Asia for New York City.

New York officials wouldn’t comment on the city’s apparently trailing position, saying they didn’t know how London came up with its figure of 250. But they said that the competition, if it can be called that, is just beginning.

“In terms of Chinese companies, I would argue that there are more than enough to go around,” said Laure Aubuchon, who is Ms. Ho’s boss at the Economic Development Corporation. “Eventually, any major Chinese company is going to want to have a presence in both cities. At this stage in Chinese economic development, where they can go only one place, it may be an either/or proposition, and maybe they will get to the other city in the next phase.”

But New York’s confidence in retaining the title of the world’s financial capital has waned since last year, when London had four initial public offerings worth more than $1 billion. New York, by contrast, hosted just one. In September, the E.D.C. awarded McKinsey & Co. a contract of up to $600,000 to study the competitive position of New York versus London.

“Certainly London has been very aggressive in terms of setting up an office in China, but New York has a built-in advantage in terms of its brand that will eventually pay off,” said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a business group that has sponsored China-U.S. trade initiatives. “The biggest concern we have has to do with federal policy as it relates to visas and intellectual-property concerns that discourage the next generation of Chinese graduate students from locating in the U.S.”

Mayor Bloomberg himself echoed those concerns about London’s regulatory superiority in a Nov. 1 op-ed penned with Senator Charles Schumer. “Unless we improve our corporate climate,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “we risk allowing New York to lose its pre-eminence in the global financial-services sector. This would be devastating both for our city and nation.”

It was back in 2002 when Mayor Bloomberg first announced plans to advertise New York as “the world’s second home.” While the bid for the Olympics failed to do that, Ms. Ho, Ms. Aubuchon and two other E.D.C. representatives make regular trips to different points on the globe, pitching the city as a second headquarters location for firms from Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Strong Currency

Ms. Aubuchon, who started the international business-development desk in 2003, came from Ernst & Young and W.R. Grace & Co., where she worked a stint in Asia. Ms. Ho started out her professional career writing scripts for Hong Kong’s first soap opera, the title of which can be loosely translated as Strong Current.

“It was a knockoff of American soap operas about a hotel,” Ms. Ho said. “There was the owner, his wife and mistress, the daughters. We did 108 episodes. Now when I go back to Hong Kong, I tell people about it and they say, ‘Oh, I remember that show.’”

What an icebreaker!

Ms. Ho moved to New York in 1977 to work in the city’s independent-film world, producing two shorts about the Asian-American experience and working on numerous other productions. In 1985, CBS drafted her to help select and translate programs to sell to the Chinese national television network. Eventually, the network sent her back to her birthplace to set up an office in Hong Kong. She became the managing director of CBS Broadcast International and counts among her accomplishments introducing millions of Asian viewers to Everybody Loves Raymond. (She sold nine seasons of the series.)

When she heard about the E.D.C. job from a friend, Ms. Ho, who won’t give her age, had been thinking about returning to New York.

“It was doing something for the city, which at this point in my career was something that I wanted to do,” Ms. Ho, a petite woman with straight black hair and glasses, explained. “Being a Chinese-American, I understand both cultures and can introduce them to each other.”

For the Grandland deal, Ms. Ho took the owners on about 10 scouting trips to see different properties. “Grandland will need anywhere from 800 to 1,000 bilingual people to work in this merchandise mart,” said Ms. Aubuchon. “In terms of a Chinese labor market, Queens is second to none. It took them half an hour driving around Queens to realize that.”

Other Chinese companies that have opened offices in the region include Haier America, a household-goods maker; the Bank of China; and the China Ocean Shipping Co., or Cosco, which operates out of New Jersey. The E.D.C., along with their upstate counterparts, tried to keep Lenovo’s global headquarters in Westchester County after the Beijing consumer-products company bought I.B.M.’s personal-computer division. Lenovo located its North American headquarters in North Carolina instead.

A Chinese real-estate venture, Beijing Vantone, has been looking for a space for more than a year in which to locate a business center for visiting companies and also a China Club where American executives could mingle with their Chinese counterparts. Vantone had its lease cancelled at 7 World Trade Center after developer Larry Silverstein said it was taking the company too long to present a letter of credit. Xue Ya, Vantone’s development director, told The Observer that she hopes to sign a lease elsewhere in lower Manhattan “within the next few months.”

New York City is now trying to recruit the Shanghai Media Group and China Life, the national life-insurance company, to open offices here. Executives from the latter company met with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff when they were in town and received follow-up visits in China from E.D.C. staff. But so far neither company has made any decisions about overseas headquarters, Ms. Aubuchon said.

Ms. Aubuchon said that she has had to adjust her expectations concerning what kinds of overseas business the city can attract. “Before, we were looking at who will come here and bring jobs, and that still is a focus,” she said. “I have learned that you have to be very open-minded to different opportunities, so that if a real-estate company comes here looking to make an investment, you can help them with that.”

“The most important thing is to break the myths,” Ms. Ho said. “They always think that New York is too expensive, New York is too big, and that the crime rate is too high. Basically, those three points we always have to talk to them about. And the other thing is, they actually are pretty surprised why New York City, an international city, has to come to them.”

She started on the first day of the transit strike last year. She walked across Central Park to the Upper East Side to hitch a ride with her new co-workers in an S.U.V.

“On my first day, I was given a list of companies and told to call them all and ask them what they wanted from the city,” she said. “It was a very bonding experience.”

Ten months later, Ms. Ho, a vice president for international business development at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, has landed her first deal: a 128,000-square foot exhibition center in East Elmhurst, Queens, for Chinese home-furnishing companies to show off their wares to U.S. retailers. It is expected to open in June.

Modest though it is—1,000 jobs by the second year—the Grandland New York Expo is supposed to be the harbinger of all the Chinese investment that could come into the city as the world’s fastest-growing economy seeks toeholds in the world’s largest one. The Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Ms. Ho acts as Mayor Bloomberg’s foot soldier, warding off London, the West Coast and New Jersey to get as much capitalism as the People’s Republic will offer.

New York is starting at what seems to be a disadvantage: Despite a large immigrant community, the city hosts just about 60 Chinese companies, while 250 have chosen the British capital, with more than half putting their European sales and marketing headquarters there, according to official counts by the respective cities. Think London, a 12-year-old private-public partnership, has had a Chinese speaker on staff for six years and opened a three-person bureau in Beijing in the spring. Ms. Ho is the first person ever to lobby exclusively in Asia for New York City.

New York officials wouldn’t comment on the city’s apparently trailing position, saying they didn’t know how London came up with its figure of 250. But they said that the competition, if it can be called that, is just beginning.

“In terms of Chinese companies, I would argue that there are more than enough to go around,” said Laure Aubuchon, who is Ms. Ho’s boss at the Economic Development Corporation. “Eventually, any major Chinese company is going to want to have a presence in both cities. At this stage in Chinese economic development, where they can go only one place, it may be an either/or proposition, and maybe they will get to the other city in the next phase.”

But New York’s confidence in retaining the title of the world’s financial capital has waned since last year, when London had four initial public offerings worth more than $1 billion. New York, by contrast, hosted just one. In September, the E.D.C. awarded McKinsey & Co. a contract of up to $600,000 to study the competitive position of New York versus London.

“Certainly London has been very aggressive in terms of setting up an office in China, but New York has a built-in advantage in terms of its brand that will eventually pay off,” said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a business group that has sponsored China-U.S. trade initiatives. “The biggest concern we have has to do with federal policy as it relates to visas and intellectual-property concerns that discourage the next generation of Chinese graduate students from locating in the U.S.”

Mayor Bloomberg himself echoed those concerns about London’s regulatory superiority in a Nov. 1 op-ed penned with Senator Charles Schumer. “Unless we improve our corporate climate,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “we risk allowing New York to lose its pre-eminence in the global financial-services sector. This would be devastating both for our city and nation.”

It was back in 2002 when Mayor Bloomberg first announced plans to advertise New York as “the world’s second home.” While the bid for the Olympics failed to do that, Ms. Ho, Ms. Aubuchon and two other E.D.C. representatives make regular trips to different points on the globe, pitching the city as a second headquarters location for firms from Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Strong Currency

Ms. Aubuchon, who started the international business-development desk in 2003, came from Ernst & Young and W.R. Grace & Co., where she worked a stint in Asia. Ms. Ho started out her professional career writing scripts for Hong Kong’s first soap opera, the title of which can be loosely translated as Strong Current.

“It was a knockoff of American soap operas about a hotel,” Ms. Ho said. “There was the owner, his wife and mistress, the daughters. We did 108 episodes. Now when I go back to Hong Kong, I tell people about it and they say, ‘Oh, I remember that show.’”

What an icebreaker!

Ms. Ho moved to New York in 1977 to work in the city’s independent-film world, producing two shorts about the Asian-American experience and working on numerous other productions. In 1985, CBS drafted her to help select and translate programs to sell to the Chinese national television network. Eventually, the network sent her back to her birthplace to set up an office in Hong Kong. She became the managing director of CBS Broadcast International and counts among her accomplishments introducing millions of Asian viewers to Everybody Loves Raymond. (She sold nine seasons of the series.)

When she heard about the E.D.C. job from a friend, Ms. Ho, who won’t give her age, had been thinking about returning to New York.

“It was doing something for the city, which at this point in my career was something that I wanted to do,” Ms. Ho, a petite woman with straight black hair and glasses, explained. “Being a Chinese-American, I understand both cultures and can introduce them to each other.”

For the Grandland deal, Ms. Ho took the owners on about 10 scouting trips to see different properties. “Grandland will need anywhere from 800 to 1,000 bilingual people to work in this merchandise mart,” said Ms. Aubuchon. “In terms of a Chinese labor market, Queens is second to none. It took them half an hour driving around Queens to realize that.”

Other Chinese companies that have opened offices in the region include Haier America, a household-goods maker; the Bank of China; and the China Ocean Shipping Co., or Cosco, which operates out of New Jersey. The E.D.C., along with their upstate counterparts, tried to keep Lenovo’s global headquarters in Westchester County after the Beijing consumer-products company bought I.B.M.’s personal-computer division. Lenovo located its North American headquarters in North Carolina instead.

A Chinese real-estate venture, Beijing Vantone, has been looking for a space for more than a year in which to locate a business center for visiting companies and also a China Club where American executives could mingle with their Chinese counterparts. Vantone had its lease cancelled at 7 World Trade Center after developer Larry Silverstein said it was taking the company too long to present a letter of credit. Xue Ya, Vantone’s development director, told The Observer that she hopes to sign a lease elsewhere in lower Manhattan “within the next few months.”

New York City is now trying to recruit the Shanghai Media Group and China Life, the national life-insurance company, to open offices here. Executives from the latter company met with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff when they were in town and received follow-up visits in China from E.D.C. staff. But so far neither company has made any decisions about overseas headquarters, Ms. Aubuchon said.

Ms. Aubuchon said that she has had to adjust her expectations concerning what kinds of overseas business the city can attract. “Before, we were looking at who will come here and bring jobs, and that still is a focus,” she said. “I have learned that you have to be very open-minded to different opportunities, so that if a real-estate company comes here looking to make an investment, you can help them with that.”

“The most important thing is to break the myths,” Ms. Ho said. “They always think that New York is too expensive, New York is too big, and that the crime rate is too high. Basically, those three points we always have to talk to them about. And the other thing is, they actually are pretty surprised why New York City, an international city, has to come to them.”

The adviser, Richard Miller, was a senior vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Miller had been assigned the task of formulating a comprehensive new energy policy that would offer new ways of meeting soaring energy demand and set guidelines for the construction of new power plants.

The policy statement, two years in the making, was released last month with very little fanfare.

But just two weeks before the plan became public, Mr. Miller quietly resigned. According to sources familiar with the situation, he left in part because he clashed with Daniel Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, over City Hall’s decision to block construction of a huge new power plant on the Brooklyn waterfront. City Hall had argued that a new plant was incompatible with Mr. Doctoroff’s plans for a sweeping redevelopment of the waterfront.

But Mr. Miller, who had long argued that the city needs to beef up its capacity for generating energy within the five boroughs, thought City Hall’s opposition to the new plant was misguided, sources said.

This difference was part of a broader disagreement between Mr. Miller and City Hall--a difference that has taken on a new urgency in light of the catastrophic blackout that deprived New Yorkers of power for up to 24 hours and reportedly cost the city $1 billion in lost revenue.

Mr. Miller believed that the Bloomberg administration wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the city’s need to produce new sources of energy, the sources said. They added that Mr. Miller also felt that the administration had failed to devote enough attention and resources to developing an energy policy.

Mr. Miller also came to believe that energy policy couldn’t be formulated out of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, sources said. He felt that the goals of the E.D.C., which seeks to spur the city’s economy, weren’t always in sync with the quest for sound energy policy, the sources said.

“He felt the city’s energy policy wasn’t going anywhere,” said one person who discussed the matter with Mr. Miller.

Under former Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, the city had an energy-policy office, and its director had real weight within the government. Mr. Miller, however, apparently felt that he wasn’t accorded the power and access his predecessors had.

Mr. Miller declined to comment on any aspect of this story.

Mr. Doctoroff rejected the suggestion that City Hall has not given energy policy its due. “We think we’ve been very actively supportive of in-city generation,” he said, adding that the city was backing a number of plans to either expand existing plants or build new ones. “Nothing that occurred during the blackout is due to any failure on the city’s part. The question going forward is: What are the right polices to insure that we have an adequate energy supply to respond to our growing needs?”

The city’s policy, which was released after Mr. Miller’s departure, emphasized the re-powering of existing plants over building new ones, saying that it would be more friendly to the environment and would eliminate the politically fraught process of finding sites for new plants.

Mr. Doctoroff also denied that the E.D.C.’s goals were overshadowing energy policy. “We think E.D.C. is the right place to formulate energy policy,” he said. “Our new energy team is hard at work coming up with ways to insure that the city’s needs will be met in the future.”

Mr. Doctoroff declined to elaborate on Mr. Miller’s departure. But City Hall sources maintained that the administration had been unhappy with his work. “We presented his policy to the Mayor,” one official said, “but he rejected it due to lack of substance.”

Energy Point Man

As the city’s point man on energy policy for several years, Mr. Miller was charged with ensuring that New York’s power supply met the needs of businesses and residents. Under Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Miller has testified on behalf of the administration before the City Council and has represented the Mayor at private-sector energy conferences. In those settings, he has been a consistent advocate of building new power plants within the city.

The immediate dispute which led to Mr. Miller’s departure highlights a broader debate over a perennial urban dilemma: how to supply power to a dense population that is ever hungry for more power, but is opposed to the construction of new power plants and transmission lines.

Mr. Bloomberg has been struggling to address that problem since taking office in January of 2002. He has repeatedly talked about an urgent need to build more plants in New York City to prevent blackouts. At the same time, many prospective projects have dragged on because of opposition from community groups, or fear among investors who are reluctant to subject themselves to the uncertain process of gaining approval in the first place.

In his quest for a sound energy policy, Mr. Bloomberg has been grappling with another problem: Many of the difficulties the city faces are beyond the control of municipal government. Although the city can help or hinder the siting and construction of power plants and transmission lines, the power system comes mostly under the purview of state and federal entities, and is affected by issues over which the Mayor’s office has little control.

“The drawback to action at the local level is that a lot of these [energy] grids are regional, so you’re not going to be able to do that much to fix it at the state and local level,” said James Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The situation has become even more complicated in recent years as New York, under the initiative of Governor Pataki, deregulated the energy industry and put the operation of its plants in private hands. One result is that it has become less clear than ever who exactly is accountable for such vital matters as the security of the generating stations and transmission lines, and the expensive upkeep of the distribution network. Another result is that it is arguably more difficult now than it has ever been to build new plants.

All of these factors have conspired to make the task of Mr. Miller--and now that of his successor, Gil Quinones--nearly impossible.

“Making energy policy in New York City is a much more complicated task than anywhere else in the world, because of the sheer demands on the grid and because of the density of the population,” said Assemblyman Michael Gianaris, who recently introduced a bill to improve security at New York’s power plants. “I’m hopeful that because of what we’ve just experienced, everyone is now aware of the priority we have to place on dealing with these issues.”

Ostensibly, the announcement (first reported on The Daily Politics) is a disappointment for Kate Ascher, but Sirefman essentially outranked her anyway, so that the rumor she was ascendant was just that--rumor.

-Matthew Schuerman

"The message here is that there are a lot of residential projects on the board," he said. "But how many sites out there are focused on what's going to become a huge demand for office space? Manhattan is running out of office space. The big blocks of space that will be left, there will be huge premiums associated with them."

And the site, on Boerum Place between Livingston Street and the Fulton Street Mall, has lots of large blocks of space, with 850,000 square feet of potential development rights. It was one of just six projected sites that the Bloomberg administration identified in a 2004 rezoning to transform downtown Brooklyn into a Class A office district.

It turns out (we didn't know this in January) that when the city Economic Development Corporation designated Muss to acquire the city-owned parcels that make up part of the site last July, the agency said he could devote only 250,000 square feet to residential. The rest can be for retail, office or community uses (the latter most likely for neighboring Brooklyn Law School).

But the final mix is far from definite and no tenants have been announced .

""Both Muss and the E.D.C. are interested in doing a commercial building," said Muss spokesman David Stearns. "They are still in discussions with the E.D.C. and nothing more has been is determined."

-Matthew Schuerman

Crain's is reporting that the rent is a tad more than $50 a square foot.

-Matthew Schuerman

(The piers are located roughly in the center of Brooklyn's much-hyped waterfront-renewal project, a map of which is posted to the left; the Brooklyn Bridge Park area is off the map to the north.)

According to E.D.C. executive vice president of infrastructure Kate Ascher, the city has begun the planning stages to develop the piers the site just north of the Atlantic Basin area where cruise ships, starting with the Queen Mary 2, will begin to dock in April.

"Tonight's about a dialogue," Ms. Ascher said. "This is a project I'm really excited about." She said that the E.D.C. had "no specific plans" as of yet, and last night's meeting would be the first of several to analyze what the neighborhood and area residents need from the piers, currently occupied by American Stevedore. She said that residents of the secluded and poorly accessible neighborhood need to figure out how much development they want.

"How many people do we want to come in from the outside?" she asked.

Ms. Ascher presented a timeline of the gradual conversion of the 1.1-mile-long, 120-acre area (both waterfront and upland) from industrial waterfront use to mixed maritime industrial and recreational marina uses:

--December 2005-January 2006: feedback on conceptual framework
--February 2006: planning development and marketing study
--April 2006: cruise-ship piers (11 and 12) in use
--Summer 2006: the uniform land-use review process
--Spring 2007: acquisition of Piers 7 to 9B
--2007 and on: maritime use of Piers 7 to 9B
--2007-09: development of uplands

Ms. Ascher welcomed suggestions from the public for uses of the waterfront, and fielded questions about how local business can begin to prepare for the piers' increased use. The more popular suggestions were for a public boat slip, sewage and infrastructure repair (several people said that the prevalence of sewage and seafood stench would drive out any tourists debarking from the cruise ships), streetscape improvements and the removal and/or beautifying of area industries, especially the garbage-truck lot facing the ship terminal.

"I think that's something we need to solve, not just work on, before the fancy people from the Queen Mary show up," Ms. Ascher said jokingly.

-Matthew Grace

The city's Economic Development Corporation (E.D.C.) is eyeing Memorial Park, which sits under a large white tent on the corner of East 30th Street and the F.D.R. Drive. Most of the tent is occupied by refrigerated trailers that hold unidentified body parts found at the World Trade Center site-11,499 of these painful relics. The indoor park, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg dedicated at the end of 2002, is lined with shrines to the dead.

After the attacks, the parking lot behind the medical examiner's office became an impromptu morgue, and family members turned it into a makeshift memorial. Memorial Park, Mr. Bloomberg said at its dedication, would provide "someplace serene and secure and respectful for contemplation and remembrance."

But in the years before Sept. 11, 2001, the parking lot was the subject of negotiations between the city and New York University, which hoped to create a $500 million East River Science Park, including a huge biotechnology center. The lead tenant was to be ImClone Systems, whose founder, Sam Waksal, is now serving seven years in a federal prison on insider-trading charges.

The E.D.C., which conducts the city's real-estate business, is undeterred by Mr. Waksal's troubles and by the site's somber new use. The agency is aiming to revive that project, according to the E.D.C. document.

The document is an "RFP Checklist" for a planned East River Science Park. Dated Feb. 6, 2004, it lays out a nine-week timetable for issuing a Request for Proposals (R.F.P.) to develop the site.

"Do not reveal all negatives in RFP text," the unsigned document advises, after listing some of those negatives: squatters, garbage and "serenity park," another name for the memorial site.

The three-page document makes no mention of public pledges by city officials, who have promised to keep Memorial Park open "as long as it takes" to test all identifiable remains, and who have also promised to leave the park standing at least until a memorial at Ground Zero is completed.

Michael Sherman, the spokesman for E.D.C. president Andrew Alper, distanced the agency from the memo.

"That was a personal note written by a staff member that was completely inappropriate," he said. He declined to comment on whether the staffer would face disciplinary action. "That does not reflect the view of E.D.C. or the administration," he said.

The plans-and the absence of a commitment to retain the memorial-came as a surprise to relatives of the victims.

"If they propose to relocate, move or toss aside any of those remains, they will be met with extreme, heavy resistance," said John Cartier, who lost his brother in the attack.

But Mr. Sherman denied the agency is considering displacing the memorial.

"The administration is committed to keeping the remains of the victims at the site until a permanent memorial at the Trade Center is complete," he said.

The E.D.C. has long had a reputation for secrecy, although that has abated under Mayor Bloomberg. These days, for instance, notices of public meetings are actually posted on the agency's Web site, not buried in small-type newspaper advertisements. But the agency was created as a quasi-private local development corporation in order to make economic development deals without getting snared in government red tape, and a private-sector focus on speed and secrecy can conflict with public-sector standards of transparency. "E.D.C. should not be in the business of hiding information to suit its purposes," said Stephen Sigmund, the spokesman for City Council Speaker Gifford Miller.

The controversy underscores the political danger still involved in touching the sites and issues that Sept. 11 made sacred. Builders at Ground Zero have been forced to work around the "footprints" of the two towers. And the Memorial Park site is certainly among those newly sacred spots. A 2,000-square-foot room within the larger tent, its high ceiling is formed by opaque white drapes. Low tables along the walls hold photographs, stuffed animals, flags and letters to dead relatives, many of them among the 1,198 victims whose bodies still haven't been identified. There's also a book for visitors to write in. There's an entry for April 8, from a parent to a son:

"While you are no longer here, we are still attached to this memorial where you spent so much time before we brought you home."

The park is formally open only to families, but a reporter was able to visit one recent afternoon, walking down a closed street, past a homeless shelter and rows of parked city-owned cars.

The memorial is an ambiguous blend of permanent and temporary, with big wooden doors set in a white plastic tent, and its opening did little to resolve that ambiguity. Officials gave no timeline for its closure, and the chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, made the following pledge in a press release on Dec. 23, 2002: "We remain committed to the families of these victims that we will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to identify as many people as the limits of science will allow. While this process continues, we hope this park will serve as a welcoming environment where families can gather and pay their respects."

No Long-Term Plans

One city official involved in planning the memorial said there had been no internal discussion of how long Memorial Park would stand.

"We saw this as a solution to a problem that existed then," the official said, referring to the families drawn to the barren parking lot. "I don't know that we were thinking four, five, six years down the road."

A spokeswoman for the medical examiner, Ellen Borakove, said that work will continue to identify the victims using DNA and other technologies. But the fires that raged at Ground Zero for weeks after the attack severely damaged many of the remains.

The remains will "be there until the final memorial is built at Ground Zero," she said. "Those that still are with us will be transferred down to the permanent memorial site."

The medical examiner is seeking to ensure that technicians will still have access to the badly damaged remains in case future technologies make it possible to identify them, she said.

A spokeswoman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Joanna Rose, said she hadn't heard of the 30th Street site and said there was no timetable for the memorial's completion. The agency hopes construction will begin early next year, she said.

While the E.D.C.'s plans may distress the medical examiner and family members, some local residents would like to remove the refrigerated trailers and reopen the street, and community-board members expressed interest in the science park at a meeting with E.D.C. officials at Assemblyman Steven Sanders' office last month.

"We would like to see 30th Street reopened and remapped," said Timothy McGinn, the chairman of Community Board 6. "I would think that could be done as part and parcel of this development."

As for Memorial Park, another person present at the meeting said its future "didn't come up as an issue."