The soon-to-be-former home of Collegiate School.

Collegiate School is defined on Urban Dictionary as “a haughty, arrogant school.” When the Upper West Side boys’ academy is trailing in a basketball game and rivals start chanting “score board,” the Collegiate heckling squad has been known to chant “college board” in response.

The academy regularly lands toward the top of various publications’ rankings of secondary schools by college matriculation, and it boasts a distinguished alumni list including Cesar Romero, Peter Bogdanovich, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and John F. Kennedy Jr.

Significantly less distinguished has been its campus, a clumsy architectural hodepodge of three buildings around the intersection of Broadway and 78th Street, patched together by time and improvisation. 

Students learn Gay-Lussac’s law in the science department and then head down seven flights of stairs, surrounded by their ’80s predecessors’ crude psychedelic murals. They change buildings and climb three more flights to the stifling English department, where they can experience for themselves the correlation between the temperature of a container and the pressure of its contents.

While the buildings are inadequate by almost all accounts, students past and present are nevertheless dismayed by Collegiate’s plan to move into a gleaming new building after the institution’s eviction from its longtime home. In 2016, the school’s 650 students across 13 grades will decamp for a modern, new campus on an oddly shaped block of Riverside Boulevard between 61st and 62nd Streets.

“It’s kind of a bummer they’re kicking us out,” said the filmmaker Whit Stillman, who attended the school as an elementary school student in the early ’60s and later made a movie, Metropolitan, lamenting the decline of the “urban haute bourgeoisie.”

“I think it was kind of academically great, the strange spaces in the old building,” he said. “My formative experience in third grade was to be in a remedial reading class with one other student and a teacher. We were almost in a closet. It was so cramped! But it focused attention.”

A rendering of the proposed Collegiate building.

The move was prompted by the school’s loss of its lease on 241 West 77th Street, its home since 1892. The “old building,” as it’s called, is crowded and lacks air conditioning, the steps on its narrow stairs worn down by generations of scampering.

The building is owned and partially occupied by the Collegiate Church, which in 2006 requested back the space it had been leasing to Collegiate, declining the school’s offer to buy the building. The school will also be vacating Platten Hall, built by the school in 1967, and West End Plaza, an apartment building built in 1912 and acquired by Collegiate in 1977.
Alumni have paid homage to the campus in films including House of D by David Duchovny (class of ’77) and The Talent Given Us by Andrew Wagner (’81), as well as the novel Heavy Metal and You by Chris Krovatin (’03). Former students who pride themselves on the school’s longevity can be resistant to change. In 2001, the administration painted the red gates on the school’s west side black. After protests, they were returned to their original color.

“I will always remember the school’s red door and the tumult of running up its narrow stairs to English class,” New York Times national editor Sam Sifton (’84) wrote in an email. “I still have nightmares where I awaken in one of those classrooms at the start of a test I didn’t know was coming.” On Facebook, another recent alum published a lyrical 800-word essay describing the campus as a “memory palace” (“I remember the slight temperature variation of each different water fountain in the school”) and spawning a thread of 170 comments.

“Facilities were a challenge,” headmaster Lee Levison told The Observer. “I realized before any action the church took that the community was concerned about the lack of space and the quality of space.”
Collegiate’s board of trustees considered redeveloping the school’s two adjoining properties but was stymied by their location in a historic district. The sale of a school-owned apartment building will cover part of the current plan’s costs, said by The New York Times to be around $130 million.

Collegiate's future, as seen from the outside.

Collegiate was started in 1628—making it the country’s oldest school. Its connection to the church is perhaps the only aspect of the school’s identity that can be traced back to its 17th-century founding, and even the most nostalgic must admit that the school as we know it—I graduated in 2008—bears little resemblance to its original incarnation.

As Jean Parker Waterbury wrote in A History of Collegiate School, “The stages of its growth are distinct: at first the only school in the colony, it became the city school when the British arrived in 1664; in the 1700s it was principally a charity school for children of the poor parishioners, although a small group of paying students was accepted; the next century saw it as wholly a charity grammar school; the present phase, as an outstanding private secondary school, began in 1887.”

“It had already lost pretty much everything,” a 2007 graduate remarked during an impromptu visit to the development site, which seemed notably less vibrant than its current coordinates. Though developers have been trying for years to remake the area into a community called Riverside South, it hasn’t quite gelled.

Collegiate has long been part of the ecosystem of uptown Manhattan; boys bus across on the M79 in the morning, flood Broadway for lunch, take gym in Riverside Park. But the neighborhood has been changing recently, as if anticipating the school’s relocation. New Pizza Town across Broadway, the after-school hangout immortalized in Gossip Girl’s pilot as the “little pizza joint on the corner,” closed last year; its rival Big Nick’s appears to be on its last legs.

Will a modern open campus diminish the school's scrappy urban elitism?

Headmaster Mr. Levison takes note of “a pride that most students feel about the school and its commitment to academic excellence and intensity,” but points out that Collegiate differs from similar schools “in that its facilities are modest. It’s not a community that has historically craved ostentatious facilities.”

The new building, while sleeker and larger than the current campus, is basically a humble cube. It will feature three open “hubs” stacked on top of each other: students will ascend from one to the next as they graduate from lower to middle to upper school. The drastic increase in space will not correspond to an increase in enrollment, Mr. Levison told The Observer.

Architect and alumnus Thomas Gluck has promised unobstructed 180-degree views of the Hudson River; the new lobby, like the current one, looks out upon a courtyard, but this one will be expressly built for the purpose of athletic play. (The small outdoor space between Collegiate’s three current buildings has long been used for handball, soccer and basketball games.) The school will carry totems of its history with it in its move: the plaques in the lobby listing the “head boy” of each graduating class since 1912, the grandfather clock in the library admonishing students to “improve the flying moments,” the red door at the school’s entrance.

Mr. Levison assured The Observer that the church will continue to host school events and that the school’s religion classes will continue under the current chaplain. (These classes are comparative rather than catechist; a good percentage of the student body is Jewish.)

Alumni, parents and even some with no immediate stake in a new campus crowded Alice Tully Hall when the school unveiled its plans. Seated onstage at Lincoln Center was the school’s former college guidance counselor, Bruce Breimer. He was soon joined by the headmaster, the head of the board of trustees, a team of architects, and Anna Quindlen, mother of Mr. Krovatin.

“This school that we all love so much was founded at a time when the ground on which it now stands was thick forest and the only part of New Amsterdam that was inhabited was the southernmost tip,” she reminded the audience. “But of course, our true feelings about Collegiate have nothing to do with location.”

Some are warming up to Collegiate’s evolution. “I was bummed and then I saw the pictures,” one current senior said of the proposed new space, following Mr. Gluck’s presentation. “Futuristic. Glass. Cool.”

There is talk of organizing a shuttle service to the new location, which will be at least a 10-minute walk from the Columbus Circle subway station. “If Collegiate was on 61st, I wouldn’t have gone there,” a former classmate, raised on the Upper East Side, told me.

But another alumnus noted that some might see the new neighborhood’s relative isolation as a plus. “Kids are gonna smoke weed for days,” he said.

editorial@observer.com

The happy couple.

Edgar Bronfman Jr. announced yesterday that he was stepping down from his position as the chairman of Warner Music Group, effective January 31. Turns out he is stepping down from his perch at 812 Park Avenue, as well.

According to city records, Mr. Bronfman has transferred sole control of the triplex penthouse to his wife Clarissa Bronfman, with whom he bought the home in May for $16 million.The transfer of ownership was made for all of $0.00, which suggests it may be for tax reasons—a not uncommon occurrence in the confines of tony Upper East Side abode.

Initially, The Observer sighed, fearing the worst. A divorce on the horizon? It's happened before. "I love my wife," Mr. Bronfman said via a spokesman. He declined to comment further on the purpose of the transfer, though it does not appear to be related to the Warner deal—unless of course a fat, taxable severance in need of offsetting is involved.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said Mr. Bronfman was stepping down as CEO, which he did earlier this year, not chairman, the move announced yesterday. The Observer regrets the error.

eknutsen@observer.com

ORIGINAL POST: With the city scrambling to close its budget hole, mulling everything from higher hotel taxes to closing fire houses, maybe local pols should just persuade Edgar Bronfman Jr. to trade a few more homes.

By The Observer's count, he has bought or sold no fewer than eight properties over the past decade, some of them near the top of the Manhattan housing heap: the Carhart Mansion, 1040 Fifth, the Muppet Mansion. The combined value of these various transaction approaches $200 million--quite the transfer tax tab.

Mr. Bronfman has just made his latest offering, returning to the market a property he purchased all of seven months ago. Now that the family is moving back from London and into the triplex penthouse at 812 Park, he is prepared to sell the smaller (if nine rooms can be considered as such) full-floor co-op he bought at 810 Fifth in November, the Post reports.

Which is the nicer property is debatable. Both were designed by renowned architect J.E.R. Carpenter, and each have boldface tenants. Eight-twelve is home to playwright Richard Abrons and writer and diplomat William Jacobus vanden Heuvel. The wattage is a little higher to the west, where Pete Peterson bought the old Rockefeller penthouse from David Geffen, and Felix Rohatyn still makes his home.

The triplex at 812 Park is slightly larger, 15 rooms compared to what was once a 13-room sprawl at 810 Fifth, and while the former came cheaper, $15.9 million compared to $21 million, it is also move-in ready. This is part of the reason Mr. Bronfman abandoned the Muppet Mansion on 69th Street, as it needed a full gut renovation. The home at 810 Fifth is livable--very, livable, thank you--but it was transformed into a more generous nine-room configuration, with only two bedrooms. Great for a titanic bachelor or old-money empty nesters, but not a blossoming second family.

Will Mr. Bronfman, the consummate dealmaker, turn a profit this time around? He lost about $5 million on the Muppet Mansion sale, but he is asking $3.925 million more than what he paid at 810 Fifth for the flip. (Bonnie Chajet and Ronnie Lane of Warburg have the listing.) Transfer taxes aside, he might still walk away from that one a richer man.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

As The Observer reported on Tuesday, Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought the penthouse ahead of his family's triumphant return to the city from London. The price at the time was not known, but the deed was just filed, and Mr. Bronfman and his wife Clarissa paid exactly the asking price. 

It is not the only huge deal for Mr. Bronfman. Today, his Warner Music Group announced it was being sold to New York-based Russian conglomerate Access Industries for $3.3 billion, a nice turnaround from the $2.5 billion he paid in 2003, having been mocked at the time considering the industry's continued tailspin. Kind of makes up for the Universal Vivendi fiasco.

And to think we gave the mogul a hard for losing $5 million when he sold the Muppet Mansion in March.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

When Mr. Bronfman sold Jim Henson's old mansion at 117-119 East 69^th Street to fellow Londoner James Murdoch for $23 million in March, it appeared the Bronfman brood might be settling down by the Thames for good. At least that was the assumption of the city's top brokers--who watch the frequent wheelings and dealings of Mr. Bronfman closely.

Au contraire, as they say on the Continent.

It was precisely because Mr. Bronfman was returning to New York that he decided to sell the 40-foot-wide redbrick manse. The place had been gutted, but it still requires a top-to-bottom renovation. Mr. Bronfman has torn through companies before, but this would be too much of a headache. "It was really just a much easier move, not to have to deal with a huge renovation," a person familiar with the deal said.

The Bronfmans have instead opted for the long-suffering five-bedroom triplex penthouse at 812 Park Avenue, The Observer has learned, a 6,500-square-foot co-op that, while outdated, is at least livable. First listed for $36.5 million in November 2007, it has since seen three large price cuts, arriving at $15.9 million in September. The exact price Mr. Bronfman paid is not yet known.

The mogul has now bought and sold nearly $150 million in New York real estate over the past decade, calling six properties home.

The sellers have done quite the opposite. Gordon Pattee, a financier who serves as treasurer for the New York City Ballet, and his wife, Dailey Jones Pattee, a psychotherapist, spent the past 25 years in the 15-room spread atop this coveted J.E.R. Carpenter masterpiece. Some years ago they oversaw a renovation by noted architect Mario Botta that maintains many of Carpenter's stunning prewar details, including intricate fireplaces (six of them!) and the swooping three-story stair.

"It is seldom that an apartment of this caliber becomes available," Brown Harris Stevens' Caroline Guthrie wrote in her listing. In addition to the five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, there is a "magical top floor surrounded by a beautifully planted terrace." There is also a stinging 2 percent flip tax to be paid by the buyer, on top of $12,251 in monthly maintenance--terms almost as onerous as the sell-off of Vivendi Universal.

Ms. Guthrie declined to comment, and co-broker Bunny Goodwin of Sotheby's did not return calls seeking comment. Mr. Bronfman's spokesman also declined to comment.

Read past Manhattan Transfers here. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Mr. Bronfman has resettled in London, which is said to be why he is selling the home. Having offloaded his old townhouse around the corner to Len Blavatnik for $50 million in 2007--more than 10 times what he paid for it in 1994--perhaps the Seagrams heir and Warner Music boss can come to terms with a 20 percent loss on the Muppet manse, which just sold for $23 million, according to city records.

The buyer has a sense of humor, hiding behind a limited-liability corporation by the name of Statler. That happens to be the name of the tall, skinny muppet who heckles the stars from a theater box along with his pal Waldorf on the old Muppet Show. And yet the joke is on the buyer, as the deed lists an address for the LLC at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, headquarters of News Corp., and the deed has been signed by one of the building's denizens, Jesse Angelo, editor of The Daily.

This seems like an awfully expensive home for the 37-year-old Murdoch man, whose most recent purchase was a $1.9 million condo at the Meatpacking District's Porter House, bought in January 2005. Then again, as a recent profile revealed, Mr. Angelo is the son of a hedge fund manager. Plus, there is the $30 million Rupert gave his squire to start his iPad-only publication...

The 12,000-square-foot home is in need of a top-to-bottom, every-inch renovation, as Corcoran brokers Carrie Chiang and Loy Carlos write in their listing: "There are few opportunities to create a 40-ft wide majestic residence reminiscent of the golden era when the most prominent New Yorkers like the Fricks, Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Roosevelts built palatial homes in what was then an up and coming neighborhood... the Upper East Side. In 1928, Beekman Winthrop commissioned architect Julius Gaylor who created this masterful residence. [...] The house awaits a special purchaser who desires to undertake a restoration befitting its history, marrying it with the best of 21st century technology."

Does Mr. Angelo really have that kind of money, or could the home be for one of his News Corp. cubicle mates? He did not return repeated requests for comment, and the brokers, who had a co-exclusive with Brown Harris Stevens' Paula Del Nunzio and Alina Pedroso, declined to comment. "We don't even know who the buyer is," Ms. Chiang said.

Read past Manhattan Transfers here. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

But it’s starting to feel like a long time ago now, and pretty much everyone involved has mumbled some kind of mea culpa and tried to move on. Now, you want to talk about a serious media-merger hangover? Check out Vivendi, the French water and telecoms company that bought the old Seagram a decade ago in a dot-com–era bid to be a junior league AOL–Time Warner. That transnational nightmare is still going strong. Last week, the hapless French conglomerate was slapped with a jury judgment in a Manhattan federal court that accused it of recklessly misleading investors about its financial health before and after the October 2000 Seagram deal. Depending on whose lawyer you listen to, the company is on the hook for anywhere from $9 billion to (according to Vivendi’s side) an incalculable but far smaller figure. Vivendi says it will appeal the case, but there is so much lingering toxicity and pathos around the time the company was known as Vivendi Universal that it is practically the Love Canal of media constructs.

In fact, it’s worth remembering that this year’s media mega-mega-merger—General Electric’s handoff of NBC Universal to Comcast—can be traced to Vivendi’s near-collapse after its stab at empire-building under the heady leadership of former CEO Jean-Marie Messier, once known lovingly as J6M, short for Jean-Marie Messier Moi-Même Maître du Monde. En Anglais: “Me, myself, master of the world.”

As part of its efforts to get back on its feet after Mr. Messier’s debt-addled reign, Vivendi sold the remnants of Seagram—the Universal film and TV studios and theme parks and a passel of cable networks—to NBC in 2004, keeping the Universal Music business and 20 percent of the new NBC Universal as part of the bargain. NBC’s struggles lately have been well documented, but it was Vivendi’s desire to finally unload its last vestiges of the business—which it did recently—that pushed GE to offload NBC U altogether. Under far less flashy management, Vivendi has gone on to buy video game company Activision and a phone company in Brazil.  

And the shareholder verdict last week is not even the last of it. Still to come, Vivendi will be back in court to square off against combative billionaire John Malone’s Liberty Media, which in 2003 filed a similar suit accusing Mr. Messier, his chief financial officer and Vivendi of “fraud, misrepresentation and concealment” related to its dot-com deal spree. Strangely, while the jury last week found that Vivendi bore responsibility for duping its shareholders, it ruled that Mr. Messier and the company’s finance chief at the time did not.

But Mr. Messier isn’t entirely out of the woods. In addition to facing Mr. Malone, he will also be in a French criminal court later this year to stand trial for share manipulation relating to this whole fiasco, and, if convicted, could face several years in prison. This time, the taint extends to former Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is one of several former Vivendi colleagues who have been ordered to stand trial along with Mr. Messier. Mr. Bronfman has already had to wear the shroud of having wiped out much of his famous family’s fortune through the infamous merger, and had moved on by buying and running Warner Music Group. (His lawyers have said he did nothing wrong.) One can only imagine how much he is looking forward to reliving the good old days in Paris avec J6M.

editorial@observer.com

One comparatively easy way to take the city's temperature as its health gets sorted out is to follow the stocks that define it. We assembled the Observer 100 Index to watch the city wheeze, cough, sigh, and sing.

The rule was to pick the public American stocks (which means no LVMH, which is foreign, no Condé Nast, which is private, and no Ikea, which is both) that have woven themselves into New York's chromosomes. See them here.

The index's companies send Manhattan its envelopes of movies, market its anti-anxiety drugs, make its k-cups of pressurized coffee grounds, put on its concerts, and lend and manhandle its money. Some are nefarious (the Altria Group is Philip Morris renamed), expensive (Coach), omnipotent (Goldman) and benign (John Wiley and Sons). Some are all those things but also inconspicuous--like Fortune Brands, which, if you're a certain type, makes your bourbon, golf balls, and kitchen faucet.

We'll tally the two that rose and fell the hardest over the past week. Only one presidential administration ago, the inaugural winner and loser--see the image above--both belonged to the same gargantuan conglomerate, which is as good a way to begin as any.

One comparatively easy way to take the city's temperature as its health gets sorted out is to follow the stocks that define it. We assembled the Observer...

A few minutes later, Mr. Bronfman, 27—son of the billionaire Warner Music CEO and Seagram liquor fortune heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., and fiancé of the Grammy-nominated electro–hip-hop auteur M.I.A.—was mingling with power players of the environmental movement. 

There was Kevin Conrad, best known as the guy who famously told the United States, “If you’re not willing to lead … please get out of the way,” at the U.N.’s 2007 Climate Change Conference in Bali; Graciela Chichilnisky, the feisty Columbia University economist who helped get the Kyoto Protocol adopted in 1997 by introducing a marketplace for nations to trade carbon emission rights; and fellow Columbia professor Peter Eisenberger, a physicist who’s working with Ms. Chichilnisky to develop a technology that can suck noxious emissions right out of the air.

“It’s really amazing stuff,” said Mr. Bronfman, who learned about their efforts two years ago through Ms. Chichilnisky, his childhood neighbor. He convinced his father to invest in the duo’s technology firm, Global Thermostat, where he has been named associate managing director (Edgar Bronfman Jr. is the chair), and is headed to Copenhagen with them in a few weeks. 

During the event, Mr. Bronfman, tall and scruffy-faced in a slim black suit, dark maroon button-down (no tie) and black canvas sneakers, sat near his mother, Sherry Brewer Bronfman, and his sister, Vanessa Bronfman, both bubbly as they munched on their respective salmon and chicken entrees. He speaks softly and has sleepy eyes and a laid-back demeanor, even though he always seems to be rushing around. After lunch, he declined a cocktail.

“I have to go meet my pops,” he said.

DESPITE COMING FROM one of the wealthiest families in New York, if not the U.S. (Forbes recently ranked his grandfather, Edgar M. Bronfman, No. 123 on its 2009 list of the 400 richest Americans), Ben Bronfman has managed to remain relatively obscure throughout most of his adult life. He was raised on the Upper West Side and attended the Collegiate School. He discovered punk rock in the mid-1990s and frequented all the grimy downtown spots of the day—Coney Island High; ABC No Rio; the cube at Astor Place. After a year at Emerson College studying politics and law, he spent the first half of his 20s touring basements, bars and V.F.W. halls with a band called the Exit, in which he played guitar and sang. (His new band is called Bermuda). He went by his mother’s maiden name at the time. “It wasn’t the Strokes. It wasn’t a bunch of posh kids. It wasn’t New York City private school. That’s not who we were,” he told The Observer recently. “And I didn’t want every article on us to be about,” he paused, “my father.” Mr. Bronfman is a curious kind of scion: not dutiful, not a rebel, but something in between.

In May of 2008, news broke that M.I.A.—real name: Maya Arulpragasam—a Bed Stuy–dwelling, Sri Lankan (by way of Britain) singer and visual artist famous for her genre-bending music, anti-establishment politics and eccentric style, was recently engaged to “Benjamin Brewer,” a young member of the Bronfman clan. (It’s an unlikely union, to be sure; he the son of Manhattan society, she the daughter of Sri Lanka’s oppressed Tamil minority.) Headlines followed in October that the couple was expecting a child. He was born on Feb. 11, three days after they walked the red carpet at the 51st Grammy Awards, where a full-bellied Ms. Arulpragasam performed with Kanye West and Jay-Z.

In March, the tabloids gawked over the newborn’s purported name, prompting Ms. Arulpragasam to declare on her MySpace page:

MY BABY IS NOT CALLED ICKITT, PICKIT OR LICKIT THANK YOU VERY MUCH TO ALL THE HOLLYWOOD PRESS. HES A BABY , HE DONT NEED PRESS!

(Shortly thereafter, TMZ got a hold of the birth certificate, revealing the child’s real name, pronounced “I-Kid,” as in, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman.)

“I try not to let any of that stuff penetrate my sphere of consciousness,” said Mr. Bronfman on a crisp October evening, a few days after a French court ruled that his father would stand trial in Paris on insider-trading charges. He was sitting on the edge of a wicker couch in the dim light of the Bowery Hotel Bar’s back patio with a glass of Malbec and a Winston. Ms. Arulpragasam was across town doing a photo shoot for Vogue. 

“If you grew up in New York counterculture, I think it’s relatively easy to filter out all the bullshit,” he continued. “And Maya does such a good job keeping her ship on an intellectual level, keeping it really culture- and art-driven. So I just try not to let it drift too far from shore.”

Their love affair began in December 2007, a few days before New Year’s.

“We met at our mate Simonez’s house on the Lower East Side,” said Mr. Bronfman. “He was a door guy at the Beatrice, I was going there all the time, and he knew Maya from her art school days at Central St. Martin’s in London.”

Mr. Bronfman proposed four months later in San Francisco. He said that ever since “the little one” was born, they’ve been hopping back and forth between their apartments in L.A. and Bed Stuy.

“It’s the best thing in the world,” he said of fatherhood. “I have a whole new crazy profound respect for my parents. I find my conversations are more direct. I think it makes you just—it turns you into a man, you know? It makes you real.”

Mr. Bronfman didn’t care to elaborate on his relationship with Ms. Arulpragasam, who is 34. But what about the wedding? “We’re working on it,” he said. “We haven’t picked an exact date, but it will probably be pretty soon. In New York.”

Ms. Arulpragasam could not be reached for an interview, but told Spin last year: “I’ve always had that fuck-the-system mentality, and his dad is so ‘the system.’ But then, they’re the most liberal family—they bootlegged alcohol, for God’s sake. They’re rich because they threw big, illegal parties, so I don’t mind.”

A FEW YEARS  ago, Mr. Bronfman found himself getting depressed about the doom and gloom of climate change.

“We hadn’t talked in a long time, and I remember getting a voice mail from him just being like, ‘I’m starting to understand what’s going on with global warming and it’s really freaking me out!” said Billy Parish, founder of the Energy Action Coalition and Mr. Bronfman’s classmate at Collegiate.

The two friends met up one day for a walk around the Central Park Reservoir. “I felt like the greater environmental picture was always marketed more toward, like, the Dave Matthews crowd,” Mr. Bronfman said. “So I just said to him, ‘What if we could bridge the gap between quote-unquote hipster culture and the environment?’”

The result was Green Owl, an indie record company described on VanityFair.com last year as “Earth’s first green music label.” It focuses on digital releases, sheathes its physical products in 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper, and buys carbon credits to offset its energy use. It has signed four bands to date, including Brooklyn’s the So So Glos and African pop sensation the Very Best. 

Mr. Bronfman and his partners are expanding the Green Owl brand into a news and entertainment Web site and sustainable clothing line, which will be overseen by Mr. Bronfman’s younger sister, Hannah. (He said a recent Page Six report that Hannah would be appearing in Tinsely Mortimer's upcoming reality show was inaccurate.) His older sister, Vanessa, is developing an online talk show to be hosted by their mother, a cultural philanthropist and former actress. (Ben is proud of his interracial roots: Sherry, who is African-American, and Edgar Jr. met through Dionne Warwick in the late ’70s, but divorced in 1991.) His father is on Green Owl’s board.

“It’s a family affair at this point,” said Stephen Glicken, general manager and co-founder.

Back at the Bowery Hotel, Mr. Bronfman opened his silver Mac and pulled up a grainy photograph of himself and Bill Clinton. “The picture’s from my dad’s BlackBerry, so the quality’s kind of shitty,” he said.

They’d met with Mr. Clinton the previous week at the former president’s Harlem offices to explain Global Thermostat’s carbon-capture technology (picture a power plant with a giant, 50-foot window that uses the plant’s excess energy to suck carbon from the atmosphere) and to show him a prototype of the company’s Web site, which the younger Bronfman is building.

“Right now, if I just said, ‘I’m gonna stop everything, stop all imports and exports, shut down all the grids, make us live in complete darkness,’ we’d still be dealing with the same amount of carbon that was emitted today for the next hundred years,” Mr. Bronfman said. “So you’ve gotta be able to stop it, catch it and pull it all the way back. We think we’ve found a way to do that.”

“Ben can move swiftly between beautiful rock music and highly technical concepts,” said Ms. Chichilnisky, who Mr. Bronfman will be assisting at the Copenhagen talks. She added of her protégé’s fiancée: “Maya’s a real sweetheart. She has a message that’s more than music. I think what they represent is unstoppable.”

jpompeo@observer.com