She'll always have the Fifth Avenue Apartment

Clementina "Tina" Santi Flaherty won't be leaving the penthouse after all at 1040 Fifth Avenue, the fabled limestone building that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis also called home.

Business trailblazer, socialite, author and self-declared "powerchick," Ms. Flaherty is keeping the duplex penthouse that she and her ex-husband William Flaherty, a zinc magnate, purchased in happier times. She is paying $13 million for the privilege of staying, according to city records.

And considering that the co-op was most recently listed with Leighton Candler of Corcoran for $32 million in October 2010—after coming on the market for a staggering $43 million literally one day before Lehman collapsed—$13 million seems like a steal for the pleasure of gazing out at Central Park or sitting in the pine-paneled English library to pen another book like The Savvy Woman's Success Bible or What Jackie Taught Us: Lessons from the Remarkable Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The former first lady was long gone by the time Ms. Flaherty moved into the building.

Despite the listing, it seemed that Ms. Flaherty had every intention of staying put in her most enviable of homes in the most enviable of buildings, designed, of course, by uptown godhead Rosario Candela.

“I’m like Scarlett O’Hara. The land—the apartment—means a lot to me. I even have a dog named Scarlett, just like Scarlett O’Hara. I’m just as persistent and everything else," Ms. Flaherty told the Observer in 2008, when rumors of the listing first started to circulate. (Ms. Flaherty did not return a call for comment on her more recent victory).

The persistence apparently paid off in Ms. Flaherty's case, though one wonders if she might not now try and flip the home like other famous divorcees, such as J. Crew's Jenna Lyons.

In the divorce proceedings, filed in 2007, Ms. Flaherty claimed not only marital abuse, but that Mr. Flaherty had hid as much as $100 million in marital assets overseas.

Perhaps this is a sign that the couple's complicated divorce proceedings (properties and a substantial amount of jewels counted among the possessions the couple needed to divide), which have been wending their way through the Palm Beach courts, have finally come to an end.

kvelsey@observer.com

Two American corporate giants. (MacRumors)

It is a POPS done right.

The Apple Cube on Fifth Avenue managed to transform a windswept plaza at one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan into a destination known the world over—one that became a shrine to its creator when Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week. The Journal's Eliot Brown (an Observer alum!) talked with reclusive developer Harry Macklowe about how the cube came to be. Like all things Apple, it wasn't his idea but Jobs'.

“Shortly after I won [the $1.4 billion bid for the GM Building],” Mr. Macklowe said, “the real estate director called me and said, ‘Your idea has been very well received in Cupertino – would you be available to make a presentation personally to Steve Jobs?’”

Mr. Macklowe said he made the trip, and walked into a conference room off Mr. Jobs’s office to find “a full model of my plaza and his idea of what could be built there.”

For the entrance, Mr. Macklowe proposed a number of options.

“We had crescent, we had rectilinear shapes, we had round shapes,” he said.

Mr. Jobs had a different idea.

“He is solely responsible for the cube,” Mr. Macklowe said. “I had different shapes and different ideas, and his cube was somewhat different than what it is now, but it’s Steve Jobs’s idea.”

Mr. Macklowe, who had to sell off his beloved GM Building two years after the Apple Store opened, is revered for his real estate genius, and while the plan for the Apple store was his—he reached out to the company first—of course Jobs prevailed when it came to the look of the building, which is in the process of being streamlined even further.

It is too bad neither of the men will be there to see it through.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Mr. Macklowe purchased the building the year before he bought it, in 2007, as opposed to 2003, as was actually the case.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

North Face opened its first Manhattan location near Lincoln Center, at Broadway and 73rd, in 2003. It has since opened stores in Soho and on Madison Avenue.
Not enough European tourists have been making the trek there, so North Face began eyeing a more heavily trafficked locale, the source said. The company initially feared, however, that the area dominated by Saks, Chanel and Tiffany didn't fit its rugged image.

Lately, Fifth Avenue has been getting down with a younger, hipper crowd-or trying to, at least. Urban Outfitters just opened its doors hawking hipster apparel. Now Joe Fresh, a preppy clothing line found in Canadian grocery stores, will open at Fifth and 43rd Street.

North Face is less concerned about a specific size or location and more about finding the right space to fit its image, said the source. North Face's Lincoln Center store occupies 8,000 square feet, and the Soho store is 4,300 square feet. With the influx of trendy stores between 42nd and 49th streets, that area looks especially compelling.

Fifth Avenue still boasts the highest asking rents in the city, at around $1,400 a square foot on average, and has one of the city's lowest retail vacancy rates.

lkusisto@observer.com

Retailers in the area are now paying upward of $1,700 a square foot annually, according to a quarterly report from the Real Estate Board of New York that came out this morning. That's still well behind coveted Fifth Avenue, where average asking rents were $2,367 a square foot, but not too shabby for a neighborhood that was exactly that not too long ago.

But Times Square may soon be giving Fifth Avenue a run for its money. "That's certainly my observation as well," Michael Slattery, a senior vice president at REBNY, told The Observer.  

Oakley was recently rumored to pay a record-setting $1,400 a square foot for its flashy store at 1515 Broadway. Leaks about blockbuster deals might be prompting retailers to ask a little bit more, Mr. Slattery said, but it's harder to get a handle on whether retailers are paying anything like that price and what types of concessions might be thrown in. 

Yet Times Square may still be a deal as the economy and the tourism industry continue to improve. "It's a good time to jump," Mr. Slattery said. "For a long time, what my people were saying about Times Square is [that leases] should have come out of the advertising budget and not out of the real estate budget," Mr. Slattery said. "Now I'm hearing brokers say retailers expect to make money at these locations." 

But Fifth Avenue will not give up without a fight. The strip has been one of the few in the city to see stable rents during the downturn, this despite a few major vacancies. "That's not what people would have expected," Slattery said. "Everyone was so damn depressed a year ago they couldn't see any sunlight."

lkusisto@observer.com

The first is the retail space at the World Trade Center, which Futterman said is in talks with "all the household names," something to be expected given the psuedo-mall's size (500,000 square feet), prominence and, of course, everyone's desire to be downtown.

There is also the little-known fact that, despite the aforementioned Fifth Avenue's strength, the old World Trade Center mall was actually the most high-traffic, profitable place in the city, before it was destroyed on 9/11, something that no doubt makes the new venture all the more appealing.

Yet here is what Futterman said that really caught The Observer's pink eye: "You'll probably have something hipper than any shopping mall, maybe a mix of local and international operators." That sounds exciting. Sort of a Soho II, maybe?

Meanwhile, Futterman confirms the aquarium talks for 11 Times Square, about the only thing better for the area than a throwback peep show. But it also sounds like the building could be destined for more of the same pedestrian pablum. 

We have 55,000 square feet on the ground, basement and second floor, but the retail could go up to the sixth floor. Most of the interest is from fast-fashion retailers like Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, Old Navy. Consumer electronics are also interested, and restaurants. 

Given that Disney has just opened its Times Square dreamland, this sounds just about right.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

July brings more modestly optimistic news for the city's commercial real estate industry, according to the latest report from brokerage Cassidy Turley.

Manhattan-wide vacancies are still dropping, down from May's 13.1 percent to 12.8 in June, marking the lowest amount of empty office space since at least April of last year. Downtown is faring better, with vacancies at 10.6 percent. Class A vacancies in midtown saw the biggest fall, from 13 to 12.4 percent.

"Signs of stabilization appeared to have continued in June—though all is not quite what it seemed," reads the report, as "a significant portion of the improvement was due to a large block of availability removed from the market." June's big block: 229 West 43^rd Street, the old New York Times building, which will soon be home to a bowling alley cum theme park, according to Curbed.

And while office rents continue to slide all over, Times Square and Grand Central have bucked the trend and seen small hikes.

ajulius@observer.com

Rumor has it that a group of investors approached Starwood out of the blue with an incredibly generous offer for the retail condominium—which houses pre-recession luxury artifacts like a De Beers outlet, and Emilio Pucci and Bottega Veneta boutiques—and that Starwood proceeded to hire Ms. Stacom to suss out the market. Ms. Stacom declined to comment or to confirm that sequence of events. Starwood did not respond by press time.

That the Fifth Avenue mall should retain its appeal in this slasher of a retail market is not exactly surprising. Sure, asking rents have fallen—but only from K2-levels of inaccessability to, say, Mount Everest levels. Fifth Avenue, between 49th and 59th streets, remains the most desirable shopping corridor in the city, with average asking rents at $1,631 a square feet, according to the Real Estate Board of New York's May retail report for Manhattan. By point of comparison: The second most expensive corridor is Broadway/Seventh Avenue, between 42nd and 47th streets (Times Square), with an average asking rent of $1,381 a square foot.

drubinstein@observer.com

But the seventh-floor condo at 817 Fifth Avenue is no mere apartment. It is a Steve Wynn experience.

“I will tell you,” said Roger Erickson, the casino magnate’s broker, “it is out-of-sight fantastic.” After a separate source told The Observer about Mr. Wynn’s upcoming $25 million listing, Mr. Erickson was willing to describe the 3,900-square-foot, onyx-floored apartment, which takes up an entire floor of its mid-1920s building.

The place opens up onto a private elevator vestibule, lined with what Mr. Erickson described as “very discreet leather.” That leads to a giant room, created from the apartment’s original living room and library, facing Central Park. The old formal dining room became an eat-in media center: “It has no table,” the broker said, “but what would you call those things that sit in front of a couch? A little lower than a table? You can eat there; you can watch TV.” Sticklers who prefer to keep those two separate can use the new dining room, carved out of what was once kitchen space, maids’ rooms and a servants’ dining room.

Three of four original bedrooms were combined to make Mr. Wynn’s corner master suite, with a dressing area and “one of those infinity tubs,” Mr. Erickson said, “where the water kind of pours over the edge.”

Back in late 2004, all was not well with the apartment. In a suit against the building and 10 John Does—the former owner, the current and former tenants of a neighboring apartment, plus five inspectors and construction workers—Mr. Wynn and his wife, Elaine, complained about a burst ceiling pipe that caused “total destruction of numerous items.”

“That’s why he redid the entire apartment. It’s literally new,” Mr. Erickson said. The suit, which biblically declares that far-reaching renovations were needed to bring the apartment back to “its pre-Flood condition,” was settled, according to a separate source.

Considering that Mr. Wynn’s eponymous Las Vegas resort is the kind of place where suites’ foyers have granite wet bars, does his renovated apartment look like a hotel? “No! It feels really elegant; beautiful; prewar,” Mr. Erickson, his broker, said. “Everything is in light yellows and beige.”

Mr. Wynn, whose divorce was announced in March, and who was ranked No. 468 on this year’s Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, bought the place for $7 million in 2001. So is his new price too high? “I think not,” said Mr. Erickson (who was also interviewed for this week’s Observer Sit-Down). “That includes all the furnishings, and he tells me the furnishings alone are worth $4 million.”

The condo’s art collection, including a Matisse, is not included in the sale.

Money issues aside, mega-condos have tended to sell to foreigners, and foreigners have tended to like very high floors. But Mr. Wynn’s place is only on the seventh floor. “I have a wonderful customer from Russia who was explaining to me what the Russian is looking for,” Mr. Erickson said. “They don’t want high floors; they’re not into Time Warner or the towers; lower floors connected to the earth, like fifth through 12th floors; buildings that are private, like prewar buildings,” he added. “And comfort.”

mabelson@observer.com

According to a deed filed in city records on May 4, the couple just paid $7.2 million for a co-op at 912 Fifth Avenue, a building that brokers call “nice” but not particularly top-crust. Even though Lady Foster, who before their marriage had been a celebrity sex psychologist in Spain, is listed alone on the deed (with her title, of course), a source said the apartment is for the couple. Apparently, Lord Foster--whom Tom Wolfe, a critic of 980 Madison, called “quote-Lord-quote Norman” in an Observer interview last year--even appeared for a co-op board interview.

Considering his virtuosic taste in very beautiful windows, it’s odd the architect chose an apartment that only has two rooms facing Central Park: According to the floor plans of a mirror-image apartment one floor down that’s on the market with Stribling, the apartment is oddly long and thin, with about 2,725 square feet. “It only has good views from two rooms, the master bedroom and living room,” a source said. “The rest of it is kind of internal, because it’s not a corner building.”

That Stribling listing came on the market at $7.1 million in February, was cut to $6.45 million in March, and lowered to $5.95 million just this week. Lord Foster and his wife spent $1.25 million more on their co-op, even though it hadn’t been listed on the market.

According to the deed, their apartment was sold by the estate of Fred Strauss, an oil executive who died last year at age 94. Lord and Lady Foster originally came to the building because they had tried to buy a unit one floor up: “We actually started the process of doing it,” said a source involved with that failed deal, “and the seller had a change of heart and took it off the market."

UPDATE, Tuesday 6:13 PM: A spokesperson for Foster + Partners said, “I have spoken to Lord Foster, who does not wish to make any comments.”

Finally, a billionaire's child has decided to sell something off. According to city records, Anne Chandler Bass—the daughter of oil/aerospace/media magnate Robert M. Bass, the 62nd richest man in the nation—has sold her six-room co-op at 956 Fifth Avenue for $6.25 million. On the downside, her asking price had been $7 million.

The listing with Stribling says Ms. Bass' corner living room had a wood-burning fireplace, her floor plan had "a fabulous flow for entertaining," and her master bedroom had "en-suite his/her baths and dressing room." But, most importantly by far, there was a mahogany-paneled butler's pantry and wet bar.