He had abysmal timing. The capital advisory firm at which Mr. McCann had been working laid him off in late 2008.

At a January party Mr. McCann organized for young professionals at Stone Rose Lounge in the Time Warner Center, longtime developer Francis Greenburger described the commercial real estate market thusly: “This is as bad a cycle as I can remember.”

Mr. Greenburger is 60.

The real estate industry may be in thrall to the stumbles and intrigues of the mighty, the foibles and foreclosures that trip up the Macklowes and Swigs and Solows of the world. But, for countless young up-and-comers, those who dream of bricks and mortar and making a tangible mark on the stone-cold city landscape, this downturn has hit home hard. They are being laid off. They are graduating into a market that has no room for the likes of young upstarts. They are trying to chart a course in an ever-more-confusing landscape.

On Friday, March 13, Jenna Mitchell, 25 and oval-faced, sat in the Sunburst Espresso Bar, the coffee shop near her Stuy Town apartment that has become her de facto office, an impersonal wooden two-top serving as the desk where she composes carefully worded cover letters and browses through online wanted ads.

Ms. Mitchell, in jeans, sneakers and a gray, flower-lined sweater, dropped into her seat and ordered a French vanilla coffee with soy milk. Her long brown hair was swept back into a disheveled knot, revealing dark brown, thickly lashed eyes. On her left hand, she wore two rings, one on her thumb, another on her ring finger. She was laid off on the first Tuesday of the New Year, one week after her boyfriend, a third-year medical student, proposed.

Given her qualifications, naked intellect and unabashed love of real estate, Ms. Mitchell is something of a wasted resource. She earned a degree in city planning from Cornell in 2006 and a master’s in real estate development from Columbia in 2007, and along with a number of internships, she worked 18 months as an associate project manager at a boutique real estate firm, from which she was ultimately let go. Now, she survives on the beneficence of her parents, both Boston real estate lawyers, and the moral support of her fiancé.

“It’s tough, because, you know, we’re adults, and our parents still support us,” Ms. Mitchell said. “We want to be off on our own.”

Sometimes she gets lunch with real estate friends who work nearby, and they take her on tours of their ongoing projects. Afternoons like that make her “sad.” “It makes me want to be out there so badly,” she said.

She burns off her anxieties at the gym, surrounded by the heaving bodies of the fellow unemployed. Her midday, midweek gym classes are packed. Snippets of conversation—“interview this,” “recruiter that”—float through the air. Sometimes she escapes to museums, or to movies, like the one she shamefacedly admitted to seeing last Thursday: He’s Just Not That Into You.

HERE'S THE THING about this economy: It’s horrible and awful and incredibly painful for so many people, but for those who are nimble and brave and don’t have responsibilities, i.e., for those who are young, it’s also a great leveler, knocking the legs out from under the big guys, and giving the little guys a chance to grow.

Or so argues Jack Heaney, founder of the year-and-a-half-old Fulcrum. Mr. Heaney, 29, is nothing if not a talented salesman.

To get to Fulcrum’s stylishly outfitted workspace, one must enter a derelict Bleecker Street office shanty and trust one’s fate to a grimy elevator with dented walls and “Left 4 Dead,” scrawled in black marker on a porthole-shaped window. 

Mr. Heaney, originally from Chicago’s South Side, has wide-set blue eyes and a strong chin. That Friday morning, he wore a black blazer, a collarless black shirt and jeans.

“The economy is a great leveler,” said Mr. Heaney, as he began to lay out the case for why young bucks like he and his partner, Brooks Crowley, could exploit the down market, first by using non–recourse construction debt from HUD, and second by working with people whom larger developers wouldn’t deign to deal with.

Fulcrum is a development and asset-management consultant company. At the moment, Mr. Heaney is working on ground-up projects in the Rockaways and in West Philadelphia, and is consulting with developers on the Upper West Side.

“Hopefully, at the end of the cycle, we’ll build up enough of a nest egg to compete with the bigger guys,” Mr. Heaney said.

“There’s a great transfer of wealth from the haves to the have-nots,” chimed in Mr. Crowley, 28, who was recently laid off from a private-equity firm that invested in real estate. Mr. Crowley sat across from Mr. Heaney at the conference table, all fair-haired good looks, in a yellow buttoned-down shirt and pinstriped suit.

“That’s how Related got started; they started off doing HUD deals,” said Mr. Heaney, who, at times, jiggled his leg with enthusiasm.

Mr. Crowley noted that Sam Zell’s rise started unconventionally, too; in his case, investing in distressed assets.

Does Mr. Crowley want to be the next Sam Zell?

“I wouldn’t mind owning a baseball team,” he said. “I like the Cubs.”

RAMON MAISLEN arrived a few minutes early to a meeting on the second floor of a Flatiron coffee shop. He sat down at a window-side table, his healthy biceps rising beneath a black muscle shirt, the late morning sun streaking down into the 20th Street canyon, through the window, and across the right side of his face.

Mr. Maislen is the president of his 95-person master’s program in development at Columbia University’s architecture school, and an intern at Fulcrum. He and the others in his program have the misfortune of graduating into one of the worst job markets in decades.

“I think it’s pretty bad,” Mr. Maislen said. “I think it’s really bad.”

So, apparently, does every developer that’s spoken at his school this year. “I think people [in my class] are almost immune to it at this point, because basically every single speaker that’s come in has told us this is basically the worst economic situation they’ve ever experienced, and they’re over 60. So it’s basically just a joke amongst us at this point. We realize how bad it is and there is, nothing we can do but laugh.”

Mr. Maislen, who has the Hebrew words for “understanding” and “wisdom” tattooed on the inside of his upper arms, said he, for one, is not frightened.

“I’m an eternal optimist; that’s why I want to be a developer,” he said. “I’m not nervous. I don’t know why I’m not nervous. I’m just not. I think that it’s going to be O.K.”

Mr. Maislen graduates in May and is applying to a job at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. He’s also thinking about starting some sort of firm with a couple of his classmates.

“It’s like a hamster’s wheel,” he said. “And you just jump in. At whatever moment, you just jump in. It’s not that I lost tons of money in the downturn, because I didn’t have tons of money to begin with. So I can only go up from here.”

ON A THURSDAY in mid-February, Mr. McCann met me for a drink at the Trump Bar, on the ground floor of Donald Trump’s midtown skyscraper. It was the same location where, in December 2005 and November 2007, Mr. McCann hosted industry parties for more than 1,000 people a pop.

As Harsh Toprani, the managing director of another real estate start-up, Corbel Capital, put it, “Among some people, Mr. McCann is more famous than Donald Trump.”

He was exaggerating, of course. Nevertheless, Mr. McCann gets around.

At the 2007 party at Trump Bar, the Donald himself stopped by, striding over to Mr. McCann and asking, “So you’re the one who put this together?” Mr. McCann said yes. He asked Mr. Trump to pose for a photo with him. Mr. Trump obliged.

Fifteen months later, sipping a Manhattan cocktail, light on the sweet vermouth, Mr. McCann talked about his recent layoff, his unlikely foray into the makeup business and the real estate market in general. Mr. McCann, who lives in Williamsburg, wore jeans with a gaping hole in the left knee, a stylish hoodie and spiky hair.

His voice was low-pitched, his eyelids languid, his overall air a touch laconic. “I’m a Type B extrovert,” he explained. “Most extroverts are Type A.”

Mr. McCann comes from Omaha, son of an absentee steelworker and a former nun. He has 35 first cousins. He says he’s loved real estate ever since he was a babe.

“Buildings and people are my two favorite things in the world, which made [coming to] New York a no-brainer.”

He moved here about eight years ago, ultimately getting a gig as an analyst at a real estate capital advisory firm in 2005. He got laid off in the second quarter of 2008.

So he started looking for opportunities elsewhere. The makeup artist friend of his, Mike Potter, suggested they start a company. And so was borne Knock Out Cosmetics, which specializes in matte nail polish and opened its first counter in February, at Henri Bendel no less. DailyCandy called the polish “powerful, elegant, iconic,” and InStyle magazine named it an editor’s pick this March.

“You have to do whatever it takes to survive,” said Mr. McCann, who is also holding down two bartending jobs, one at Heathers, the other at Local 138.

“I’m also continuing to host my real estate events, because I feel they’re important in times like these.”

Which brings us back to the party Mr. McCann hosted at Stone Rose on Jan. 28. The room and the mood harked back to a pre-Lehman era. Through the glass curtain wall, the bar overlooked the gray facade of the Museum of Arts and Design. Lights from neighboring apartment houses twinkled like relics of a happier season.

Francis Greenburger, the industry veteran, encouraged his young audience not to give up on real estate just yet. “Our job, today and frankly always, is to find exceptions to the rule,” Mr. Greenburger said. “If it was easy, everybody would be successful.

“We also know the times are ripe with opportunity for those who can see beyond the doom and gloom.”

The talk wrapped up.

The hundreds of young professionals in the room saluted Mr. Greenburger with whistles and cheers.

drubinstein@observer.com

“She essentially asked me if she were to do this, she would hope that she would have my support,” said Mr. Engel. “I told her she would.”

In a half-hour conversation, the two asked after each other’s spouses, joked about taking full Spanish-immersion lessons together and reminisced about thrashing their primary opponents in this year’s election.

Then Mrs. Clinton laid it out for him.

“She told me that if she did this, she thought that there were a number of states she could win,” said Mr. Engel. “She could win all the Kerry states plus a bunch of other states. We talked a bit about Ohio and Florida.”

After months of shrouding herself in studied ambiguity about her Presidential intentions, Mrs. Clinton is campaigning. Finally.

Pushed into action by the ostentatious temperature-taking exercises of fellow Senator and media superstar Barack Obama, she has launched into the necessary spadework of campaign-building in earnest. She has been contacting top lawmakers in her home state and in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire to ask for support, and has set up individual and group meetings with top Democratic donors she’ll need to fuel her political operation.

She didn’t start a moment too soon.

Mr. Obama’s visit to New York this week to address a crowd at a charity event—and to flirt with the press and on Mrs. Clinton’s home turf—created the unmistakable feeling of a challenge to her primacy within the party.

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, for their part, seemed all too happy to respond.

“Someone like Barack Obama—who is suddenly a real candidate—always worries me, because he is a novice candidate,” said Representative Jerry Nadler, who is backing Mrs. Clinton. “Novice candidates—not always, but 95 percent of the time—make a mistake. I made some terrible mistakes in office when I was district leader. No one remembers what they are; I wasn’t in front of all the news cameras.”

And in stark contrast to the hypnotically repeated line endorsed by the Clinton press office and dutifully delivered by in-the-loop supporters until this week—that Mrs. Clinton was a long way from even making up her mind about 2008—her donors are now saying publicly that, at this point, it’s only a matter of time before her candidacy is officially launched.

“There are two possibilities,” said Francis Greenburger, a prominent literary agent and Democratic donor who sits on Mrs. Clinton’s finance committee. “Either she announces at some point that she is going to be a declared candidate, or she postpones the announcement for a period of time.”

To call this an epic departure is an understatement. Mrs. Clinton’s Presidential aspirations have always been strictly implicit. Rarely has an indiscreet word escaped her lips, and her sharp-elbowed Senate staff has obsessively, and very effectively, insulated her from unwanted questions from the press.

Since her lopsided Senate re-election victory in November, her low profile was so pronounced that the Hillary-obsessed Web site JustHillary.com actually instituted a feature that counted the days since her last confirmed public appearance.

As a result, the long-anticipated news of her low-key activities—starting with a story in the Dec. 3 New York Times Metro section about her calls to local Democratic officials—exploded into the media will all the force of an official declaration of intent.

Further amplification arrived with the news that she had lined up Jonathan Mantz, a Congressional fund-raiser, to the critical job of national finance director; Phil Singer, a former spokesman of the committee that engineered the Democratic takeover of the Senate; and Karen Hicks, an alumna of Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign, as national field director.

And then there were hastily scheduled meetings with Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and powerful Congressman Charlie Rangel.

During the last week of November, according to Mr. Rangel, he received an urgent call from Mrs. Clinton asking to meet him as soon as possible. A few days later, on the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 30, the two met for a private, two-hour meeting over coffee and fruit in the back of the Jyraffe, a small restaurant in Washington Heights.

“We talked about a lot of things,” said Mr. Rangel, who said he has not yet decided who to endorse in ’08. “In order for these things to be successful, we decided we had to play our cards close to the vest and not discuss the subject matter.”

Several other officials were more forthcoming about their encounters with the odds-on front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

Representative Anthony Weiner received his call on Nov. 30, in the form of a message on his BlackBerry from a member of Mrs. Clinton’s staff, inquiring if the Senator could reach him on his cell phone.

Representative Gregory Meeks—who was John Kerry’s most visible supporter in New York in 2004—heard from Mrs. Clinton by phone on Dec. 4. He said he told Mrs. Clinton that he was eager to offer her “the same kind of energy that I brought to John Kerry’s campaign,” and added that “she was very pleased with that.”

Mrs. Clinton has worked just as assiduously to line up donors and fund-raisers, who tend to enjoy attention from the candidates that benefit from their largesse.

Mr. Greenburger, for example, received a thank-you note from Mrs. Clinton after he sent her and Bill autographed copies of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. (Mrs. Clinton had told Mr. Greenburger “that she and Bill like Dan Brown’s books.”)

“She gets an A-plus on communications, she gets an A-plus on graciousness, and she gets an A-plus on her staff,” said Mr. Greenburger. “Those are all important strengths.”

John Catsimatidis, the supermarket magnate and Clinton loyalist, received a dinner invitation from Mrs. Clinton on Thursday. He didn’t waste any time before taking shots at the viability of her potential rival.

“To take Obama seriously at this stage of the game is very naïve,” said Mr. Catsimatidis. “He’s not ready for prime time. What, do you want to take the weatherman from Boise, Idaho, and put him in New York City? I mean, give me a break.”

Still, for all Mrs. Clinton’s enormous advantages, it looks like she may be getting in just in time.

An entire field of Democratic hopefuls has been beating a path to Park Avenue apartments in search of contributions for months now. Evan Bayh, John Edwards and Tom Vilsack, who declared his candidacy this week—more than 700 days before the election—have become virtual houseguests in some donors’ apartments.

And this week, as Mrs. Clinton was going down her phone list, Mr. Obama himself came to town. Lanky and confident, he stepped out of the elevator and onto the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where he encountered dozens of reporters, a New York Yankee and 500 people who had paid to hear his message at a charity event.

Reporters asked him about Mrs. Clinton and his answer was appropriately deferential.

“I’m not one of those people who believe she can’t win,” he said.

But he was all business when asked about his other appointments in town, Mr. Obama said, “When I got down here, I got with people who had been supporters of mine in the past.”

(According to The New York Times, that group turned out to include George Soros, the billionaire and liberal political activist, who hosted a get-together for Mr. Obama and some donors in his office.)

After delivering a speech about societal empathy that made heavy use of Bobby Kennedy’s experiences in Mississippi, Mr. Obama fed himself to the pack of New York reporters crammed into the hotel’s nearby Lotus Room. Journalists literally stepped over each other in a struggle for proximity. A photographer’s obsessive clicking illuminated the Senator’s face like a strobe light. So many television cameras sapped electricity from the wall that they caused a mini-brownout. “It’s Hillary,” said New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser to the Senator. “She’s got her finger on the switch.”

Just a few blocks away, Senator Joseph Biden—another prospective candidate for President—was set to deliver a speech about Iraq at a meeting of the Israel Policy Forum at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

Mr. Nadler, who was standing off to the side of the audience, took a moment to recount his phone conversation with Mrs. Clinton. At one point, he said, she addressed the big question of whether or not she was going to run.

“She said to me she was leaning heavily toward it,” Mr. Nadler said.

And with Mr. Biden lingering just a few feet away, he explained why he felt that was a good thing. “I don’t see a lot of other good possibilities in our party,” he said.

—additional reporting by Azi Paybarah and Choire Sicha

"We bought the lot because we were thinking of building an extension there," said Alix Friedman, the Y's director of public relations. "But [after the donation], we came to see that the West Side facility serves our space needs. We've taken another look at the East Side property and decided we don't need it. The board has authorized us to sell it."

The vacant lot is located at 125 East 92nd Street, and is bounded on both sides by residential townhouses. Ms. Friedman declined to put a minimum price on the property, but she said she has already received several unsolicited bids.

The Y purchased the 25-foot-wide lot for $1.035 million in 1996, when the confines of its main headquarters at 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue began to prove too close for comfort.

"We're in a 73-year-old building that's bursting at the seams," said Ms. Friedman. "We had people who were working in what were literally closets."

The previous owners of the lot, a husband and wife, had bought the property themselves after a condemned townhouse on the spot had been torn down. The couple had to abandon their plans to erect a new house when it became too expensive to realize their vision. They then sold it to the Y, which spent the next several years embroiled in a dispute with its Carnegie Hill neighbors over the Y's plans to erect a five-story institutional building on the site. But by early 2001, with the zoning battle won, the Y was on the verge of breaking ground for the new building when it, too, halted its development plans for the lot.

That February, Michael Steinhardt, a retired hedge-fund manager and founder of Makor, an Upper West Side Jewish cultural center, announced that he was donating the Makor building to the Y, and that the two organizations would merge. His gift was a double-wide 22,000-square-foot townhouse on 67th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.

The still-vacant 92nd Street lot measures 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep. Neighbors include Woody Allen, who owns a townhouse one block to the west.

Co-op King Sells Village Townhouse In 'Unsentimental' $4.7 M. Deal

In the 1980's, developer Francis Greenburger earned the nickname "King of the Co-ops" by converting more than 10,000 New York rental apartments into co-ops. The real-estate crash of the late 80's wasn't kind to his company, Time Equities Inc., but he's since clawed his way back to the top, and-proving he's no sentimentalist-he just unloaded a rental building that was extremely close to his heart.

In mid-February, Mr. Greenburger sold a four-unit Greenwich Village townhouse that he and his family had lived in for about 15 years.

"Frankly, the rental market was not strong enough," Mr. Greenburger said. "It was economically more advantageous to sell it than to rent it."

The building, at 43 West 10th Street, had been home to Mr. Greenburger and his family from 1985 until right around 1999, when he and his kin moved to a larger house on Waverly Place. It's now owned by Jan Carendi, the new head of American operations for Allianz A.G., the financial-services conglomerate. Mr. Carendi paid $4.7 million for the house, which was delivered vacant. A spokesperson for Allianz said that Mr. Carendi was in Germany and unavailable for comment.

While they were living on West 10th Street, the Greenburgers occupied the duplex apartment on the second and third floors, while other tenants occupied the ground level and top floors. Mr. Greenburger exercised his option to buy the building in 1998 for $1.8 million.

"It had what I thought was one of the nicest gardens in the neighborhood," Mr. Greenburger said. "And not only was the garden nice, but the adjacent houses' gardens were nice, too. That's one of the things I miss: the way [our garden] looked out to others around it. Birds were singing … it was very pleasant."

Mr. Greenburger said his company is currently involved in about 25 real-estate deals across the country, including a conversion project for a 100-plus apartment complex in Freeport, Long Island.

RECENT TRANSACTIONS IN THE REAL ESTATE MARKET

UPPER EAST SIDE

1623 Third Avenue

Four-bedroom, four-bathroom condo.

Asking: $1.1 million. Selling: $940,000.

Charges: $1,303. Taxes: $998.

Time on the market: one month.

CATERING TO THE KIDS As the owner of Michelle's Kitchen, a lunch spot and catering restaurant on Lexington Avenue between 61st and 62nd streets, Samir Billan is well versed in the precepts of space efficiency. Despite its relatively small size, Michelle's exports some gargantuan catering orders every day. The Kitchen also attracts a star-studded roster of regulars who include Hugh Grant, Brooke Shields, Paul Newman and many former First Ladies. "I still have a $20 bill that Jackie O. used to pay for her wild mushroom soup," said Mr. Billan. Despite being able to wring such an operation out of his diminutive store, Mr. Billan, 50, recently decided that he no longer wanted to meet that kind of challenge on the home front. He and his wife have six children, ranging in age from 3 to 14, and their old three-bedroom apartment just wasn't cutting it. "When you have six children in that tiny of a space," he said, "everything gets lost." The margin of difference, in Mr. Billan's case, turned out to be just one more bedroom. When he closed on and moved into this four-bedroom spread at Rupert Towers-a new condo conversion at 92nd Street-everything seemed to fall into place. "When you have a bigger space, everyone knows where their stuff is," he said. "It's really like heaven when you have a big apartment." And as you would expect, Mr. Billan put in a kitchen fit for a caterer. "I can cook for 40 to 50 people here," he said. "I used marble for the table, cabinets, and put in a G.E. six-burner stove." Kathleen Rupy of Michel Madie Real Estate Services brokered the deal.

UPPER WEST SIDE

277 West End Avenue

Three-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $1.695 million. Selling: $1.645 million.

Maintenance: $1,466; 48 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: three weeks.

PRAGUE-ON-THE-HUDSON Between 1990 and 1997, the American couple who bought this apartment were living in Prague, helping the new Czech government in the country's transition from communism to democracy. She was working alongside then-President Vaclav Havel on Czech-U.S. and Czech-NATO relations, and he was heading the East West Institute, a think tank and consulting organization dedicated to democratic economic and political reforms. The seven-year immersion in Old World architecture apparently left an impression. "When we moved back here," the think tanker said, "we wanted to look for an apartment that would have the same architectural details and graciousness of the places we were living in in Europe." They settled first, happily, at a European spread at 50 Riverside Drive. But with the addition of their first child, they decided to look for some more breathing room, and set off on what became a year-long, Manhattan-wide search with independent broker Katie Rodgers. As before, they insisted on finding a pre-war apartment with Old World European details. They found just the thing in this pre-war seven-room spread. It has about 1,700 square feet, separate living and dining rooms, and a windowed kitchen. "We still get to live that lifestyle that we learned to love in Europe," said the father.

MIDTOWN

303 East 57th Street

One-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $375,000. Selling: $350,000.

Maintenance: $1850; 14 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: three months.

IN FLAGRANTE DELICTO There are plenty of ways to scare off potential purchasers of an apartment: leaky pipes, tiny closets, noisy neighbors. But in this case, it turned out to be the sellers themselves. An Upper East Side broker, who asked not to be identified, had the exclusive on this estate-sale apartment at the Excelsior, a land-lease building overlooking the East River. It used to belong to a woman who ran an antique-jewelry store in midtown, but because it was now vacant, the broker had gotten carte blanche from the owner's family to show the apartment at all hours. So when one interested couple said that they wanted to check out the 1,300-square-foot spread at 11 p.m. one night, the broker readily agreed and took them for a late-night tour. The walk-through was proceeding well-if uneventfully-when the touring trio threw open the doors to the master bedroom and startled a slumbering couple. At this, the broker and her clients ran out of the room, stammering apologies in their wake. It turned out the late owner's son and his girlfriend had dropped by for the night to pack up some family belongings. "Not in their dreams did they think anyone would be showing the apartment at that time," the broker said. "It was kind of embarrassing, to say the least." She didn't try to make formal contact with them that night, waiting instead until the next day to make another apology. Happily, the son and his girlfriend didn't have any hard feelings-but as for the broker's clients, it was sayonara . "They were a little spooked," she said. "I never heard from them again." Luckily for the broker, she found a pair of takers in a couple who lived in the building and wanted to upgrade. He's a consultant for an investment firm, and she's an interior designer who will have her work cut out for her, since the apartment was in estate-sale condition-a nice way of saying that it needs just about everything.