By Matt Chaban 12/06/12 4:10pm

Skyscraper Living

Bound for the heavens. (432park.com)

Watch New York’s Tallest Building, 432 Park Avenue, Rise in Real-Time on a Secret Sky Cam Site

The condo tower rising at 432 Park Avenue may be the most fascinating development project in the city. Sure, it can boast of being the tallest building rising in the city at the moment, to an eventual height of 1,397 feet (29 feet higher than the roof of 1 World Trade Center). It is also set to be the most expensive. But even more so, it is the secrecy of the building’s developers, CIM Group and Harry Macklowe, that make the project all the more intriguing.

Very few details about the project have been released, and none of them publicly. Even renderings are clandestine. Which is why it is amazing that not one or even two but three different skycams have been whirring away at the site for the past year, showing it off in real-time, free for anyone to look—except that no one thought to. Read More

By Kim Velsey 11/01/12 7:16pm

Stratospheric Sales

A personal real estate investment.

Real Estate Scion Billy Macklowe Gets Back to Business With Fifth Avenue Buy

What better way to pass these strange, disordered days after Hurricane Sandy than by inking the contract for a $27.5 million apartment on the Upper East Side? Harry Macklowe’s son, budding real estate dynamo Billy Macklowe, certainly thought so, at least according to The New York Post. The Post reports that Mr. Macklowe signed an under-ask contract for a four-bedroom, 5.5-bath co-op apartment at 950 Fifth Avenue. Read More

By Matt Chaban 10/05/12 4:36pm

Skyscraper Living

Going up. (NYT)

432 Park Will Not Only Be New York’s Tallest Building But Also, at $2.43 B., Its Most Expensive

So we are obsessed with the changing skyline along 57th Street, so we are always excited and intrigued by new renderings that pop up for it. The latest may also be the greatest, and while 432 Park Avenue is nothing new, the pic that ran in The Times today gives the clearest indication yet of just how big this spindly behemoth will be. At 1,397 feet, the ritzy condo building surpasses 1 World Trade Center, less its spire, by 29 feet, boasting by some measures the biggest building in New York status. Read More

By Kim Velsey 9/04/12 11:12am

Dizzying Designs

Prices may rise in tandem with the tower.

Higher Tower, Higher Prices: Is 432 Park Avenue Upping Its Asking Prices?

With everyone else tacking on millions to the asks for their apartments, we guess 432 Park Avenue wanted to get in on the action, even if the most soaring of soaring residential towers has yet to break ground. Why should One57 and 15 Central Park West rake in all the cash? Especially when 432 Park Avenue is set to be the tallest residential building in the city at 1,395 feet? Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/05/12 11:53am

Dizzying Designs

Hello Midtown.

Just How Crazy Will New York’s Tallest New Building Be? The 432 Park Avenue Pics You’ve Been Waiting For

Last week, The Journal got its hands on a 67-page marketing packet for Harry Macklowe and CIM’s soaring tower at 432 Park Avenue, the former Drake Hotel site where the developers are working on the tallest tower in the entire city, apartment or otherwise.

In their write-up, Journal journalist Eliot Brown and Craig Karmin mentioned that inside the packet “are a collection of striking images of what would be the tallest residential tower in the U.S. at 1,395 feet as well as a number of other interesting factoids about the tower, called 432 Park.”

Those factoids are below, but what obviously whet The Observer‘s appetite most was the promise of “striking images” (we have a thing for those) that were sadly absent from The Journal‘s report. But no more. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/27/12 5:07pm

Skyscraper Living

To infinity, and beyond. (CIM)

The Tallest Building in New York City, 432 Park Avenue, Is Now Rising

The Observer was wandering along 57th Street today when we saw an unexpected sight: a cement truck backed up to the old Drake Hotel site. Two of them actually, one dumping its payload into the maw that Macklowe built while another waited to do so.

And so, a new era for our ever-more-spindly skyline begins, thanks to Harry Macklowe and his secretive partners at CIM. See what the future holds after the jump. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/03/12 3:00pm

power broker

Baxter, Richard NEW 6 31 11

Richard Baxter Dishes on the Drama Behind the Deals at Casa Lever

It was lunchtime at Casa Lever, the high-end restaurant in the iconic Lever House, and Richard Baxter was on his BlackBerry negotiating.

It was a busy year for Mr. Baxter and his colleagues at Jones Lang LaSalle. His four-man team comprised some of the city’s most prominent brokers of large-scale commercial office buildings, and as the Manhattan sales market’s post-recessionary thaw continues, Mr. Baxter estimated that the group had tallied an impressive $1.3 billion in deals this year.

Three days before Christmas, however, it wasn’t one particular skyscraper Mr. Baxter was bargaining over from his plum seat at Casa Lever. In a year-end rush, his group had loose ends to tie up, deals to close and transactions still in the works. And so, on this particular Thursday amid a bustling lunch crowd, Mr. Baxter was not negotiating with a buyer or a building owner, but rather one of his own assistants, whom he was asking to stay late to receive critical documents and to help get the team through the rest of the day. Read More

1:30pm

power broker

David E. Green

The Repositionist of 2 Park Avenue

Even in Manhattan, a building can go stale.

In Midtown South, for example, a commercial property can amass a litany of blue-chip legal practices and financial services firms in one decade, and then, 10 years later, watch as its tenant portfolio withers in prestige.

Take 2 Park Avenue. The building once served as the base of operations for Newsday and Times Mirror Inc. back in the 1980s and 1990s and more recently for The Hartford, the Connecticut-based insurance company. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 12/07/11 2:00pm

ICSC

i-love-new-york

The White Whale of West 57th Street: Nordstrom appears poised for NYC

It’s the great white whale of Manhattan retail.

Aside from Walmart, Nordstrom is the store every retail broker in the city dreams of harpooning and reeling into a new home. One prominent broker familiar with the store, the amount of space it needs and the rents it would probably be willing to pay estimates that the commission for handling its lease would be around $10 million.

But like a leviathan lurking beneath the waves, the department store has offered only fleeting glimpses around the city, most notably at several development sites and a few existing assets with the capacity to accommodate its sprawling footprint.

The scuttlebutt nowadays: Nordstrom is contemplating one of two leases, one at the West Side rail yards with the Related Companies or another at the base of Extell Development’s soaring new residential tower now rising at 157 West 57th Street. Read More

By Matt Chaban 10/25/11 10:13am

Machers

It's a swell deal. (Getty)

DEAR SIR! Harry Macklowe Requests the Benificence of Your Honest Investment in Bangladesh

Those email scammers sure are clever. Instead of continuing to make up foreign kings and dictators who have miraculously and mysteriously chosen you—yes, you!—for the riches they must now dispose of, they are using real, honest to god Americans, if slightly embellished, to attract patsies, err, investors.

Today, The Observer received one such email, with an offer to join “Mr. HARRY MACKLOWE, Biggest Land Owner of United State & Founder Chairman & Owner of Macklowe Properties” in an investment to establish a real estate investment in Bangladesh. Biggest Land Owner of United States? How could you say no! Still, something tells us Mr. Macklowe is plenty busy here at home, but in case you have a spare $2 million, we’ve included the details below. Read More