Bound for the heavens. (432park.com)

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.

"On September 26th, 2011 Macklowe Properties and CIM Group began excavating the construction site for 432 Park Avenue," a banner at 432parkavenue.com reads. "Simultaneously, we strategically installed three cameras overlooking the site so that our friends and supporters would be able to watch our extraordinary building take shape."

One almost gets the sense this site was intended just for friends and supporters, since the developers never bothered to publicize it.

A Berenholtz special, from September. (432park.com)

Internet data reveals that the cameras went live online sometime this summer at 432parkavenue.com, before which it was just a placeholder page. It features skycams overlooking the development from Park Avenue, 56th Street and 57th Street. There is also a rather stunning set of black and white slideshows by Richard Berenholtz, the architect-turned photographer well know for books like Manhattan Architecture and New York, New York. These sorts of photo-treatments have become de rigeur for developers, from Annie Liebovitz's Building the Times to the Port Authority's WTCprogress.com.

Currently, there are 16 slideshows on the site, mostly showing demolition of the row houses the developers had tried for years to buyout, and the slow setting of the foundation. The most recent gallery is from October, showing the building just above ground level. As the live cam shows, it has since progressed a few stories from there along the 57th Street side.

With One57 almost finished—the crane accident not withstanding—and 225 West 57th not yet ready to rise, all eyes will be one this tower, and these webcams, as the battle for skyline supremacy takes off.

A personal real estate investment.

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.

Mr. Macklowe, who first stepped out of his father's real estate shadow with a 636 Avenue of the Americas buy last November, has apparently decided it's time to acquire a new home more suited to his growing reputation in the real estate world. The duplex apartment spanning the fifth and sixth floors certainly (and perhaps more than) fits the bill. A sprawling prewar pad overlooking Central Park with parquet de Versailles floors, lots of wood-burning fireplaces (in case the next hurricane hits the Upper East Side) and plenty of built-ins and custom cabinetry, the co-op is listed with Stribling brokers Cindy Kurtin and Jessica Vertullo Maher.

But is it as nice as sis Elizabeth Macklowe's co-op at 740 Park? Ms. Macklowe and estranged husband Kent Swig's home was, last we heard, in the midst of foreclosure proceedings, but it's hard to beat a spread in the fanciest building in the city. Perhaps Mr. Macklowe's purchase was inspired by a little sibling rivalry. Or a brave show of support for the city as it grapples with rebuilding in the days ahead?

kvelsey@observer.com

Going up. (NYT)

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.

It will also be the most expensive, as The Times, which got its hands on the condo's offering plan, reveals:

The apartments will be large, and very expensive, with an 8,255-square-foot six-bedroom penthouse on the 95th floor being listed for $82.55 million, according to the condominium’s offering plan.

The Park Avenue tower’s 147 residential units, which have already undergone two price increases totaling 3 percent, are being listed, when counted together, for $2.43 billion, a record for a residential development, appraisers say.

That penthouse will not beat out the prices at rival One57, where at least one unit has already surpassed $90 million, nor the previous record holder, 15 Central Park and its $88 million manse-in-the-sky. Will it have the same ability to attract the world's billionaires as those buildings, or are we running out?

Another important question: Who gets to cut the ribbon?

Will it be Harry B. Macklowe, the legendary developer who has survived a roller-coaster career of highs and lows? Or the CIM Group, the Los Angeles-based real estate investment company that acquired the land, on the site of the old Drake Hotel, after Mr. Macklowe defaulted on his loan in 2007?

Both are listed in the tower’s offering plan. While some real estate executives in New York are embracing a familiar narrative for the famously risk-loving Mr. Macklowe for staging yet another comeback, just how involved he will be in the building’s development—and eventual profits—remains a mystery to outsiders.

How could something so insistent and ostentatious contain so many mysteries? Perhaps it is all part of the plot. How better to draw attention away from your skyline-topping rivals?

Prices may rise in tandem with the tower.

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?

In her weekly luxury market report, Donna Olshan of Donna Olshan Realty writes that sources tell her that the blended average asking price in the building will be about $5,800-a-square foot. Last we heard (when The Wall Street Journal snagged a brochure for the luxury high-rise this June), the average ask was at $4,500-a-square foot. One57 is still more expensive even with the price increase, offering some bargain prices of around $3,500-a-square foot on the lower levels, but charging as much as $13,000-a-sqaure foot for the penthouse (which is currently in contract for somewhere north of $90 million).

Of course, we'd expect some more price adjustments before sales start at the Harry Macklowe/CIM project (although Ms. Olshan said that the building is due to come on the market as soon as this fall!). Even One57, which just recently topped out, scrambled to bump their asking prices up after Sandy Weill sold his 15 CPW penthouse for $88 million last December.

So what kinds of luxuries and amenities can residents at the 117-unit building expect? Designed by Rafael Viñoly with interiors by Deborah Berke, the building is set to offer residents onsite housekeeping, valet parking, a 75-foot pool, a yoga studio, a fitness center, a billiards room, a children's playroom, a screening room, six elevators, a landscaped sculpture garden and a 64-seat private restaurant that opens onto a huge terrace. Also, owners will be able to buy offices below the 34th floor for those who hate to walk/take a Town Car to work.

Not that anyone will be seeing any of these touches anytime soon. The building is not expected to be finished until 2015.

kvelsey@observer.com

Hello Midtown.

Those are some views.

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.

The Observer put out a call for some of the renderings and got lucky with two. Our understanding is there are more, basically all showing the building through the day from diffferent angles. What may be as striking as the height and the views is how singular it looks from all sides--quite the contrary from its rival One57, which with its waterfall-like facade looks different from all sides. It almost reminds us of the Trump obelisk near the U.N.

Now, for those factoids, courtesy The Journal:

The tower, designed by Rafael Viñoly and developed by Harry Macklowe, is expected to cost $1.2 billion; when everything is completed, CIM projects it would net $2.5 billion from sales of residential units and and other space, which is mostly retail.

Its 128 units would vary in size from 1,390 square feet to more than 8,000 square feet.

The expected average sales price is $4,500 per square foot, which would be below recent resales at the Time Warner Center and asking prices at One57.

CIM expects to pre-sell 40 of them, and then sell four per month; closings are expected to begin in October 2014, and the building is planned to hit “substantial completion” in April 2015.

There would be 25 studios “to house residential support staff.”

The retail would run along 57th Street with 101 feet of frontage.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Going up... and up and up and up. (Matt Chaban)

To infinity, and beyond. (CIM)

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.

To those not in the know, 432 Park Avenue will surpass Gary Barnett's One57 as the tallest residences in the city, which will surpass the current title holder, Frank Gehry and Bruce Ratner's Eight Spruce Street/New York by Gehry. And while the 400-foot spire will technically make 1 World Trade Center taller, does that really count?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

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.

Richard Baxter. (Illustration by Joao Maio Pinto

“She was going to take the train to Boston,” said Mr. Baxter, after hanging up with his assistant. “But we just booked her a flight for later this evening.”

Such are the costs of deal making in the city, much like lunching in prime and pricey spots like Casa Lever. On the way in, Mr. Baxter, along with JLL colleagues Ron Cohen and Glenn Tolchin, stopped to chat with Jon Mechanic and Sush Torgalkar, who were having lunch at a nearby table. The conversation that ensued had all the easy chatter and laughs of old acquaintances catching up, yet it wasn’t difficult to imagine how casual encounters like this can spawn business. Mr. Mechanic is the city’s top transactional real estate attorney and Mr. Torgalkar is the chief operating officer of Westbrook Partners, an active buyer and seller with holdings that include boutique asset 444 Madison Avenue.

A natural networker with a sharp wit, Mr. Baxter seems readily able to take advantage of such opportunities. Having a grasp of the industry’s personalities is helpful in brokerage, allowing a level of insight beyond the facts and figures of a transaction. To hear him tell it, simmering disputes, hidden ambitions and other underlying factors can play as much of a role in sealing a deal as an investment’s rate of return or a building’s vacancy.

Settling into what he claimed was the real estate investor Aby Rosen’s usual booth, Mr. Baxter shifted conversation to the Seagram Building, the trophy tower that sits across Park Avenue from Lever House and, like Lever, is also owned by Mr. Rosen.

Years ago, Mr. Baxter was one of the brokers who sold a stake in the property to the billionaire investor Peter Brant. Earlier this year, Mr. Brant traded that interest at a huge profit to the Blackstone Group.

Rumors in the industry circulated that the sale had as much to do with Mr. Brant’s soured relationship with Mr. Rosen as it did cashing in the stake’s big returns. According to published reports, in fact, Mr. Rosen had allegedly made insulting comments about Mr. Brant’s wife, the former supermodel Stephanie Seymour.

“A woman’s scorn,” Mr. Baxter said, acknowledging with both amusement and marvel the dramatic sequence of events that may have led to the investment’s turnover.

In a more recent deal that Mr. Baxter wasn’t involved in but that also highlighted the hidden psychology underpinning the business, SL Green, among the city’s largest commercial landlords, was rumored to have snapped up the office building 10 East 53rd Street. SL Green has been one of the city’s most active acquirers of office buildings, specially through the downturn in the market when prices sagged from record highs. But the JLL team’s assessment of the deal was more penetrating than attributing it simply to SL Green’s voracious appetite.

SL Green had likely been disappointed at not getting 510 Madison Avenue, a nearby building that the firm nearly foreclosed on last year by buying up the property’s debt. The deal had slipped away from the firm when the rival REIT Boston Properties recapitalized the property, taking control. SL Green was paid handsomely, but 10 East 53rd Street was its way of restoring a bruised ego, picking up a boutique building that can potentially compete for the same kinds of tenants that 510 Madison Avenue attracts.

What is such insight worth in a deal? Perhaps not much. But if a broker’s job is to decide who is going to have the extra oomph to fully realize a property’s potential value, perhaps a lot.

“It is a matter of marketing and finding the buyer with the right vision for the asset,” Mr. Baxter said. “Directing the buyer towards maximizing the property’s true potential enables us to obtain premium pricing for our sellers. The five to ten percent premium wins the property. That is what our team does.”

Mr. Baxter and his team’s grasp of the industry’s players has paid off in the deals they have arranged in recent months. This year, the group sold both 737 Park Avenue and 150 East 72nd Street, for $360 million and $70 million respectively, to Harry Macklowe. Mr. Macklowe, once the prince of Manhattan’s real estate industry, took a precipitous and publicized fall during the recession. Though few doubted that Mr. Macklowe was still well-heeled enough to compete for major assets in the city, the acquisitions marked a surprising comeback and earned Mr. Baxter and his team accolades for identifying Mr. Macklowe as a buyer with resilience when many others had counted him out.

Mr. Baxter began his career during the early 1980s in sales brokerage at Newmark, where he and Mr. Cohen first became brokerage partners. The pair shifted to the Edward S. Gordon Company by the 1990s, at the time one of the city’s major real estate firms. ESG, as the firm’s name was abbreviated, eventually was acquired, first by Insignia, and later by the world’s biggest real estate services firm, CBRE.

CBRE, however, already had a powerful brokerage duo in place: Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan, who had a contractual right at the company to broker its deals in the city, said Mr. Baxter and Mr. Cohen. With a bustling business of their own, the pair proposed merging into a four-member group to defuse a potential rivalry and allow everyone to operate within Manhattan.

“It got complicated,” Mr. Baxter said about the talks then to join the teams, preferring not to go into the details of what those complications entailed.

Soon after, the pair ended up departing for Cushman & Wakefield, where they met Scott Latham and Jon Caplan, two sales executives at the firm. The two groups quickly merged and have been negotiating deals together ever since, although they have their specialties.

Mr. Cohen, for instance, has focused on recruiting foreign buyers and sellers into the team’s pipeline of contacts and deals, especially from Israel, where he is from and where investors have been active in the New York commercial real estate market in recent years. The four-man team’s time at C&W proved successful: In 2007, the group brokered the $1.8 billion sale of 666 Fifth Avenue, then the biggest commercial office sale in Manhattan, to the real estate investor, and Commercial Observer owner, Jared Kushner.

Last year, however, Mr. Baxter and his colleagues took a gamble, leaving Cushman for the rival brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle. The move, one of the biggest shakeups in the city’s investment sales industry in years, was a clear victory for JLL, whose lack of a competitive sales team was becoming increasingly conspicuous in the eyes of many real estate observers, not least of all those at the dominant brokerage firm CBRE.

For a time, the team seemed to lose ground to competitors like Ms. Stacom and Mr. Shanahan, who in 2010 appeared to re-energize the investment sales market by scoring a string of prominent sales, not least among them 340 Madison Avenue, 125 Park Avenue and 600 Lexington Avenue.

But Baxter and the team have regained ground. Aside from prominent deals like the pair of residential buildings the group sold to Mr. Macklowe, the team has sold smaller but still-lucrative assets, like 15 Little West 12th Street, which the group traded to investor Steve Elghanayan for $70 million in May. In June, they sold 70 Pine Street to Metro Loft for $205 million.

Heading into 2012, meanwhile, the group has even bigger deals in the pipeline. Indeed, the team will be hitting the market in the upcoming quarter with two prominent assets—one of them in Midtown, the other in Midtown South—that Mr. Baxter expects will trade for $600 million and $300 million respectively. “New York is a huge market and the way we look at it, there’s room enough for everyone,” Mr. Baxter said.

Mr. Baxter, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Tolchin were clearly in a hurry to leave Casa Lever. With so much to do, they had ordered a car to meet out front and shuttle them back to the office. By then, Mr. Mechanic and

Mr. Torgalkar had left, but in their place was Andrew Mathias, president of SL Green and the man in charge of overseeing acquisitions at the firm. Mr. Baxter and his team exchanged hellos and slid in to catch up.

The sense of urgency to leave was suddenly gone. The office could wait.

dgeiger@observer.com

David E. Green

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.

But newspapers and insurance companies are far from lustrous in a real estate market that has seen an influx of younger and savvier tech companies infiltrate an area like Midtown South, which boasted the lowest vacancy rate in the country in the third quarter of 2011, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report released in October.

“Like anything else in life, things go stale, and you need a fresh face,” said David E. Green, 47, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield who has also worked for Sutton & Edwards, Harry Macklowe and others through his 25-year career in the business.

Mr. Green and a Cushman & Wakefield team became the exclusive leasing agents for 2 Park Avenue in 2010. This was Mr. Green’s second time working with the vibrantly designed, landmarked, Art Deco building, the first coming during his time at Vornado Realty Trust, which owned the building then (Morgan Stanley Prime Property Fund now owns 2 Park Avenue).

When the Hartford agreed to take 90,000 square feet at 277 Park Avenue, moving its Manhattan headquarters uptown, it left three floors of vacant space on the hands of Mr. Green and the Cushman & Wakefield team.

Luckily for them, online retailer the Gilt Groupe, which offers its members discounts on top designer apparel and other deals, was a subtenant in 2 Park Avenue. The company had subleased 50,000 square feet from Yahoo, and with Gilt’s growing profile, was looking to take on even more space.

“They felt that in the last few years the building had started to redevelop, the area had become more cool, more hip, they felt that they were part of that,” he said.

“Staying there was the right thing to do—staying and expanding,” he added.

And expand they did. The company eventually agreed to take 98,000 square feet and two additional floors. In Mr. Green’s mind, having Gilt Groupe expanding in 2 Park Avenue was just as invaluable as a multimillion dollar capital improvement plan. The building officials had already renovated its lobby prior to Cushman & Wakefield’s arrival, he said.

“The physical changes had already been done, but we had reinforced in the marketplace that 2 Park was a cool place to be and come to, which is why it resulted in the kind of the tenants that we got,” added Mr. Green.

Securing Gilt was enough to lure designer Kate Spade away from her old headquarters at 48 West 25th Street and relocate to 86,000 square feet of space at 2 Park Avenue.

“After nearly two years of hunting for the perfect home, we believe we have found it at 2 Park Avenue,” said Craig Leavitt, CEO of Kate Spade, in an interview with The Real Estate Weekly.

Also this year, Mr. Green worked—alongside team members Tara Stacom and Cynthia Foster, who also work at 2 Park Avenue—with boutique investment bank Lazard Frères to remain in 370,000 square feet of real estate—with desirable views of Central Park and Midtown—at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The lease renewal for 21 years, signed in March of this year, also gave Lazard 60,000 square feet of additional workspace.

The firm had been looking at new offices elsewhere—and had they done so, it would have been a huge undertaking of relocating over five full floors of operations and executive staffs.

“We’re were very much out in the market,” said Mr. Green. “The deal was a huge undertaking because it was our job to have them out in the market.”

Eventually, the deal was closed and Lazard now has 21 years to remain neighbors with NBC and Rockefeller Plaza.

When tasked with repositioning the 350,000 square foot office building on 114 West 41st Street, Mr. Green said the massive renovations to the building’s lobby helped keep two major tenants in the building.

“It is one of the nicest side-lobbies you will ever see,” he said.

Two tenants seemed to agree. Tzell Travel renewed its lease and took on additional space—for a total of 65,000 square feet—at the building, which in 2009 was facing imminent foreclosure. Guess Jeans also renewed in the building for 10 years and 16,000 square feet.

If those deals weren’t enough to make Mr. Green’s year, in November he was named the 2011 Young Real Estate Man of the Year by the Young Men’s/Women’s Real Estate Association, where he had been a member since 1995.

“I guess what’s nice about it is that I was selected and recognized by my colleagues and peers for my personal and professional contributions to the organization,” he said. “That’s what makes it really feel good.”

The tennis-loving Mr. Green, who played in high school and taught the sport at Camp Greylock in Massachusetts, co-chaired the YM/WREA’s tennis outings between 2006 through 2010, and coordinated the association’s annual “Feed-the-Less-Fortunate” campaign, which fed over 400 needy people at Rufus King Park in Jamaica, Queens, last year. With a daughter heading to college and more repositions on the horizon in 2012, Mr. Green believes the next year will be a solid one for him and his firm.More repositions in 2012 means more results to a building’s bottom line, he said.

“You’ll see shorter lease-up time and higher rents, that’s what every owner wants to see,” he said.

drosen@observer.com

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.

Illustration by Zack Nipper

According to brokers familiar with Nordstrom’s search, the options are emblematic of the dilemma that has kept the retailer bouncing around Manhattan for years. The department store is ideally searching for a roughly 250,000-square-foot box, a commodity so rare in the city that the only major department stores that have it—Macy’s and Saks among a short list of others—are ones that have been established in the city for decades and hence had a chance to address their real estate needs before the market became as expensive and supply-starved as it is now.

The solution, of course, has been for Nordstrom to accept a smaller space with a layout that is atypical for a traditional department store.  Many brokers say the template for this configuration is the Bloomingdale’s on Broadway in Soho, where the retailer had to greatly reduce the size of its store and tailor its clothing line and layout to appeal to the type of shoppers in that neighborhood.

A similar reshuffling of the Nordstrom concept would likely be necessary to bring the chain to Extell’s project, brokers told The Commercial Observer. The attractiveness of the rail yards stems from an assumption that the company could design a building from the ground up to meet all of its specifications.

But the rail yards are considered a new frontier in the city with little retail connecting the site to Midtown, making a deal there a gamble if the neighborhood takes longer than expected to develop into a popular destination for shoppers.

Extell’s development, though perhaps ill fitting for Nordstrom, would place it at the center of Midtown and near the Time Warner Center, a successful high-end retail mall in Columbus Circle that has helped designate the neighborhood as a retail hub.

Nordstrom has been linked to that area before. Last year, developer Stephen Ross bought the mortgage on the office building 3 Columbus Circle with the intent to foreclose on the property, raze it and erect a new tower with Nordstrom in the base. The deal fizzled when Joe Moinian, 3 Columbus’s landlord, held onto the property by recapitalizing the building with SL Green.

The trade-off between location and compatibility has been a conflict for the company for more than five years. Nordstrom almost had a deal to move into an office tower that was to be built by Stephen Ross and Harry Macklowe on the former site of the Drake Hotel at 57th Street and Park Avenue.  A person directly involved in those talks said that lease eventually crumbled because Nordstrom pushed the physical limits of the project, insisting on towering ceiling heights and other amenities.

“They wanted 18-foot ceilings,” the person said. “You could literally do two office floors for every floor that they wanted. They placed themselves out of the game by needing too much.”

The office building at 650 Madison Avenue, not far from the Drake site, has also been a location that Nordstrom has considered. According to brokers, the issues plaguing that property centered around the likelihood that nearby department stores like Saks, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman would balk at or even bar its vendors from supplying Nordstrom with the brands that they sell, which would essentially prevent Nordstrom from being competitive.

“None of the existing department stores are going to roll over and give into Nordstrom without a fight,” the broker said, adding that he wasn’t “100 percent certain that they have given up on 650 Madison.”

Perhaps out of necessity, the company has poked around downtown, reportedly checking out an anchor tenancy at the World Financial Center office complex as well as the retail being built at the World Trade Center. Here again, brokers said, Nordstrom has expressed a preference to be in Midtown.

dgeiger@observer.com

It's a swell deal. (Getty)

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.

MOHAMMED RAFIQUL ISLAM

200/4 West Agargaon , Mamun Monjil, 3^rd Floor,Dhaka-1207, Bangladesh .

Cell Phone: 0088-01733892823, Tele Fax : 0088-02-9676977.

E-mail: yameen_shafeer@yahoo.com

 

To                  MR. CHABAN                                                                          October 23,2011.

His Excellency

Mr. HARRY MACKLOWE, Biggest Land Owner of United State & Founder Chairman & Owner of Macklowe Properties, 400 Madison Avenue, New York.

U.S.A.

Reference:- Our Participation on UNFCCC-2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference-2009 in Copenhagen , Denmark on December 2009 as a part of my Social Work.

Subject:- Regarding to have Your Excellency’s  kind PERSONAL FINANCE of US$ 2 Million   to  establish REAL ESTATE Business in Bangladesh as a SON.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YOUR EXCELLENCY,

All the Members of my Family Joint me in extending our Heart-Felt Big Land Owner Celebration & Hope This Big Land Ownership  will bring PEACE ,Helpful & Prosperity for all of us.

I will be grateful to Your Excellency if I get Fund to establish my REAL ESTATE Business in Bangladesh as a SON.

MY BANK ACCOUNT FOR YOUR EXCELLENCY  KIND FUND AS A SON.

1. MOHAMMED RAFIQUL ISLAM,

Account No:- 0105101000213592

Dutch Bangla Bank Limited,

Foreign Exchange Branch, Dhaka , Bangladesh .