A few weeks ago, The Observer took a stroll around the Drake Hotel site and noticed an orange crane poised in the northwest corner. That was just the first in a series of signs that the developers are moving ahead on one of North America’s most valuable development sites.
Insiders told The Observer Read More
Thick black slabs of plywood encase what some call North America’s most valuable development site. The location of the onetime Drake Hotel, now a rubble-strewn yard at Park Avenue and 56th Street, is literally a black box.
A black box to everyone, that is, except Harry Macklowe. Barely two years after his fortune was Read More
Developers are moving forward with super-secretive plans to begin construction on the most valuable development site in North America.
A team led by the California-based CIM Group has filed an application with the Department of Buildings to begin construction on the site, at Park Avenue and 57th Street where the Drake Hotel once was, according Read More
Back in the fall, The Observer profiled development scion William Macklowe as he stepped out on his own. His father, Harry, along with Billy, had lost much of the Macklowe empire in the bursting of the real estate bubble, and parting ways seemed best. He launched the William Macklowe Company last year. “So much Read More
Ever since the credit crisis hit and the real estate market collapsed, the news has been filled with disgraced developers–including in these very pages. Yet for every plucked chicken, there seems to be an equal number of phoenixes who, year after year, decade after decade, return from the construction graveyard to build again. (The Observer, Read More
Billy Macklowe, the son of real estate great Harry Macklowe—who, in one of the boom’s great gambles, famously bought a $7 billion office portfolio only to have to give much of it back to the bank in the throes of the recession, and to sell the GM Building to boot—has officially left his dad’s company to form Read More
The breakneck rise and fall of New York developer Shaya Boymelgreen unfolds like a Gilded Age novel of social ascendance: young man immigrates to ethnic neighborhood in big city; accidentally takes part in Crown Heights riot of historic importance; strikes up fortuitous friendship with Uzbek diamond billionaire who agrees to bankroll his projects; Read More
Sam Zell–the self-proclaimed “grave dancer” with a history of swooping in on the carcasses of struggling businesses–is now picking at the Manhattan real estate market. Yesterday, Mr. Zell’s company Equity Residential fleshed out its plans in Chelsea, which were reported by the Post last month. From today’s Wall Street Journal:
In its Read More
Harry Macklowe—the self-made real estate tycoon whose ill-fated $7 billion 2007 purchase of a portfolio of New York skyscrapers rendered him a symbol of the perils of overleveraging—is trying to reassert some control.
Mr. Macklowe is competing against fellow tycoon Douglas Durst, among others, in a bid to buy back the mortgage on one of Read More
And he does it again.
Back in July, developer Harry Macklowe made his debut on the very small screen, telling a knee-slapper of a joke for the ever-amusing Web site, OldJewsTellingJokes.com.
Now he’s done it again. Or, more precisely, the Web site, whose makers taped Mr. Macklowe telling multiple jokes a while Read More
