Who will follow in Amanda Burden's (very stylish) footsteps?

With the New York City mayor's race not even past the Democratic primary, it's a bit early to be handicapping the city's next chief city planner, but where's the fun in being coy?

Crain's has taken a look at who might fill the post, which it calls "perhaps more important than any deputy mayor position at City Hall," arriving at a short list that includes names ranging from Vishaan Chakrabarti, a consummate real estate industry insider and former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning, to the more community-minded Anna Levin, a member of the City Planning Commission and the chair of Manhattan Community Board 4's Land Use Commission during most of the 2000s.

But when we spoke to Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's Andrew Berman about who might be the city's next chief city planner, he threw cold water on the speculation.

"I think that the choice of who the chair will be, while it certainly tells you something, who the mayor is tells you more," Mr. Berman said.

He cited the evolution of Amanda Burden, widely heralded as driving the relatively radical rezonings—radical, at least, for the staid post-war planning years; there hasn't been a major revision to the city's code since the 1961 overhaul—of the Bloomberg years. Under Burden, development rules for a third of the city's land were changed in one way or another.

"Amanda was a very, very different member of the City Planning Commission when she was Mark Green's commissioner"—Mr. Green appointed Ms. Burden to the commission as the city's first public advocate—"than when she was Mike Bloomberg's."

"Some would argue," Mr. Berman continued, "that the Amanda Burden who served on the City Planning Commission [under Mark Green] wouldn't even recognize [today's] Amanda Burden."

Back before she became the face of Michael Bloomberg's Big Real Estate-friendly rezonings, Ms. Burden was not so well received by the industry. “I think there’s a concern about the prejudices she may bring to the position,” one developer told The Observer back in 2002. “I don’t think she was at the top of [our] list. But I think we feel that we can work with her, since we have no choice.”

Dapper though Mr. Chakrabarti may be, don't expect New York City's next chief planner to make the cover of Women's Wear Daily.

Of the candidates identified by Crain's, Mr. Chakrabarti and Ms. Levin sit on opposite sides of the pro- and anti-development spectrum.

"Folks from the real estate industry feel that they are entitled to more or less choose who the next chair is," Mr. Berman told The Observer. He wouldn't single out any candidate, but we can't help but think he was referring to Mr. Chakrabarti, who has been an unfailing advocate for density around New York's many transit hubs.

"Mr. Chakrabarti's group at Columbia University," wrote Crain's, "is expected to release a report soon showing that the city does not have the zoning capacity for the 1 million new New Yorkers expected by 2030 and is short about 300,000 residential units. As commissioner, Mr. Chakrabarti would likely support the upzoning of neighborhoods like Long Island City and the South Bronx that are one or two subway stops away from midtown."

Mr. Levin, on the other hand, has shown herself to be much more interested in affordable housing, and less interested in increasing the size of the city's overall housing stock, often expressing that distinctly West Side antipathy towards density.

She was, for example, the lone vote against Extell's Riverside Center project, saying the project was "too big."

And Ms. Levin and Mr. Chakrabarti stood on opposite sides of an early debate over the future of Hudson Yards back in 2003.

"We feel that the amount of growth planned for the area is essential to the long-term growth needs of the City of New York," Mr. Chakrabarti, then with the Department of City Planning, told The Observer.

Ms. Levin felt differently. "The city wants to create five World Trade Centers’ worth of new development. We feel that this is just too much," she said at the time, arguing that "the city must proceed without crushing the existing neighborhood."

At least one developer wants to build more housing at their Hudson Yards site.

With the 7 train extension set to see its first train at 34th Street and 11th Avenue next June, developers are rushing to line up financing and break ground on millions of square feet in new projects. The New York Times took a look over the weekend at the progress at Hudson Yards, but they buried some news deep within the story: at least one landowner—Silverstein Properties, which owns a 90,000-square foot site at 41st Street and 11th Avenue—wants zoning rules changed to allow it to build more housing and less office space.

For an area with poor transit links, the desire to shift from commercial to residential is not surprising. Though there will be a new subway station at 34th Street and 11th Avenue, successful office locations generally require not only transit, but redundant transit.

There are seven different subway stations, for example, along 42nd Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Grand Central has three plus a regional rail terminal, and the Plaza District has around half a dozen, depending on how you define the ritzy submarket.

Hudson Yards, on the other hand, will have just one two-track subway, with Penn Station and the Eighth Avenue subway a few long avenue blocks away, at best. Commuters from Queens may have it easy, but there will be no one-seat subway rides from Brooklyn or any of Manhattan's residential neighborhoods.

While the desirability of housing in New York is also driven by proximity to transit, it relies mainly on access to midtown. Office tenants, by contrast, need transit links to the outer boroughs—a much taller order for out-of-the-way Hudson Yards.

And the market seems to be bearing this out: developers are in some stage of building or have already delivered 10,000 of the total 20,000 apartments that the city has planned for Hudson Yards since 2005, according to the Times, while only one office building has broken ground—Related's tower at 10th Avenue and West 31st Street, where they signed Coach, L'Oreal and SAP as tenants. Extell's building on 11th Avenue is on hold for want of an anchor tenant, and Moinian's mixed-use building doesn't have one either.

Office developers at Hudson Yards get much more space than those who build housing.

And while developers in today's market will throw up as many apartments as they can, builders have to work much harder to woo office tenants. The city has incentivized office space at Hudson Yards through tax breaks and more liberal zoning allowances, but office space at the World Trade Center is even more subsidized and has better transit access. Developers at Hudson Yards are understandably reluctant to throw up new towers while those in more natural locations—say, Vornado at 15 Penn Plaza—are shelving their plans.

More office towers will eventually join Related's first in the lower 30s between Penn Station and the new 7 stop on 11th Avenue, with Related aggressively courting tenants for its second, larger building. But it remains to be seen if there will be demand for the string of commercial skyscrapers that the city envisioned rising along Hudson Boulevard, on sites like Silverstein's which lacks the redeeming proximity to Penn Station. Could a potential request by Silverstein to build housing instead of offices be the first of many?

The city goes to great length to stimulate commercial development—both where there is demand, and where there isn't. At least for the moment, Hudson Yards seems to be a little bit of both.

Like most places south of the Arctic Circle, night falls on NoChe once per 24-hour period.

Manhattan West too corporate? Far West Side too bland? Clinton too anodyne? Hell's Kitchen too imprecise?

"You've heard of NoMad, NoLita, and NoHo," writes Bisnow. "Well, get used to 'NoChe.' " (We'd prefer not to!) "It stands for North Chelsea, pronounced a touch exotically"—because nothing screams exótico like millions of square feet of shimmering class A office space!—"like the Spanish word for 'night.' It's how insiders are referring to the dramatic new area being forged by Brookfield and Related on the Far West Side."

This is the first we're hearing of NoChe, although it isn't the first appearance of the name, which dates back to at least 2005, when Lockhart Steele was still slumming it as a writer at Curbed NY. The New York Times also included the abbreviation in its pages as recently as October, when it quoted broker Clifford Finn, then CitiHabitats' head of new development marketing, as saying, "A lot of people like to think of it as North Chelsea, or NoChe." (The name appears most popular with unnamed "insiders" and "a lot of people.")

The Observer spoke with Hell's Kitchen resident Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, to get his take on the latest attempt to rename what may be Manhattan's most oft-renamed 'hood.

"I've never heard of that one before," said Mr. Berman, referring to the NoChe moniker. "I've heard of some other funny ones—Hellsea, Chelsea Heights—but those were always sort of tongue-in-cheek, people weren't actually trying to rebrand or rename. At one point somebody was trying to push SoPA—South of Port Authority." (Though Sandy may have, mercifully, put the kibosh on that particular neologism.)

Then again, "stranger things have happened," Mr. Berman conceded. But is it likely? "I think Hell's Kitchen is a great name, and I think people feel a lot of pride attached to it. So... I don't think so."

Could development finally be coming to the long-stalled project?

The planned conversion of the Beaux-Arts Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue into Amtrak's "Moynihan Station" has always been more about real estate and architecture than transportation, spurred by the city's desperate search for atonement after the destruction of the old Penn Station. Former Amtrak President David Gunn didn't mince words when he told Bloomberg News in 2011 that the project is "controlled by a bunch of rich developers."

And Related Companies doesn't seem to be doing anything to disabuse us of that notion. The New York Times reported that Stephen Ross has yet another trick up his sleeve to revive the stalled project: he wants the Borough of Manhattan Community College to move into Moynihan Station.

But Related isn't just looking for an anchor tenant for Moynihan—it also wants BMCC's land in Tribeca.

"Under the proposal by the developer," The Times writes, "the community college would move 3.8 miles north of its current location downtown to 1.1 million square feet of space in the post office building," where it would serve as the would-be complex's anchor tenant.

This would be an upgrade from BMCC's 780,000 square feet between Chambers Street and North Moore Street fronting on West Street, but this extra space would be dwarfed by Related's haul, should the plan pan out: BMCC's site sits on nearly a quarter of a million square feet of land, the majority of which has an unimpeded view of the Hudson River. With a 20 percent bonus for affordable housing or a public plaza, the current zoning would allow the site's owners to build 2.7 million square feet of space—slightly larger than 4 WTC, as a comparison.

Related may be able to count on the support of New York's civic elite, who are eager to see Moynihan Station come to life—Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association seemed to endorse the deal if it would get Moynihan back on track—but BMCC doesn't appear to have much interest in the project, especially since it would mean leaving their $325 million, newly-built Fiterman Hall. Plus, there's a slight legal barrier to overcome: "It was also unclear how the school could legally swap the land without going through an auction," The Times writes. Unnamed "government officials" told The Times that Related should stick to retail and office tenants, suggesting Google as a possibility.

But Mr. Ross remains undeterred, and Related is reportedly taking the issue directly to Governor Andrew Cuomo, perhaps seeking to appeal to his edifice complex.

ssmith@observer.com

“With today’s groundbreaking, we’re taking a major step forward in the transformation and rebirth of the Far West Side of Manhattan,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said from the podium at the corner of 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue.

Behind him stood the Farley Post Office, some day to become a grand new entrance for Penn Station. In front of him, earth movers had already begun tearing up this former parking lot, making way for one of the project's two 60-story office towers. Directly across the tracks below, on 31st Street, construction workers had not even stopped for the groundbreaking ceremony as they prepped the southwest corner for a residential tower that will rise there. All three towers and a large retail building on the northwest corner are being designed by Ken Lewis and SOM.

Ric Clark, Brookfield's Chief Executive, told The Observer after the ceremony that the project had actually been ready to move forward last year, but the market felt better now, particularly for the inclusion of apartments. "We weren't sure if we would be building one tower at first, or two, but as things progressed, it just made more sense, in terms of economic and market conditions," Mr. Clark said. He had on a long navy overcoat to stave off the cold of the winter morning groundbreaking.

Brookfield has actually controlled most of the parcel since the 1980s, but in the middle of last decade, it acquired the piece Mr. Clark was standing on, at the northeast corner of the site. This unlocked the next important piece of the project, which was determining to build to construct any buildings along the edges of the site. That way, the foundations and cores could be built over terra firma, with only a small section of each building cantilevering out over the train yard below.

In 2009, Brookfield hit upon using a concrete bridging technology that would allow it to deck over the tracks without having to build a huge steel structure reaching down to the yard, holding up what will eventually become the 1.5-acre public plaza at the development's core. Instead, this bridge will be suspended across the 5-acre site.

The final piece was acquiring a 75 percent stake in 450 West 33rd Street, the massive pyramid-with-its-top-shorn-off tower that was the former home of the Daily News and occupied the block front on 10th Avenue. Brookfield is currently redeveloping the property, with architecture firm REX redesigning the structure.

"It's finally the right time," Mr. Clark said.

The developer is still working on finding an anchor tenant before the tower will rise, but until then foundation work will move forward, and numerous tenants are said to be interested.

Correction 1/16: An earlier version of this post stated that 450 West 33rd Street was located on 11th Avenue, not 10th Avenue. The Observer regrets the error.

On a recent evening at the 92nd Street Y, Stephen Ross, chairman of the Related Companies, reflected on four decades of transformation—for the city, where he has built more apartments than almost any other developer of his generation, and also for himself. In September, Mr. Ross, 72, stepped down as the CEO of the once-humble affordable housing outfit he transformed into a luxury real estate behemoth.

Not that he’s stepping aside. There he was a few weeks later, alongside Mayor Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn on the formerly desolate Far West Side, breaking ground on the Hudson Yards project, a glass and steel city within a city that is actually larger, in terms of square footage, than downtown Portland or downtown Baltimore.

“What’s good for the city is the first thing,” Mr. Ross told the audience at the Y. “I think if you really take that into consideration, the opportunities open up.”

On stage, Mr. Ross wore a navy suit and pink tie and sat next to fellow real estate mogul William Mack of AREA Property Advisors, as Businessweek senior editor Diane Brady asked the two friends about their long careers. About a decade ago, Messrs. Ross and Mack teamed up to build the Time Warner Center, the twin-towered behemoth that rose on Columbus Circle in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, an unwitting glass echo of what had been lost. Before the project began to rise, doubts were widespread, but Mr. Ross recognized a unique combination of location, transportation and public support that has become the hallmark of his success.

Even before the attacks, the city had been “muddling along,” as Mr. Ross put it, but he could never forget gazing at the site, home to Robert Moses’s loathsome Coliseum, from his old office on the other side of the park, at 59th Street and Madison. The opportunity, with the park and subway, at the axis of Midtown and uptown, was undeniable. “The location was superb,” Mr. Ross said. “I looked at it as the best site in the city that had been undeveloped. I really thought it deserved a world-class project.”

From his revival of Union Square to his partnerships with Equinox and Danny Meyer, everything has been preparing Mr. Ross and the Related Companies for creating the 26-acre, $12 billion Hudson Yards, the city’s 21st-century Rockefeller Center. The best views, the best services, the best address. “Everyone sees the potential now,” Mr. Ross boasted at the Y.

Related’s rise has been entwined with the rebirth of New York from a bankrupt dystopia into a glittering place of wealth. The evolution has undeniably improved safety and heightened public investment, but it has also perpetuated a view, held by some New Yorkers, that the city is losing its character and diversity to a wave of glassy boxes. While no single developer is responsible for this gentrification, Related’s trophy towers have strongly correlated with the luxury surge.

And no developer has navigated City Hall with such success. Mr. Ross became friends with Dan Doctoroff, the former deputy mayor for economic development in the Bloomberg administration, when the two were part of a group that bought the New York Islanders in 1997. Critics argued that their relationship gave Related an inside track on development bids, but others credited the company’s appetite for complexity and a willingness to take on daunting projects.

“He understands what’s needed on the city’s side,” said Steve Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, where Mr. Ross was chairman for two years. “He’s in it for the long haul.”

SUCCESS has enriched Mr. Ross, whose net worth is an estimated $3.1 billion, according to Forbes. He owns the Miami Dolphins and though a registered Democrat, became a champion of Mitt Romney in the recent presidential campaign, donating over $100,000.

And yet Related originated from disappointment. After graduating from law school and working as a tax attorney in his native Michigan in the 1960s, Mr. Ross arrived in New York to work at the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns. “I was working for a Wall Street firm, and I got fired for the wrong reasons,” he said at the 92nd Street Y. “The person I was working for didn’t really realize my capabilities.”

But as Mr. Ross noted in a 2009 graduation address at Michigan University’s School of Business, which bears his name after a $100 million donation, “Bear Stearns is gone. Steve Ross is still here.”

Mr. Ross wanted his business to be sustainable, without relying on boom and bust cycles, so he focused on affordable rental housing. His first projects were small apartment complexes financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Wasaka, R.I., and Middletown, N.Y. He then closed in on New York, building in Rockland and Westchester Counties and southern Connecticut.

Mr. Ross eventually entered Manhattan with an affordable housing project in 1976, and his big break came when he won a bid in 1980 for River Walk, a development site just north of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town.

Related won the rights to build some 1,800 apartments, a hotel and ample retail (a formula the company would replicate again and again), but the biggest prize was having the Related name run on the front page of The New York Times. This immediately led to more deals, in Battery Park City and on the Upper East Side. And thus his conquest of Manhattan began. “It was first survival and concentrating on a company, then it was a question of diversifying,” Mr. Ross said. “I knew I didn’t want to stay in affordable housing forever.” 

In the early 1990s, Manhattan’s Union Square was nicknamed “Needle Park.” “It was really dangerous back then,” said Robert K. Futterman, chairman and CEO of Robert K. Futterman & Associates, a top retail brokerage that has worked with Related on numerous projects. “Though it was a great transportation hub, it didn’t have great retail.”

The district’s historic buildings had begun giving way to newcomers, starting with Zeckendorf Towers, built in 1987 after the demolition of the Union Square Hotel. But Mr. Ross first focused on old buildings, partnering with Starwood Hotels and Resorts to convert a historic Beaux Arts building on the northeastern side of the park into the W Hotel. Related also owns the historic building on the north side now occupied by the massive Barnes & Noble, one of the bookseller’s top outlets.

Related’s biggest mark was 1 Union Square South, completed in 1999, which sits at the terminus of Park Avenue South and looms over the park. “It was a very important site as a focal point,” Mr. Ross said. Related has been lauded for the aesthetics of some of its projects, but not this one. A blank wall spans an entire city block, and it isn’t helped by the swirling digital clock Related commissioned to liven up the façade.

“The south side of Union Square has been trashed, from an architectural point of view,” said Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council.

Aesthetic questions aside, the building has been a financial coup. Monthly apartment rents now go as high as $17,000, and dozens of condos have sprung up around the park in the past decade as a result. “It was really one of the first urban power centers,” said Mr. Futterman.

As 1 Union Square South was rising, Related was bidding for what would become the Time Warner Center.

For two decades, Mort Zuckerman’s Boston Properties had tried and failed to make something of Robert Moses’s unloved old Coliseum. When his deal fell apart, the Giuliani administration put it out to bid. Mr. Ross quickly mobilized. He would give Jazz at Lincoln Center a prime view overlooking Central Park and rope in Richard Parsons, the Time Warner CEO, as the anchor tenant in the office portion of the tower.

“He’d been in 75 Rock for 35 years with no issues,” Mr. Ross recalled, referring to Time Warner’s old headquarters at Rockefeller Center. “I told him, ‘This isn’t about space, this is about showcasing your company. Nobody knows who you are; they think you’re a part of NBC.’ That struck a nerve.”

He also lured the Mandarin Oriental hotel chain and a clutch of Fifth Avenue brands, like Hugo Boss and Cole Haan, for a “vertical mall” in the base of the tower. A popular model in Chicago, such retail spaces have always struggled in New York, where storefronts are believed to be king.

In the end, Related beat out the likes of Tishman Speyer, Bruce Ratner and Donald Trump. Though the development seemed expensive at the time, costing $410 million for the site and $1.7 billion to build, it has paid off handsomely. “We stole it,” said Mr. Ross.
“It’s become a destination point.” said Rosemary Scanlon, dean of New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. “There’s a lot of vision there, as well as courage.”

Paul Goldberger initially panned the structure in The New Yorker, calling the towers “banal.” Nevertheless, he commends the developer for the architectural diversity of its portfolio. “I think Related has been very good at bringing a range of serious architecture ideas into the mainstream,” he said. “They know that the market today won’t accept junk.” 

HUDSON YARDS is its own city, and not a small one at that. The shortest towers will be 75 stories high, and designed by some of the world’s best architects. The tallest will surpass the Empire State Building, with a higher observation deck. Hudson Yards will have its own cultural center and a mall twice the size of Time Warner Center, and nearly half the 26-acre site spanning eight city blocks will be given over to public open space. It will be as if someone has taken a massive swath of Midtown, perfected it, and dropped it on top of the once-desolate Far West Side. And it will only cost $12 billion and a dozen years to build.

The project reflects Related’s growing influence in City Hall. Three years ago, in a rare defeat, Related’s plan to convert the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx into a massive shopping mall was rejected by the City Council because Mr. Ross refused to agree to require that retailers there pay a living wage. Mr. Ross walked rather than back down. This year, Hudson Yards was exempted from a citywide living wage bill, which some critics claim was the result of a $34,000 donation to Ms. Quinn’s mayoral war chest.

Already, the area is filling in around him, with luxury buildings popping up in the once-unthinkable wasteland of 10th and 11th Avenues in the 40s and 50s. “Already, we’re getting our best rents in Chelsea,” Mr. Ross said. For proof, look to the nearby MiMA tower, in which TIAA-CREF just paid $551 million for a 70 percent stake, and where the top floor units rent in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. The tower is almost fully leased. It has a doggie spa, and it is at 42nd and 10th.

The case could of course be made that by burnishing all these outlying areas, Mr. Ross is leaving the city overpolished. Not only has he shifted from affordable to luxury housing, he’s fighting living wages for the working class while creating apartments that sell on average for more than a million dollars, and frequently tens of millions. If any developer represents the go-go highs of the Bloomberg era, it is Stephen Ross, even if his approach often leaves the average New Yorker on the sidelines, gazing up at glass peaks.

In 2017, Related plans to move its corporate headquarters from the Time Warner Center to Hudson Yards. And Mr. Ross will trade his Time Warner penthouse, with its Central Park view, for a fresh perspective atop what he calls the new heart of New York.

editorial@observer.com

What're you lookin' at? (Visualhouse/Related)

Party on the skyline. (Visualhouse/Related)

Earlier this week, the Related Companies announced it had found backers to begin building the first tower of its Hudson Yards project (at the same time that it is trying to get a break from the MTA for payments on the entire 16-acre complex). Should the project get off the ground, it will have a long way to go.

Sure, in terms of time, as it will takes years, if not decades, for the entire 12 million square feet of office, residential, retail and cultural space to be built. But there is also a long way to go in terms of distance. As the design team puts the finishing touches on the first phase of the project, it turns out the other office tower on the site, which has yet to find an anchor tenant or an announced start date, will become the second or third tallest building in the city when it is completed, surpassing the Empire State Building.

At 1,300 feet, the tallest of the Hudson Yards towers (designed by KPF) will fall just short of 1 World Trade Center (sans antenna, er, spire) and the even taller 432 Park, CIM and Harry Macklowe’s new luxury tower at the corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue, which reaches a spindly 1,397 feet into the skyline.

But this is not the only place where Hudson Yards will surpass the Empire State Building. It will also boast both a observation areas closer to heaven than at the Empire State Building, both indoors and out.

Perhaps you noticed an unusual shard jutting out from the side of the tallest tower in the latest set of renderings, first revealed a few weeks ago in New York magazine? That is an open-air observation deck located at 1,100 feet. That puts it 50 feet above the Empire State Building’s famous outdoor terrace, that iconic movie set and marriage proposal destination.

And above Hudson Yard’s outdoor observation space will be a veritable playland of attractions reaching to the top of the tower, and by extension beyond the Empire State Building’s topmost observation room, at 1,250 feet, the place where zeppelins were once meant to dock.

"It's more akin to the Rainbow Room to be honest," Related spokeswoman Joanna Rose explained. "We have a ballroom, restaurant and bars above the observation deck that offer panoramic views. And yes, we are looking at locating some of those above the 1250 mark."

They are just going after all the landmarks—not just the Empire State Building but Rockefeller Center, too. And it will be hard to compete, since as previously reported, that master of hospitality Danny Meyer will be running the show way up in the clouds.

While this is far from a comprehensive list of the commercial development coming to town—and no doubt more will be announced in the years to come—these are the projects that first came to mind. If you think of any good ones we forgot—maybe Solow's East Side project, or some new towers around Moynihan Station—do let us know in the comments.

Race for the prize? (Getty)

Dan Doctoroff, Olympic dreamer, got to attend an opening ceremony for the games this summer, even if it was not the one he had hoped for. It was from London, where Mr. Doctoroff was taking in the 2012 summer Olympics, that he fired off an email to his friends declaring “feelings of ‘what might have been’ are curiously absent.”

The Times got a hold of this email, where the former deputy mayor for economic development and current head of Bloomberg LP goes on to say that even without them, the Olympic bid was good for New York.

He pointed to the High Line park in Manhattan, which he called “one of New York’s premier tourist destinations,” as well as “a subsidized middle-income housing project in Queens, ferry service on the East River, new parks and even a new Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn.”

“I don’t know whether New York will ever host the Olympics,” Mr. Doctoroff wrote, “but I do know that no city has ever benefited so much from trying and that no city embodies the Olympic spirit more. As we always said, New York really is an Olympic Village every day.”

The Times notes that both Atlantic Yards and the new Yankees Stadium were already well underway by the time the Olympics bid was announced, but Mr. Doctoroff counters that those projects were spurred on by the bid.

And yet the counter argument could also be made: Look at everything that remains unfinished. While it is true that the Bloomberg administration held onto much of the bid as a blueprint for the development of the city over the past eight years, think of how much further along many of these projects would be had we actually won the games.

Hunters Point South, instead of waiting to break ground on two towers sometime this year would be built, some 6,000 affordable housing units that would have, in the interim, served as the Olympic Village. Ditto Hudson Yards, which would have to be finished, instead of just begun--never mind the plan for a West Side stadium had already been scuttled by the City Council before the International Olympic Committee had made its decision.

A new Javits Center would probably have been undertaken, as well, on top of other projects that have since been forgotten or never would have materialized. And the Barclays Center might just be finished, along with some of those apartment towers. Would Dan Goldstein really have dared to stand up to the Olympics? (Probably, rightly, yes.)

Indeed, it is these hiccups, on the West Side, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, that likely left the New York at the bottom of the IOC’s list. Ask any developer, this is not an easy place to build. Mr. Doctoroff questions whether we will ever host an Olympic games. He is probably right to ponder such a question.

Nevermind that things are reportedly very quiet in London this summer, driving off the normal tourists in favor of the Olympic variety, of whom there are apparently far fewer. Meanwhile New York continues to see record numbers of visitors (we know, we tripped over them on the way into the office today). And there is the general fact that Olympics tend to be expensive boondoggles, costing nations and locations more than they are worth. The city might have gotten more money from the state and federal governments to realize the projects that are still undone.

Still, as the mayor, unlike his deputy, expresses disappointment at not hosting the Olympics this summer, despite the losses for a few developers on still unrealized projects, we cannot help but wonder if New Yorkers won the real gold in losing out.

One of those "bests" was 500 West 34th Street, previously known as the World Product Centre. “It’s the best site in all of Hudson Yards," Mr. Barnett told us at the time. "It's overlooking everything, and it's right on top of the new subway.”

That is almost exactly what he told the Post's Steve Cuozzo in revealing that the project is back on. So singular is the project Extell is now calling it One Hudson Yards. As you can imagine, the developer across the street actually developing the 26-acre megadevelopment of the same name was none too pleased with the announcement.

Was Barnett worried the name might steam up Related chief Stephen M. Ross?

“I’m not interested in steaming up anybody, much less Steve Ross,” Barnett told us.

But Ross fumed, “I don’t know why he is trying to deceive tenants and the public."

Oh that Gary Barnett—so coy!

But the name is not the only thing underscoring his savvy on this project. Consider how he managed to get the MTA to help prep the site for his tower to rise.

Barnett said he’s cooperated closely with the MTA on the new subway station and helped the agency assemble the site. He said station construction also put in place some of the foundation for his tower, which will reduce Extell’s cost and allow it to build swiftly.

“We have the ability to begin vertical construction by the end of the year,” he said, “and the ability for our tenants to do their buildouts in 2015.”

As the battle for tenants heats up—not only at Hudson Yards but the World Trade Center, too, and possibly even Midtown East as a rezoning of the area is underway—it will be interesting to see how these towers take shape and who of the development titans can claim victory.