Here's a shot of Barack Obama from one of his fund-raisers in NYC on Friday, courtesy of a reader who attended one aimed at young professionals at the Grand Hyatt.

Another reader who attended a second fund-raiser for Obama at a different ballroom in the Grand Hyatt noted the Obama-JFK connection there was tangible, even if the pins and bumper stickers were not.

Introducing Obama at the event was was JFK speech writer, special adviser and alter-ego, Ted Sorenson. According to the reader, "he hit on what are definitely their talking points - they say he doesn't have experience and yet look who did have experience -- Cheney and Rumsefeld and look where experience has gotten us. What's more important is leadership. And since he was Kennedy's guy he was able to really hammer home the Kennedy/Barack connection (there was another man who they said was inexperienced 47 years ago, who they said was born with the wrong kind of heritage to be President."

The reader also noted that the last guy Sorensen was really excited about was Gary Hart.

But there was only one thing lacking from the fund-raiser.

"People were buzzing about the fact that there were no Obama pins or bumper stickers -- "Kerry events always had a lot of schwag."

--Azi Paybarah

Which either means that the response was overwhelming -- organizers say they've changed the event's location to a new, bigger space in the Grand Hyatt Hotel to make "room for more people," and, of course, for more money -- or that it wasn't quite overwhelming enough.

After the jump is the email, composed and sent out by New York Magazine spokesperson Serena Torrey.

--Jason Horowitz

Dear Friends,

I have great news - because of the overwhelming response to this coming Friday's Barack Obama "late night" fundraising reception, the campaign has moved the event to a bigger location - the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street between Park and Lex - and there's now room for more people. It's the same hotel (but not room) where the Senator will be for an earlier (much more expensive) reception, and because he won't have to travel to a new venue to see us, he'll spend even more time at our event.

The ticket price is still tiny as far as these things go: $100. So if you're at all intrigued by this guy, please join us on Friday to hear him in person. I promise you won't be disappointed.

If you've already RSVP'd AND paid for this event, your name will be at the door and you should be all set

If you've RSVP'd but not paid, please send in your payment before 6 PM on Thursday, March 8 - even if that means RSVPing a second time. Your payment is what secures your name on the list and they will NOT take payments at the door of the event.
If you missed the first round of RSVPs and would like to attend, please click on this link and fill in your information - but be sure to do it by COB on Wednesday.
TO RSVP and/ or to pay, either click on this link and follow the instructions or fill out the attached form and please fax it back.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you indicate that I am your "host" or "raiser," I can better track your RSVP.

I hope to see you on Friday! Please feel free to email me with any questions.

Best,

Serena

“We acquired an apartment. It’s a lovely apartment,” said her husband, the investor Michael Vlock. “We got it at a price that’s right for us.”

That price tag was a relative bargain: The penthouse was first listed in March 2006 for $17.5 million, before a $2.6 million markdown in May.

“In which case, we’re wonderfully smart,” Mr. Vlock said—proving that couples worth around $1.7 billion can still appreciate a pleasant haggle.

The estate of Leslie Turchin, who founded Tops Appliance City, was the seller. But earlier tenants are better known: According to the new book High Rise Low Down, the penthouse is known as the “J.F.K. Suite” in honor of the President who hosted Marilyn Monroe there.

Car man Henry Ford II (“Hank the Deuce”) and I-banker god Henry Kravis reportedly came afterward. “I honestly wasn’t even aware of that,” said Mr. Vlock, when told about the olden days. “The celebrity whatever”—celebrity allure, he meant—“didn’t figure into our decision-making process.

Did the maintenance fees figure in? Horrifically, the monthly bill is $34,200, the price of a new BMW sedan.

Listing brokers Leila Stone and Reginald Fairchild didn’t return a call to Sotheby’s International Realty. And Turchin’s widow, Sharyn Bey Turchin, didn’t return calls to her apartment at a Fort Lauderdale condominium named—seriously—Le Club.

According to the listing, she renovated the apartment’s “two extraordinarily appointed bedrooms” and “two and one half onyx/marble baths.” There’s also a solarium and open terrace—photographs show the penthouse’s monarchic city and Central Park views from its perch in the hotel at 76th Street and Madison Avenue.

Those perks aside, it’s odd that Ms. Pritzker and her husband didn’t pick a suite at a family hotel like the midtown Grand Hyatt. After all, they don’t own the Carlyle.

Nevertheless, it will be the couple’s first hotel home. “It’s a wonderful place. We’re happy to be there, happy it all worked out and eager to be in the city,” Mr. Vlock said. “That’s the whole story—honest.”

Martha’s Daughter Pays $16 M. For Another Two at 165 Charles

Alexis Stewart may have briefly lost her mother to the federal penal system, but she’s since been recompensed with copious name-brand waterfront real estate. According to city records, she’s paid $16 million for her fourth and fifth apartments at Richard Meier’s crystalline 165 Charles Street condo.

Last September, she bought a $19,119,000 three-unit spread in the building, one of Mr. Meier’s trio of Hudson River towers. (Mom Martha was a first buyer at next-door Perry Street.)

The younger Ms. Stewart’s new apartments, which separately cost $8.32 million and $7.68 million, take up the 15th floor. Together, they’ll combine into a 4,897-square-foot apartment, with dual balconies and five bedrooms.

Ms. Stewart will be one floor below her seller, the art-magazine (and classified-ad) baroness Louise T. Blouin MacBain. Ms. MacBain bought her Charles Street penthouse for $20 million, spent $15,152,800 on the apartments below (the ones Ms. Stewart just bought), and reportedly owns houses in Southampton and London that are each worth over $50 million.

Pity Ms. MacBain! The Observer has called her “an ambassador from an alien land populated with smarter, taller and richer blond bombshells.”

According to the Corcoran listing, her old 15th-floor combo was the “apotheosis of living as art.” The description gets more poetic: “A palette both cool and sleek swaths the elegant, sparse lines within the individual rooms, replicated throughout the holistic thesis.” Martha would be proud.

Holism aside, the floor-through will have an impossibly pretty panoramic view. On the downside, it isn’t clear from the floor plans if the place is contiguous with Ms. Stewart’s earlier units at the building.

According to a source with knowledge of the deal, Ms. Stewart won’t be using Mr. Meier’s insider architectural know-how. Her renovator, the source said, is Urban Glass House interior architect Annabel le Selldorf.

Old Bush Pal Buys Park Avenue Penthouse for $6.17 M.

Digging for Texas tea isn’t the most laudable vocation, but it’s a surefire way to get a triplex penthouse on Park Avenue. Alan Quasha, board chairman of President George W. Bush’s old oil firm, Harken Energy, has paid $6.175 million for a 14th-floor apartment at 580 Park Avenue.

According to deed records, the seller is Susan Uris Halpern—whose dad was the Manhattan skyscraper developer and big-time philanthropist Harold Uris.

Conveniently, the apartment is below the top-tier duplex that Mr. Quasha bought two years ago for $8 million. So a triplex awaits. “It’s going to be a spectacular apartment when he does the final combination,” said Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Joel Bross, who represented buyer and seller.

The living room at the west end of the apartment looks onto Central Park through a plush picture window. There are other Park Avenue niceties: The old owner made two bedrooms into one and even combined a pair of maids’ rooms.

Mr. Quasha is probably the kind of man who likes double-sized space for the help. He’s a longtime director of extra-fancy Richemont (which owns Cartier and Chloé) and a chairman of the Harken board since 2003.

He was also at the energy firm’s helm from 1983 until 1991, when Time called Harken “surely one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil.”

It’s also one of the best-connected: Mr. Quasha acquired Mr. Bush’s money-losing Texas operation Spectrum 7 Energy in the mid-80’s and attracted other V.I.P. partners, like George Soros and the Harvard endowment fund.

“He’s a wonderful fellow,” Mr. Bross said about his client at the block-wide building. “He’s delightful and very easy to work with.” Indeed, the apartment was listed for $5.895 million, which means that Mr. Bross put in a delightfully high offer.

Gypsy Rocker Ceases Wandering, Buys Philip Johnson Condo with Island Kitchen

Who knew playing in a local Gypsy-punk cabaret-rock band could yield a high-floor, high-modernist luxury condo? Eliot Ferguson, a drummer and songwriter for Gogol Bordello, has bought a new $2.65 million apartment at Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House on Spring Street.

Mr. Ferguson will live in un-Gypsy-like conditions. According to the floor plan, his 1,722-square-foot apartment has an enormous open “living/entertaining space” with an island kitchen on the south side.

Then there are two bedrooms, a home office, two bathrooms and a powder room. Hip Manhattan musicians adore home offices, and they adore powder rooms.

On the city deed, Mr. Ferguson’s address is listed at a Washington Street building he bought with his brother in 2000. It houses their chic Integrated Studios, the audio/video production facility where Gogol Bordello (plus Jay-Z and Iggy Pop) have recorded.

The Urban Glass House, a few blocks north, is even more chic. The condo has been marketed as the late Philip Johnson’s final residential project—although Neue Galerie designer Annabelle Selldorf finished the job.

Maybe Mr. Ferguson won’t fit in among the black absolute granite and French white-oak floors and Kota blue limestone. Ms. Selldorf even says in marketing materials that she wanted the condo “to make sense for people with children.”

Gogol Bordello’s 2005 album Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike is the kind of music that stirs up the desire to throw stones, even if they come from the heated floors of a family-friendly glass condo.

“In the world of rapidly dissolving authentic cultures,” says the band’s MySpace page, “soul-searching through the music is something that connects you with the most authentic thing there isyour [sic] savage heart.”

The first is a pricey get-together (suggested contribution: $1000-$2300) at the Grand Hyatt from 6 to 8 p.m. The second is a less formal gathering of supporters at The Grand for only $100 a head.

-- Azi Paybarah

Here's an invitation to a February 15th dinner at the Grand Hyatt honoring Eliot Spitzer. Notice that it's hosted by the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee.

After yesterday, which Spitzer said was a "turning point" in his relationship with the legislature -- he marked the new era by threatening to support primary candidates against sitting Democratic incumbents -- I think it's fair to wonder if he's still planning to attend.

I'm waiting on word back from Spitzer, the Assembly Speaker's office, and DACC and the state Democratic Party.

-- Azi Paybarah

"One of the open secrets in Washington is that senators of the same party and same state rarely get along. Hillary and I are both ambitious hard working politicians who occasionally step on each other's toes. We have had out high point and our low points. But we have the bonds of my campaign in 1998 and hers in 2000 that are unique to our relationship."

The book starts with some curious little tidbits. For example, Schumer, aka Mr. 1600,reveals that in 1964, as a 14-year-old, he worked the mimeograph machine for Stanley Kaplan of the eponymous SAT prep course and that he nervously munched on "Cold calamari and oversized cookies" in the Hyatt Regency Washington on midterm election night. At Harvard, he originally planned to be an organic chemist and, much less surprisingly, what he looks for in a restaurant is a place where the "food is good and not very expensive."

(Hillary Clinton will be throwing Chuck his book party in his favorite haunt, a cheap Chinese restaurant in D.C.)

As far as the future of the Party, Chuck was not satisfied with the Democratic takeover of the Senate.

"Our victory was well deserved, but the Democratic Party still needs a new paradigm," he writes. And Schumer thinks he is just the person to provide it. His key to perpetual victory is encapsulated in the title for Chapter 2: "It's the Middle Class Stupid."

Chuck talks at length about Joe and Eileen Bailey, the middle class family he has conceptualized and who he feels should be the Party's target voters.

They live in Massapequa and are both 45. He's an insurance agent and she works in a doctor's office. They have two cars in the garage, are worried about terrorists, heath care property taxes and college tuition. They are infrequent church goers and "politically, they are up for grabs."

One of the reasons he recruited Casey over significant opposition, he said, is that "Casey was the guy who best represented the Joe and Eileen Baileys of Pennsylvania."

Chuck says that he was at first reluctant about taking on the head job at the DSCC.

"The DSCC job is not necessarily a plum assignment. It's like being elected resident of your condo association - someone's got to do it. It requires a lot of travel and a lot of time dialing for dollars.

"The number-one reason that I decided to take the job was because I worried that if we had another bad election, if we lost another two or three seats, it would be over...The Supreme Court would take this nation backward 130 years."

The major cause for the 2004 electoral losses, Schumer says, was losing touch with middle class voters.

"We were competitive among the middle class - voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 - only because of near- unanimous support among middle-class African-American voters. Meanwhile, among white middle-class voters - a third of the electorate - Bush beat Kerry by twenty-two points. Twenty-two points!"

"We needed to do a better job of reaching the middle class, regardless of ethnicity, and, whatever we did, we could never ignore African-American voters."

Schumer attributes the decay of Hispanic support for the Democratic Party in 2004 to their increased incomes, which put them more in the middle class that he thinks the Democrats were ignoring.

The rest of the book targets the more wonkish reader, and consists of Chuck's "eureka moments" about how to "increase reading and math scores by 50 %," how to "reduce property taxes that fund education by 50%" how to "increase the number of college graduates by 50%," how to "reduce illegal immigration by at least 50% and increase legal immigration by up to 50%" "reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 50%" and how to reduce cancer mortality, abortions, tax evasion, child obesity and access to child pornography by 50 percent.

--Jason Horowitz

At 8:45 a.m., Mike Bloomberg will meet with Jeb Bush and School officials on Chamber Street.

At 10 a.m., the Assembly's Environmental Committee holds a hearing in Albany.

At 3 p.m., the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation discusses "SI Conference 2007" at the Borough President's office.

At 7:30 p.m., U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks discusses immigration issues on a conference call with reporters.

Also at 7:30 p.m., S.I. District Attorney Dan Donovan, will speak to Brooklyn Young Republicans.

-- Azi Paybarah

Mrs. Clinton had been delayed by traffic. She said she'd been flipping through the paper over the weekend and had found something she wouldn't normally read. She said she had learned that "Mercury is in retrograde, whatever that means" and had been thinking of that as her little caravan had inched along.

She thanked Mr. Rangel for filling the ballroom's dead air. "I love Charlie Rangel," she said. "I'll say it. I'm sure I'll be on the front of some tabloid tomorrow."

-- Choire Sicha

"For all of you from Mississippi, I'd like to extend my deepest apologies," he said. "I promise I'll visit as soon as I find a food taster. My brother David Dinkins isn't available."

-- Choire Sicha

A reader knowledgeable of the business community in the City shared their thoughts on the list of Corporate Leaders for Spitzer, which was unveiled at a small press conference in the Grand Hyatt yesterday.

The list includes:

--Roger Altman
A close confident of Hillary Clinton, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasurey, and someone whose private equity firm, Evercore Partners, just went public.

--Alan Patricof
A fundraiser for Hillary and a Democratic operative

--Michael Carey
Former Governor Hughe Carey's son who was fired by the Bloomberg administration. The younger Carey wanted to be the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation, and Bloomberg's people said no.

-- John Dyson
Deputy Mayor for Economic Development under Rudy Giuliani, and is now an active fundraiser for the Brenan Center (the people who called the state legislature "dysfunctional" and the worst in the nation.)

--Blair Effron
An active Democratic political operative who probably played a role in brining together the entire list of Corporate Leaders for Spitzer.

--Robert Pitman
Sold AOL to Timewarner

--Lewis Ranieri
Along with Alfonse D'Amatao, was almost removed from the board of CA Inc., after a scandal-plagued era at the company.

--Steve Rattner
Head of Democrats for Bloomberg, and one of the deep-pocketed Democratic contributors who closed his wallet to Freddy Ferrer's campaign.

--Richard Ravitch
A Bloomberg supporter who went to war with Dan Doctoroff and City Hall to block the West Side Stadium deal.

--Wilbur Ross
Ex husband of George Pataki's first lieutenent governor, the one who famously refused to sit down during a state of the state address.

--Henry Silverman
Pataki's appointee on the Port Authority, whose company has had some legal trouble.

-- Azi Paybarah