Here we thought 40 Bond Street was one of the greatest building of the past generation. (Maybe that's not saying much, since this is New York.) But this riotous video from Curbed shows that opinions are far less uniform than the lofty windows on the Herzog & de Meuron-designed, Ian Schrager-built condo project in Noho. The highlight is clearly the angry neighbor who calls the place "a piece of shit" and "Frank Lloyd Wrong."

And then I drove to the basket... (PMcM)

Much has been made of the fact that Jeremy Lin was overlooked because of his book smarts and bloodlines, but the same thing might have happened half a century ago to nightlife king Ian Schrager.

In an interview with the Real Deal, Mr. Schrager discusses his dreams of playing basketball and how it all fell apart because of some good old Jewish guilt.

What were you like as a kid?
Very active, obsessed with basketball — the way I became obsessed with business — and very competitive. I played guard. I had a bunch of scholarship offers, but my father wanted me to concentrate on my studies, so I didn’t play in college.

That athleticism might also help explain Mr. Schrager’s taste in women.

How’d you and your wife [of three years, Tania Wahlstedt] meet?
She used to dance with the New York City Ballet. I knew her because my first wife also danced with the ballet. For some strange reason, I have a preference for ballerinas.

Or maybe the boutique hotelier just wants to relive his time on the dance floor at Studio 54.

Ian Schrager shares Steve Jobs' obsession with detail.

The Commercial Observer: Will the style of PUBLIC New York be similar to how PUBLIC Chicago was designed?

Ian Schrager: No. It will be the same attitude, the same approach. But it will be different. That’s because it’s New York, and New York is different from Chicago and really we have fun redoing each room (in a) new, original style, but with the same attitude, the same approach.

Who is handling the design of the hotel?

Right now we’re responsible for laying out the hotel, obviously, and all the finishes and a lot of it will be done by my in-house design staff.

But in all likelihood, we’ll also be working with John Pawson, who is an English architect.

And what can you tell us about The Clock Tower project? When will that become an Edition hotel?

Because they  (Marriot International, the owners of the Clock Tower, and with whom Mr. Schrager is a partner) are a public company, I don’t really like to talk about it very much. It’s really their show.

I am thinking that The Dakota, which was built around the same time – I think there was twenty year’s difference. I think The Clock Tower was built in 1909 and The Dakota was built in the 1880s, and so I am very much inspired and would use the Dakota as a point of departure.

Not Gothic, like the outside architecture of the Dakota, but more the inside, with the rich woods, and the proportions, and the way that all works on the inside. We would use that as a point of departure for The Clock Tower.

And what would you say would be the point of departure for PUBLIC New York?

It’s really been very much inspired by Apple and Steve Jobs and the way… every aspect of (the design) is important. The screw in the back of the computer is as important as the screw in the front, and it’s really bared down and simple and pure. When you look at it, everybody gets it, everybody understands it. That basic approach is a real influence on me. Also, the service that they offer in the Apple Stores. When you go in there, you really get the service you need to get in and get out really quickly.

They have that Genius Bar, and you don’t have to wait on line to pay. When I saw that, I asked myself ‘what kind of service is that? Is that luxury service?’ I came away saying ‘no, it’s just the service you need.’ So that was a real inspiration for me and kind of the great service we want to provide.

Also Trader Joe’s, the supermarket was a big inspiration, because it’s a combination of elite, sophisticated shoppers (standing) right alongside bargain hunters, all sharing the same experience shopping in the same store and cutting across all demographics. Both of those two had a tremendous impact on me for this brand.

Do you share a Steve Jobs’ fastidious obsession with glass?

Absolutely. Every single thing is a matter of life and death to me. Because you never really know what thing pushes it over the top. There’s no rulebook. You just try to sort of overwhelm the customer with the details. Not at a kind of superfluous kind of way, just don’t leave a stone unturned and try to make every single aspect – no matter how big, no matter how small – important, so that when it all comes together, there’s a certain alchemy that happens. Which is what happens with (Jobs’ products)… Walt Disney did it like that also, and both those guys have been incredible inspiration as me.

Do you use the same glassmaker as Apple?

Well, I would! I just can sort of empathize with him so much…You never really know what a person’s going to respond to. You just don’t know. Therefore everything becomes important, and to me everything is a matter of life and death.

Will you have any say in the design of the rentals?

No, I won’t.

What do you think the experience is going to be with two separate entities living in one building?

I think it’s going to be a “one plus one makes three” situation. I think that it’s really going to enhance the apartments, because you’re going to be able to provide hotel services and you’re going to be able to pick and choose what you want and when you want it.

You can have all the benefits of having a personal staff, but just pick and choose when you want it. I think it’s great for the (rental) apartments and I think some of the facilities that we’re doing for the apartment, the hotel guests will also be able to use. I think it just makes it better.

I’m very reluctant to talk about the residential. (Durst Fetner Residential) are the experts on that. The only thing I do know is that it will be first rate and of the highest quality and they’ll make every possible effort to make it special. If I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t want to be a part of it.

What will be the going rate for a room? Will it be similar to what PUBLIC Chicago is charging (that hotel’s starting rates are at $135 a night)?

It’s affordable, but it’s for a new class of person. It’s for rich people and for people who are not so rich and young people and people who are older. Because I think value is going to be critically important going forward.

I don’t think it has anything to do with a bad economy. I just think people want value for their money, and I think if you can stay in a really, really cool place that gives you really, really great service, and you get everything you want and you can pay less than you would at some other hotel that gives you an array of services that you really don’t care about, why would you stay there?

Do you have any other hotels in the works?

We’re looking at a hotel in downtown (NYC) as well. We just won a bid for a hotel in London. And we’re looking to expand quickly. It’s the same strategy that I always had, and that is to go in to these 24 hour international gateway cities. It’s that same strategy, but not make the mistakes I made before by not having a brand. This time I want to do it with a brand.

Drosen@Observer.com

The two towers, back from the dead. (Pay a Visit)

The Observer is not sure which is worse: a Tommy Hilfiger-themed hotel or just another blasé Marriott. The fashion designer had planned to tranform the Madison Square icon into a red-white-and-blue boutique hotel before he backed out. A plan to turn the landmark into condos already failed, but the owners have found a new buyer who still wants a hotel overlooking Shake Shack.

This will not be any old Marriott, though, The Journal reports. The MetLife clocktower is becoming an Editions Hotel, a brand led by none other than the very public Ian Schrager.

The lodging giant signed a contract earlier this month to pay $165 million to Africa Israel USA for the property, according to people familiar with the matter.

Marriott is likely targeting the site for its stylish Edition Hotel line, hoping to build fresh momentum for Edition after the brand stumbled coming out of the gate, some people in the hotel industry say.

The Bethesda, Md., company announced Edition in 2007 with hotelier Ian Schrager as a partner. It predicted then it would open 100 Edition hotels over 10 years. So far, there is one in Istanbul and one in Honolulu.

Meanwhile, another article in The Journal reveals that Steve Ross and HFZ Capital are closer to taking over the teetering One Madison. The two developers had been sparring over control of the property, but they have since teamed up and hope to win out at an auction to take place in December.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Ian Schrager’s Brooklyn-bred rasp comes at you like spitfire. Ideas—plucked from the worlds of art, food and commerce—tumble forth from all directions. It's easy to imagine swarms of exclamation points floating in the air above his head.

In minutes, the millionaire hotelier has skipped from the wonders of Trader Joe’s to the charms of Apple, from how bottle service killed New York nightlife to how, and why, Williamsburg is the city’s new Soho.

Picture Malcolm Gladwell’s brain. Add Tom Ford’s sexed-up style sensibility, say, and round off the package with Woody Allen’s hyperfluent New Yorkese. Speak to the 65-year-old hotelier about something that makes him passionate, or drives him crazy, and you can imagine precisely such a creature.

Right now, what’s driving Mr. Schrager crazy is $20 coffee.

The king of boutique hotels, whose Gramercy Park Hotel has defined the boho-luxe look of Gotham hospitality in the past decade, making him a fortune in the process, will come out and say it. Paying 20 bucks for a hit of caffeine is preposterous.

“I don’t think people care about the guy with brass buttons and epaulets, serving them something out of bone china, spreading out a table-cloth,” he says. “Previously, my hotels included, if you woke up and called room service and asked for a pot of coffee? It’d be at least $20. Seven dollar service charge. And you’d have to wait 45 minutes!”

Though there will always be those customers willing to pay for five-star opulence and violently expensive hot beverages, Mr. Schrager thinks enough is enough.

On Oct. 11, he launched what is perhaps his riskiest concept to date: PUBLIC Chicago, a total reimagining of the city’s Ambassador East Hotel, which aims to be the paragon of mass class. The Trader Joe’s of posh hotels. Room rates begin at a cut-rate $135.

The Ambassador, which opened its doors in 1926, was once a well-groomed Midwestern glamour-puss of a property. Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall thronged the Pump Room, its famous see-and-be-seen restaurant. But by mid-2010, when Mr. Schrager got the keys, it had lost its luster.

“It was essentially a dump,” says Mr. Schrager, who offered $25 million to buy it from Chicago developers Peter Dumont and David Bossy, according to reports.

Located on Chicago’s Gold Coast, which is jam-packed with international hotel chains, the Ambassador had to become something different. “It was sexy. I respond to a building the way another man might respond to a woman. It’s a visceral thing. I walk through, and it’s got the bones. The sex appeal.”

It wasn’t just below-the-belt thinking. “I’m in an opportunistic business, and the acquisition was very compelling,” he adds.

Eschewing what he terms “design on steroids,” PUBLIC Chicago is rendered in calm tones of camel and wheat, mellow metallics and crisp white. The supper club–inspired Pump Room has been reinvigorated by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and a pot of coffee from room service costs five bucks, thank you very much. “It gets there in five to six minutes,” says Mr. Schrager, triumphantly.

The bottom of the hotel market is “wide open,” he says. “It’s completely devoid of creativity. There’s nothing original there, there’s no elevated experience.” With PUBLIC Chicago, he aims to change that.

For a moment, he stays emphatically on message. PUBLIC Chicago’s wider concept, its accessibility, is just the beginning. “I’m probably more excited about this brand than I have been about anything in a long time. It’s a little bit like what Terence Conran and Mary Quant did in London in the ’60s. What Andy Warhol did with art. He took the pretense out of it. Make it available to anybody and everybody.”

Betting on high occupancy, rather than sky-high room rates, is a canny move in this economic climate. “When we got in the boutique space,” recalls Mr. Schrager, “everyone was very skeptical of it. They thought that only people who wore head-to-toe black and lived in Soho went to boutique hotels. About 15 years ago, I remember The Wall Street Journal had a headline: ‘The Death of the Boutique Hotel.’ It was like ‘Dewey Defeats Truman.’ Now what’s happened is that everybody went into that space. It’s really, really overcrowded. Today, the opportunities are above that space and beneath that space.”

Instead of bowing to amenity creep and gouging guests on bath butlers and doggie massages, Mr. Schrager is getting back to the basics: good service and “plain old good taste.”

The business of doing business has changed. “There’s a paradigm shift. I think people are going to be very focused on value. It’s not quite so easy to become wealthy. What’s going on in Europe … I’m not an economist. But what was really challenging [with this project] was to redefine luxury service. Get rid of all those things that nobody cares about. Create a sophistication that someone who’s rich and someone who’s not rich can both appreciate.”

Which brings him back to cheap-but-chic visionary companies like Trader Joe’s, or the service-centered ethos at the Apple Store, where high design is a given but hasn’t clouded the focus on people. “I think it’s being treated with dignity. It’s being friendly. When I got started 25 years ago, we were looking to get ourselves noticed. We really focused on the innovation of [the hotel space]. The look and feel of it. Well, that’s not enough now. I learned a lot from the Apple stores. You’re met by a brand ambassador and you don’t wait on line to pay. The person who helps you, they’re an expert. If you go into a hotel, it’s like staying in somebody’s home. If you’re treated beautifully, that’s what matters.”

Born in the Bronx in 1946, the son of a garment worker, Mr. Schrager has New York—its energetic mayhem, its sometimes destructive glamour, its bull-headed optimism—in his bones. By 1977, still under 30, he and business partner Steve Rubell became the life force of New York night-life with their club Studio 54. Its starry legacy—Liza, Mick, Bianca—still elicits a heady era in Manhattan, when the Beautiful People danced ’til dawn (with not a stretch Hummer or gourmet taco truck in sight).

In 1981, after an oft-reported spell of time in prison for tax fraud, Mr. Schrager was primed to reinvent himself. Studio 54 may call to mind a lost decade of high-octane, reckless fun, but it had exacted its toll. Looking back on that era, he told French Vogue, “It almost destroyed me. I must have been intoxicated by the success of it all and got lost along the way. I made certain mistakes and I paid very dearly for them. Very dearly.”

By 1984, Mr. Schrager had hit upon a new idea. The boutique hotel. Morgans, the Royalton, the Paramount and the Delano followed, as did a fruitful period of intense collaboration with designer Philippe Starck, which began in 1988. In 2005, he founded the Ian Schrager Company with the Gramercy Park Hotel, a collaboration with artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel and its first showpiece.

But today, Mr. Schrager seems to be tinkering with the formula that catapulted him to rock-star status. Hotel design, he says, has become overblown. “The design! You hear about somebody doing a hotel and the first question is always, ‘Who’s designing it?’ I really feel like it’s Frankenstein’s monster, what we created here. There’s no more tricks. When I used to do hotels with Philippe, there was al-ways something, a little wink, a chair that was lit, or a phrase on a wall. Now it’s gone too far, there’s a thousand tricks in every square inch of every hotel space. Everyone is trying to overwhelm you with how clever they are. It’s oppressive and precious and you feel like you can’t breathe. It’s just too much. I think we’re trying to go the other way,” he says, pausing to catch up with his thoughts. “Plain old good taste is a universal language.”

When the moment is right, Mr. Schrager also feels that the PUBLIC Chicago model can work in New York. “We have one hotel in the works, a new build downtown, and we’re close to announcing a second hotel. In this climate, it’s difficult to get anything done. In New York hotels, I think there’s going to be price pressure, because there’s been a tremendous increase in supply. But business is always going to be done in New York—[the city’s economy] will get back to where it was.”

A die-hard city-dweller and booster, Mr. Schrager is  passionately engaged in  understanding what makes New York tick and how the urban landscape has transformed over the three decades he’s been at the center of it all. Before he was a slick, powerful hotelier, Mr. Schrager was one of  Manhattan’s original after-dark pioneers. Today, the co-founder of Studio 54 says the city’s partyscape falls flat.

“I’m a little disappointed with the nightlife in New York now,” he says, a hint of exasperation in his voice. “I hope I don’t sound like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who thought New York was at its best in the ’20s. But you go out on a weekend night in New York and it’s not the same as it once was. When I was in the nightlife biz, there was an electricity in the air. People were up ’til 4 or 5 in the morning. When we were in the club business, anybody that wasn’t from New York, someone from Florida or California, who wanted to open a club here? We would laugh at them.”

Mr. Schrager’s engagement with the city is infectious. You sort of wish he’d adopt you. Or at least invite you into his richly drawn vision of New York as it was, and as it could be.

He’s fascinated by the shift from downtown to Brooklyn and the gentrification of Williamsburg, which he deems “one of the places in New York that’s more fertile than any-where.” He’s also intrigued by the cult status of food culture in the city. “I passed through the era when the movie stars were It and the artists were It. Then it was the rock stars, the media kingpins. Now it seems to be the chefs,” he says, praising restaurants like the Smile, the low-key Bond Street cafe where Melia Marden, daughter of artist Brice Marden, runs the kitchen. “It’s really cool,” says Mr. Schrager, who pops across the street from his 8,500-square-foot, $14.5 million penthouse at his project 40 Bond Street, which changed Noho from a boho thoroughfare into a thoroughbred.

He isn’t about to write off the age of the dance club or the glamour of dressing up to stay out all night. The most succulent spit-roasted pig in the world doesn’t supplant the need for a really good nightlife. “A healthy nightlife is part of the fabric of a city, like the theater, like music. Don’t forget that clubbing, at its core, it’s still young people dancing and socializing. The city makes it hard, is really hard on nightlife now. So there are roadblocks. But somebody should do it, and do it right. I’ve done that already.”

These days, if the indefatigable entrepreneur is staying up all night, it’s because of PUBLIC Chicago. He is anxious to see how it will be re-ceived and hopes it’s as revolutionary as he believes it to be. He still has big ambitions. “When I open up a hotel, I take it very personally, I internalize it. It’s a real act of love for me, to try to do something that hasn’t been done before. I always feel anxious. I feel like I’m opening up a show.”

The iconic Clocktower Building is changing hands.

Africa Israel USA, the controversial owner and operator of commercial properties across the United States, has entered into a contract to sell 5 Madison Avenue to an undisclosed investor for $165 million.

The 267,000-square-foot structure, also known as the Clocktower Building, has been vacant since 2005. A tentative deal to sell the property to Tommy Hilfiger earlier this year officially fell through last month after he failed to secure adequate financing, according to published reports.

The undisclosed buyer has made a $5 million deposit, $2 million of which is non-refundable, according to a statement by AFI USA’s general counsel Laurie Golub in a press release issued today. The price during discussions with Hilfiger was reported to be $170 million.

“We are delighted to have reached an agreement with a very credit-worthy buyer to secure the future of this remarkable building and support the burgeoning vitality of the Madison Square Park neighborhood,” Tamir Kazaz, chief executive of AFI USA, said in a statement.

AFI USA purchased the Clocktower Building in 2007 with its partners RFR Holdings and hotelier Ian Schrager for $200 million from SL Green. AFI USA has $1.5 billion in debt from U.S. real estate acquisitions made at the height of the market, according to Bloomberg.

Doug Heitner and Ashley Lostritto of Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman represented AFI USA.

Dashing. (Getty)

Almost a year ago, Ian Schrager entered his latest act—The Observer is not sure whether this counts as his fifth or sixth or tenth act at this point—which promised two new hotel chains, as well as "bikini boot camps." While there is no sign of the latter, Bloomberg is reporting that Mr. Schrager has purchased two sites in the city that he is preparing to transform into budget boutique hotels befitting his new Public brand.

The first Public hotel just opened in Chicago, and he has an eye on one in London, at the Crowne Plaza. Now comes his triumphant return (again!) to Manhattan, buying up two undisclosed plots somewhere in the city—recession be damned!

“Of course it's easier to open a hotel when the economy is strong, but we aren't trying to time it,” Mr. Schrager said. “I opened my first hotel in New York when interest rates were 22%. We're not in the timing business. We buy fundamentally sound investments.”

In New York, new supply may also put pressure on room rates. Sixteen hotels are scheduled to open in Manhattan in 2012, and at least 18 are slated to come on line in the following three years, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. More than 65 hotels are in the pipeline with unspecified opening dates, the firm said.

“There's already pricing pressure in New York,” Mr. Schrager said. “But there's always an opportunity to get market share. It's not unlike Steve Jobs. When he came up with his hardware, the market was already full of products, but he did something special. There's always business in New York. It's just a question of getting it to your hotel.”

Mr. Schrager made his exit from New York hospitality in 2005, when he left the Morgans Hotel Group, which helped launch the boutique hotel trend, and last year, he split with Aby Rosen at the Gramercy—though he was still very busy, developing luxury housing projects like 40 Bond and striking deals with Marriott and other corporate clients.

The party doesn't stop until Ian Schrager says so.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

It was reported this morning in The Journal and confirmed a few hours ago by a press release that Mr. Rosen has just purchased the Paramount Hotel, the second of Ian Schrager's now infamous boutique hotels. The announcement made no mention of price, but the business rag reports RFR is paying $275 million. Furthermore, it "had an incentive for the acquisition: taking advantage of a tax law by reinvesting proceeds from a recent sale to defer a capital-gains payment, say people familiar with the matter."

But is there an upside here beyond taxes? From the release:

Under the direction of Aby Rosen, the RFR Hotel Group has enjoyed extraordinary success in repositioning its lodging properties into award-winning destinations for the global traveler. Both the W in Miami’s South Beach and the Roomers Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany won prominent design awards last year.

Conspicuously absent from this list are his two New York hotels. Mr. Schrager split from the Gramercy Park Hotel a few months ago amid acrimony, and it has not been the same since. And last month a judge ruled that the foreclosure on 610 Lexington Avenue, the site behind Mr. Rosen's beloved Seagram Building, could continue. It was planned to be a 61-story Shangri-La Hotel designed by Norman Foster, so luxurious that each room would cost a half-million dollars.

Will re-treading a dowdy Times Square dowager really revive Mr. Rosen's hospitality rep?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The maniacal Studio 54 founder (and ex-con!) who pioneered the boutique hotel thinks the whole scene is over. As he prepares to launch his new Public brand of hotels, one of a handful of new ventures, it will be anything but boutique, he explains to The Journal.

"It's not about being a stylish hotel," he said. "It's really trying to get away from the iconic over-the-top blow-the-customer-away kind of design that people are sick of. It's become a Frankenstein monster and being replicated by companies who don't understand the purpose."

Apparently drawing inspiration from Apple and--gulp--Trader Joe's, Mr. Schrager said he is seeking to carve out a new "essential services" collection. Sounds like all substance and no style, with slick tech and mango strips in every room. "What I did before was based on exclusivity, and this is inclusive," he told The Journal. "This is for everyone that wants it."

How utterly un-Ian.

mchaban@observer.com :: @mc_nyc

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Both Andre Balazs and Ian Schrager are said to be interested in the Chelsea, and now Page Six is reporting that "several bids are in but no deal has been struck." Could this be the beginning of a bidding war for the heralded hotel asking $100 million?

A big sale is certainly possible, especially with record numbers of tourists in New York and the legacy at the Chelsea, but there are two problems facing any expensive take over--the tenants (as always) and the renovations. Page Six got the word from inside the red-brick behemoth:

"Management has already been whittling down the tenants," a source said. "They would go in there and get building permits to renovate the rooms and then make them hotel rooms. They aren't giving out long-term leases."

One source predicted that the only way to avoid a lawsuit by tenants is to offer them cash. "It's a complicated deal," said the insider. "The building needs so much work. It's going to cost a fortune to overhaul."

A tenant buyout, eh? That shouldn't be too hard.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo