The first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, 720 pp., $30), a doorstop set in Miami, is that city’s former mayor, Manny Diaz. Read More
Madison Avenue has a new neighbor, one who knows quite a bit about real estate. Developer Don Peebles of the Peebles Corporation has way up, from Miami to the Upper East Side, to open his first office in New York, according to The Real Deal. The developer, considered the largest African-American builder in the country, moved to the big organic apple to build a few buildings. Read More
Everyone had so much fun at The Dutch this summer! We can hardly remember what sun is like, what with the never-ending rain, but during that warmer season the city flocked to Andrew Carmellini’s new SoHo restaurant for plentiful seafood and cocktails, not to mention the wistful old-turned-new ambiance. Sam Sifton called it Read More
So much for Karl Lagerfeld’s Dubai dream. Like many things in the Emirate, it has proven too good to be true, falling victim to the city’s collapse. Like the hundreds if not thousands of projects that have been abandoned before it, all that remains of the Isla Moda is its otherworldly renderings.
As The Read More
The alleged architect of an $880-million Ponzi scheme may have copped to the charge, The Associated Press reports.
According to prosecutors, Nevin Shapiro, the man behind already suspicious-sounding Capitol Investments USA, bilked more than 60 investors using the technique pioneered by Charles Ponzi in 1920 and perfected by Bernie Madoff through the 1990s Read More
I wrote last week about the 67 percent annual increase in first-time residential foreclosures in New York City in July. That’s a sharp jump, no doubt. But compare it to Miami and Los Angeles, and it starts to pale.
In L.A., foreclosures jumped 249 percent annually to 5,982 in July, according to a report Read More
The Real Deal magazine this month launched a South Florida edition. The flagship New York edition has been around since March 2003; and much of the business side, including all of the production, of the South Florida edition, currently at 48 pages, will remain out of New York as well. (Full disclosure: I Read More
Did you realize that, according to the BBC, CSI: Miami—the one starring David Caruso—is the world’s most popular TV series? It features on more Top 10 ratings lists in more countries than any other show. This seems to me a phenomenon worth investigating. Especially since I’ve recently fallen under the spell of the show through Read More
It sounds like a medical procedure you’d hope to avoid, or like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie: Neutron Activation Analysis. It’s actually a high-tech way to take a sample of something and precisely determine its elemental makeup. A venture called the Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project, which keeps a database of over 2,100 samples Read More
Few people play the zipper quite like Ken Butler. Tucking a microphone down his pants, the Brooklyn-based musician counter- rhythmically zips and unzips his fly to a soundtrack of pre-recorded beats. He plays other instruments: His head doubles as a bongo drum, and he “scratches” a toothbrush across his teeth as adeptly as a D.J. Read More
