Yet 435 50th Street is anything but flashy and new. A throwback in the grandest sense, in that it is a far bit better than the original, the project is the second coming out for Ralph Walker, the long-forgotten AIA president and Art Deco master who dotted the city with at once industrious and luxurious old towers for the New York Telelphone Company. It is noveau prewar of the first order.

The first such was the now eponymous Walker Tower, just off Sixth Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets, where developers JDS Development and PMG hope to achieve some of the highest prices not only downtown but in the entire city, including a possible duplex penthouse overlooking Chelsea and the Village asking $94 million. Walker also designed such tough jewels as 1 Wall Street and the Barclay Vesey Building, landmarks you never knew you knew.

On West 50th Street, the plan is much the same. JDS and PMG bought both the West 18th Street building and the West 50th Street building from Verizon, which retains control of the lower floors for office and operations while the developers assemble grand condos above, designed by Cetra/Ruddy. The developers paid $20 million for the latter building last July, and according to city records, Barry Sternlicht's Starwood Capital—also a backer in the Chelsea project—just injected $25 million into the project last week.

"Construction is under way and we expect to complete the project in early 2014," JDS principal Michael Stern said in a brief statement.

The project is expected to come on the market some time next year, and renderings show new windows added to the grand 1930s facade but little alterations beyond that. The exact price of the renovation was not given, but for comparison, the one at Walker Tower is set to surpass $200 million.

All told, there will be somewhere around 65 and 70 units on floors 10 through 17. Prices have also not yet been set, and while this building might not have the same commanding views or white hot neighborhood to boast, the area is certainly on the up and up. And so, too, is this new building.

Michael and Ken with the author.

“I just want you to know you’ve won the lottery,” an unfamiliar voice announced when interior designer Kenneth Alpert answered his phone one afternoon this past July.

And indeed he had.

Mr. Alpert, who counts Mary Tyler Moore, Camille Grammer, Kelly Rippa and Mark Consuelos as clients, and his partner of eight years, Michael Stern, who founded his own a high-profile event production company before becoming creative director of the real estate management firm Stonehenge and a yoga instructor, were among 400 couples selected by the city’s Marriage Bureau to get hitched in Manhattan on July 24, the first day it was legal.

Just a few weeks ago, they were also the first gay couple to hold their wedding celebration party at the swanky 583 Park Avenue, the soaring space designed by Delano and Aldrich, which opened at the height of the Jazz Age.

I know this because I was present for both occasions. Minutes after meeting Kenneth and Michael for the first time at the City Clerk’s office that momentous midsummer day, I officiated their marriage.

The week prior, I had been ordained as a Minister of American Marriage Ministries (A.M.M.), a process that required no special knowledge of the Psalms, nor any particular ability to counsel romantic pairs on how to steer clear of the rocky shoals of matrimonial enmity. All I had to do was click a few buttons online and pay $54.04. The documents were shipped overnight. Once I received my Certificate of Ordinance, a copy of the church’s Articles of Incorporation and a notarized letter confirming my position within A.M.M., I registered with the city clerk, an hour-long undertaking that set me back another $15, and earned me an I.D. number: 1427884.

On my second trip to the city clerk’s office—this time with my good friend and co-conspirator, Skip—I planned to paper the surrounding area with fliers. “Mélanie Berliet wants to marry YOU!” they read, wording I only later realized might be interpreted as a desperate plea for a husband—or a wife, for that matter.

As Skip and I approached the marriage bureau, we encountered an assortment of onlookers. Behind a line of police barricades, a contingent of rainbow flag–wrapped, glitter-cheeked supporters of L.G.B.T. rights burst into cheers whenever a pair of newlyweds exited the building. A collection of fanny pack-equipped tourists gawked and snapped photos. A twosome whose look harkened back to Sonny and Cher’s heyday were on hand, strumming guitars. There were protesters reciting Bible verses and warning of the dire consequences for mankind, should gays be allowed to marry. And, to my dismay, there were a number of other eager officiants. The competition.

But many of them, I quickly realized, were in it for the money—charging up to $60 per service. I had an edge, then. I was doing it purely for the glory.

Buoyed by good spirits in spite of the humid 80-degree weather, we set out to work the crowd.

Several failed pitches later, two things became clear: (1) as cheerful as some New Yorkers can appear, most are too smug to accept a flyer from a stranger, and (2) the people congregating outside the city clerk’s office were mostly spectators.

“We have to get inside,” I said.

We devised a plan. Wearing our best lovey-dovey grins, Skip and I walked up to the building’s entrance hand in hand. The security guard manning the door stared back at us as if waiting for the punch line.

“Can’t straight people get married today too?” I asked the guard plaintively.

Expression askew, the uniform replied, “Pass through the x-ray machine and join the others in line.”

Soon enough, Skip and I were in, standing amid the throng of nuptial-hungry couples populating an atrium sparse on seating though abundant with vitrines housing sample bouquets. We sensed we were the only straight couple in the vicinity.

It was a short-lived romance. After surveying the scene, we agreed that we’d draw less attention by separating and posing as stray marital witnesses.

Within half an hour, I distributed about 30 fliers. Feeling relatively good about the chances I’d be asked to officiate an upcoming ceremony, I sought out Skip to suggest we head out.

Suddenly, there was a gentle poke at my shoulder.

Before me stood a dapper man dressed all in white, his sneakers as virginal as his jeans, T-shirt and fedora.

This was Michael. He explained that he and Kenneth wanted me to marry them, and that the ceremony would be held any minute.

“What, now?” I asked with a laugh.

“Yup!” he said.

I hadn’t considered the possibility of being called upon right then, so I had not yet researched exactly what an officiant does or says. I wracked my brain, trying to recall scenes from various romantic comedies, but only disastrous weddings came to mind. Regardless, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity, so I played it cool. “Great!” I said.

Michael then escorted me over to meet Ken, who was equally fit and handsome but was dressed in all black.

Ken looked from Michael to me with squinted eyes that said: I hope you remembered to ask this girl for credentials. I sensed that Ken is the more serious yin to Michael’s carefree, outgoing yang.

I whipped out my Certificate of Marriage Officiant Registration.

“See?” Michael said. “She’s legit.”

“So, why do you want to do this?” Ken asked.

A fair question. I took a moment to reflect.

“Gay family member, maybe?” he prodded.

I shook my head. That wasn’t it.

Why did I care? This lovely pair deserved a meaningful answer.

“I’m not an especially benevolent or charitable person,” I started. My sister, however, was, I explained. Before dying two years ago, at age 30, she was a big proponent of gay rights. “I guess I’ve kind of adopted the cause on some level,” I said.

It sounded good, and it was true.

“So pure of heart!” Michael said. He turned to Ken. “She’s better than a random judge.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ken said. “We’re good to go.”

By the time Skip joined us, I felt a renewed sense of purpose. I reported the news and charged him with gathering some information about my role. He whipped out his smart phone. Meanwhile, I launched into an accelerated getting-to-know-you session with fiancé and fiancé.

Michael and Kenneth met in 2003, I learned, at which point they had each been married twice already—to four different women—and had three children apiece. I made a mental note that their story would make a hell of a sitcom. When Kenneth proposed to Michael in March 2010, they were resigned to the fact that it might be years before they could marry officially in New York. “We didn’t want to feel like refuges, having to go out of state to get married,” Michael explained.

The specialness of the occasion continued to sink in as I stood in a back room at the podium before Kenneth and Michael, reading from the script Skip had managed to dig up on his phone. The thing about partaking in such a beautifully significant moment in two men’s lives is that you have to concentrate on not fucking it up, especially if you’re prone to slips of the tongue, as I am. But I pulled it off. The room was government-drab, but the energy was powerfully emotional.

“Here today, by the powers of the State of New York vested in me, I now pronounce you husband … and husband,” I declared.

Weeks later, Skip and I toasted the duo over dessert and Champagne at the fancy Upper East Side address where friends and family, ex-wives and all, gathered in honor of Kenneth, Michael and marriage equality. There were giant candy apples, miniature red velvet cupcakes, glass jars brimming with assorted sweets and stacks of custom-wrapped chocolate bars with recipes for a happy marriage in place of the usual nutritional information on the back. The crowd was diverse—in age, race, sexual orientation and attire, with some in black tie and others frolicking about in dreadlocks and hemp tops. But for all our noticeable differences, we were united as guests of the happy—now tax break-eligible—couple.

Toward the end of the event, Kenneth and Michael invited their entire awesomely unconventional family on stage. It was like a homosexual Brady Bunch. A Gaydy Bunch. I felt like Alice.

I left that night with several new friends, a warm feeling of human connection and a colossal sugar high.

melanie.berliet@gmail.com

A year ago, this Net Baby found himself on the cover of The Wall Street Journal and inside many other publications, including Fast Company , Forbes , Red Herring and Business 2.0 , in stories heralding him as a "dorm-room" entrepreneur. His incubator, which he actually ran from an office near his room in Calhoun College at Yale University, had a $1 million commitment from New Haven-based Dagim Capital. It had 12 employees and had invested in two other student start-ups, including Broadcast Builder (also now defunct), co-founded by Mr. Stern's roommate Ravi Paidipaty, and Goldthumb, a software company run by a bunch of recent Brown University graduates. His company was small, but the message was big: He was a baby entrepreneur, a poster boy for the New Economy.

Now his company has folded, and Mr. Stern is arguably a poster boy for the New New Economy–one who is battle-scarred but not bitter; older and wiser at age 20, with a firsthand understanding of one of the wildest business cycles in history. Mr. Stern is back in college now, but he wears his experience on his tailored shirtsleeve: "I know what I like now," he said, referring to his summer job search. "Small companies, smart, aggressive people and stability ."

Mr. Stern and about 300 others like him–male and female, young and old–had gathered at the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan on Feb. 8 to talk about the New New Economy. The forum, called "Building After the Bubble," featured a panel of industry heavyweights: Merrill Lynch's Internet analyst, Henry Blodget; Fidelity Management & Research Company's chief executive, Robert Pozen; Euclid SR Partners' general partner, Graham Anderson; Lehman Brothers' vice chairman, Fred Frank; Yale School of Management professor David Cromwell, and Hotsocket.com founder Dev Bhatia.

The event was sponsored by the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, a group formed in September 1999 to foster the spirit among Yalies and others. Y.E.S., as it is known, is now the largest student organization on campus, with 500 student members and another 400 alumni and other adjuncts. Some of the organization's members traveled down from New Haven to join other Yale alum and other members of the financial community at the forum.

It was–as the society's president and the organizer of the event, David Pozen, a Yale junior, unabashedly called it–an evening of "networking and schmoozing." There was media to court, business cards to be swapped and heavy-hitters to listen to, suck up to, pitch to.

But this was not an evening of desperation. The big guys who spoke had a message to impart, and they mostly stuck to it: There's money out there for good, well-thought-out, well-executed ideas. At least for now.

The panel discussion, however, began inauspiciously. As the young Mr. Pozen (son of Fidelity's Robert Pozen) was winding up his introductory remarks, a glass hit the wooden floor of the Tap Room and shattered loudly, evoking images of bubbles bursting and markets crashing.

There was some forced laughter, surely generated by thoughts of recent events. In November, Crosspoint Ventures had pulled the plug on a billion-dollar early-stage tech fund. Lucent Technologies had announced plans to lay off 6,000 more workers, in addition to the 10,000 already let go. The New York Post has no trouble filling its ongoing column, unsubtly titled "Dead Dot-Com of the Day." Add in rising unemployment rates, decreased consumer confidence and the ups and downs of the Nasdaq, and the sound of a crash seemed most appropriate.

Yet the tone of the panel began on a remarkably upbeat note, more in line with the Y.E.S. acronym than with the recent headlines.

"This is an excellent time to be an entrepreneur!" declared Mr. Anderson of Euclid Partners, from his seat at the dais in the front of the memorabilia-filled room. "There is money out there. There's more venture money now than there was in 1995. It will take longer to get it, but the money is still out there."

David Cromwell, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Yale's School of Management and the former chief executive of J.P. Morgan Capital Corporation, noted that the venture-capital industry financed more new ventures– 4,000! –during the last 12 months than ever before. Henry Blodget was characteristically bullish, saying that only five years ago, when Netscape went public, the Internet accounted for $1 billion of market value, mostly from America Online, and everyone thought that was absurd. "Now," he added, "even after Armageddon, we have 400 to 500 billion dollars of Internet value in the market. That's extraordinary value creation."

Of course, there was plenty of self-interest behind all these remarks–these speakers' fame and fortune, after all, rise and fall with every tick of the Nasdaq. Nonetheless, in the face of all the doom and gloom, these words of comfort–delivered in the warmly lit setting of the Yale Club's Tap Room–were, if a little sugar-coated, reassuring.

Mr. Pozen, of Fidelity Management, spoke for the institutional point of view, joking: "I guess I'm gonna have to be the pessimist in the group.

"Since the bubble has burst, I guess people like us feel a little vindicated," he continued. "We were always a little reluctant buyers of companies that had no earnings and sometimes no revenues. But these companies were going up quickly; we tried to get good prices for our shareholders, and we knew a trade when we saw it."

Mr. Pozen lamented how, during the late 90's, "the notion of audited earnings had pretty much become a joke, so the question became: 'Do you have revenues; do you even have an idea ?'"

Fred Frank, of Lehman Brothers, made similar jokes about the exuberance of the last five years: "We used to take companies public that had demonstrable records of achievement. Now we take public companies with demonstrable expectations of achievement."

He made a similar point at the expense of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman: "Roughly five to six years ago, Senator Joe Lieberman came to visit me to determine how can the state of Connecticut–and, more importantly, Yale–attract biotech companies around the Yale Medical Center.

"So I asked Joe a very impolitic and very impolite question. I said, 'How do you define a biotech company?'

"Well, he stammered and he stuttered, but he's a very adroit politician, so he points his finger at me and says, 'Fred, that's a hell of a good question. How does one define a biotech company?'

"I said, 'Joe, it's very simple–a biotech company is a pharmaceutical company not encumbered with revenues.'"

Ba-dump-bump.

And so the panel continued. The senior Mr. Pozen added some weight to it by offering a little case analysis as to why he thought Priceline.com had failed.

"Here's the reason the auction wasn't a success. Travel tickets are what I call perishable goods: If a company doesn't sell seats, then they lose them. Priceline therefore was able to get airline companies to give them low discounted seats pretty close to travel date. Unfortunately, the company misunderstood its success. They thought they were successful because they were a travel company, not because they were a perishable-goods company. So they decided to sell travel insurance, to sell gasoline, to sell all these things that were related to travel but not to perishable goods. I think we've seen the company has had problems since then. One very important lesson for all you people is, understand what your business model is … understand, if you're successful, why you're successful."

Converting to Metrics

It took some pointed questions from the audience, however, to focus the panel on what was on everyone's minds–particularly those Y.E.S. kids: How do you get the money?

One software entrepreneur, who had taken time off from his School of Management studies to start his company, complained that he had met "some of the most prolific angel investors in the world" who had told him that "nothing is getting funded now." He added, "No one knows the metrics which define the path to profitability."

He then asked the panel, "Do you have any working metrics whereby one can define the path to profitability?"

Then came the bad news everyone had been expecting.

Said Mr. Anderson: "If you're already generating revenues at this time and have a loss, and can't show an actual break-even by 2002 second quarter, I don't think you'll get any venture funding at this time. If you don't have revenues right now, typically, I would think–if you could find a venture firm that's doing seed–you would need to demonstrate profitability within eight to 10 quarters, max. At the late stage, some venture firms are not doing any investing unless they can sell their investments within one year."

Dev Bhatia, the founder and chief executive of Hotsocket.com, a database-driven marketer which has raised capital from Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group and Bessemer Venture Partners, among others, shared his experience. One of his venture firms, he said, had spelled out the metrics pretty clearly: Within six months, one had better be gross-margin positive; six months after that, they had better be bottom-line positive.

There were more questions, about global investing and niche versus generalist investing patterns. It wasn't until the end that someone finally asked what a lot of people had presumably been wondering all along:

"Yes, there's been value created," a member of the audience said. "But a lot of people have lost a lot of money. A lot of jobs were lost, and there are clear signs that the pain is not over yet. I was wondering if some of this could have been avoided …. From venture-capital firms to banks to online investors, there was some irresponsible behavior across the board, and I'm wondering is this going to happen again or can some of it be avoided?"

"I'll take a swipe at that," said Henry Blodget, to much laughter. "I've found myself in the role of piñata" of the dot-com shakeout, said the man whose career was made by a bullish Amazon bet. (Amazon recently fired 1,300 employees.)

"Absolutely, this will happen again, hundreds of times," he said. "It's happened hundreds of times in the past …. Sure there were some stupid bets made … people got drunk … expectations got way ahead of reality… but there's also a huge risk of missing the upside."

Shortly thereafter, the panel ended. Many who lingered seemed to have upside on the brain, as they gathered in groups to chat and stood on line to pay homage to the financial luminaries at the dais. Lehman Brothers' Mr. Frank had the most supplicants, not surprisingly. As the lone investment banker on the panel, he was the one who ultimately could turn an idea into I.P.O. riches.

No one seemed deterred by the designs resembling gray storm clouds that decorated his tie.

Class Act

At a gathering at Bliss on East 49th Street following the summit, the Y.E.S.-men were downing kamikazes and making out with their girlfriends. (Y.E.S.'s membership is about 40 percent female, Mr. Pozen said, though there were few female representatives at Bliss on Thursday night.) A few of the guys were talking shop. One could be overheard asking his friend, "Did you get a deal?" Mr. Stern was there, too, though in a league of his own.

Sitting at a corner table with his friends and sipping a drink, he talked exit strategies and bricks-and-clicks with the same passion that some of his classmates might bring to pornography, Derrida or extreme football. He shared industry gossip, reminisced about past experiences with reporters, and made a call from his cell phone to a friend burning the midnight oil at an investment bank.

He was not unaware of the irony of his situation. He brought up the Business 2.0 article, in which Irrational Exuberance author and Yale professor Robert Shiller dismissed him and other undergraduate entrepreneurs as part of a media-driven fad.

"Now," said Mr. Stern wryly, "I'm taking his class."