Dita Von Teese.

The fashion world’s favorite stripping star, Marilyn Manson ex-wife Dita Von Teese (née Heather Renée Sweet, which sounds very porn star to us), brings her 90-minute revue “Burlesque: Strip Strip Hooray!” to the Gramercy Theatre for a four-night run. A Cointreau Brand Ambassador, Ms. Von Teese will be serving up not only some R-rated sashays, but also Cointreau cocktails like the enticingly named “The Corset”—we feel tightly squeezed already. Drag king (yes, they exist) Murray Hill will M.C., and special guests include flamboyant personalities with monikers like Dirty Martini, Catherine D’Lish, Perle Noir and Lada Nikolska.

Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23rd Street, (212) 614-6932, 7:30pm, standing-room tickets $52.50.

Creepy or cozy?

We are as fond of baby animals and those brightly-colored mini food erasers as much as the next person. But our affections are decidedly more muted when it comes to small hotel rooms. Certainly there's something cute about the teensy spaces, but it's one of those you-won’t-know-until-you-try-it kind of things. And we're not sure that we want to try it.

That said, tourists will have more opportunities than ever before. BD Hotels, the developer responsible for opening the first tiny hotel (or pod—if you want to put a positive spin on it) in Manhattan in 2007, is opening up a new location in Murray Hill, reports The New York Times. The 366-room hotel, Pod 39, will be slightly larger than its Midtown East sibling, Pod Hotel, and it will have more amenities.

“When we built the original Pod Hotel, we had a nice communal lobby and garden, but we realized it was just too small for the capacity,” Richard Born, a principle of BD Hotels told The Times. “In every corner was somebody sitting cross-legged with a backpack and laptop.”

Perhaps residents found their rooms too small?

Pod 39, however, will have about 4,500 square-feet of communal space, Mr. Born said, and will include a lobby, marquee, ground-floor restaurant, and a lounge with a bar, library, pool table, tennis table, and a fireplace.

“We’ve learned that our customer really wants to be out of their room in a public environment with other hotel guests,” he added.

Inn-deed!

Mr. Born told The Times that one of the reasons why they chose Pod 39’s location was for its size. The new hotel, which has 17 stories and includes a rooftop garden, is located in a former Allerton club hotel that still has its original Italian Renaissance style façade.

The new hotel will have other perks, like private bathrooms for every room (the Pod Hotel has some rooms with shared bathrooms), and more rooms with two single beds and bunk beds. But the hotel’s main draw, of course, is the price. With rates going at $100 to $200 a night, guests almost won't mind pretzeling themselves into their chambers.

jschiewe@observer.com

77 Park Avenue. (Photo from StreetEasy)

Philip Durocher has stepped behind Rachel Uchitel's velvet rope!

As The Observer reported earlier this month, Ms. Uchitel's Park Avenue apartment had gone into contract. The deal for the former club promoter and Tiger Woods woman's co-op at 77 Park Avenue cleared city records today, and the deed shows that Mr. Durocher, of Warren, N.J., is the proud owner of her redecorated home at The Griffon.

Mr. Durocher appears to be a V.P. at Colgate Palmolive, which would make him the second senior member of the company to purchase property in the city this summer.

The place sold for $1.95 million, the asking price listed by Sotheby's agent Kate Meckler. Although Ms. Uchitel bought it for $1.625 million, it was unclear if she had made any profit on the flip as she put a significant amount of work into the place.

"It was completely gut renovated," Ms. Meckler told The Observer. "It was in triple mint condition, of course," she added, mentioning that Mr. Durocher was attracted to the property's layout and tranquility.

eknutsen@observer.com

The Prudential Douglas Elliman listing at 108 East 37th Street was originally intdended for Morgan's granddaughter, and features 2,000 square feet of living space and three outdoor levels totaling 1,500 square feet with views of the Chrysler Building. Inside is impressive, too, with a chef's kitchen, 170-bottle wine refridgerator, working fireplace, floor-to-celing walls, and a media room with drop-down screens.

SLIDESHOW: Thanks, Grandpa! >>

Not only was 133 East 38th Street awarded the Murray Hill Architectural Award for best historic restoration--at least that's what its Corcoran listing declares--but rehabbers extraordinaire Nikola Webb and Paul J. Andersson just sold the place for $4.55 million, exactly the asking price. That is after paying only $1.625 million for the home in 2002. The buyer is Stuart Wallace Thorn, president and CEO of Southwire, a Greorgia-based company that is "one of the worlds largest producers of electrical power cables." He previously worked for Campbell's Soup, among other companies.

This exquisite five-bedroom home, with a 40-foot-deep garden, 16-foot-long terrace and 1,000-square-feet of overalloutdoor space is a sight to behold. It drips with molding and original banisters, and even the neighboring rowhouses are a beautiful pair. There are original marble fireplaces and a tastefully renovated kitchen. It'll outshine any southern mansion, that is for sure. But don't take our word for it, see for yourself.

SLIDESHOW: The Prettiest Townhouse in Murray Hill. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Not only will they spend precious minutes of family time waiting for the slightest signs of motion, but it turns out this vital piece of infrastructure belongs in a museum -- and not just because it's seven decades old.

To commemorate the tunnel's 70th birthday, the MTA Bridges and Tunnels division has prepared an exhibition in the lobby of 2 Broadway chronicling the tunnel's construction, including pictures, models and memorabilia. 

Make no mistake, the fact that a septuagenarian tunnel built for $58 million that once carried a little over 4 million people a year now accommodates nearly 30 million is pretty remarkable.

The tunnel was finished Nov. 15, 1940, with a 3,000-person sunset ceremony and a story on the front page of The Times. Among the many memories to cherish is that it almost deflated the monumental ego of Robert Moses. The master builder swore loudly that the tunnel would be a massive boondoggle that would never recoup its cost -- until they finally made him the head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. As it turned out, the tunnel started turning a profit its very first year.

There's nothing The Observer loves more than a juicy Robert Moses story, but that doesn't mean we have to be happy about the tunnel as a modern-day piece in the city's failing infrastructural puzzle. It was already closed last month for repairs like fixing potholes and repairing concrete. Even when traffic is running relatively smoothly, sitting at the tunnel's mouth honking one's horn has become a cherished Murray Hill tradition.

It must be said that the Queens-Midtown Tunnel is in better shape than many projects of its era. But that's not something to be particularly happy about either. Given that building it was the largest local make-work project at that time, maybe fixing it could keep a few unemployed construction workers busy in this one. Just sayin'.

SLIDESHOW: The Midtown Tunnel Turns 70.

lkusisto@observer.com

The sale hit public records yesterday evening, and will give the school a commercial condo in Toll Brothers' glassy new apartment building at 303 East 33rd Street, which enjoys both the distinction of being the area's first green building and the developer's least controversial one. The seller is KTL 303 LLC, an affiliate of Toll Brothers and Kibel Companies.

This marks New York University's second high-priced commercial condo purchase since the kiddies came back to school this fall, when the university proper also dropped $10 million on a condo in the Silk Building, at 14 East 4th Street.

The medical center also recently leased more space for a new women's medical center further uptown.

It's not the Financial District, but this should still make at least a few Village residents happy. Earlier this year, NYU dropped $65 million on the Forbes building at 60-62 Fifth Avenue and bought Founders Hall, a 26-story dorm for for $134 million, boosting its saturation of the neighborhood.

It will soon seek approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission for a 400-foot tower at the I.M. Pei Silver Towers complex, as well as other development on the so-called super blocks, a move that has incensed neighbors even more than usual.

Whether this new purchase helps alleviate pressure on NYU's "core" campus or is simply another piece of its growing medical empire is unclear--representatives for the university and Toll Brothers were not immediately available for comment.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for NYU Langone contacted us Thursday and it's the latter. NYU Langone Medical Center purchased the commercial condominium to house its Department of Plastic Surgery and the Institute of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

lkusisto@observer.com

The Landmarks Preservation Commission today unanimously added the 21-story “Look Building” to its list of midtown landmarks. The white-brick, multi-tiered office tower, located at 488 Madison Avenue, between 51st and 52nd streets, was under consideration by the commission after its staff completed a survey of around 500 midtown buildings.

Designed by architecture firm Emery Roth & Sons, and named after one of its first tenants, Look magazine, the structure is one of nine modernist city buildings that have been stamped with the landmark designation over the past seven years.

Esquire magazine, Pocket Books, and music publisher Witmark & Sons—which had a studio where a young Bob Dylan produced demo recordings in the 1960s—have been tenants in the building, which was completed in 1950.

The Look Building features tightly rounded corners, multiple setbacks, and bands of ribbon-like windows, giving it a strong horizontal emphasis. Now owned by the Feil Organization and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the building was originally sold to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1953.

“The Look Building helped establish European Modernism as a fashionable, though practical, approach for office towers that were constructed in Manhattan’s business districts after the Second World War,” Landmarks chairman Robert B. Tierney said in a press release sent out this morning. (The Observer's Emily Geminder profiled the building in March.)

In other landmark news, the commission also unanimously approved landmark status for the Beaux Arts-style Middleton Burrill House, a five-story Murray Hill mansion at 36 East 38th Street, between Madison and Park avenues.

The commission made some advances in Brooklyn, too, agreeing to hold public hearings on proposals for two historic districts—the proposed Wallabout Historic District (55 houses along Vanderbilt Avenue), and the Park Place Historic District (a group of 13 Romanesque Revival row houses in Crown Heights).

slevin@observer.com

Back when these seniors were freshmen, an apartment at 200 East 36th Street, with a newly renovated kitchen and a price recently reduced to $379,000, would likely have been flooded with moms eager to give their young the gift of an alcove studio.

Or, "maybe mom would like a nice pied-à-terre?" said Damon Powell, with the hopeful beam of a broker 20 minutes into an open house. Probably not, unless it can be purchased at the 24-hour convenience store, where pajama-clad co-eds drifted early Sunday morning in search of flowers and off-brand chocolates.

The classic Murray Hill starter apartment features a crevice for the bed, Japanese folding screens and a display of school colors to put a football stadium to shame. But the apartment's owner, Ralph Vizcarra, who works in the fashion industry, has instead infused his sunlit corner unit with oil paintings and a huge vintage table he admits was a squeeze to fit.

Ten years ago, Mr. Vizcarra came to Murray Hill when the only thing cool about the neighborhood was that Andy Warhol used to hang out around here. Now at 43, he outgrew his apartment when he got married and needed space for two people, plus a nearly 13-year-old chocolate Lab.

The dog isn't the only senior citizen in the building, true to Murray Hill's lingering reputation as Manhattan's answer to Boca Raton. But in the past decade, the neighborhood has filled with young families, college students and newly minted professionals working in everything from fashion to finance.

"You see a lot of school emblems in the bars, which tells you a lot," said Mr. Vizcarra. The moneyed young also bring restaurants and a more upbeat, casual feel. Murray Hill is not just Curry Hill anymore—though that's still the only cuisine that rhymes.

A few blocks west, at another studio alcove, at 104 East 37th Street, Susan Nash, with her two 20-something children and a future son-in-law in tow, made up a significant portion of the day's house-hunters. "This was my Mother's Day gift," said Ms. Nash, referring to the children's reluctant company, rather than the $369,000 apartment. Instead, the neighborhood resident was looking to buy a place for her 85-year-old father, who lives in Yonkers.

But no Mother's Day would be complete without a friendly disagreement over religion or real estate. The kids loved the modern studio, with its 12-foot-high ceilings and an elevated alcove for the bed. Ms. Nash, on the other hand, objected to a kitchen so conveniently three feet from the bed.

In the past 30 years, the family has watched shiny condos replace gritty brownstones. But after the college baby boom began, mom stuck around while the kiddies fled.

"It went from quiet and residential to fratty pubs," said her 28-year-old son, Eric Weinschenk, who now lives on 15th Street. "I wanted to leave."

But Ms. Nash relishes the yearly arrival of freshmen Wall Streeters, even if they haven't yet learned how to walk and use a BlackBerry at the same time. "They're constantly upgrading the services," said the mom, in her 50s. "There's a lot of new money thanks to all the preppies—or whatever you call them these days."  

But generation my-pad is more hesitant lately than when it was considered reasonable to buy a midtown apartment before you could legally buy a beer. Jeffrey Dyksterhouse, a broker at 201 East 37th Street, has had two deals fall through on a spacious studio alcove since January, and said other real estate agents in the building have seen similar "weirdness."

"Murray Hill was hot, with a lot of young people. But it seems to have been hit especially hard," he said, because young workers have suffered more in the recession. And he doesn't expect the market to pick up with the next wave of gangly grads, who appear more inclined to rent until they know what the future holds.

"That age group, even if they have a job, they don't have certainty," said the broker. "They no longer think everything's going to be O.K. forever."

The newest restaurant to throw its name into Murray Hill's boundless South Asian mix is catering to a somewhat specific niche: It's also kosher. Shalom Bombay, currently of Teaneck, N.J., will soon open its second location on Lexington Avenue.

"This is an ideal spot for a restaurant that caters to a wide variety of eaters," said ZE Realty's Joshua Roth, who brokered the deal. Among the restaurant's likely patrons, Mr. Roth said, are vegetarians and the health conscious. Unlike much ghee-infused Hindustani fare, Shalom Bombay prefers olive oil.

The restaurant will take up 1,100 square feet, plus an ample basement. It plans to open in April.

egeminder@observer.com