A mani and a blowout at Blow in the Meatpacking District.

Amidst the chicest clubs and restaurants of New York City’s Meatpacking District sits the bright pink home of an even bigger trend. Blow, situated at 342 West 14th Street, is just one of the many essential blow-out stops getting penciled into the overflowing schedules of Gotham’s hippest women. Blow-dry bars are taking the wash, cut, color and style hair-salon cycle to a one-stop, celeb-worthy style service.

“In New York City, there is always an occasion for a blowout,” Diana Pratasiewicz, a manager at Blow, says above the roar of blow driers and quaint music. “Whether it’s an important meeting, or you’re not feeling so great and you just want to give yourself an instant makeover, or it’s an event with the girls.” Put simply, there’s never a not good time for a blowout, except possibly when you’ve just had one.

It is a regular Friday afternoon at Blow: the appointment book tightly packed, the swivel chairs lining the length of the salon fully occupied, and the bustle of the street outside rivaling the bustle of customers inside.

Rachel Zoe, co-founder of DreamDry.

“We have women who have standing appointments with us: they come in on Mondays and they come in on Fridays,” says Ms. Pratasiewicz, talking as swiftly as the stylists are working. “We’re seeing more and more women fit that Blow Pro blowout into their schedule.”

The “groomers” meticulously attend to every stray hair while clients peruse magazines, taking a minute to relax or, if they aren’t running to another appointment, taking a few more minutes to get a manicure simultaneously with their blowout—an added service at Blow.

Maria Peterson, her hair sectioned off in clips, and nails being coated with a bright red sheen, blushes as we approach her. “I’ve become very dependent on these services,” she says. Her dependency is closing in on a decade; she has been a client at Blow since 2005. “It’s such a time saver,” she adds. One stylist, drier in his left hand, round brush in his right, is tackling Ms. Peterson’s auburn hair, while a second beauty professional works on her nails.

If two stylists and a 45-minute grim-to-glam transition isn’t quick and accommodating enough, Blow has partnered with Nordstrom department stores to launch outposts in the West Coast and with Macy’s in Herald Square to offer an even more time-saving range of services. The goal is to take efficiency another step forward with dry-style pods—an express blowout that revives style without a wash.

Blow’s competitors aren’t simply “on the map,” they’re all over it. At Drybar, you can get your blowout with a glass of champagne whether you’re in Tribeca, Flatiron, Midtown, the Upper East Side or Murray Hill.

Anna Cooperberg, a student at Columbia’s Journalism School, considers herself a Drybar regular. “Everything is taken care of, it’s very dependable,” she says. “Every detail is attended to.”

From the “Straight Up” classic blowout to the “Mai Tai” (a sexy, beach-hair look) to the “Shirley Temple” (cute curls for the divas ten and under), Drybar has managed to put a modern spin on your grandmother’s beauty salon, and women (sometimes even men) of all ages seem on board with the trend.

“If you have to go somewhere you can just hop in and hop out if you have an appointment,” says Sahar Saleem, a 21-year-old client at Drybar. “A lot of women are devoted to that.”

More blow drying at Blow.

Ms. Saleem also admits that although “$40 isn’t bad to get your hair done,” it wasn’t her top priority when it comes to spending decisions. And in a period when full-service hair salons are losing profits as consumers cut back on cuts and perms, a venture in this industry may seem more risky than opportune.

This didn’t stop DreamDry CEO Robin Moraetes and uber-stylist and DreamDry co-founder Rachel Zoe, from opening their first location in New York’s Flatiron District on Valentine’s Day this year. In fact, Ms. Moraetes informs us that although the passé, regular hair salon industry is suffering difficulties in the market, the “quick-service blow-dry industry has seen a 30 percent increase in the last year.”

Apparently, primetime Saturday appointments at DreamDry have to be booked weeks in advance. Not bad for the barely three-month-old establishment. “Our busiest time is early Monday morning,” says Ms. Moraetes. “The busiest days are Fridays and Saturday mornings, by far.” Luckily, they’re open as early as 6:30 a.m. Monday through Friday.

“We always want to look and feel the best we can,” Ms. Moraetes says, attributing near-magical powers to DreamDry’s services. With a blowout, “you feel like you can pretty much accomplish anything.” DreamDry’s target woman is the mother, the daughter, the CEO, the assistant: actually, DreamDry’s target woman is “everyone.”

ygayduk@observer.com

Aside from Walmart, Nordstrom is the store every retail broker in the city dreams of harpooning and reeling into a new home. One prominent broker familiar with the store, the amount of space it needs and the rents it would probably be willing to pay estimates that the commission for handling its lease would be around $10 million.

But like a leviathan lurking beneath the waves, the department store has offered only fleeting glimpses around the city, most notably at several development sites and a few existing assets with the capacity to accommodate its sprawling footprint.

The scuttlebutt nowadays: Nordstrom is contemplating one of two leases, one at the West Side rail yards with the Related Companies or another at the base of Extell Development’s soaring new residential tower now rising at 157 West 57th Street.

Illustration by Zack Nipper

According to brokers familiar with Nordstrom’s search, the options are emblematic of the dilemma that has kept the retailer bouncing around Manhattan for years. The department store is ideally searching for a roughly 250,000-square-foot box, a commodity so rare in the city that the only major department stores that have it—Macy’s and Saks among a short list of others—are ones that have been established in the city for decades and hence had a chance to address their real estate needs before the market became as expensive and supply-starved as it is now.

The solution, of course, has been for Nordstrom to accept a smaller space with a layout that is atypical for a traditional department store.  Many brokers say the template for this configuration is the Bloomingdale’s on Broadway in Soho, where the retailer had to greatly reduce the size of its store and tailor its clothing line and layout to appeal to the type of shoppers in that neighborhood.

A similar reshuffling of the Nordstrom concept would likely be necessary to bring the chain to Extell’s project, brokers told The Commercial Observer. The attractiveness of the rail yards stems from an assumption that the company could design a building from the ground up to meet all of its specifications.

But the rail yards are considered a new frontier in the city with little retail connecting the site to Midtown, making a deal there a gamble if the neighborhood takes longer than expected to develop into a popular destination for shoppers.

Extell’s development, though perhaps ill fitting for Nordstrom, would place it at the center of Midtown and near the Time Warner Center, a successful high-end retail mall in Columbus Circle that has helped designate the neighborhood as a retail hub.

Nordstrom has been linked to that area before. Last year, developer Stephen Ross bought the mortgage on the office building 3 Columbus Circle with the intent to foreclose on the property, raze it and erect a new tower with Nordstrom in the base. The deal fizzled when Joe Moinian, 3 Columbus’s landlord, held onto the property by recapitalizing the building with SL Green.

The trade-off between location and compatibility has been a conflict for the company for more than five years. Nordstrom almost had a deal to move into an office tower that was to be built by Stephen Ross and Harry Macklowe on the former site of the Drake Hotel at 57th Street and Park Avenue.  A person directly involved in those talks said that lease eventually crumbled because Nordstrom pushed the physical limits of the project, insisting on towering ceiling heights and other amenities.

“They wanted 18-foot ceilings,” the person said. “You could literally do two office floors for every floor that they wanted. They placed themselves out of the game by needing too much.”

The office building at 650 Madison Avenue, not far from the Drake site, has also been a location that Nordstrom has considered. According to brokers, the issues plaguing that property centered around the likelihood that nearby department stores like Saks, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman would balk at or even bar its vendors from supplying Nordstrom with the brands that they sell, which would essentially prevent Nordstrom from being competitive.

“None of the existing department stores are going to roll over and give into Nordstrom without a fight,” the broker said, adding that he wasn’t “100 percent certain that they have given up on 650 Madison.”

Perhaps out of necessity, the company has poked around downtown, reportedly checking out an anchor tenancy at the World Financial Center office complex as well as the retail being built at the World Trade Center. Here again, brokers said, Nordstrom has expressed a preference to be in Midtown.

dgeiger@observer.com

Next year, Target will re-release the best of their 17 designer collaborations featuring looks from Luella Bartley, Proenza Schouler, Libertine, and others. [Racked]

Nordstrom is opening a store on West Broadway. [The Real Deal]

A biopic of Isabella Blow is forthcoming with John Galliano and Philip Treacy linked to the project. [WWD]

Lara Stone has won the suit she filed against French Playboy for publishing unauthorized photos of her. [Vogue UK]

Mayor Bloomberg had been pushing the grungy, truck-filled area south of the Javits Center hard on the private sector; the city’s biggest developers started planning new hotels and apartment towers; commercial and residential rents seemed on an endless march upward; and the No. 7 subway line was being extended to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, making the area, for the first time, convenient to millions.

Finally, the transformation’s linchpin—the 26-acre West Side rail yards, which represent Manhattan’s largest remaining undeveloped parcel—had attracted bids from New York’s largest developers, partnered with major employers, to build a giant new complex of office towers and apartments. (The site was ultimately awarded to the Related Companies, led by billionaire Miami Dolphins owner and Time Warner Center co-developer Stephen Ross.)

The economic crisis, of course, has obliterated any sense of imminence and removed the far West Side’s aura of inevitability as Manhattan’s next great neighborhood, certainly for the next few years.

Yet, amid the rubble, Related is still plodding away on its $15 billion plans for the rail yards, a tremendously complicated project that would be larger than the World Trade Center and that has been dubbed a 21st-century Rockefeller Center. Related is in the midst of the city’s onerous public-review process, and executives now say they expect to sign a development contract in January with the M.T.A., the site’s owner.

This puts Related, one of the city’s largest developers, in an uphill battle to transform an unproven area that the economic crisis has pushed far back to the fringes. Numerous competitors expressed deep skepticism that Related’s commitments are realistic, and the first step would be a platform atop half the rail yards costing around $1 billion, a number that demands tremendous confidence in the project’s future.

Leading the project for Mr. Ross is Jay Cross, a wiry, relatively demure native of Canada who joined Related in June 2008. The public face of the Jets’ failed effort to build a stadium on half of the rail yards during New York City’s 2005 bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, Mr. Cross now is left to try to sell the idea of the small city-within-a-city at the rail yards to the local community, elected officials and potential tenants and investors.

“We’ve always believed that it’s a long-term, great project,” he said, adding what has become a standard line these days with large projects: “They’re going to go through ups and downs.”

Related’s vision for the site, which runs between 30th and 33rd streets and between 10th and 12th avenues, includes 13 towers resting on two massive platforms atop a Long Island Railroad storage yard. The tallest buildings, and probably the first to rise, would be on the eastern-most part of the site, where there would be both a hotel tower and office buildings, with a giant retail complex in the vein of the Time Warner Center (though almost twice the size).

In all, if it is ever built out to plan, the project could produce well over 5,000 apartments and about 6 million square feet of commercial and retail space, amounting to a development 50 percent larger than Rockefeller Center.

To get started and to build the first of the two platforms, Mr. Cross said that Related would need a set of major tenants signed on to take office, hotel and retail. “If we have an anchor store and an anchor office tenant and a hotel commitment, then I think we’ve got enough commitment to go with phase one,” he said.

FROM THE TIME WORK on the first $1 billion platform starts, Mr. Cross estimates it will take four years to be ready with a first building, putting 2015 as the earliest delivery.

“We’re talking to people—we’ve made presentations to all the major brokerage houses and we’ve talked to some tenants in particular,” he said, declining to name names. “No one’s making major growth decisions.”

In headier times, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Si Newhouse’s Condé Nast and the pre-recession Morgan Stanley each agreed to move their headquarters to the rail yards before separately pulling out. Now, just who would eventually trek out there is anyone’s guess, as no one is talking about 2015 right now (though Condé was still pondering the move as of earlier this year). But, if the economy stabilized, it seems reasonable to think that a diversified media concern like News Corp. could again be interested in anchoring a re-imagined West Side.

Also, a number of large law firms have lease expirations six or seven years out—Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, for one—and perhaps financial firms, if they ever grow again, would want the prestige of a large headquarters.
On the department store side, Nordstrom’s, currently with no New York presence, has for years been on the lips of landlords with big chunks of retail space (Related, of all landlords, just landed a Nordstrom’s Rack in its building on Union Square).

More than anything else, the battle Related faces is to convince any of these businesses to take the first dive in the cold water of an untested district that is in many ways still the wild west of Manhattan (it’s deserted at night and prone to Dust Bowl–strength winds). All this at a time when the local economy and workforce continue to shrink.

Such a task spawns pessimism.

“If they do build the 7 line, it’ll provide some transportation and eventually the area will get developed,” said a major New York landlord. “I wouldn’t want to bet any money that Related will do it.”

“No one believes this will happen,” said Joe Restuccia, a member of the local community board, which this week issued its official recommendations on the plan (more infrastructure investment, more affordable housing and less density, among other concerns). Large-scale development in New York is far more gradual than the current project calls for, he added. “Long-term, is this going to work? In some version, yes,” he said.

LESSONS FOR RELATED CAN be divined from the history of another large chunk of prime Manhattan real estate once owned by the M.T.A.

In 1985, the agency first designated Mort Zuckerman’s Boston Properties to develop an office tower on the site of the Coliseum exhibition center by Columbus Circle. It quickly hit hurdles: litigation, an economic downturn, the loss of a financial partner, another downturn. Boston hung on for nine years in on-and-off renegotiations before the deal ultimately collapsed, in 1994. (A decade later, a building finally did rise: Time Warner Center, co-developed by Related, and anchored commercially by its namesake.)

On the West Side, the most relevant question is whether Related will indeed sign on the dotted line with the M.T.A. Such an act—due to happen by Jan. 31, per Related’s agreement with the agency—would subject the company to rent worth $1 billion over a 99-year lease, an amount reached near the real estate market’s peak and one that adds substantial pressure to start building.

Mr. Cross, for his part, insists Related expects to commit at that price by January, even in the recession, as the opportunity to control the land is tremendously valuable and the rental payments aren’t all that painful.

“We think that we can complete the transaction without having to go and immediately start building buildings, so it still proves to be a long-term good hold,” he said. “It’s not a small price to pay in the sense that it’s tens of millions of dollars a year. But it is a relatively affordable price in the context of a 12 million–square–foot development.”

“It’s not a question of delay, delay, delay,” Mr. Cross added. “We believe fundamentally that the market will come to us sooner rather than later.”

ebrown@observer.com