Buried at the very end interview is Jay-Z, finally bringing a nasty rumor about himself to rest.

Jeff Rosenthal, interviewing Jay-Z for Rolling Stone:

So, everyone wants to know – streets are talking, suburbs, exurbs – you recently played Jenga for the first time, at 42 years old. What was that like? When was the last time you lost at something?

Where did that even come from? That's some kind of rumor. I played...

Yes, it's true. Jay-Z playing Jenga did hit the gossip circuit for a brief moment. Onward:

I heard you played Jenga at a birthday party in L.A. ...

That wasn't my first time playing Jenga...he lied. He lied! I played Jenga many times. We have Jenga nights at The Spotted Pig. And I'm not very good, 'kay? [Laughs]

And now you know:

Jay-Z—an investor in Ken Friedman's West Village hotspot The Spotted Pig—has indeed played Jenga.

He is not very good at it.

They have Jenga nights with Jay-Z at The Spotted Pig.

And so it was: The hottest "game night" in all the land, declared.

Jay-Z Will Invite Obama to Play His Philadelphia Music Festival [Rolling Stone]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Photo via Johnny Milano

Retired Philadelphia police Captain Ray Lewis, arrested yesterday after joining up with the Occupy Wall Street process, has quickly become one of the more iconic figures from the movement's two month's anniversary.

After we noted his arrest and put up several pictures of the event, we were contacted by everyone from The Associated Press to worried parents who thought they could find their son, who had been in the same paddy-wagon as Captain Lewis.

Here is what we know so far: Captain Ray Lewis has been released from custody. An unconfirmed Twitter account @CaptainRayLewis puts his release time at 9:00 p.m.

According to another source, Captain Lewis may not have ended up being charged with any assault.

From an email we received, "Regarding Ray Lewis":
When the legal aid (or whatever they're called) heard that ___ was ziptied next to Lewis, they asked ___'s mom for more info.

She and I knew that Lewis had been freed, or apparently so, much earlier .  The lawyer related that his people had heard press reports of Lewis' arrest all day but that his name never showed up on the arrest rosters they were given. This even as of around midnight.

I'm prepared to conclude that Lewis, unlike ____, was not charged. And of course he was not released, alone, from Pearl St in the middle of the night.

We called the Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information to see if we could find an initial charge for Captain Ray Lewis.

Who is "Captain Lewis?" asked the confused DCPI spokesperson. We had to clarify that Captain Ray Lewis wasn't NYPD, and was also retired.  Then we were told, "We're not identifying individual charges from the arrests yesterday...there's just too many people." We asked if it would be possible to find out if Mr. Lewis had even been officially arrested, according to their records.We were put back on hold, and then then told that Captain Lewis had been arrested on three charges.

"One violation of local law, and two counts of disorderly conduct including disrupting traffic and refusing to move on."

So officially, the charges have been filed. We are still looking to get in touch with Captain Lewis, whose Twitter feed says he'll back back at #OWS today. If you have any information, please let us know!

(Photos via Johnny Milano)

Former Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis occupying Zuccotti Park last night. (Photo: YouTube)

A Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson confirmed to the Observer that Mr. Lewis was a captain prior to retiring in 2004. He was photographed at the protests yesterday afternoon as demonstrators ringed Zuccotti Park in the wake of their eviction.

In his late night interview with the livestreamers, Lewis said police in New York City should have dealt with Occupy Wall Street through negotiation rather than forcefully removing protesters from the park.

"You should, by law, only use force to protect someone's life or to protect them from being bodily injured OK? If you're not protecting somebody's life or protecting them from bodily injury, there's no need to use force. And the number one thing that they always have in their favor that they seldom use is negotiation--continue to talk, and talk and talk to people. You have nothing to lose by that," Mr Lewis said. "This bullrush--what happened last night is totally uncalled for when they did not use negotiation long enough."

Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale "a farce."

"They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they're concerned about a dirty park. That's obnoxious, it's arrogant, it's ignorant, it's disgusting," Mr. Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis said the police want to get rid of him, but he vowed to keep coming back to the protests.

"They're trying to get me arrested and I may disappear OK?" Mr. Lewis said. "As soon as I'm let out of jail, I'll be right back here and they'll have to arrest me again."

Mr. Lewis thinks some officers might appreciate his presence, but not top brass.

"I'm their worst enemy, especially with the white shirts, the bosses OK? Some of the fellow cops they might be thinking, you know, 'That guy, he's got a point,' but the bosses, i'm their number one enemy," Mr. Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis clearly doesn't think the NYPD likes him, but he told the protesters he doesn't think cops are their enemy.

"All the cops are, they're just workers for the one percent and they don't even realize they're being exploited," Mr. Lewis said.

Viewers who watched Mr. Lewis' interview told us he spoke on camera for more than 40 minutes. We'll try to get our hands on a full clip, but for now, you can watch an excerpt of Mr. Lewis' livestream appearance below.

The rebound in core office and apartment prices that distinguishes Manhattan and a subset of the nation’s other cardinal markets has been a key factor in motivating plans for new development. Contrasting the mixed outlook for job growth, Manhattan’s investment momentum and the expectation that new, well-positioned properties will capture a disproportionate share of net absorption render favorable results from long-term feasibility analyses.

Some trophy projects that have been agreed upon in principle for a decade or more are finding new urgency amid a convergence of property market optimism and supportive government; cautiously accommodative financing partners and looming deadlines are certainly elements of the motivational mix, as well. If realized, transformative projects at Penn Plaza, the Port Authority and Hudson Yards could result in a surge in new office inventory before the end of this decade. Absent measurably stronger employment trends, changes to the skyline will push market vacancy rates higher.

Acting opportunistically, however, the best-positioned developers can expect to outperform the broader market statistics. Historical patterns suggest that the relative age of the city’s core office inventory, coupled with internal migration of tenancy within the metro area, will see new trophy assets outperform co-located comparables.

Not every proposal will bear fruit, as negotiations with key stakeholders and financiers may prove to be insurmountable obstacles to developers’ plans. Nonetheless, the city’s construction tides are rising.

Multifamily on a Tear

Few of the large projects that seemed improbable a year ago have advanced enough that shovels have hit dirt. Most are in the planning and permitting phases. For the projects that are furthest along in that process, construction is anticipated to begin in late 2011 or early 2012 at the earliest. Even in New York City, year-over-year construction employment is still down, reflecting the lag between project announcements and activity.

At the national level, as well, an observable increase in planned and proposed projects has yet to make a significant impact on national construction payrolls or spending activity. In terms of permitting, the apartment sector may be furthest along. But office and hotel projects are being announced with surprising frequency as well.

In the second quarter, 37,000 rental apartments units were started, according to the census count. That is the highest tally since the fourth quarter of 2008 and more than double the recession’s low. Nonetheless, the lagging impact of the recession’s construction slowdown is readily apparent in the construction data. While apartment demand is robust, recent construction starts have yet to result in inventory additions. Only 24,000 rental units came online in the second quarter, the smallest number on record.

There is no shortage of apartment development projects to cite as indication of the national supply response to improving fundamentals. Among high-profile projects, Kensington Investment and National Development have reportedly just broken ground on a 27-story, 385-unit apartment building on the edge of Boston’s Chinatown. Less than a month earlier, AvalonBay broke ground on Avalon Exeter, a 28-story, 187-unit apartment building in the Prudential Center in Boston’s Back Bay.

In some instances, development plans are not a response to improving apartment demand but reflect broader master-planning efforts, including significant investments in new infrastructure. One of the most visible examples of a long-term, large-scale project is the transit-oriented Tysons-Spring Hill Road metro station in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Abstracting from the anecdotal, the lists of projects are growing longer across the property sectors. In a limited number of cases, developers are proceeding without preleasing commitments. In Houston, for example, Prologis has kicked off construction on a 147,000-square-foot speculative industrial property in its fully leased Prologis NorthPark. Prologis is the exception to the rule rather than the norm. Not far away, work has begun on the 276,000-square-foot Sense Road Distribution Center. In this case, the property is significantly preleased to one tenant.

Philly’s Convention Center Draws Hotels

The surge in hotel development activity in New York City has been supported by a succession of banner years for tourism. Development downtown anticipates a further rise in tourist visits to the World Trade Center as monuments and buildings approach completion. But New York City is not alone in the growth of its hotel-room inventory. In markets from Savannah to Chicago, new hotel projects are getting underway. In the latter, work is underway on a three-hotel project at 501 North Clarke Street that will introduce more than 650 rooms to the city’s inventory in 2013, coinciding with the opening of the 320-room Langham Hotel in Mies van der Rohe’s 330 North Wabash Avenue. A harbinger of things to come, Chicago’s Radisson Blu is nearing completion and is scheduled to open on Nov. 1.

Albeit on a smaller scale, hotel projects are getting underway in Philadelphia as well. Marriott Hotels, Liberty Property Trust and Ensemble Hotel Partners announced the development of a new, 168-room Courtyard by Marriott at Philadelphia’s master-planned Navy Yard Corporate Center. Subject to Ensemble’s negotiation of project financing, the new hotel is projected to come online in the second quarter of 2013.  The announcement followed less than a month after the Sept. 15 groundbreaking on a 268-room Kimpton Hotel that will overlook Independence Mall. Parkway Corporation announced plans in late September for a Hilton Home2 Suites hotel near the expanded Philadelphia Convention Center. That project, estimated to cost $60 million, has been facilitated by at least $10 million in H.U.D. Section 108 loans and other low-cost assistance.

A few blocks from the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, construction is underway on a 136-room Hilton Homewood Suites. The project represents Campus Apartments’ first foray into hotel development and has been facilitated by a low-leverage loan supplemented with a bevy of public and private financing sources and access to the New Markets Tax Credit program. Chandan is tracking at least two other Philadelphia projects that are in the early stages of planning, including one at the Convention Center and another in Philadelphia’s Old City. Three hotels opened in the City of Brotherly Love during the recession.

Taking Risks

In the absence of a collusive supply response, individual commitments to large-scale construction inevitably represent a degree of risk-taking by developers and their lending partners. The apartment sector may be the one instance where the downside risks are mitigated by a weak economy’s drag on housing outcomes. Even in this case, however, markets where real and artificial barriers to entry are weak may suffer a destabilizing period of overreaction as new rental units flood the inventory. Overall, the same tempering of enthusiasm that qualifies the economic and labor-market outlook should inform our assessment of loss mitigation strategies when extending credit for property development. As compared to stabilized assets, lenders’ loss severities are generally much higher for these projects; in today’s environment, the probability of that loss depends inordinately on factors that are external to real estate.

dsc@chandan.com

Sam Chandan, Ph.D., is president and chief economist of Chandan Economics and an adjunct professor at the Wharton School.

The Barnes Foundation is currently closed, as it prepares to move to its new Philadelphia home.

The ongoing legal battle over the Barnes Foundation's move from Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia continued today, with a county court hearing new arguments from a citizens group that has long opposed the relocation of the prized art collection, the Associated Press reports.

The group, Friends of the Barnes Foundation, has alleged that the Barnes' board misled officials when it argued that it needed to move to Philadelphia in order to attract more visitors and increase its flow of revenue. Though their previous legal efforts to stop the move have been unsuccessful, the Friends' new suit argues that the attorney general who approved the move, Mike Fisher, inappropriately encouraged the plan, failing to act as a neutral, impartial party in discussions.

The Barnes argues that Mr. Fisher was not required to be neutral, only to act in the best interests of Pennsylvania, and it further maintains that the citizens group has no standing to bring suit.

Founded by pharmaceutical entrepreneur Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922, the Barnes Foundation's collection features a trove of Impressionist and Modern works, including more than 180 works by Renoir and 44 works by Picasso. Dr. Barnes' will stated that the works were not to be moved following his death. He died in 1951.

As the AP notes, the never-ending melee over Barnes has begun to seem a bit ridiculous since the foundation's new Philadelphia home is nearing completion, and is set to open to the public in the spring of 2012.

Art history is a lot more fashionable and faddish than most people in the paintings business would like to admit. In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art acquired Pierre-Auguste Renoir's spectacular 1902 Reclining Nude. In 1973, it went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, which described it in a catalog as a "monumental nude ... of power and full authority." In 1989, MoMA sold Reclining Nude because "it simply didn't belong to the story of modern art that we are telling," explained curator Kirk Varnedoe at the time. Similarly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the 1980s, parted with a late Renoir, too. Curiously, at the same time that late Renoir was resoundingly "out," paintings by the artist in his prime, which have a different look, were decidedly "in." Renoir's 1876 Le Moulin de la Galette sold for $78.2 million at Christie's auction house in 1990, breaking the record for a work of art.

This week, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opens one of the East Coast's biggest summer blockbusters, "Late Renoir," and opens up, again, a long-standing debate on the artist. The show features 80 works the painter did in the last three decades of his life, flanked by a handful of works by artists he influenced, such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (timed tickets to the exhibition are $27 for adults, $17 children). The Philadelphia Museum of Art was the first in America ever to stage a Renoir exhibition, according to director Timothy Rub, and these last three decades of his life document the "least understood" but "most joyful" part of it.

Indeed, that "joy" may be the problem in a nutshell. Recent art history has judged works Renoir painted in the last years of his life as wanting: The painter was simply too happy. Settling down, marrying one of his models and becoming a papa (to three sons, including legendary French film director Jean Renoir), so the theory goes, made him sentimental. The brilliant coloration of such earlier masterpieces as Girl with a Watering Can turned one-note rosy, his nudes indistinct. He overdid it on beribboned hats. Late in life, conventional wisdom holds, Renoir went from painting deliciously pretty candy-box covers to portraits of women who'd eaten too much candy. Jennifer A. Thompson, curator of the show at the museum, has a different interpretation: "Many of his late paintings evoke a summer paradise."

Plowing right into the heart of the debate, the Philadelphia Museum of Art show begins right at this critical turning point in his life, when Renoir was, some have held, on the decline. The show "opens in the 1890s; he was working on genre paintings, the kind that sells. He married a model in 1890, the mother of his three sons," said Ms. Thompson. At this point, the painter was 50, famous and reasonably financial secure. His breakthroughs behind him, he traveled to Italy to study, and to emulate, the Renaissance works of Raphael and the fleshy nudes of Peter Paul Rubens. "He often spoke of loving models whose skin took the light," Ms. Thompson said.

The young Renoir of the 1870s and 1880s was, in contrast, a rock star. Credited with helping to overthrow French academic painting (a structured curriculum for artists that began with months of Old Master-style drawing), he championed painting in the open air; portraiture of ordinary people; and fluid brushwork. In an age where people fought over the latest salon art show the way they would discuss The Real Housewives of New Jersey today, he inspired debate, fierce loyalty and the generation of artists who followed him.

So why do a show of what some may consider Renoir's "off" years? A couple of reasons: The museum already owned many of the paintings, making it a relatively inexpensive show (for them, at least; it also toured in Paris and Los Angeles), and there's the eternal box office draw of Impressionism. Plus, baby boomers love "Late" art shows. The idea that someone who was thought of as past his peak and over could make radical contributions late in his life is a happy ending. Indeed, the show has been renamed "Late Renoir," a change from the "Renoir in the 20th Century" title it carried in L.A.

But, mostly, the Philadelphia Museum of Art did the show because art history may be ripe for rewriting. "The works were widely admired at the time but are poorly understood now," said curator Thompson. Scholarship has switched sharply on late Picasso and late Monet, for example (the best late-in-life works by both were once deemed consolation prizes for collectors; now they sell for tens of millions). Can it turn on a dime again?

The show (Organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Musée d'Orsay and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art) argues that Renoir's last decades were among the most fertile, innovative and artistically courageous of his life, a time when he sought successfully to build bridges between what came before Impressionism and what came after.  Through Sept. 6, visitors are invited to judge for themselves.

Renoir, who died at the age of 78 in 1919, has "long had its admirers and detractors; until the 1940s, most were admirers. ... Late Renoir [paintings were] considered fundamental to a modern art collection," said Ms. Thompson.

Picasso, not incidentally, owned a few. 

apeers@observer.com

Brownstoner Philadelphia launches not a moment too soon. Brooklynites, in particular amongst New Yorkers, migrated there in the mid-decade (I wrote about it in early 2008). One imagines an entire ex-pat community of New Yorkers taking to the new site. 

tacitelli@observer.com

The report includes data through the second quarter of 2008 that ended June 30, and found that median home prices had declined by 6.6 percent since the second quarter of 2007.

Homes sales dropped from over 11,000 in the first half of 2007 to under 9,000 in the first half of this year and fell from just over 6,000 in the second quarter of 2007 to about 4,500 in the same time this year (exact numbers are unavailable). As the report notes, the decrease in sales activity coincides with high inventory rates that have yet to fall from their boom-year highs. As a result the percentage of sold listed homes has dropped from about 25 percent in 2004 to under 10 percent in the most recent quarter. It’s no surprise, then, that it takes about 65 days on average for a home to clear the market.

Philly still remains a much more attractive (read: cheaper) alternative to New York City. The median home price in Philadelphia was just over $100,000 in the second quarter, according to Mr. Gillen's report. In contrast, the respective third quarter median sales prices in Mahattan, Brooklyn and Queens were $928,263, $510,000 and $400,000, according to figures from appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

Here at The Observer we’ve been chronicling the exodus of New Yorkers moving to Philadelphia, and it will be interesting to see if this significant price gap continues to lure some people away.

In a coauthored analysis written for the watch-dog website Hallwatch.org, Mr. Gillen wrote the following:

(Hat tip: Matrix).

So, how was Mayor Nutter feeling Thursday morning, after he listened to Joe Biden address the Pennsylvania delegation’s breakfast? “I think this week has been tremendously helpful,” he said. “I was very clear with the public. And I think people understand that in Democratic primaries, people can support who they want to support. But this is an adult business with adult consequences. We take our politics very seriously in Philadelphia.”

Despite everything, Nutter said, he was looking forward to hearing Obama’s speech—not the least of which because he appreciated the historic step it represented for black Americans—and he said that the wounds of the hotly contested primary had healed.

“You can see who’s standing next to me,” Nutter said, nodding to his right. “Congressman Fattah.”

Chaka Fattah, an opponent of Nutter’s in the 2007 mayoral campaign, represents a West Philadelphia district and has family connections to the Black Power movement of the 1960s and '70s. He supported Obama. “I don’t mean to minimize the fact that we had a tough primary, but when you have an organization that’s vital, you have competition for leadership,” he told me. “When Kennedy ran against Carter [in 1980], Ed Rendell and myself supported Kennedy and the party establishment of that time supported Carter.”

This campaign, of course, turned out differently than that one. “I’ve been involved in a lot of other insurgency campaigns,” Fattah said. “This is the first time I’ve seen the insurgency win.”

Fattah said that “the Obama campaign has put together the most significant field operation ever seen in the state of Pennsylvania”—one that, at least during the primaries, operated largely independently of the Philadelphia Democratic machine. For instance, Obama eschewed the customary practice of putting out “street money,” cash payments that candidates in the city have traditionally doled out on Election Day to precinct bosses and ward heelers. His campaign now must integrate its organization with this traditional Democratic infrastructure. Congressman Bob Brady, the burly former carpenter who runs the Philadelphia Democratic Party, stayed out of the primary battle and did not attend the convention, but I was warned not to read to read too much into that—he is apparently phobic about planes. (And also elevators.) Rendell, who is much beloved among the party faithful, has been playing the lead role in redeploying the troops. At a delegation cocktail hour on Wednesday afternoon, I met Josh Uretsky, a long-haired 31-year-old who introduced himself as the co-chair of Philadelphia for Obama. “I think that among the political elite, it’s coming together faster than a lot of people expected,” he told me.

Still, in Philadelphia, all politics is personal, and not everything has been fixed. At the same cocktail party, I met Tom Knox, a former banker and deputy mayor who is now running to succeed Rendell when his term expires in 2010. “He’s said in the past that I was his largest fund-raiser,” Knox said, though he added that Rendell had been known to exaggerate on occasion. “I was probably the only Obama guy” within the Rendell circle, Knox told me. “They were pissed. All right, maybe not ‘pissed’—I would say they thought I was stupid.”

For supporting Obama?

“For going against the machine,” Knox replied.

“Rendell told me he always thought Obama had a strong chance of winning the primary, and if he did that, of winning the general, too,” Knox said. But he said that Rendell backed Hillary “because the Clinton administration did more for the city of Philadelphia than anyone had ever done.”

So, was he expecting Rendell’s support when he runs for governor?

“This guy is a consummate politician—he never gets mad at anybody,” Knox said. He paused for a second and corrected himself. “Or, he doesn’t stay mad.”

Meanwhile, the median house price there was roughly $109,000 by the end of June. In Manhattan, it was $1,025,000 (for condos and co-ops), according to Miller Samuel; and, in Brooklyn, $525,00.

No wonder so many New Yorkers are splitting for Philly.