He's really sweet. (YouTube)

Best part is, he's huge on Reddit. That's worth more than a job with health insurance any day!

On a recent evening at the 92nd Street Y, Stephen Ross, chairman of the Related Companies, reflected on four decades of transformation—for the city, where he has built more apartments than almost any other developer of his generation, and also for himself. In September, Mr. Ross, 72, stepped down as the CEO of the once-humble affordable housing outfit he transformed into a luxury real estate behemoth.

Not that he’s stepping aside. There he was a few weeks later, alongside Mayor Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn on the formerly desolate Far West Side, breaking ground on the Hudson Yards project, a glass and steel city within a city that is actually larger, in terms of square footage, than downtown Portland or downtown Baltimore.

“What’s good for the city is the first thing,” Mr. Ross told the audience at the Y. “I think if you really take that into consideration, the opportunities open up.”

On stage, Mr. Ross wore a navy suit and pink tie and sat next to fellow real estate mogul William Mack of AREA Property Advisors, as Businessweek senior editor Diane Brady asked the two friends about their long careers. About a decade ago, Messrs. Ross and Mack teamed up to build the Time Warner Center, the twin-towered behemoth that rose on Columbus Circle in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, an unwitting glass echo of what had been lost. Before the project began to rise, doubts were widespread, but Mr. Ross recognized a unique combination of location, transportation and public support that has become the hallmark of his success.

Even before the attacks, the city had been “muddling along,” as Mr. Ross put it, but he could never forget gazing at the site, home to Robert Moses’s loathsome Coliseum, from his old office on the other side of the park, at 59th Street and Madison. The opportunity, with the park and subway, at the axis of Midtown and uptown, was undeniable. “The location was superb,” Mr. Ross said. “I looked at it as the best site in the city that had been undeveloped. I really thought it deserved a world-class project.”

From his revival of Union Square to his partnerships with Equinox and Danny Meyer, everything has been preparing Mr. Ross and the Related Companies for creating the 26-acre, $12 billion Hudson Yards, the city’s 21st-century Rockefeller Center. The best views, the best services, the best address. “Everyone sees the potential now,” Mr. Ross boasted at the Y.

Related’s rise has been entwined with the rebirth of New York from a bankrupt dystopia into a glittering place of wealth. The evolution has undeniably improved safety and heightened public investment, but it has also perpetuated a view, held by some New Yorkers, that the city is losing its character and diversity to a wave of glassy boxes. While no single developer is responsible for this gentrification, Related’s trophy towers have strongly correlated with the luxury surge.

And no developer has navigated City Hall with such success. Mr. Ross became friends with Dan Doctoroff, the former deputy mayor for economic development in the Bloomberg administration, when the two were part of a group that bought the New York Islanders in 1997. Critics argued that their relationship gave Related an inside track on development bids, but others credited the company’s appetite for complexity and a willingness to take on daunting projects.

“He understands what’s needed on the city’s side,” said Steve Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, where Mr. Ross was chairman for two years. “He’s in it for the long haul.”

SUCCESS has enriched Mr. Ross, whose net worth is an estimated $3.1 billion, according to Forbes. He owns the Miami Dolphins and though a registered Democrat, became a champion of Mitt Romney in the recent presidential campaign, donating over $100,000.

And yet Related originated from disappointment. After graduating from law school and working as a tax attorney in his native Michigan in the 1960s, Mr. Ross arrived in New York to work at the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns. “I was working for a Wall Street firm, and I got fired for the wrong reasons,” he said at the 92nd Street Y. “The person I was working for didn’t really realize my capabilities.”

But as Mr. Ross noted in a 2009 graduation address at Michigan University’s School of Business, which bears his name after a $100 million donation, “Bear Stearns is gone. Steve Ross is still here.”

Mr. Ross wanted his business to be sustainable, without relying on boom and bust cycles, so he focused on affordable rental housing. His first projects were small apartment complexes financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Wasaka, R.I., and Middletown, N.Y. He then closed in on New York, building in Rockland and Westchester Counties and southern Connecticut.

Mr. Ross eventually entered Manhattan with an affordable housing project in 1976, and his big break came when he won a bid in 1980 for River Walk, a development site just north of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town.

Related won the rights to build some 1,800 apartments, a hotel and ample retail (a formula the company would replicate again and again), but the biggest prize was having the Related name run on the front page of The New York Times. This immediately led to more deals, in Battery Park City and on the Upper East Side. And thus his conquest of Manhattan began. “It was first survival and concentrating on a company, then it was a question of diversifying,” Mr. Ross said. “I knew I didn’t want to stay in affordable housing forever.” 

In the early 1990s, Manhattan’s Union Square was nicknamed “Needle Park.” “It was really dangerous back then,” said Robert K. Futterman, chairman and CEO of Robert K. Futterman & Associates, a top retail brokerage that has worked with Related on numerous projects. “Though it was a great transportation hub, it didn’t have great retail.”

The district’s historic buildings had begun giving way to newcomers, starting with Zeckendorf Towers, built in 1987 after the demolition of the Union Square Hotel. But Mr. Ross first focused on old buildings, partnering with Starwood Hotels and Resorts to convert a historic Beaux Arts building on the northeastern side of the park into the W Hotel. Related also owns the historic building on the north side now occupied by the massive Barnes & Noble, one of the bookseller’s top outlets.

Related’s biggest mark was 1 Union Square South, completed in 1999, which sits at the terminus of Park Avenue South and looms over the park. “It was a very important site as a focal point,” Mr. Ross said. Related has been lauded for the aesthetics of some of its projects, but not this one. A blank wall spans an entire city block, and it isn’t helped by the swirling digital clock Related commissioned to liven up the façade.

“The south side of Union Square has been trashed, from an architectural point of view,” said Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council.

Aesthetic questions aside, the building has been a financial coup. Monthly apartment rents now go as high as $17,000, and dozens of condos have sprung up around the park in the past decade as a result. “It was really one of the first urban power centers,” said Mr. Futterman.

As 1 Union Square South was rising, Related was bidding for what would become the Time Warner Center.

For two decades, Mort Zuckerman’s Boston Properties had tried and failed to make something of Robert Moses’s unloved old Coliseum. When his deal fell apart, the Giuliani administration put it out to bid. Mr. Ross quickly mobilized. He would give Jazz at Lincoln Center a prime view overlooking Central Park and rope in Richard Parsons, the Time Warner CEO, as the anchor tenant in the office portion of the tower.

“He’d been in 75 Rock for 35 years with no issues,” Mr. Ross recalled, referring to Time Warner’s old headquarters at Rockefeller Center. “I told him, ‘This isn’t about space, this is about showcasing your company. Nobody knows who you are; they think you’re a part of NBC.’ That struck a nerve.”

He also lured the Mandarin Oriental hotel chain and a clutch of Fifth Avenue brands, like Hugo Boss and Cole Haan, for a “vertical mall” in the base of the tower. A popular model in Chicago, such retail spaces have always struggled in New York, where storefronts are believed to be king.

In the end, Related beat out the likes of Tishman Speyer, Bruce Ratner and Donald Trump. Though the development seemed expensive at the time, costing $410 million for the site and $1.7 billion to build, it has paid off handsomely. “We stole it,” said Mr. Ross.
“It’s become a destination point.” said Rosemary Scanlon, dean of New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. “There’s a lot of vision there, as well as courage.”

Paul Goldberger initially panned the structure in The New Yorker, calling the towers “banal.” Nevertheless, he commends the developer for the architectural diversity of its portfolio. “I think Related has been very good at bringing a range of serious architecture ideas into the mainstream,” he said. “They know that the market today won’t accept junk.” 

HUDSON YARDS is its own city, and not a small one at that. The shortest towers will be 75 stories high, and designed by some of the world’s best architects. The tallest will surpass the Empire State Building, with a higher observation deck. Hudson Yards will have its own cultural center and a mall twice the size of Time Warner Center, and nearly half the 26-acre site spanning eight city blocks will be given over to public open space. It will be as if someone has taken a massive swath of Midtown, perfected it, and dropped it on top of the once-desolate Far West Side. And it will only cost $12 billion and a dozen years to build.

The project reflects Related’s growing influence in City Hall. Three years ago, in a rare defeat, Related’s plan to convert the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx into a massive shopping mall was rejected by the City Council because Mr. Ross refused to agree to require that retailers there pay a living wage. Mr. Ross walked rather than back down. This year, Hudson Yards was exempted from a citywide living wage bill, which some critics claim was the result of a $34,000 donation to Ms. Quinn’s mayoral war chest.

Already, the area is filling in around him, with luxury buildings popping up in the once-unthinkable wasteland of 10th and 11th Avenues in the 40s and 50s. “Already, we’re getting our best rents in Chelsea,” Mr. Ross said. For proof, look to the nearby MiMA tower, in which TIAA-CREF just paid $551 million for a 70 percent stake, and where the top floor units rent in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. The tower is almost fully leased. It has a doggie spa, and it is at 42nd and 10th.

The case could of course be made that by burnishing all these outlying areas, Mr. Ross is leaving the city overpolished. Not only has he shifted from affordable to luxury housing, he’s fighting living wages for the working class while creating apartments that sell on average for more than a million dollars, and frequently tens of millions. If any developer represents the go-go highs of the Bloomberg era, it is Stephen Ross, even if his approach often leaves the average New Yorker on the sidelines, gazing up at glass peaks.

In 2017, Related plans to move its corporate headquarters from the Time Warner Center to Hudson Yards. And Mr. Ross will trade his Time Warner penthouse, with its Central Park view, for a fresh perspective atop what he calls the new heart of New York.

editorial@observer.com

Dr. Adam Levinson, skirt-chaser (Mt. Sinai)

He was just trying to help out those without health insurance! A Mount Sinai Medical Center urologist was charged yesterday with unlawful surveillance in the second degree after he was caught allegedly looking up ladies' skirts in Union Square.

On Wednesday, a sharp-eyed minister using his sinning sonar followed highly-rated urologist Dr. Adam W. Levinson off of the 4 train after he saw the gentleman mussing with his newspaper. The fumbling doc was discreetly hiding a super spy pen camera; bending down to look up women's summer-wear.

The minister, Sheldon Birthwright of New Life for Better Living Christian Center in The Bronx immediately alerted Union Square authorities to the creep. Unfortunately, according to The New York Post's account of the events, Minister Birthwright lost sight of Dr. Levinson after grabbing some cops. The minister on a mission was not deterred: as a man who had spent 18 years in the security industry and TSA, he was able to locate Dr. Strangelove hiding behind a pillar on the L train platform.

The New York Times' makes no mention of Minister Birthwright's divine intervention in the proceedings, saying:

(Levinson was) observed by a transit police officer at 5:15 p.m. holding a newspaper under the woman’s skirt with a pen containing a tiny video camera clipped onto the newspaper, according to a criminal complaint.

The video pen retrieved by police included clips shot from underneath women's skirts. Dr. Levinison has since been suspended by the hospital, despite the digital "Compassionate Doctor Recognition" award given to him two years running on PatientsChoice.Org. Minister Birthwright, the unsung hero of the day (except by the Post) rode off into the underground sunset of the uptown local track.

Mr. Moinian’s strategy hardly seemed audacious at the time. The economy was hot, Manhattan rents were rising by the month and prime office space was in strong demand.

149 Fifth Avenue. (Courtesy Property Shark)

Having grown rapidly since it moved into 475 Fifth Avenue, the Eurasia Group was flying high too. Executives at the firm were ready to take the money and use it to relocate into a larger office that could house the company’s expanding staff.

But as is often the case in both life and New York’s unpredictable real estate market, things didn’t go as planned. Mr. Moinian wound up buying most of the tenants out of their leases at 475 Fifth and embarking on a thorough overhaul of the property. But before he came around to a deal with the Eurasia Group, seismic obstacles knotted his plans. The economy collapsed, the real estate market tanked and Mr. Moinian’s grand vision for the property became one of the many unfortunately timed projects whose economic underpinnings rested on market conditions that had suddenly vanished.

Buyouts stopped and construction froze almost overnight. With little hope of leasing space at the rates necessary to justify the project’s cost, Mr. Moinian and Westbrook eventually were forced to walk away from the building, turning the keys over to the lender, the British bank Barclays.

The Eurasia Group couldn’t as easily be rid of the situation. It found itself in one of the most uncomfortable scenarios a tenant can experience: captive in a building with no true owner. Despite the horror stories of suspended services and maintenance so associated with foreclosures, Alec Allenstein, the Eurasia Group’s chief operating officer, said Barclays remained a responsible steward of the property.

What was problematic was the condition of the building after months of unfinished construction. Namely, 475 Fifth Avenue’s once beautiful lobby had been stripped down to the cinder blocks.

“We had this beautiful Art Deco lobby with glass and marble that we loved and it had been taken down to the concrete,” Mr. Allenstein said.

Being one of the sole occupants in an otherwise nearly vacant property was also eerie. “Going up to our floor, it would kind of feel a little shaky,” he said, noting the elevator’s sparse use.

The Eurasia Group put its head down and continued with its business. The firm consults with financial clients and other companies, providing analyses on the spectrum of risks associated with investing and operating businesses in foreign markets. Considering world events since the economic downturn, the firm has been thriving in recent years. “We added 44 people in 2011 alone,” Mr. Allenstein said.

The company’s success only heightened the inconvenience of its situation.

“Imagine being the head of recruiting here and every time you’re bringing in a candidate you’re telling them the address and warning them not to worry, they’re not stepping into a bombed out building,” Mr. Allenstein said.

Alexandra Lloyd, Eurasia Group’s director of communications, added: “We would joke with people that the building was going for industrial chic.”

In recent months, with the firm’s lease set to expire, it had one criterion that stood above all others in its search: a secure landlord.

The Eurasia Group tapped Nick Berger, a young executive at the real estate services firm Newmark Knight Frank, to head up its search. Mr. Berger knew what the company had gone through. He’d been a leasing agent at 218 West 18th Street, a building near Union Square that likewise was almost fully emptied during the boom years to undertake a plan to remake it into a higher end property. And, like 475 Fifth, that building also ended up in foreclosure.

Mr. Berger faced a tough challenge. The real estate market has tightened substantially since the recession. And while that meant fewer problem landlords, it also led to lower vacancy rates.

“A lot of the spaces that are out there right now have been picked over. They’re not the best offices,” Mr. Berger said.

Mr. Berger stayed focused, and his ears perked when he heard about a tenant at 149 Fifth Avenue whose brokers were putting out feelers to see if they could find a company to sublet the space. Mr. Berger kept track of the situation. The company, Cadogen, an investment firm, ended up ceasing operations. Instead of waiting to see if the space would become available, Mr. Berger approached the landlord. He knew that if there was one thing both the Eurasia Group and 149 Fifth’s owner would immediately appreciate it was stability.

“This was a space that wasn’t on the market and never hit the market,” Mr. Berger said. “But I knew that the landlord might be interested in a strong tenant like Eurasia.”

The asset stands in the heart of the Flatiron district, a neighborhood in Midtown South, not Midtown, where 475 Fifth Avenue is situated. The shift, however, was not a problem.

“When we started the company, our first office was in Midtown South so it was a neighborhood that we felt comfortable with,” Mr. Allenstein said.

A lease was quickly drawn up for 22,500 square feet, all of floors 14 and 15. The space is twice as large as what the company occupies at 475 Fifth.

“The family that owns 149 Fifth has put work into the property, has fully leased its space to a host of high-credit tenants and has very little debt on the asset,” said Jason Greenstein, who, like Mr. Berger, is also an executive at Newmark Knight Frank and is 149 Fifth’s leasing agent. “So demonstrating that this was a landlord in a very strong and stable financial position was not difficult.”

Included in the building’s overhaul in recent years was an upgrade to its lobby, a renovation that did not go unnoticed by the Eurasia Group’s executives.

“My due diligence told me that this was an owner that wasn’t heavily leveraged and that gave us the sense of stability,” Mr. Allenstein said. “Plus having a nice lobby again sure will be nice.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Protest art!

Robert Lederman, a crusading artist and a bit of crank who was a frequent antagonist of Mayor Giuliani, thinks the Bloomberg administration is being two-faced in expelling the Occupy Wall Street protestors tents from Zuccotti Park. He points to tents set up for holiday markets as the unjust, commercial expropriation of public space.

The holiday vendors have permits, of course, and a portion of their proceeds goes to the parks they occupy, so there appears to be a public good here, whatever your opinion of overpriced tchokes. Mr. Lederman has his own agenda, as he has run afoul of the city for trying to sell art in parks without permits. Still, his thoughts, which he just emailed around, are intriguing in light of last night's events.

Mayor Bloomberg claims that tents are not allowed in NYC parks. Ask him to explain the giant tents being set up right now in Union Sq Park and in Central Park at Columbus Circle for the corporate run Holiday vending Markets. These tents are set up for more than a month straight, 24 hours a day. They completely displace pedestrians, residents and park visitors for a fee of millions of dollars.

Mayor Bloomberg says generators are not allowed in NYC parks, yet the Holiday Markets operate huge generators as do most of the Greenmarket vending stands in Union Sq Park. There is even a weekly Greenmarket set up right outside the Mayor’s office with huge tents and generators.

Mayor Bloomberg says protestors cannot sleep in parks, yet he allows more than 100 homeless people to sleep in Union Sq Park every night. Instead of pretending that the Mayor is a defender of free speech, perhaps the media can ask him to explain these totally inconsistent policies.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

(Photo courtesy of Marlborough Gallery)

The Parks Department unveiled its newest piece of public art yesterday, a 26 foot tall Gran Elefandret by Spanish artist Miquel Barceló. Contrasts rather nicely with Andy at the other corner of the park, no?

Though the statue may seem a little top-heavy, Mr. Barceló assured WNYC that it was built to withstand the gusty winter. “I wanted to be very sure that it wouldn’t fall,” Barceló said.

The statue is exhibited in association with Marlborough Gallery, and will be on display until May 2012.

Those were the days. And they still are! (Photo: csmonitor.com)

God bless the Silicon Alley trend piece. We've done one (and then another about a colony of the alley); and, incidentally, we cover the industry regularly every day here. No matter how much ink is proverbially spilled in deference to the tech industry's growth, we as New York reporters can't seem to get enough of the nerds-are-among-us-and-they-need-space-to-work angle.

The latest comes today from The Wall Street Journal. It notes that while Silicon Alley has been around since just about the P.C. Jr. (we had one growing up, it was awesome, floppy disks and all), it has gotten a boost via brand-names as of late:

The emergence of Union Square as a destination for technology firms got its start several years ago. But the neighborhood's tech community received a boost this year with the arrival of household names such as computer giant Apple Inc. and the impending arrival of user-review site Yelp.

Those big companies are among nearly a dozen tech firms that have signed leases this year for a combined 135,000 square feet of office space in Union Square, according to the Union Square Partnership.

What's drawing the newbies? Not the rent necessarily—it's cheaper downtown—but the spaces are lovely: wide open, airy, sort of like any rom-com set in San Francisco in the last 15 years.

tacitelli@observer.com  ::  Follow on Twitter @tacitelli

“When we went to see the space, it helped that the agent said, ‘I know what you guys are. I just used you!’” the tenant’s broker, Elliot Warren of The Kaufman Organization, told The Observer. Village Vines then successfully landed its first 2,500-square-foot permanent digs near Union Square for five years at 37 West 17th Street.

The company is less than a year old, so for the less technologically inclined, he explained the concept thusly: Diners pay a $10 reservation fee to receive a 30 percent discount when booking through the Village Vines website. He added, “You have one guy paying $1,000 a bill for dinner at Le Cirque and another guy is paying $700.”

For those not accustomed to running up four-figure restaurant tabs, the asking rent was a modest $32 a square foot for an office a few blocks from the park and amidst Union Square’s bustling restaurant scene. “Union Square was important to us … but there are very few office spaces in that neighborhood," Mr. Warren said.

The building is also home to Sushi Samba’s corporate office, Max Brenner and Basta Pasta, so we know where we’ll be freeloading our next meal.

Jake Mansher of the Moinian Group represented the landlord.

lkusisto@observer.com

To create his 10-foot-high Warhol monument, Mr. Pruitt dressed Andy Stillpass, a Cincinnati collector who has the same body type as Warhol, in the artist's 1970s fashion, and scanned him with a laser, erasing physical details. "So that it looks as though it has been dipped in liquid mercury. It has a mirror finish," said Mr. Pruitt.

Like the android in the Terminator movie?

"I was trying to make Andy as blank as possible. Having the iridescent surface, he reflects the environment around him. Like a police siren rushing by in the evening, and the activity in the farmers' market and the life in Union Square Park."

Just what had Warhol meant to Rob Pruitt, I wondered?

A great deal. Both of them, at one time or another, were exiled from the Haute Art World. For both, it's been a comeback story.

In 1992, Red, Black, Green, Red, White, Blue, a show by the then-duo Rob Pruitt and Jack Early, opened at the prestigious Castelli Gallery. A riff on black culture that explored stereotypes, this exhibit, by two white men, was roundly chastised for supposed racism. The Pruitt-Early team splintered under the pressure, and all but disappeared from the art world. 

Mr. Pruitt came back to attention in 1998, and with panache. A couple of artists who shared a studio space on 14th Street organized a group exhibition and asked him to be in it. So he shelled out several hundred dollars and laid out a long line of cocaine on the floor.

How long did the now-infamous piece, Cocaine Buffet, survive?

"Nothing was spoken about it. It was just simply there in the center of the space," he said. People "didn't know if it was baby powder or sugar or the real thing. The trepidation lasted for about an hour. Then, somebody fell to their knees. Then there were three brave souls. They broke the ice. ...  And then it just became like a free-for-all." The cocaine "only lasted for about 10 more minutes," the artist said.

Did that mark Mr. Pruitt's reentry into the art world?

Well, Artforum lauded the artist's "brilliant promotional strategy," and by 2001, he'd done an edition of prints for the New Museum; been featured in Visionaire, among other glossy publications; and opened a well-reviewed show of glittery panda paintings at Gavin Brown Enterprise, a gallery known for its savvy artist marketing.

"I think that the cocaine line was also a line in the sand. People were able to see me new again," he said.

Indeed, since then it's been hard to lose sight of Mr. Pruitt, in his role as the art prankster who is also serious. In 2009, approached by the Guggenheim Museum about spicing up its annual fund-raising gala, he launched the tongue-in-cheek Art Awards, which quickly became the art world's straight-faced version of the Oscars, complete with hosting duties by James Franco. To make his career recovery complete, last fall the Tate Modern staged a partial remounting of Red, Black, Green, Red, White, Blue, ironically hanging it not far from some Warhols.

What with Andy Warhol's similar (if posthumous) comeback from obscurity, was there some kind of theme here? 

"Having a comeback is part of the narrative of the American success story," said the artist. "That is certainly never lost on anybody, whether it be Warhol or any other figure who has peaks and valleys.

"I think that one of the themes of my work is that of the celebrity narrative or trajectory, how it's like any other constructed narrative ... that there is a rising action and a falling action. But I think when you're living your own life, it's hard to do an autopsy of it. You just end up living it."

The Andy Monument is on display through Oct. 2.

editorial@observer.com

The burger chain has opened three other New York locations since 2003. It does face some stiff compeition from Goodburger, at Broadway and 17th Street, which has to its name both a glowing Times review ,not to mention, this Chowhound gem: "Goodburger should change their name to Excellentburger."

The restaurant includes 3,570 square feet of ground-floor space, as well as a full basement. "This prime corner has laid fallow for the past five years. 5 Napkin Burger will undertake a full reconstruction of the building and turn it into a wonderful gem," said Winick Realty Group's Tatiana Jung-Voevodina, who repped the tenant along with Richard Smith. Landlord Solil Management was represented in-house by Judy Brener.

The joint is expected to open in April 2011. Its other locations are on Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, Broadway and 84^th Street on the Upper West Side, and in Astoria.

lkusisto@observer.com