1) A second penthouse at 15 Central Park West has hit the market, joining Dr. Lindsay Rosenwald's duplex on the 18th and 19th floors of the "House" building (which officially doesn't have a listing price but is said to commanding at least $90 million). A penthouse on the 40th floor of the "Tower," a 5,270-square-foot four bedroom apartment that also includes a ground-level 1,100-square-foot space for the help, is now asking $80 million, after closing in April for "just" $21.9 million. The owner is London-based investor Amit Ben-Haim, who made his money from selling off a medical device company he founded. According to brokers, the apartments are "already attracting interest from a stream of billionaires and their representatives," so call these penthouses the anti-Pierre. [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
2) Mount Sinai Medical Center's 31-story black Annenberg Building at 99th Street off Fifth Avenue is often said to be a blight, but would the East Harlem locals rather have that than an even taller condo building that could come about as a result of Mount Sinai selling off the development rights to fund a new 11-story SOM-designed medical building nearby? Critics are worried that the Durst Organization's 564-foot-tall proposed tower would leave part of Central Park in the shadows. And there's also the sensitive affordable housing topic. The city has yet to approve the deal. [The City/Gregory Beyer]
3) The rent-stabilized tenants of 220 Central Park—the 30 or so left in the building—are still fighting the demolition of their 20-story building, and they won a recent court battle which at least buys them some time. The Clarett Group and Vornado are trying to get everyone out so they can build a 41-story glass condo on the site, and the other tenants have all moved or been bought out. The holdouts, which include Corcoran's Leighton Candler, reportedly turned down an offer of $1 million per apartment to vacate. [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
Office buildings are supposed to be boring—and indeed, the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design for 250 West 55th Street isn't much to get excited about—but the saga of Mort Zuckerman's new Hell's Kitchen tower just took an interesting turn. Steve Cuozzo reports that engineers working on the new Eighth Avenue building need to get into a four-story neighbor at 241 West 54th Street to reinforce it, but the building's owner—fellow megadeveloper Joseph Moinian—is refusing to give them entry. Or at least that's what Zuckerman's Boston Properties alleges in court papers. According to Zuckerman, Moinian (the tan one) is essentially trying to force him to buy the building and another one on the block for $20-$30 million. Zuckerman even alleges that Moinian told him, "This is how the game is played in New York." Meanwhile, the occupants of little 241 West 54th Street are caught in the middle of this spat between two rich old dudes, and they are freaking out. Said one: "The court papers came in Friday and I thought, Oh my God, it's little boys in the sandbox." Yeah, if the sand is actually shredded $100 bills.
· W. 54th Demolition Derby Zuckerman to Battle Moinian [NYP]
· Midtown Braces for Another All-Glass Office Building [Curbed]
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We don't get to the Diamond District News very often, but frankly, we should. Especially if they're going to report fun stories like this one. We all know that Gary Barnett, maverick leader of developer Extell, is pissing off the diamond dudes with his planned 40-story tenant stealer, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and located at 44 West 47th Street. The protests from local landlords have all but subsided, their will shattered by The Barn, but the DDN post-mortem on the whole affair involves a breakdown of all the properties and air rights Extell acquired on 46th and 47th Street to aid the deal. And holy crapballs, it's a lot of land. A Curbed tipster forwarded along the story, and under the totally awesome title "How much does Gary Barnett really own?" (it's a question we sometimes lie awake in bed pondering), the financial burden incurred by Extell is detailed. Folks, they spent over $15 million on air!
Toren (no 'the' in front of the name, thank you very much) isn't just the most distinctive looking condo tower going up in Brooklyn. It looks like it's going to have one of the more aggressive marketing campaigns around, too. That's understandable, given that the 38-story SOM-designed building at Flatbush and Myrtle Avenues, which we last looked at as a crane part was dangling above, is going to have a lot condos to sell and a lot of competition both around it and elsewhere in Brooklyn. The project—which will have 240 luxe condos and 40 below market units—comes from BFC Partners and Halstead is handling the sales. Studios are listed in the $300s, 1BRs in the $400s-$600s, 2BRs in the $600s-$1M+ range. The website includes the usual tour around the premises (part of which was a Flatbush Ave. car wash), plus two PDFs of two magazines produced for the development, which tell readers everything they could ever want to know about the building and the selling strategy. Oh, and the developer is trying to market the retail space to...Apple. Beyond that, the online push is so full of details about the building and pro-Brooklyn, feel good statements that it makes our brains explode.
· Toren [torencondo.com]
· Toren Listings [Halstead]
· Closing Bell: Could the Toren Land the Mac Store? [Brownstoner]
The market crisis resulting from JPMorgan Chase's $2/share bailout of investment bank Bear Stearns has a real estate subplot that goes beyond the "hopeful Coldwell Banker realtor" that Reuters reports "was hawking cheap apartments to employees who saw the value of their stock options go up in smoke." There's the matter of Bear Stearns' SOM-designed 45-story office building at 383 Madison Avenue, still fresh and reveling in nearly universal praise. If JPMorgan Chase acquired the building as part of the deal, does that mean they just paid $236 million for a nearly-bankrupt i-bank and its headquarters, which just so happens to be worth more than $1 billion? Unclear! Dealbreaker reports on the situation, made very tricky by Bear Stearns' complicated "synthetic lease" on the building. JPMorgan may make out like a bandit on 383 Madison, but then again, it may not. Another real estate subplot: who's going to pay double for all those 15 Central Park West flip jobs now?
· Does Bear Stearns Own 383 Madison? [Dealbreaker]
· 383 Madison Avenue [SOM]
· Sale Price Reflects the Depth of Bear’s Problems [NYT]
The name "diamond" derives from the ancient Greek word meaning "invincible" (thanks, Wikipedia!), but the guys in charge of the precious stones have folded quicker than an Atlantic City tourist. The protests against Extell's new 40-story towerplanned for the Diamond District have all but subsided, the Post's Steve Cuozzo reports, because the local landlords—who are worried about getting driven out of business by the new Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed office building—figured the project is "inevitable." Diamond dudes, do we need to remind you that there's still a legal challenge to the Trump Soho (hearing set for tomorrow, btw) and the thing is already 40+ stories out of the ground? Inevitability means nothing when it comes to real estate development in New York. Cuozzo also reports that foundation plans have been filed with the Buildings Department, and the scheme is still in place to have the diamond tenants enter the building through 44 West 47th Street, with the other commercial tenants getting their own lobby on 46th Street. Lehman Brothers are rumored to be taking some space, but Extell's Gary Barnett refused to confirm or deny.
· Realty Check [NYP/Cuozzo]
· Extell's Diamond District Tower Revealed [Curbed]
· Gary Barnett, Maverick, is Making Diamond Dudes Mad [Curbed]
Economic slowdown be damned, Brookfield Properties is moving full steam ahead on its gigantic Manhattan Westoffice park on the west side rail yards that aren't quite the West Side Rail Yards. The company has enlisted the services of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill—the same firm behind the two signature towers of Brookfield's Hudson Yards bid—to design two more huge office towers for Manhattan West, which, confusingly, is just to the east. At top right, a rendering of the new buildings, as well as a refresher on the hypothetical One and Two Hudson Place at Hudson Yards. Our initial gut reaction was that SOM is being lazy, but then we realized the genius. Now Brookfield has to win the development rights for Hudson Yards, just so the design becomes contextual.
· Brookfield Taps SOM for Other West Side Rail Yards [The Real Estate]
· Brookfield Births 'Manhattan West' on Hudson Yards' Doorstep [Curbed]
· Yardsmania #1: Brookfield Properties Goes Splittsville [Curbed]
With the hoarding of air rights from Broadway theaters now complete, Boston Properties has come clean about its office building plans for Eighth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Revealed today by the Post's Steve Cuozzo, 250 West 55th Street will be a 39-story tower with a glass curtain wall (right; click to expand), set back from a base that will include plenty of stores for retail-deprived Hell's Kitchen residents. The design is by Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Chris Cooper, and Boston—led by Mort Zuckerman—says tenants will be able to move in by January 2010. Those tenants are still a mystery, for now. The building is close to 1775 Broadway, currently suffering from a sad identity crisis brought on by a narsty bite from the glass bug. It will also be deliciously close to Norman Foster's new Hearst tower, creating some sort of Upper Hell office district. The lunch scene at Balsley Park just got a lot more crowded, sunlight-deprived office drones!
· Midtown Masterpiece [NYP]
· The Air Up There: More Development Rights For Sale [Curbed]
1) Don't you just love it when mind-exploding architectural reveals are tucked away in seemingly small-potatoes stories? This little ditty on developers building schools in exchange for more air rights includes info on the boring Azure on East 91st Street and the very very not boring SOM-designed 59-story condo tower planned for 250 East 57th Street (right). Wow. That's a lot to process without fair warning. [Posting/C.J. Hughes]
2) Josh Barbanel reports that in November, "the number of closed sales just about matched the number closed in November 2006, and prices were considerably higher, but roughly flat compared with the prices in the previous quarter." And inventory seems to still be flying off the shelves, he says. Merry Christmas, real estate brokers. [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
3)Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is often criticized for serving no other purpose than breathlessly praising the work of starchitects, and he's had it! But instead of hitting back, the man who once nearly had an orgasm over a Gehry stairwell instead fires off a defense of his precious starchitects. Booyah, haters! [Critic's Notebook]
CENTRAL VILLAGE—The New School has been planning a new building on Fifth Avenue forever, and the SOM rendering at right has been floating around as the design. Now, a tipster has some scoop: "Regarding the new building on 5th ave between 13th and 14th streets (65 5th Ave): (Almost) all of the money has been raised for this 16-story (not 100% sure on that number...and also not 100% set in stone, depending on the rest of the money raised) building. It's rumored at $500 million. (Yikes!) The money is supposedly coming from Bob Kerrey's fund-raising, city funds, federal funds, and the plans to sell multiple properties after construction is complete, including the uptown buildings occupied by Mannes (the classical music school), The New School for Drama (on Bank Street), and the 40th street Parsons building."
CITY HALL—"nyc.gov housing website says you have NO Tenant Rights!!! Blank page!!! even in printer friendly format." Hey, at least they're being honest. [CurbedWire Inbox]
REJECTIONVILLE—And now, a note on the eternal struggle for co-op board transparency: "The Anti-Discrimination Center has been working to pass a law, 'Intro 119,' that would require co-ops to provide their reasons for rejection when they turn down an applicant. Over 40 civil rights and allied organizations and a majority of the City Council already support the bill, yet those who want to maintain a system of privilege and exclusion are fighting desperately against it. They have thus far succeeded in having City Council Speaker Chris Quinn keep the bill bottled up without a hearing. In order to underline the importance of this issue, we need to hear from people who have been turned down by co-ops. Please email us at center@antibiaslaw.com."
Developer Sheldon Solow's vision for seven new gigantic mixed-use towers along the East River waterfront near the United Nations is gaining steam. The latest, reported by Charles Bagli in the Times today, is an agreement between Solow and officials to set aside 20% of the planned apartments for affordable housing. With over 4,000 apartments planned, thats a fairly sizable chunk, especially when those low-income units will be in buildings designed by starchitects like Richard Meier and the gang at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Solow is also working with the city to figure out how to stick a new school on the property, adding to the feelings of goodwill now suddenly directed straight him. Say what you will about the litigious Sheldon Solow and his First Avenue crazytown, but he is playing this thing like Mozart tickling the ivory. What's next, promising that the skyscrapers will suck up all the pollution from the East River and turn it into five-course meals for the homeless?
· Developer Would Include Low-Cost Units in East Side Towers [NYT]
· Solow's East River Waterfront Moves Forward [Curbed]
· East River Waterfront Dreaming in Midtown [Curbed]
1) A second penthouse at 15 Central Park West has hit the market, joining Dr. Lindsay Rosenwald's duplex on the 18th and 19th floors of the "House" building (which officially doesn't have a listing price but is said to commanding at least $90 million). A penthouse on the 40th floor of the "Tower," a 5,270-square-foot four bedroom apartment that also includes a ground-level 1,100-square-foot space for the help, is now asking $80 million, after closing in April for "just" $21.9 million. The owner is London-based investor Amit Ben-Haim, who made his money from selling off a medical device company he founded. According to brokers, the apartments are "already attracting interest from a stream of billionaires and their representatives," so call these penthouses the anti-Pierre. [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
Comments
Office buildings are supposed to be boring—and indeed, the 
The 
The name "diamond" derives from the ancient Greek word meaning "invincible" (thanks, 
1) Don't you just love it when mind-exploding architectural reveals are tucked away in seemingly small-potatoes stories? This little ditty on developers building schools in exchange for more air rights includes info on the boring 
CENTRAL VILLAGE—The New School has been planning a new building on Fifth Avenue forever, and the SOM rendering at right has been 
Developer Sheldon Solow's 
