The Barclays Center is open, and like Brooklyn’s favorite son who has been performing there all week, the arena lives up to the hype. It may not be universally loved, for its tortured past or rusticated design, but there is no question the Barclays Center is one of the most unique and interesting sports venues Read More
A Microsoft spokesperson just sent over the following statement in response to The CO‘s story yesterday that the Seattle-based software giant was poised to sign a 15-year lease for 400,000 square feet at 11 Times Square. The company certainly does not deny the move. Read More
Steven J. Pozycki has reeled in his white whale as one of the most sought after tenants in the entire city has landed at one of its most troubled office towers. According to numerous sources, Microsoft is poised to sign a long-term lease for 400,000 square feet at 11 Times Square, the office tower Mr. Pozycki’s New Jersey-based SJP Properties built just as the real estate bubble was bursting.
For months, the Seattle-based software company has been looking at new offices in New York as it mulled whether or not to leave its current home at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. Microsoft had been looking at space across Manhattan, but it seemed to have a special affinity for the West Side, having strongly considered Mort Zuckerman‘s swiftly rising 250 West 55th Street. For a time, Microsoft appeared interested in 11 Times Square but its focus faded in favor of other opportunities, until a last minute pitch by SJP brought the building back into the running and helped seal the deal. Read More
The Community Preservation Organization announced Monday it had entered negotiations to sell the Domino Sugar Factory to the residential development and investment firm Two Trees for over $160 million. Read More
While Walmart refuses to say if, when or where it might finally open a store within the five boroughs, one of its favored sites is the Related Company’s Gateway Center Mall in the far reaches of Brooklyn. The area is economically depressed, meaning the cheap jobs and cheap merchandise are (theoretically) desirable. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union sees Walmart jobs as junk, and they have been campaigning against the store since it resurfaced a two years ago.
Today, they made things personal, not just with Steve Ross, Related’s founder and CEO, but also his more than 7,200 tenants in the New York area. Read More
It’s one of the more unusual buildings in the city—an office building smack in the middle of Astor Place, designed by one of the world’s top architects. But as Edward Minsikoff’s 51 Astor Place, designed by Fumihiko Maki, comes closer to reality, the building has defied understanding.
Now, it has finally launched its website with updated renderings and floorplans (spotted by Curbed) which finally helps us get what the building is all about. Read More
The latest bad news at ground zero is that costs continue to mount for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. A report that found costs rose 85 percent since the project began in 2006, to $14.8 billion, placed a great deal of responsibility for these cost overruns on prior leadership at the Port.
Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg defended the Port’s leadership and the importance of rebuilding, Read More
The Port Authority has just released the preliminary findings of its agency-wide review, the biggest, if least surprising, news of which is that the cost of redeveloping the World Trade Center continues to sky rocket. The price has risen from the $11 billion estimated in 2008 to a current estimate of $14.8 billion. That is almost twice as expensive as the project was initially expected to cost when first announced in 2006, with a price tag of $8 billion. Read More
So maybe it wasn’t a bombshell after all, the “news” yesterday that Larry Silverstein might not be able to finish 3 World Trade Center all the way, leaving it instead as a seven-story retail and mechanical stump for the time being. In a statement, the downtown don insists he will find a tenant, and he has about two years to do it before he must truly pull the trigger and decide to cap the tower or to keep building. Read More
If the Fulton Mall is being transformed, it is only so much. The strip is being glammed up, stocked with major national retailers, at the cost of the mom and pops who have called the mall home for decades.
Still, things are not changing so much. As previously, pretentiously noted, Smith Street it ain’t, nor is it going to be. This is still a discount strip. From H&M to Target, the Gap to the almost-Filene’s, the newcomers have been far from high end—not counting the hamburgers. For further proof of the trend toward the same, welcome Century 21 to the neighborhood. Read More
Among the reasons New York has the finest skyline in the world—consider that a statement of fact, not opinion—is not simply the skyscrapers bounding up the island of Manhattan but also their unusual arrangement. Like a great mountain range, the city is arrayed around the twin peaks of Downtown and Midtown.
Perhaps the appeal is Freudian.
It has long been believed that New Yorkers could thank God for their unusual agglomeration of buildings (or, for those on the Upper West Side not believing in His good work, eons of geological development). It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface. But that solid land drops away in the gooey middle of the island, long limiting the heights of buildings in the city.
Or so the aphocraphists have been passing down for decades, at least since noted geologist Christopher J. Schuberth released his seminal The Geology of New York City and Environs in 1968. Therein, he posited his belief in a correlation between bedrock and big buildings, and like the Empire State Building, it has stood the test of time. But like a bad retaining wall, it all came tumbling down last month. Read More
From the moment you walk through the doors of 757 Third Avenue, you know the building is different from the average, anonymous East Side office tower.
One of the lesser works of the monolithic Emery Roth & Sons—they of GM and Look and Pan Am buildings fame—757 Third is the typical wedding-cake office building. A banded obsidian glass curtain wall with those I-beam mullions, it is the sentinel we’ve seen before, cast ever so slightly anew in a thousand business districts the world over. Seagrams lite with a splash of Chase Manhattan.
That is why walking into, or really out of, 757 Third is such a dramatic experience. The 28-story building may have the nicest revolving doors in the entire city. Set into two curving, scythelike glass panels, the building’s egress does not really have an edge, and so when stepping out onto the street through those spinning doors, it is as though the building suddenly disappears. You have left the warm confines of this sleek building and are back on the cold New York City street. You might even stop to gasp at the trick if the door were not coming up behind you, about to deliver a smack in the toosh. Read More
It’s a good week for Oregon. Last night, the Ducks won their first Rose Bowl since 1917, Portlandia has its season premier on Friday and The Observer has learned that the Rose City’s favorite coffee roaster is about to open its second New York store, a flagship planned for 30 West 8th Street in the Village.
Stumptown is one the Beaver State’s top exports, behind grass (sod, not pot), hazelnuts, Nike duds and indie rock. Read More
The cause of the elevator accident at 285 Madison is still being investigated, and it looks like faulty maintenance may have been the cause. Not so for Post real estate sage Steve Cuozzo. He blames the city’s bureaucracy for saddling us with outdated building stock. Read More
You can take the freaks out of Coney Island… actually, you can’t. Read More
