At 8 on Tuesday morning, Brasserie, an omelet house of choice for real estate heavyweights, was nearly empty. Maybe the winter recess in Westchester public schools had Papa and kids sunning in Acapulco. Or maybe his firm is keeping a closer eye on expenses. And with good reason. If one thing’s for sure in commercial real estate, it’s that the economic malaise has finally settled in. This is not the industry of a mere three months back, when brokers, alternately panicked and despondent, struggled against the recognition that the world as they knew it was turning upside down before their dumbstruck eyes. That sense ...
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Right out of the gate, justices had a few questions for the lawyers petitioning the State Supreme Court's Appellate Division in a hearing Monday morning to block eminent domain for Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. "Can we really determine that in this framework?" interjected Justice Randall Eng, just barely after Jennifer Levy, an attorney representing a plaintiffs' group of businesses and individuals, mentioned the state's condemnation of the area in question. "This is not an argument about the act of condemning," she replied. Instead, this part of the legal offensive against Bruce Ratner's project was more about process: The plaintiffs argue ...
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A prospective tenant in Manhattan recently included her unemployment payments as financial ballast on her rental application. Instead of being mocked or disregarded, the application was accepted, according to Marc Lewis, whose Century 21 NY Metro represents the landlord. Oh, my, how times have changed. Anecdotes abound about ready-to-negotiate landlords and falling rents. And the old standby economic principles of supply and demand seem surpassed by popular perception. It’s a renter’s market because, well, everyone says and thinks it is. That’s really only partially true. Yes, the dismal economy has spawned vacancies and caused rents to drop. But the tide has changed so quickly ...
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Location: With the stimulus, you had a victory a couple weeks ago, getting $3 billion extra for transit that didn’t make it into the final bill. What happened? Mr. Nadler: We’re still trying to figure that out. That went into a—I wouldn’t even call it a conference. It was really a meeting of the White House and the leadership of the Senate and the House. … In the House bill, there were, as you know, $12 billion [for transit], because we passed that [$3 billion] amendment. The Senate bill, it was $8.4 billion, albeit they had gotten 58 votes for an amendment to bring ...
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“It’s just such an assault on all your senses,” my discerning wife, Heather, said over brunch on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 15. We were seated at a small table near the center of the famous Crystal Room at Tavern on the Green, the largest and most scenic of all six separate dining areas within the sprawling 25,000-square-foot restaurant in Central Park. The vast, 380-seat space is bathed in bright pastels and bizarrely juxtaposed floral carpeting and upholstery, flooded with light from floor-to-ceiling windows and all blinged out with a dozen or so shimmering chandeliers, including an Austrian-made emerald centerpiece believed to have once belonged to ...
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