Eliot Brown

Ritchie Studer has been making fewer trips to New York lately, and, from his perspective, that’s a big problem.

As the chief executive of the Texas-based company UTEX, which wants to process the dredged land from New York Harbor and use the material to build up land along the Jersey shoreline, ultimately selling it off to developers, Mr. Studer said he, for months, was constantly traveling to the area to craft a contract with the Port Authority.

Those talks ceased in July, after the highly valuable 30-year contract was approved by the Port Authority’s board and finalized; now the company has been waiting on the New York–New Jersey agency to execute it, an unusually long wait for a contract that was approved and readied six months ago.  read more »

Few have complained of a shortage of lawsuits flowing from Sheldon Solow’s offices at 9 West 57th Street. The 80-year-old billionaire developer is known as one of the most litigious names in the local real estate scene, described by friends as someone who has a strong feeling of right and wrong, and derided by critics as a vindictive landlord who pursues frivolous challenges.

But Mr. Solow is now engaged in a legal battle with state government that suggests a distinct lack of frivolity both in its scope (he is eligible for perhaps over $250 million in state funds) and the strength of his arguments (a state court recently ruled in his favor, though the decision is now being appealed).  read more »

The city has released a cost/benefit analysis of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums, as the city plans to issue a fresh set of tax-free bonds for the projects.

For the Yankees project, costs directly to the city are up substantially since the last analysis in 2006 (from $34.3 million to $209.5 million, excluding new parkland that has also risen in cost); though, somewhat curiously, so too are benefits (from $173.1 million to $438.3 million). The Mets figures showed less of a disparity, as costs were up from $91.4 million to $128.8 million, while benefits went up from $139.3 million to $199 million.  read more »

Avi Schick, the prosecutor-turned-development official who has served as downstate president of the Empire State Development Corporation for the past two years, will leave his job this week. Mr. Schick emailed a letter on Monday evening to colleagues announcing his departure (a copy of the letter is below).

Mr. Schick's departure comes more than seven months after the Paterson administration announced he would resign his position; in May, the state announced he would leave in September.

At the ESDC, Mr. Schick, once a top prosecutor in the state attorney general's office under Eliot Spitzer, oversaw state involvement in projects such as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, the development of Governors Island, and Columbia University's West Harlem expansion.  read more »

Editor's note: A shorter version of this interview appears in the Jan. 7 print edition of The Observer.

Location: With the budget, the city faces a gap of over $1 billion for the next fiscal year, mostly only by using the surpluses of prior years. Do you expect we’ll need another tax increase?
Ms. Quinn. I hope we won’t need to raise taxes further. Certainly, I don’t think we can go back to the property-tax well if we do need to raise taxes.

Why is that?
To go further than that [the recent repeal of a 7 percent property-tax cut] would take us to a property-tax level beyond where we raised property taxes after September 11.  read more »

Steve Roth’s Vornado Realty Trust has filed an application with the city to rezone the site of the 90-year-old Hotel Pennsylvania, clearing hurdles for the real estate firm to demolish the hotel and build an office tower of up to 2.85 million square feet in its place.

In paperwork filed with the Department of City Planning, Vornado indicates it wants to rezone the site on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue to allow for the development of a skyscraper of up to 1,198 feet, one that could hold one major tenant with a large set of trading floors, or a multi-tenant building with a large base of retail.  read more »

Here’s a look at some of the latest creations from a boisterous group of Coney Island enthusiasts, newly energized as Coney mega-landlord Joe Sitt has begun not renewing leases. The group, the Coney Island Coalition, sent an email to us on Wednesday saying they were planning a rally today at the boardwalk where they will presumably sport their new signs in protest of Mr. Sitt and the Bloomberg administration.

Full look at the signs here.

In a Forest City Enterprises conference call last week, the top executives at the real estate developer took a decidedly solemn tone, addressing analysts and investors who have seen the company’s share price drop 92 percent in the past 18 months.

“I must confess, I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Forest City’s president, Chuck Ratner, said of the financial crisis. “We believe conditions will worsen.”

With the financial crisis swallowing planned developments around the city, it has become very much an open question as to whether Forest City can actually build Atlantic Yards, the massive mixed-use development and new home for the Nets, planned for Brooklyn and headed up by its subsidiary Forest City Ratner Companies.  read more »

More than six months after Governor Paterson announced his nomination, the state Senate Republicans on Monday night approved former Koch deputy mayor Stanley Grayson to take a seat on the Port Authority’s board of commissioners.

The Senate, led by Long Island-based Republican Dean Skelos, sat on this nomination and even confirmed another Port Authority nomination—of Fred Hochberg—before acting yesterday. The confirmation forces out another Long Island Republican, Bruce Blakeman, a Pataki appointee to the board.

A spokeswoman for the Senate majority said that the Senate confirmed Mr. Grayson yesterday. Marisa Lago, CEO of the Empire State Development Corporation, was also confirmed.

The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has put a set of 19th-century Chelsea row houses used in the Underground Railroad on track to become landmarks, as the agency is slated to consider the properties at a hearing tomorrow.

The buildings, which create a new “Lamartine Place” historic district, run from 333 to 359 West 29th Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. Neighbors in the area have devoted considerable attention to the buildings, particularly as the owner of one of them, 339 West 29th Street, was planning a rooftop addition (landmark status would make such an alteration far more difficult to complete, and any addition would likely have to be contextual).  read more »

President-elect Obama has selected Shaun Donovan, the 42-year-old who leads the city’s housing agency, as his Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a powerful position that traditionally has gone to the politically connected.

The appointment was announced in Mr. Obama’s weekly radio address this morning (video here).

Mr. Donovan, commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development since 2004, is the chief architect of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious 10-year plan to build 92,000 units of housing and preserve 73,000 existing units. He looks even younger than his age, and is viewed as something of a wunderkind—a gifted, policy-focused administrator who has been able to craft effective strategies to build and finance new housing.  read more »

Apparently, Joe Sitt, the mega-landlord/thorn in the city's side at Coney Island, and Mayor Bloomberg don't hate each other after all. At least, not according to this photo from an event yesterday morning, snapped by Observer City Hall reporter Azi Paybarah.

Mr. Sitt, engaged in negotiations over a possible sale of his Coney Island property, attended a press conference held by the mayor on a city foreclosure initiative. Mr. Sitt is on the board of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, according to his spokesman. The group received a grant to help residents with foreclosures.

Come Monday, the U.S. Department of Transportation is expected to announce it is soliciting bids for a Euro-style high-speed rail that could connect New York and Washington, D.C., in a two-hour trip, an intriguing, if highly unlikely and expensive, proposal.

U.S. DOT sent out an advisory today noting that it was holding an event to make an announcement at Penn Station Monday (U.S. DOT Secretary Mary Peters, Mayor Bloomberg, and Representative Carolyn Maloney are listed as attendees), and a congressional aide with knowledge of the event filled me in on the subject matter.

The bids are expected to be solicited via a request for proposals, an initiative that was included in a reauthorization bill for Amtrak passed earlier this year.  read more »

Earlier this week we wrote about a deal between a key group of unions, UNITE HERE, and the Bloomberg administration that would help clear the path for a major Garment Center rezoning, opening up millions of square feet for office space.

The city agreed to a unique provision that would likely promote unionized workforces in any new hotels, and the union would support the city’s plan for the preservation of 350,000 square feet of production space. Those negotiations were led by the UNITE HERE affiliates that represent hotel workers.

But one of the local affiliates of UNITE HERE that represents apparel industry workers, the New York Metropolitan Area Joint Board, sent over a statement delicately suggesting that perhaps the eventual rezoning could do more to accomodate the workers, such as more production space than was agreed to. [See the statement here.]

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Larry Silverstein has won a spat with the Port Authority over the sites for his Towers 2 and 4 at the World Trade Center site, likely costing the Port Authority more than $20 million in delay penalties.

An arbitration panel ruled that the Port Authority did not fully excavate and prepare the two excavated sites for Silverstein Properties, violating the terms of its agreement with the developer, according to a joint statement between Silverstein and the Port Authority.

The dispute focused on whether a wall that the Port Authority added to the excavated site needed to be removed, among other issues.  read more »

In these strained times, holiday fun will apparently be limited at the Empire State Development Corporation.

A memo sent out Monday to staffers (below) brings the grim news that the state’s economic development agency, which pays out hundreds of millions in state dollars in an attempt to grow businesses and developments statewide, will have a relatively thrifty December.

In the Pataki era, according to an agency official, the ESDC spent comparatively lavishly and went out to restaurants for its parties. Last year, it had an in-house party, at a cost of $8,000. This year, the official said, no state money will be spent, and there will be smaller (pot-luck!) luncheons and other gatherings. As the memo notes, employees get to use two work hours to enjoy their parsimonious celebrations.  read more »

Another new development project canceled.

Speaking at an investor conference yesterday, Vornado CFO Joseph Macnow gave word that the company’s troubled plans for Harlem Park, an office tower on 125th Street, have been officially scuttled.

“We’ve shut down a couple of development projects,” Mr. Macnow said. “We were going to build the first office building in Harlem in 50 years on 125th Street and Park Avenue. We’ve shut that project down. The economics are not warranted today to do that job.”

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The word from the top brass at Forest City Enterprises, parent company of Brooklyn-based mega-developer Forest City Ratner, is the firm is suspending all new development. That is, except Atlantic Yards.

Forest City Enterprises president Chuck Ratner said in a conference call with investors and analysts that the financial crisis has forced the company to shift strategy from a development focus to a property operator focus.

“This strategy then says that we intend to put virtually all new development on hold until economic and market conditions improve meaningfully,” he said.

The company will not stop projects under construction already, Mr. Ratner said, nor will it halt Atlantic Yards, the more than $4 billion planned project that would build a new Nets basketball arena and more than 6,000 units of housing in Brooklyn.  read more »

Pat Foye used to like to joke in his public remarks about how he was a “recovering lawyer.”

Looks like the former state economic development czar has had a relapse.

Mr. Foye, who was the downstate chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation in the Spitzer administration, has joined Rivkin Radler, a law firm based in Long Island, with offices in Manhattan and New Jersey, the firm announced today.  read more »

It’s been 22 months since City Planning chairwoman Amanda Burden declared before a Crain’s midtown breakfast forum that the city, within a month, would reveal a plan to rezone and revitalize the 13-block garment district north of Penn Station.

No such unveiling ever came, as the Bloomberg administration struggled to craft a proposal that satisfied an array of industry and interest groups involved in the district. For months, many involved thought the plans had been dropped in the face of irreconcilable discord.

But now, those involved say the initiative has come back from the dead—or at least out of hibernation—as the city has cut a deal with key union UNITE HERE, according to city and union officials.  read more »

The construction industry’s main advocacy group wants the city and state to speed up approval and oversight processes for infrastructure projects in order to attract billions in federal stimulus dollars.

The New York Building Congress today issued a statement outlining steps New York City and State governments should take to better position the region for a windfall in infrastructure spending. The statement comes after President-elect Obama said over the weekend that he was calling for the largest public investment in infrastructure since the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the Eisenhower administration.  read more »

Over at the Daily Beast today, Maura Moynihan pens a piece in an attempt to revive movement on Moynihan Station, the long-planned expansion of Penn Station that has chronically been glued to the drawing boards.

The daughter of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ms. Moynihan began an advocacy effort for the station after her father’s death in 2003, and has seen multiple plans come and go since with no action:  read more »

We’re awaiting a response to this question, but it seems that Dick Ravitch and Governor Paterson’s plan to toll the East River and Harlem River bridges could very well need to go through the city’s land-use approval process. [Update: We've gotten a response and apparently it can be bypassed—see below]

Why is this significant? The process takes about seven months, and requires City Council approval, and thus it would not bring the M.T.A. the immediate revenue Mr. Ravitch suggested it needed.

The Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) is required by the City Charter for every “Sale, lease (other than the lease of office space), exchange, or other disposition of the real property of the city.” (The city owns the East River and Harlem River bridges.) The ULURP requires hearings and non-binding recommendations from the community boards and the borough presidents, and then mandates approvals from the City Planning Commission and the City Council.  read more »

Here’s another shot at Related Companies from Friends of the High Line, which made a short YouTube video advocating preservation of the High Line’s “spur” running through part of the West Side rail yards along 30th Street and across 10th Avenue, which Related has said it may want to demolish.

The meeting in the video was a community board forum on Monday night, where Related presented a small zoning change for the eastern half of the yards as part of its planned development.

Flanked by Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg at a midtown press conference, former M.T.A. chairman Dick Ravitch unveiled a package of proposals intended to rescue the authority from financial disaster. Among other recommendations, Mr. Ravitch called for a new regional employer payroll tax of $0.33 on every $100, tolls on all the free bridges over the East River and Harlem River, and a constant two-year fare increase tied to inflation.

“There should be a regular, recurring revenue stream that is inflation sensitive,” said Mr. Ravitch, who led a commission that came up with the recommendations.

The payroll tax would bring in about $1.5 billion a year, according to Mr. Ravitch.  read more »

Thought we’d pass along an email we just got from the producers of a planned documentary on gentrification, Vanishing New York.

Perhaps the collapse of the development boom is hurting the anti-development movements citywide: The filmmakers are running low on cash to finish the production, and they kindly remind potential donors to remember that overdevelopment will return!  read more »

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey failed today in an attempt to sell $300 million in bonds, a large offering that was met with zero bids. The failure seems to speak more to the continued glacial freeze of the credit markets than it does to the economic stability of the Port Authority, as the credit agencies still gave the agency high ratings.

Regardless of the reason, the fact that the authority was unable to sell bonds could mean big trouble down the road if the agency continues to have such problems. The $30 billion capital plan requires that the agency continually sell bonds to finance the construction of its major projects, including the Freedom Tower and other projects at the World Trade Center.

The agency, in a statement, said the bond offering was done in advance of when the money is needed.  read more »

A postscript to our story in this week’s print edition on how the Ciprianis, who run the art deco-themed Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, are trying to give the Tishman Speyer-owned space a restrictive landmark status, rounding up public and political support for the move.

Ultimately, the decision rests entirely with the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (which has been the recent target of an apparent crusade by The New York Times, which trashed the agency in an editorial then ran a series that focused on its shortcomings).

So what will the agency have to say about the 1934-built nightclub?  read more »

Gradually, the letters have begun to accumulate in Robert Tierney’s Lower Manhattan office. They all implore the same thing: landmark status for the Rainbow Room in 30 Rockefeller Center.

The first letter to Mr. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, came in September from Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, a union with Rainbow Room employees that has strong connections to elected officials. Then came a letter from Richard Parsons, the Time Warner chairman, who wrote there was “no more romantic space than the Rainbow Room” in New York. Then the Historic Districts Council sent a letter of approval; a similar letter from the Municipal Art Society is forthcoming; and on Tuesday night, Manhattan’s Community Board 5 was expected to take up the issue.  read more »

The Bloomberg administration’s trial closure of half of the East Side tunnel that runs under Park Avenue has added one to three minutes to some East Side travel times, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. The city said the lane closure seems to be decreasing the number of pedestrian and cyclist accidents—the impetus for the trial—though more time is needed to study the issue.

In August, DOT shut the southbound lane of the Park Avenue tunnel, which runs from 33rd Street to 40th Street under Park Avenue. The intersection at 33rd Street was notable for its high number of pedestrian accidents, many of which happened when pedestrians were crossing illegally, leading DOT to close down the southbound lane and create a refuge island in its place for pedestrians.  read more »

It seems the Bloomberg administration has chosen landscape designer Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates to build a new West Side park, though there’s no official word yet from the city.

Last night at a forum on the West Side rail yards, both Vishaan Chakrabarti, an executive at the Related Companies who is leading the firm’s development of the yards, and Assemblyman Dick Gottfried referred to Van Valkenburgh as the winner of a design competition for a mid-block park and boulevard. The park is planned to run between 10th and 11th avenues, from 33rd Street to 42nd Street (though only the first segment, from 33rd Street to 36th Street, is funded).  read more »

Bruce Ratner has drawn resentment and scorn in the Brooklyn community surrounding his planned $4 billion Atlantic Yards project, but now he’s inspired cultural enrichment. Sort of.

A local theater company has created a production, running this week, on the fight over and the effects of the Atlantic Yards project, for which Mr. Ratner’s firm plans to build a Frank Gehry-designed arena for the Nets and more than 6,000 housing units.

Brooklyn at Eye Level, put on by The Civilians production company, will run from Thursday through Sunday at the Brooklyn Lyceum, exploring the debate around Atlantic Yards.

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Here’s a postcard we got this week from the Friends of the High Line, a subtle call to arms for supporters to show up in force at a West Side rail yards forum on Monday. The incredibly successful advocacy group, which got tens of millions of public dollars to transform the abandoned Chelsea elevated rail viaduct into parkland, is waging, for now, a tepid battle against the Related Companies' plans for the rail yards.  read more »

To see Mark Page testify at a City Council finance hearing is a bit like watching a standoffish professor defend an academic paper to a panel of overconfident college first-years.

Some questions to the city's budget director are well informed and intelligent. Others are asked as if they are.  read more »

For more than three years now, Fordham University has wanted to tack its name onto the list of colleges and universities expanding in Manhattan. The Jesuit university, led by the Rev. Joseph McShane, generally avoided the spotlight while Columbia University underwent a hard-fought approval battle for its $7 billion West Harlem expansion and New York University began a somewhat contentious master-planning dialogue as it looks for space to add another 6 million square feet.

But earlier this month, Fordham’s desire for more space in Manhattan became far more than aspirational, as the school officially began the city’s seven-month land-use approval process with an application to add 1.  read more »

Long in the planning stages, Gary Barnett and his Extell Development Co. have finally let loose images of Riverside Center, their planned 3.3 million-square-foot mostly residential complex at the base of the West Side development once known as Trump City. The Department of City Planning put on its Web site today an environmental review document for the project, a draft scope, which outlined the specifics of what Extell wants to put on the site, currently a series of parking lots.

The plan calls for five buildings, designed by Pritzker-winning Christian de Portzamparc, each a skinny tower that would run east-west on the two-block superblock [more details from a prior community presentation  read more »

Construction, it seems, is indeed under way for the extension of the No. 7 line, the cornerstone of the Bloomberg administration’s planned development of the far West Side.

The MTA’s capital construction page shows an update for November with pictures from below, where the agency is hollowing out the cavern for the station and making way for the eventual launch of a tunnel-boring machine, which will slowly dig its way along the 1.5-mile route.  read more »

Tino Hernandez, chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, is leaving his position to head up a drug treatment center, Samaritan Village. He and Mayor Bloomberg announced the news in the mayor’s weekly radio show, and the mayor said there will be a national search to find his replacement. From The Observer’s Azi Paybarah at PolitickerNY:  read more »

The proposals to redevelop Pier 57 on Hudson River Park have been released, and it seems like rent-paying marketplace is the common theme for the pier off West 15th Street.

The Related Companies, West Village-based YoungWoo & Associates, and the Durst Organization/C&K Properties are the three suitors, each trying to impress the city/state Hudson River Park Trust. All three teams put forward a plan with outdoor open space and a large amount of market-retail space (two of the teams mentioned Seattle’s Pike Place as a corollary).

This is the second go-round for the Trust, which awarded the development rights for the pier back in 2005 to the Witkoff Group.  read more »

The City Council approved today a proposed rezoning of the Lower East Side, putting in height limits for new buildings throughout the area.

The Bloomberg administration has pushed the rezoning as necessary to both boost the amount of below-market-rate housing in the neighborhood and to scale back the incidences of skinny skyscrapers that have popped up. The rezoning, which covered 111 blocks, generally keeps densities similar to those that exist currently, increasing them in some spots, though it establishes height caps of up to 80 and 120 feet.

The city estimates the rezoning would allow for 1,670 new apartments in the area, 560 of which would be below market rate.  read more »

On Nov. 12, at an event announcing his support for the Bloomberg administration’s planned Willets Point redevelopment, Queens Councilman Hiram Monserrate made a round of thank-yous, mentioning city officials, other electeds, his staff and, with a smirk, the unions.

“I want to thank all my labor partners, who ensured and reminded me how important this project was along the way,” he said.

The smirk came perhaps on account of one union in particular, the New York Hotel Trades Council, which had been especially persistent, lobbying, advocating and badgering Mr. Monserrate for months to gain his support.  read more »

Marc Shaw, a former deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration and now a vice president at Gary Barnett’s Extell Development, is headed to work for Governor Paterson. The Paterson administration announced this afternoon that Mr. Shaw had be