Leigh Kamping-Carder

It seemed that in November, after the Big Four in New York commercial and residential real estate—CB Richard Ellis, Cushman & Wakefield, Prudential Douglas Elliman and the Corcoran Group—cancelled their firm-wide holiday parties, other companies would follow suit. Not so, according to an Observer poll of 10 more of the city’s top brokerages. Every last one is going ahead with holiday party plans.

"As a management team," said Jane Bayard, an executive vice president at Warburg Realty, "we had a question of whether it was going to be appropriate or inappropriate, but the company chose to represent strength, not weakness."

Ms. Bayard considered the Warburg celebration more of a "gathering" than a party – it will involve 125 brokers and staff members in a party room – and felt that anything more elaborate this year would be in bad taste. "We're very aware of the economic times," she said, "but this was something that we felt wouldn't be good for morale to give up; it would be sort of giving in."  read more »

Once upon a time, a certain Floridian man required the services of a private jet. His girlfriend had spotted a pair of designer shoes, and she simply had to have them. But there was a problem: The shoes didn't fit, and only one store in the United States had the appropriate size. It was in Los Angeles. She was in Miami. So a staff member at Quintessentially, the high-end concierge service, arranged to send the shoes via private jet. The happy ending cost a mere $60,000.

"That stuff has pretty much all dried up now," said Edward Rosenthal, the company's chief operating officer.  read more »

It's been three years since the Athena Group purchased the lot at 111 Central Park North, occupied then by a low-slung brick building that housed a hair salon and a parking lot.

In the ensuing years, the development company built a glossy condominium tower, outfitting its 88 units with marble countertops, Viking ranges and dramatic views of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park. Jill Sloane, an executive vice president at Halstead Property, broke a Harlem sales record when she helped sell a 4,000-square-foot penthouse for $8 million. And brokers, marketers, journalists, buyers and Harlem residents tested out a new label along the way: Central Park North.  read more »

After years of threatening service cuts on the G train, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is once again angering riders and advocates, who believe the agency is exploiting a funding emergency to justify bisecting the G's route.

"Every year, it seems, they try to come up with yet another reason for doing it," said Teresa Toro, co-founder of Save the G, a coalition of community groups dedicated to the line. "So it becomes hard to believe any one reason. They would just really love to do it and have not really justified their case."

"Now they've got the financial crisis as cover to get rid of it," echoed James Trent, the treasurer of the Queens Civic Congress, an organization that represents over 100 community groups in the borough.  read more »

The Manhattan zip code with the greatest number of home sales of at least $5 million this year has been 10023 on the Upper West Side. (Research site PropertyShark mined the data based on closed deals through Oct. 17.) No surprise, since the area includes 15 Central Park West and the Time Warner Center.

But even without the $5 million-and-up transactions from these ultra-luxury condos – 102 this year! – there have been at least 33 condo, co-op and other single-residential sales that have broken that barrier in 10023.

Herewith, the 16 addresses that gave us the biggest deals in the zip code.  read more »

If you need further evidence that consumer confidence is shaky, pick up a copy of The Real Estate Book this December.

Next month, the glossy advertising guide will devote 20 percent of its print pages to promote homes that have already sold. The program, Just Sold 2008, is the company's attempt to offset industry pessimism and to convince readers that, yes, homes are selling.

"There was so much negativity in the media," said Todd Walker, the company's senior vice president of operations and sales. "How can we come up with a program that can help tell that story, that homes are still being sold?"

The Real Estate Book, available for free on street corners citywide, publishes 25 editions in the tri-state area and prints 8 million copies across the United States and Canada. As in other sectors of the housing industry, The Real Estate Book has seen a dip in business. But a bigger recent challenge has been to counter the impression that no one's closing deals.  read more »

In 2005, Albert Maysles, the renowned documentary filmmaker, sold his family's longtime home in The Dakota and began planning the construction of an art house cinema in Harlem.

In the opinion of the director's son, Philip Maysles, 28, the co-op building on West 72nd Street had become "a lot less fun." Although the Maysleses sold their apartment for less than expected, the earnings were sufficient to purchase three buildings farther north: a brownstone on 122nd Street, a "shell of a building" on 120th Street, and a storefront at 343 Lenox Avenue that now houses the theater at the nonprofit Maysles Institute.

"Our goal from the inception was to cultivate a non-traditional audience for documentary film and what you could call art films," said Philip, who acts as the Institute's programmer and youth programs director. "Rather than just trying to appeal to the film-going audience from all over the city… we've been targeting niche audiences that may not be interested in film as art in general, but may be more interested in a certain cultural phenomenon or a certain political situation."  read more »

It seemed that New Yorkers would wake on Nov. 5 – happily satiated by nearly two years of electoral saturation that ended just how most of them wanted – and return to their most fervent and familiar conversation topic: real estate.

Except that they didn't.

"We don't talk about real estate," said actor Paul Michael Phillips, 24, who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment near Prospect Park. "We're not like, 'Hmm, let's got to the cigar room and talk about our condo in the Hamptons.' No, we talk about the war and health care."

Inexplicably, real estate in all its obsessive New York permutations – who’s getting what for how much; which neighborhood have the hipsters invaded now; why so-and-so can afford to move and such-and-such can’t; will we knock out walls for the baby or just move; where’s the best place to be X in Y – continues to warm a back bench to the 2008 presidential election.  read more »

Will Michael Carfagna ever transform Jackson Heights into the Park Slope of Queens?

"It's going to take someone with deep pockets and with a vision," he said. "And if you find them, put them in touch with me."

Mr. Carfagna, perhaps best known for designing the "Billy Burg, Meet Jack Heights" and "More Park, Less Slope" bus shelter ads that ran in Williamsburg and Park Slope, respectively, aims to close the price gap between the trendy areas of Brooklyn and the Queens neighborhood he's called home since 1985.

Jackson Heights is renowned for its diversity – a mix of Hispanic, Asian, white and black populations – and the city's second-largest gay pride parade.  read more »

Leena Akhtar is fielding more questions about the Great Depression than ever.

As exhibits and archives manager at the Museum of American Finance, Ms. Akhtar curates the displays, such as frozen pork belly that illustrates "Commodities" or rococo cash registers that mesmerize the teenage girls. The mission of the Smithsonian-affiliated teaching museum is, in part, to educate the public about capitalism. But September's events presented the museum with a new challenge: Document the current financial turmoil.

Admissions are up roughly 10 percent since the summer, according to Linda Rapacki, the director of visitor services. (The museum closed last fall for a move; it reopened in its new location at 48 Wall Street in January.) Tour groups are booked almost solidly through the fall and winter.  read more »

Welcome to the buyer's market: Supply is up, demand is down, and prices are teetering. Brokers say buy now – after all, there are deals to be had! But what if you waited?

Here’s four areas (and one borough) where buyers would be fools to rush in now.

1. MANHATTAN
In Manhattan, prices are falling. But several gauges indicate that, in the months ahead, they'll fall even further.

For one, new development – which accounted for 30 percent of sales in the borough last quarter – continues to skew prices, according to the third-quarter market report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

Prospect Heights residents, along with elected officials and local community groups, testified before the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday afternoon to support designating the neighborhood a historic district.

Advocates of landmark designation included Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Council Member Letitia James, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, as well as representatives from Community Board 8, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood District Council, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and others.

"The better Prospect Heights does, the better it is for all of Brooklyn," said Mr. Markowitz, adding that it is "imperative we retain the character of this historic neighborhood."  read more »

Over the last few years, something like conventional wisdom cohered around northern Staten Island: New development and new arrivals would make it the New Williamsburg.

Art galleries, bars and cafés opened near the ferry to Manhattan. The first annual Rock the Harbor music festival took place last June. A graffiti artist scrawled "Williamsburg II" on construction fences. The New York Times a year ago dubbed the North Shore "Bohemia by the Bay." Condominium towers with city views sprouted along Bay Street Landing, luring Wall Streeters across the water. Creative types and Brooklyn refugees trickled in.

But in this market, can the gentrification continue? Although home sales are up annually by close to 30 percent in St.  read more »

In his first public appearance in New York since July, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, arguably the nation's most powerful person right now, talked about efforts to stem foreclosures and advocated closer ties with China as a means to strengthen the U.S. economy.

"While some see China as a threat that must be countered or contained," he said in a 10-minute speech, "I believe that the only path to success with China is through engagement. We must recognize that China's growth is an opportunity for U.S. companies and consumers, for our producers, exporters and investors."

Secretary Paulson addressed the National Committee on United States-China Relations at the Plaza Hotel on Tuesday, where he was honored at the non-profit organization's annual gala dinner for his work promoting dialogue between the two countries. (The press was kept safely contained in balconies above the crowd during the secretary's speech.)  read more »

From the top of her building at 330 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, Stephanie Eisenberg can see nearly all of two boroughs: the Williamsburg bridge, the United Nations, One Hanson Place, Greenpoint's sewage treatment plant. But she prefers to look out over Brooklyn, with its church steeples and elevated subway tracks.

It's lucky, because her view over the East River is slated to change in 2009, when the approximately 2,400-unit New Domino condominium development breaks ground at what is now the Domino Sugar Refinery across the street. With at least four buildings rising to 30 stories or more, the 11.2-acre project will no doubt transform the waterfront. The question is, how?

With condo sales slowing across the borough – down 38.2 percent annually in the third quarter, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel – Ms. Eisenberg is more convinced than ever: The New Domino plans must be scrapped. As head of Save Domino, a community group, she argues the site could be put to better use, namely as the Domino Center, a sprawling cultural institution modeled after London's contemporary art museum, the Tate Modern.

"It's time to rethink some of these gigantic projects and look at something in a more creative way," she said. "The last thing this city needs is another 1,800 market-rate condominiums."  read more »

On May 2, George Noia moved into a two-bedroom basement apartment on Long Island. His bedroom was small and windowless, and the kitchen held only a microwave and a hot plate. But of all the places he had seen, the one on Revilo Avenue in Shirley was the cheapest, at $130 a week.

Until he found out that his roommate was scamming him.

"When I heard that, I was pissed," Mr. Noia said. "I was absolutely angered by it. I'm paying more money for a smaller room?"

In September, Mr. Noia overheard his roommate chatting about their rent with one of the building's other tenants.  read more »

When Gib Veconi moved to Prospect Heights in 1991, he and his neighbors spent years renovating brownstones. They started with garden-level apartments, and finished each successive story with rental income earned from the ground-floor tenants.

"No one could imagine tearing down a historic building," he said. "It was a question of economics." They couldn't afford the demolition.

Mr. Veconi, the chairman of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC), will tell you how the block associations of the 1990s were made up of members who had lived in the area since the 1950s, and the newcomers were like him, just looking for more space to raise a family.  read more »

Behind the sagging wire fence, all that's left of 55 Eckford Street in Greenpoint is a skeleton, its steel ribs turned rusty from months of rain. A tangle of weeds has shot up among the bottles and soggy cardboard covering the ground, and blue construction tarp flaps in the autumn wind. The place smells faintly of urine.

Is this the future of McCarren Park's shiny new condo expansion?

Not yet. But if New York's real estate boom died on Oct. 1, as The New York Times declared, then these deserted developments are its ghosts, projects left over from a more hopeful time.  read more »

“The lookers are gone,” said Stribling’s Brenda Vemich, sales director at One Hanson Place, the condo hewn from Brooklyn’s tallest tower, the old Williamsburgh Bank Building.

The economic crisis has rippled across the rivers, driving sellers into hiding, buyers into tizzies of anticipation and analysts and brokers into thorough consternation. What the heck is going on out here?

Slower sales, for one thing, a sluggishness that’s dragged from the summer into an uncertain fall. With this could soon come price tumbles. And with that, from the Bronx through Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, the decade’s first real buyer’s market.  read more »

For most non-profit organizations, the current financial crisis is likely a cause for anxiety. Sean Andrews, the executive director of the Prospect Park YMCA, sees an opportunity.

"We've been in neighborhoods through the hard times, the good times, the real estate booms and busts," he said, "and people know to come to us whether they have the means to pay or they don't."

Given the scope of the most current bust, it's not difficult to imagine New Yorkers trading their pricey gym passes for a belt-tightener like a Y membership. The Prospect Park branch has been around since 1891, and the building itself, at 357 Ninth Street, since 1927.  read more »

Since 2002, Williamsburg-Greenpoint has lived without a movie theater. The absence is especially surprising given the area's history of film exhibition: At one point, the neighborhoods boasted six movie theaters in less than five square miles. But since the 1950s, the theaters have been slowly disappearing, converted to other uses or demolished.

"If you're making some amount of money showing movies there," said Patrick Crowley, the co-founder of CinemaTreasures.com, a Wikipedia-like site devoted to cinema preservation, "and a developer says, 'I can give you a ton of money to have development on top of the theater,' then it's hard to say no to that.  read more »

"I don't think we live in Park Slope," my roommate said to me one evening, sitting at the kitchen table in our new walk-up. "I think we live in Go-anus. I don't even know how you pronounce that."

My roommates and I had recently moved into a three-bedroom near Fourth Avenue, assuming we'd entered the land of baby strollers and Tea Loungers. (After all, Fifth Avenue is one block away.) But our address--on the northwest side of the mini-highway--puts us outside Park Slope's boundaries and firmly in Gowanus.

At least for now.

Park Slope is growing, spreading not only further south but also further west, into an industrial area which looks nothing like the boutiques-and-brownstones district closer to Prospect Park.  read more »

Walk Score is a Web site that tells you what you already know: In your New York City neighborhood, you can walk places, a lot more places than in a lot of other neighborhoods.

With the help of Google's local data, Walk Score rates properties between 1 and 100, based on the number of amenities located within a one-mile radius of its address. The aim is to measure what was once subjective, to quantify the "walkability"--the ease of living a car-free lifestyle--of neighborhoods across the United States.

Walk Score garnered media attention last July, when it ranked the walkability of the 40 largest cities in the United States and compiled a list of the country's 2,508 most walkable neighborhoods.  read more »

On Friday afternoon, Senator Hillary Clinton announced proposed legislation which includes $237 million in new funding for New York City's mass transit system. The bulk of the cash will go toward the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in an effort to prevent future fare increases.

"One of the best ways to save money, help the environment, end our dependence on foreign oil and free our roads up is mass transit," Senator Clinton said during a press conference in the middle of Grand Central Station.

She stressed the need to alleviate congestion, which she said costs the country $68 billion per year, and highlighted the efforts of countries like France and China, whose investments in mass transit dwarf those of the United States.  read more »

The wet bar seats eight comfortably; the billiards table is covered in red felt; ESPN blares from the flat-screen television, a salvo of sports scores echoing over the brown leather armchairs; and, next-door, the children are playing in their rec room.

Upstairs, the rooftop terrace is quiet. Several neighbors are lounging on the deck chairs under the gazebo, surveying the brilliant emerald lawn.

Is this suburbia? Not exactly. Two Gold Street is a luxury rental building smack in the middle of the Financial District.

Luxury rentals like this one, where a one-bedroom will set you back between $2,950 and $3,875 monthly, are New York City's answer to the gated community: clean, secure, exclusive (but not out of reach), and outfitted with amenities like grill stations, manicured rooftop lawns, and foosball tables.  read more »

Even at the height of the Thursday morning rush, Roosevelt Islanders have time to stop and talk about transportation. That's because they're likely watching two or three or four F trains go by, packed to the doors with Manhattan-bound commuters.

As newcomers flock to Roosevelt Island, transportation on and off the 147-acre landmass is becoming increasingly challenging. The temporary suspension for upgrades of the island's iconic tram next spring will only exacerbate the situation.

"We're at capacity," said Jonathan Kalkin, who's on the board of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), which manages the island. "Sometimes you do have to wait--especially in the morning--for another train, depending on how gutsy you are, how much New York is in you to push through.  read more »

In 2000, Roosevelt Island had less than 10,000 residents. Since then, 1,331 new apartments have gone up or are under construction. Another 1,160 are expected within the next five years.

These new structures will pile thousands of fresh faces--and Fresh Direct trucks, as one resident put it--onto the sleepy spit of East River land once officially called Welfare Island, possibly changing it forever.

In 2006, tenants moved in to the Octagon, Becker and Becker's 500-unit luxury restoration of the insane asylum on the Island's north end. The real colossus, however, is the nine-building Riverwalk development, a joint project of Hudson Companies and the Related Companies.  read more »

Thomas Degeest's Wafels & Dinges truck might just be the perfect metaphor for Belgium. Painted in the country's colors -- red, yellow and black -- the truck sells Belgian waffles at several Manhattan locations. It looks patriotic. It flies a Belgian flag out its back window.

But then there's that name.

"Every time we get Belgians [ordering] we get, 'Whoa, what a crazy name,' because it's really Flemish slang that we've got on the truck," Mr. Degeest said.

"Wafel" is spelled the Flemish way. "Dinges" (pronounced ding-us) is Flemish slang for "stuff." And the "liege cinnamon royal" waffle is served how King Albert II likes to eat them: "on a silver plate while serenaded by Flemish virgins.  read more »

She never thought she'd get married. In her own Park Slope living room. On a Friday night. Or that her mother, many miles away, would lecture her about her choice of groom: one of "them," an American. She never thought she'd have to keep so many secrets--from her family, from potential employers, from the U.S. government.

But in February, a 26-year-old woman--whose name The Observer agreed not to print--joined the ranks of illegal immigrants in New York City. She tried to look for new work, but as soon as employers saw her foreign résumé, the questions started. Last spring, marrying her American boyfriend seemed like the only way to secure legal status in the United States.  read more »

When Peter Eide moved to Clinton Hill, he had a "fantastical" idea.

The sculptor had spent 12 years moving around the borough after arriving from Philadelphia: Greenpoint, Williamsburg, back to Clinton Hill. But Mr. Eide, now 37, never strayed far from the G train, the only subway line in the city that doesn't travel through Manhattan. And he never stopped thinking of that idea he had: to connect his neighborhood G train stop, Fulton Street, to the Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street transit hub, effectively linking the line to almost a dozen other routes.

The fantastical part? A 660-foot tunnel buried under Fort Greene.  read more »

Ridership on Amtrak's Northeast corridor increased over 3.2 percent annually in June, from 878,671 passengers to 907,316, according to new figures from the national rail service.

A look at the most recent numbers for fiscal year 2008, which covers October through June, reveals an even sharper increase in ridership compared to the same nine months in 2007. From October through June, over 5.6 million passengers traveled the Northeast corridor, from Washington to Boston, versus 5 million during the same period last year, representing an 11 percent increase (and coming despite increased fares). Travel on Acela, the Northeast-only express service, increased by 8 percent, from 2.  read more »

At a hearing this morning, the City Council discussed seven legislative reforms regarding construction site safety, including three bills that would further regulate crane operations.

If passed, the legislation would force crane operators to undergo a 30-hour certified training course and to attend refreshers every three years. (Currently certification is not compulsory for crews that “jump” cranes.) It would also require a licensed individual to monitor concrete operations, which Robert LiMandri, the acting commissioner of the Department of Buildings, called a "high risk endeavor" responsible for 59 percent of material falling from building sites.

"We can't have a city where people feel unsafe to walk down the sidewalk because there's a crane working on that block," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.  read more »