Empire State Building

The flagship store of AT&T Mobility will join Starbucks in the retail part of the Empire State Building. The approximately 3,000-square-foot store is scheduled to open in early 2009, according to GlobeSt, and follows the June opening of an 8,000-square-foot Starbucks.

$660 million, please.

The owner of the Empire State Building has a tall order -- a $660 million loan to renovate New York City's tallest building, according to a Bloomberg News article published in today's Boston Globe.

The idea, according to developer Peter Malkin, is to make the 102-story Art Deco masterpiece, long home to small tenants, more attractive to larger (and presumably more lucrative) ones.  read more »

Time to ready the oxygen tanks: Commercial brokers are planning to race up 86 floors of the Empire State Building.

Come Feb. 5, an Empire State Building spokeswoman tells us that the city’s biggest brokerages will square off with each other as part of the building’s annual “Run-Up,” with Jones Lang LaSalle, Cushman & Wakefield, CB Richard Ellis, Studley and Newmark Knight Frank each planning to send at least one team of five runners (team names include the “Sub-Primers” and “Victoria’s Secret”).  read more »

Take a gander of the city's tallest building this evening if you can. For the first time ever, the Empire State Building will be lit up for an Islamic holiday. In this case, the color's green and the holiday's Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.

• Restoration heroes Beyer Blinder Belle are fixing up the Empire State Building: uncovering the lobby's gold-and-silver "celestial sky" ceiling mural. But, of course, the original lighting will be replaced by "modern, energy-efficient fixtures" [Interior Design]
• Tragically, Brooklyn bars are now officially over-packed: "Manhattanites are actually commuting to our fair borough to party in Boerum Hill, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Williamsburg." [Brooklyn Record/Time Out NY]
• Speaking of Park Slope: Residents turned out in droves last night to bemoan plans [above] for bicycle lanes: "There is no way in hell there is going to be a bike lane on Ninth Street," a charming Sloper screamed before the meeting started. Why? "A bike lane would interfere with double parking." [Curbed]
• The neighborhood isn't as hip as it was in the Truman Capote/Norman Mailer days of yore, but Brooklyn Heights' open houses are still a hot ticket. A studio is up for $265,000; a house costs 13 times more. [NY Mag] - Max Abelson
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• London group buys East Harlem, East Village properties.
[NY Times]
• New-home sales drop--again--in February, feds say.
[NY Times]
• Anti-Coney Island condos rally set for City Hall.
[NY Post]
• Changes put Empire State Building on tenants' radar.
[NY Post]
• Housing woes roil markets.
[NY Post]
• City tenants to split $1.9 M. settlement.
[Daily News]
• Indy Racing on Governors Island? Maybe.
[NY Sun]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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Saturday

9 a.m. The New York Young Republican Club will hold an all-day political training seminar on topics including grassroots campaigning, mail and Internet techniques, public speaking and the Leadership Institute at Kings College at the Empire State Building, 350 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street.

Sen. Hillary Clinton holds a fundraiser in Los Angeles.

Barack Obama campaigns in Las Vegas.

Sunday

1:30 p.m. Helen Selsdon, a Brooklyn single mom whose daughter attends PS 29, will host a peace march from Carroll Park in Brooklyn to Grand Army Plaza to mark the fourth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq.

5:30 p.m. Senator Chuck Schumer and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden will discuss issues from Schumer's book, Positively American: Winning Back the American Middle-Class One Family at a Time, at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway at 12th Street.

Monday

The tide of the hot hotel industry in New York City is lifting all sorts of boats, including midtown south's, an area tourists staying in midtown hotels usually visit by accident when trying to find the Empire State Building.

Brack Capital Real Estate has bought for $31 million a six-story parking garage on the north side of West 35th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and plans to build a 300-room "upscale hotel." Brack already has a hand in New York projects like 15 Union Square West and The Chartwell House at 1760 Second Avenue.  read more »

Eastern Consolidated's Brian Ezratty and Scott Ellard repped both Brack and seller Icon Parking. Full release after the jump.

- Tom Acitelli

• We noted earlier on Tuesday that the day's preliminary work at Atlantic Yards might not be so apocalyptic. And Daniel Goldstein [depicted above by Sarah Sagarin] declares that Ratner's wrecking ball maneuvering is "premature, and a scare tactic used against the eminent domain plaintiff residents" and "a public relations gimmick intended to convince his investors that work is moving forward. Don't be fooled." [DDDB]
• SHoP Architects' new project m127 (or is it 127 M?) has a facade of brick and cantilevered custom-steel windows. Other perks: the newly built top floors are pushed back 15 feet from the front, and one lucky duplex has a roof deck facing the Empire State Building. [Interior Design]
• When "small is the new black" is declared in a large font size, you know the declaration has to be true. Especially if Oprah is involved. [Apartment Therapy]
• What the world needs now is "a new interactive lifestyle center." Luckily, the online rentals behemoth Apartments.com is launching Apartment Living--so New Yorkers can burn more time obsessing over landlords, leases, budgeting, moving, gardening, health, fitness, decorating and entertaining. [Apts/PR]
- Max Abelson
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It's Manhattan's grandest symbol, but the Empire State Building has always been a punch line in the real estate world (the Empty State Building. Ha!).

Well, in a thorough story in The Real Deal, Vanessa Londono runs down just what's happening over on 34th and Fifth.

The management team of Wien & Malkin is ready to shake down and empty the building to 50 percent vacancy as they upgrade and smooth over those famously rough edges (you know, low ceilings, weird layouts, etc.). The building is in such bad shape that average tenants have less than 2,000 square feet.

Wien & Malkin--understandably--want to get that number to somewhere around 10,000 to 15,000 feet, and to try to raise rents, which are currently 25 percent below-market, on average.

The key player in all of this, Anthony Malkin, said he's putting $600 million into the renovations, and he means business. "We're not running a hotel full of one- and three-year leases," he said. "We want higher-credit-quality tenants brought in by higher-quality brokers."

- John Koblin

Some weeks ago, my top-floor neighbors taped a map onto the rooftop door of the Avenue B apartment b  read more »

The Empire State Building was a miracle of Depression-era America.  read more »

Ben Smith discovers that the city's Economic Development Corporation chief Andrew Alper has another love other than New York: the University of Chicago, where he is chairing a $2 billion capital campaign.

Alper closes a fundraising message for his alma mater with the words: Crescat scientia; vita excolatur! Our sentiments exactly.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

The L.A. Times reports that the National Cartoon Museum has taken up a 14,000-square-foot, three-story space at the bottom of the Empire State Building.

"The space is street level," says Brian Walker, a curatorial advisor to the project and a co-curator of the "Masters of American Comics" show on view here at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum. "It's not like you take this elevator up and then have to search around for it. Millions of people will be walking by."

Ralph Applebaum Associates is doing the design for the museum, which focuses on newspaper comic strips; Mr. Walker's father drew the Beetle Bailey cartoons.

"I've always thought this is where the museum belonged," he says. "I've thought that from the beginning. This is the capital of cartooning, from the New Yorker to comics publishers. It sort of begins and ends in New York City."

For now, according to the Museum's Web site, "our collections are being housed at an atmospherically controlled secure storage facility located in Stamford, Connecticut."  read more »

Opening is slated for next year.

National Cartoon Museum Via ArchNewsNow.com - Tom McGeveran

Maybe Mike's eternal soul will be saved after all.

He'll be spending the morning of May 4th at King's College in the Empire State Building in a private meeting with the anti-gay-marriage members of the City Action Coalition, whom we wrote about in February.  read more »

Or maybe he'll just get more people mad at him.

Think of this as a memoir of a love affair-of the beginning, anyway, of a long, strange, curious, so  read more »

Voices mighty and obscure are having their say about what ought to rise on the former World Trade Ce  read more »

I have been six years without one serious relationship, and I am so not bothered by it.  read more »

It's a shock to walk down West Broadway in Tribeca at night.  read more »

This holiday season, signs that all is well with theworld-or at least that charmed swatch of it that  read more »

In his most recent exercise in literary self-congratulation, Trump: The Art of the Comeback , Donald  read more »

As you may know, Titanic is a movie about a grand ocean liner that goes down, dumping its passengers  read more »

I'm not saying this new crusade of mine is as critically urgent to the intellectual life of the city  read more »