Come to New York, the World’s Greatest Cheap DateIt may be hard for us locals to believe, but the global image of New York is still, apparently, that of crime and grime: streetwise swindlers, filthy sidewalks, and brusque passersby. Enter George Fertitta, the man Bloomberg has picked to mount an NYC ad campaign the likes of which the world hasn’t seen (unless one counts every Hollywood romantic comedy of the last twenty years). Fertitta is a logical choice for the mayor who famously called his city “a luxury product.” As a co-founder of Margeotes Fertitta & Weiss, he’s previously been peddling Godiva, Remy Martin, and Orrefors crystal. Bloomberg has set a goal 50 million visitors a year by 2015 — six million more than now — a bar Fertitta finds almost dispiritingly low, “a layup,” he says. So how will NYC & Company, the city’s self-promotional arm, with a $45 million budget, lure Europeans to New York on Fertitta’s watch?
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He Vants to … Avoid Traffic on the Henry Hudson
The towering turrets, the pine-swathed Carpathians, the wolves baying at the moon — what piece of real estate has creepier curb appeal than that thirteenth-century Transylvanian pile, Dracula’s Castle? It’s now on the market for $78 million, a price that would have even the most blood-sucking Manhattan brokers grasping for their silver crosses. But, then, those New York Realtors might well have an in with the owner: Sixty-nine-year-old Dominic von Habsburg lives in the Westchester burg of North Salem. Descended from Austro-Hungarian royalty, von Habsburg is a furniture designer living in a decidedly un-Gothic, one-floor contemporary. “My friends call it a house for easy living,” says von Habsburg, who built the home a few years ago. “It’s very airy, simple and full of light.”