Where the High Line EndsThe planned completion of a park that has become a metaphor for New York’s evolution from a place of weeds and rusting iron into a sanctuary of hip.
Advertisers Still Wary of Don ImusPlus, the latest on what’s going on at Citibank, JPMorgan, and on the Upper East Side, in our daily industry roundup.
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‘Crain’s’ Introduces Us to Cute New New Yorkers, Reveals Secrets About OthersLike anyone else, we love 40-under-40 lists. Browsing them is like browsing Internet personal ads, except we don’t feel embarrassed for the people on them, because they didn’t place the ads themselves, and we don’t feel as embarrassed for ourselves, because you know, we’re not really looking. So, after we got over the searing disappointment of not being on Crain’s 40-under-40 list (for some reason they only picked rich, good-looking, successful people!), we enjoyed perusing the video profiles of some of the cute New Yorkers on it. Such as Frédéric de Narp, the CEO of Cartier North America, who gestures with his hands and appears to be totally not wearing a wedding ring is totally unfortunately married; Robert Hammond, the co-founder of Friends of the High Line, who’s so nerdy-cute that we almost forgot how much the publicity surrounding the High Line bugged us; and Pilar Guzman, the editor-in-chief of Cookie, who is so appealing that we almost forgot we hate children! This being what it is, the videos are short on juice, but we did glean a few things.
it just happened
Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff Out at City Hall, In at Bloomberg LPDan Doctoroff, who has been toiling away since 2001 as the mayor’s get-it-done man, will announce today that he will be out of City Hall by the end of the year. He’ll be named president of Bloomberg LP, reports the Times.
“Our administration and the city of New York have been incredibly lucky to have Dan in City Hall for the past six years, and I’ve personally been very lucky to have him sitting just six feet away from me,” the mayor said in a hastily scheduled news conference in the Blue Room of City Hall. “He has been a true partner, a trusted friend, and the architect of the most sweeping transformation of New York City’s environment since the days of Robert Moses.”
Doctoroff, a former investment banker who, like the mayor, earns only $1 a year for his civil service, is the deputy mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding. He’s overseen successful projects like the High Line redevelopment and the rescue of the city’s waterfronts, including Governors Island. He was also a force behind the mayor’s ill-fated West Side Stadium and Olympic bids. Doctoroff was popular in City Hall and is credited with helping Bloomberg with much of his economic and redevelopment success. New York’s Geoffrey Gray reported that Doctoroff was planning a departure last month.
Doctoroff Is Leaving Bloomberg Administration [NYT]
Related Doctor! Give Me a Job [NYM]
NewsFeed
Where You Might Eat One Day at Hudson Yards
Whether Hudson Yards is a windswept corporate outpost or a mash-up of West Chelsea and Herald Square, whoever lives and works there will need to eat. At a presentation before 1,000 architects, planners, and onlookers last night, design-team leaders described the commissary aspects of their proposals. Predictably, the Brookfield team, which reunites the High Line’s landscape architects, invoked a “café culture” with street-level seating under the trestle’s 30th Street entrance, shown above. We predict sustainable purveyors in the Alice Waters mode.
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André Balazs: Selling Hotels Is Standard ProcedureEver since yesterday’s little Gawker item about André Balazs selling three of his signature hotel properties (it turned out that it came from a Crain’s story), we’ve been wondering what’s up. Is our favorite hotelier and celebrity dater hard up for cash? Are delays and extra costs on his High Line–spanning Standard Hotel becoming a burden? Apparently not, according to Balazs himself. The Observer got him on the phone to talk about the transfers. “Quite frankly, we’re a little surprised about Crain’s much ado about nothing,” Balazs said. “It was financing. You know, we recently refinanced a bunch of the other properties and restructured them to take advantage of the capital markets. And these are all now stabilized properties that it’s just an opportune time to refinance them, meaning that they’ve been open long enough, and they’re steady and mature hotels.” So everything’s okay? “It’s a routine recapitalizing and restructuring [of] the underlying debt or equity. We do it all the time. We control the management and control the properties.” Hm. We liked it better when all we had to think about was whether we liked his pretty lobbies.
Andre Balazs Explains Hotel Moves: ‘We Do It All the Time’ [NYO]
Hotelier selling assets in refinancing move [Crain’s NY]
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Raising the Standard
The High Line, as the headline read on Adam Sternbergh’s May cover story for New York, brings good things to life. One such good thing: André Balazs’s High Line–straddling Standard Hotel, which, according to the photo that showed up on Curbed today, seems well along its way to fruition. As it happens, a Daily Intel spy tells us it’s magnificently behind schedule and overbudget. But, then, it’s in the meatpacking district; of course it’s too expensive.
High Line Construction Chronicles: Standard Anything But [Curbed]
Related: The High Line: It Brings Good Things to Life [NYM]
