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Providing a daily dose of news and features of New York culture, housing and travel for both business and consumer.

Manhattan Condos Tighten the Rules

Historically, condos have cost more, partly because they had looser rules, and partly because of their scarcity. Although both are changing, the price differential between condos and co-ops has remained roughly the same. Nor has the shift toward co-op-style behavior so far seemed to affect condo prices. The average sales price for Manhattan condos in the first quarter of this year was $1.45 million, 28% more than the average sales price for co-ops, which was $1.13m, according to sales data from Prudential Douglas Elliman.

» nytimes.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Project HYDRA Secure Super Grid: Attack-Proof Power Line Under NYC

American Superconductor Corporation and Con Edison, announced joint effort to develop and deploy a new system level solution that utilizes high temperature superconductor (HTS) power cable technology in Con Edison's grid in New York City. Code named Project HYDRA, this new technology is capable of carrying very large amounts of power while also being able to automatically suppress power surges. The Department of Homeland Security will invest in the development and demonstration of this technology to enable "Secure Super Grids" in the United States.

» amsuper.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

PBS: Spying on the Home Front / Domestic surveillance datalogging

Last night, PBS Frontline aired Spying on the Home Front, devoted to all the ways the US government is spying on us.

9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people's records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell FRONTLINE, was the government's shift after 9/11 to a strategy of pre-emption at home -- not just prosecuting terrorists for breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike.

President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.

Even government officials with experience since 9/11 are nagged by anxiety about the jeopardy that a war without end against unseen terrorists poses to our way of life, our personal freedoms. "I always said, when I was in my position running counterterrorism operations for the FBI, 'How much security do you want, and how many rights do you want to give up?'" Larry Mefford, former assistant FBI director, tells Smith. "I can give you more security, but I've got to take away some rights. … Personally, I want to live in a country where you have a common-sense, fair balance, because I'm worried about people that are untrained, unsupervised, doing things with good intentions but, at the end of the day, harm our liberties."

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president's warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: "The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda's trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks."

Spying on the Home Front also looks at a massive FBI data sweep in December 2003. On a tip that Al Qaeda "might have an interest in Las Vegas" around New Year's 2004, the FBI demanded records from all hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, casinos and other businesses on every person who visited Las Vegas in the run-up to the holiday. Stephen Sprouse and Kristin Douglas of Kansas City, Mo., object to being caught in the FBI dragnet in Las Vegas just because they happened to get married there at the wrong moment. Says Douglas, "I'm sure that the government does a lot of things that I don't know about, and I've always been OK with that -- until I found out that I was included."

A check of all 250,000 Las Vegas visitors against terrorist watch lists turned up no known terrorist suspects or associates of suspects. The FBI told FRONTLINE that the records had been kept for more than two years, but have now all been destroyed.

In the broad reach of NSA eavesdropping, the massive FBI data sweep in Las Vegas, access to records gathered by private database companies that allows government agencies to avoid the limitations provided by the Privacy Act, and nearly 200 other government data-mining programs identified by the Government Accounting Office, experienced national security officials and government attorneys see a troubling and potentially dangerous collision between the strategy of pre-emption and the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Peter Swire, a law professor and former White House privacy adviser to President Clinton, tells FRONTLINE that since 9/11 the government has been moving away from the traditional legal standard of investigations based on individual suspicion to generalized suspicion. The new standard, Swire says, is: "Check everybody. Everybody is a suspect."

» pbs.org [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Curl Up With A Good Blog

Publishers increasingly turn to the web to find new talent - but they should be doing it more. Once upon a time, a writer would have to try to attract the interest of an agent in the hope they would submit their proposals to publishers and beg them a book deal. Now, however, it would appear to just be a simple matter of a writer posting their work online and then sitting back waiting for the offers to roll in.

Yesterday's announcement of this year's winners of the award for blogs turned into books, the Lulu Blooker prize, would have us believe that many publishers are perusing blogs with the aim of adapting them into books. The website eagerly claims, "Traditional publishing houses, ever in search of the next big name author, have begun to mine blogs and websites for new talent."

» guardian.co.uk [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

New York Sues Dell for Deceptive Business Practices

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'

» state.ny.us [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Lindsay Lohan sued; NYC photographer says she hit him with BMW

Lindsay Lohan and her mother have been sued by a New York City freelance photographer who claims the 'Georgia Rule' actress struck him with a BMW.

Photographer Giovanni Arnold claims he 'sustained severe and permanent personal injuries' when he was struck by the BMW on Ninth Avenue between 12th and 13th streets in Manhattan on March 13.

Arnold's attorney, Marc Mauser, said Tuesday that his client suffered injuries to both knees and was 'still getting medical treatment.' He said Arnold was seeking unspecified monetary damages 'for his pain and suffering and his lost wages.'

» AP [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

New York City Renters Cope With Squeeze

Property and Portfolio Research: The vacancy rate for Manhattan rentals is now estimated at 3.7%... It is expected to shrink to 3.3% by the end of this year and to 2.9% by 2011. Renters without high salaries… are squeezing in extra roommates or making alterations... The rents for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan average $2,567 a month, and two-bedrooms average $3,854 a month, according to data from Citi Habitats. Because landlords typically require renters to earn 40 times their monthly rent in annual income, renters of those average apartments would need to earn at least $102,680, individually or combined, to qualify for a one-bedroom and $154,160 to afford a two-bedroom.

» nytimes.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Turtle Tries to Lay Eggs Near NYC Wollman Rink

A determined turtle crawled up a flight of stairs and trudged toward Central Park's ice skating rink in an apparent urge to lay eggs near the rink, park officials said. The 20-pound snapping turtle turned up near the Wollman Rink three times on Friday, according to park officials. The animal's first foray was at about 7:30 a.m., said Douglas Blonsky, the president of the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages the park.

» Associated Press

Record price for lower Manhattan office building

Record price for lower Manhattan office building. Deutsche Bank agreed to sell its North American headquarters at 60 Wall St. in New York to German billionaire mail-order retailer Michael Otto, for $1.18 billion. The 1.6 million-sf tower sold for $732/foot, a record for lower Manhattan, according to Real Capital Analytics. The bank will remain in the building for the next 15 years under a lease agreement reached with the owners. Lower Manhattan office rents are surging as the area recovers from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Rents averaged a record $52.86/sf in Q1, up 43% in a year, while the vacancy rate fell 36% to 7.6%, according to Grubb & Ellis.

Home Prices Fall in Rich New York Suburbs Once Immune to Slump

MLS: The average price in Westport, Connecticut, fell 8.2% to $1.56 million in Jan.-April 2007, from Jan.-Apr. 2006.... In Chappaqua, New York… properties sit on the market an average of seven months before they sell, up from five months a year ago… The tightening of credit in response to rising subprime defaults has disrupted the real estate food chain… Prices fell as much as 18.8% this year in areas of… New Jersey, Connecticut and New York's Westchester County… Larchmont and Mamaroneck experienced a drop of 18.8% to $1.08m… In Bronxville, the slide was 12.4% to $1.34m. Home prices continue to climb in the wealthiest California suburbs, at a much slower pace.

» bloomberg

Judge says NY surveillance data can be made public

Six hundred pages of documents relating to intelligence that New York City gathered before the 2004 Republican National Convention should be made public, a federal judge ruled on Friday.

Judge James Francis of U.S. District Court in Manhattan struck down the city's attempt to keep the documents confidential, but agreed to keep them sealed pending a possible city appeal. The New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times had petitioned the judge to make the documents public.

» Reuters

The $5bn question about Mr Murdoch's desires

Some News Corp shareholders are privately furious about Mr Murdoch’s willingness to pay such a high price for what they see as “the media equivalent of a trophy wife”, notes the Economist in its latest issue. But is there more to Rupert Murdoch’s $5bn bid for Dow Jones than an old man’s vanity, the magazine asks, raising the thought that others dare not mention: that Mr Murdoch, at 76, is starting to show his age.

But his friends contend that the media tycoon has always been prone to rambling sentences and repetition. If there is an occasional lack of clarity in his explanation of News Corp’s strategy, particularly its embrace of new media through acquisitions such as MySpace, there can be no doubting the excellence of that strategy in practice.

Mr Murdoch’s recent behaviour shouts that he is still the bold, innovative big spender, bent on global media domination, and his $5bn offer for Dow Jones is a case in point says the Economist.

» alphaville

A third NYC store planned for Apple

During this afternoon's financial conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced that a third Big Apple store is being planned. It's been suggested that this building at 401 West 14th Street will be the third store's location. At 52,000 square-feet, it would house one heck of a store.

» 401 W14 Street

Jean Nouvel's Residential Tower, New York

Jean Nouvel’s “Vision Machine” a 23-storey residential tower located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan along the Hudson River has begun construction. The stunning building which features a Mondrian-like curtain wall comprised of nearly 1,700 different size panes of glass that change character according to lighting conditions, is, according to its architect, a direct conceptual and material descendent of his Arab World Institute in Paris, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The building, which stands next to the recently completed, Gehry-designed Interactive Corporation headquarters, will contain 72 residences that will range in size from 890 square feet to 4,675 square feet. The buildings top floor will be a single grand residence with a full rooftop terrace. Each unit will have a sparely designed top of line kitchen and baths. At the base of the building is a dramatic lobby space with 20-foot high ceilings. It will a concierge, a ground floor restaurant and dining patio, a residents’ mail room, package and refrigerated storage room, access to a garden and a private elevator landing serving the residences above and the pool, gym and spa areas below. At 70 feet long, the building’s mirror-canopied pool will be one of the largest in Manhattan. Prices for the units will range from US $1.6 million to $22 million. The building will be LEED certified. Beyer Blinder Belle is serving as executive architect for the project.

» jeannouvel.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Experimental Tidal Power for Manhattan

Working from barges and tugboats off New York City's Roosevelt Island, engineers are battling northeasters and this month's heavy spring tides to install the first major tidal-power project in the United States. The project involves a set of six submerged turbines that are designed to capture energy from the East River's tidal currents. The three-bladed turbines, which are five meters in diameter and resemble wind turbines, are made by Verdant Power of Arlington, VA....

Before the company proceeds, however, it must monitor the first six turbines for 18 months to assuage concerns of federal and state regulators that the turbines, whose tips cut through the water at up to nine meters per second, won't chew up the river's fish. Such qualms have already delayed the first-of-its-kind project by several years. Corren says monitoring to date has shown that few fish venture into the strong currents flowing past the turbines, but he says the extensive studies will provide a critical foundation for future developments.

» technologyreview.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

Shareholders set to attack New York Times management

The Sulzberger family’s long-standing control of the New York Times Company is expected to come under attack on Tuesday from a group of frustrated shareholders at the media company’s annual meeting.

Hassan Elmasry, a portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, is pressing shareholders to withhold their votes for the company’s directors in protest at its dual-class share structure and the management of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the Times and chairman of its parent company.

» Financial Times

New York Temperatures Rival Record for Coldest April

The groundhog's prediction for an early spring is proving wrong in New York City, where a cold front has kept temperatures about 7 degrees below the historical average this month, the National Weather Service said.

Just 10 days into April, temperatures have averaged 42 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius), about one degree warmer than the average for April 1874, the coldest on record, said Michael Silva, meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Upton, New York, station.

» bloomberg.com

Manhattan Housing Cycle Turns Toward Rentals

With the vacancy rate for rental apartments at less than 1% in Manhattan and sales of condominiums slowing, a number of developers have turned their focus to construction of residential rental apartments.

"Developers today are increasingly looking to build rental units for two main supply side reasons and one demand side reason," the chairman of Massey Knakal Realty Services, Robert Knakal, said via e-mail."On the supply side, the number of condominium units is increasing rapidly while & the velocity of sales in this segment is slowing," meaning there is no reason to add to the inventory unless a project has significant, unique characteristics, he said."That being said, the inventory of available units is minimal and rents & now approach & $80 per square foot for well-located new construction. Trends in demand are exacerbating these supply side issues as the number of people looking to move into New York continues to increase.

» Search NYC-Specific Tags: Housing - Apartments - Condominiums

Taking the pulse of the people: Newest awards by popular vote

What is America's favorite example of good design? The Smithsonian's Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum in New York has been asking that question this autumn by urging people to vote for their favorites in the first People's Design Awards.

What does the response tell us about America's perceptions of design?

For starters, it suggests that design is one of those subjects on which most people have opinions, often strong ones. Public votes and prizes are precarious projects for museums, accustomed to exploring subjects with scholarly subtlety in exhibitions, rather than delivering absolute judgments by naming winners and losers. As the Turner Prize for contemporary art proves year after year at the Tate Britain, awards are remarkably effective at generating media coverage and public debate, and at provoking controversy and accusations of sensationalism.

» peoplesdesignaward.org

» Search Branding-Specific Tags: Design Awards - Turner Prize - Contemporary Art
» International Herald Tribune

Judge postpones criminal trial of 16 former KPMG executives accused of selling illegal tax shelters.

One of the Department of Justice’s most high-profile white-collar crime cases has been dealt a blow after a New York federal judge postponed indefinitely the criminal trial of 16 former KPMG executives accused of selling illegal tax shelters.

The ruling represents a setback for prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York, who have been heavily criticised by Judge Lewis Kaplan for their role in pressing KPMG, the accounting firm, to cut off legal fees to its former employees.

» Financial Times

One runway trend that has crossed all boundaries in recent seasons, it is that fashion loves gold.

Designers are dotting their collections with long gold gowns - which seem more common than "little black dresses" - and working gold fabrics or accents into their pieces, whether for spring or fall, casual or evening.

In some cases, designers have personal reasons for using gold. Elie Saab showed a spring collection in Paris entirely devoted to gold - from sequined minidresses to flowing chiffon gowns - after he went to his native Beirut and was inspired by the intensity of the sun there. Donna Karan has created a capsule collection and a fragrance based on the material that she has used since her early days as a designer.

» Search NYC-Specific Tags: Fashion Design - Elie Saab - NY Style
» New York Sun

Morgan Stanley turns up heat on NY Times

The debate over the future ownership structure of the US newspaper industry deepened when Morgan Stanley Investment Management boosted efforts to loosen the Sulzberger family's grip on the New York Times Company.

» FT.com - US homepage

SEC chief gets blogging

Chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox, has joined the blogging world.

In a comment on Sun Microsystem's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz's blog, the SEC chief showed interest in Mr Schwartz's recent request that blogs be used as a way to expand investors' access to information. In a triumph of PR, Mr Cox posted the text of a letter he had sent last week in response to a letter from Mr Schwartz on the subject. "Since you're talking about trasparency and efficiency in communications, I though you might appreciate my taking advantage of the internet's speed and potential for broad dissemination by posting here as well," he added.

MET Podcast: New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori

The photographer Robert Polidori describes his experience depicting the loss and pathos of a civilization in chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[mp3] Special Exhibition Podcast - Metropolitan Museum of Art

City's Financial Pre-Eminence in Jeopardy

New York risks losing its pre-eminence in the global financial sector unless government eases regulation and does something about excessive civil litigation, Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer are warning. In an opinion piece with a double byline in the Wall Street Journal titled "To Save New York, Learn From London," the two politicians argued that while New York is still the dominant international financial center it is "losing ground as the leader in capital formation."

City Will Soon Get Open Internet Listings of Real Estate

In a step toward opening up New York's real estate marketplace, the Real Estate Board of New York announced yesterday that it plans to launch a public Internet portal containing all the exclusive apartment sales and rental listings of its 319 members, including the city's biggest brokerages. While similar systems exist in many real estate markets around the country, establishing a comprehensive, shared, and free listing system on the Web has been a long, hard slog in New York City.

via: New York Sun

Urban Glass House, Soho, New York / Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie

Is a modernist residence the latest luxury accessory of the rich and famous? Judging from the brisk sales of units at The Urban Glass House, a new, luxury condominium project located in Soho New York designed by Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie, one would think so. The 11 storey 40-unit project, which is ready for occupancy in 2007, is 80% presold. And the penthouse unit set a record for the neighbourhood. No small feat given that real estate market has cooled and that the units here are pricey, ranging from 1.6 to 12.5 million dollars.

Part of the project’s success is that it has been cleverly marketed as the urban version of an iconic building, Johnson’s Glass House in New Caanan, Connecticut, which the architect completed in 1949 and occupied until his death in 2005. Ritchie says in scale and context, the Urban Glass House echoes the Seagram building. But the details are drawn from the Glass House. The building’s palette is limited and restrained, with steel and glass as primary materials. Inside, Annabelle Seldorf has designed rich, warm yet spare interiors. White oak floors are laid in a chevron pattern like the brick floors in the original Glass House, and large expanses of glass are used throughout.

» pjar.com [ Contribute: submit link / submit article / submit company ]

110-Building Site in N.Y. Sold to Speyer for $5.4 Billion

Jerry Speyer, a real estate investor who controls some of the city’s most prominent icons, like Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, signed a deal to buy 110 apartment buildings along the East River in Manhattan for $5.4 billion, MetLife announced today.

Mr. Speyer, the chairman of Tishman Speyer Properties, is buying a trophy of a different kind in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two adjoining complexes on First Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets. Built by Metropolitan Life in 1947 for returning veterans, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village have served as an affordable redoubt for generations of police officers, teachers, nurses and the like. The unremarkable brick buildings are set among trees and fountains on 80 acres of some of the most valuable land in the country.
Via: New York Times

Wall Street Woos Film Producers, Skirting Studios

Since the birth of Hollywood, movie studio chiefs have been makers and breakers of careers, arbiters of taste and gatekeepers who decide which movies are made.

But as Hollywood power shifts more to Wall Street investors, financiers are starting to bypass studio bosses by dealing directly with successful producers.

Now, instead of deals being cut over lunch at Spago or the Grill, movies are increasingly being greenlighted in conference calls to New York.

The reason is a simple desire for more control. Wall Street financiers want a greater say over what movies they finance and who makes them; producers want more artistic independence and a larger share of the profits.

The studios themselves are nudging the trend along, too, since they are making fewer movies.
Via: New York Times

Google Video Strikes Music Video Distribution Deals

Google's purchase of YouTube isn't the only thing making the news for the Internet giant this week, as they also have entered into an agreement with two major music labels to release music videos through the Google Video service. In fact, the blog Toby's Space mentions the irony of these deals being struck for Google Video just as YouTube was purchased by Google, pointing out that Google Video is "a destination that has been utterly dwarfed by now-sister site YouTube."

The plan is to provide dual platforms for audience members, one offering the content on-demand in a pay-per-view format, with each video costing $1.99, set by the iTunes price (which seems like a rip-off when compared to getting an hour television show for the same price), while the other is available for free but accompanied by advertisements that the viewer must watch to view the video.

The partnership is with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group, with the videos debuting later this month. Both Google and the record labels will share in the profits, and the long-term plan is to make this content available through other Web sites as well, sites that features Google AdSense advertisements. The Sony videos had been available for download since January through the Google Video Store.

In addition, according to their recent statement, the company wants to create copyright-safe places for user-generated content, such as a space that would allow them to create videos using footage from the Google music video repository that can be repurposed and then posted to Google Video. In other words, the company is looking to create ways to do what YouTube does without facing the barrage of lawsuits that have been threatened in the past few months.
Via: http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2006/10/google_video_strikes_music_vid.html