Douglas Durst

The proposals to redevelop Pier 57 on Hudson River Park have been released, and it seems like rent-paying marketplace is the common theme for the pier off West 15th Street.

The Related Companies, West Village-based YoungWoo & Associates, and the Durst Organization/C&K Properties are the three suitors, each trying to impress the city/state Hudson River Park Trust. All three teams put forward a plan with outdoor open space and a large amount of market-retail space (two of the teams mentioned Seattle’s Pike Place as a corollary).

This is the second go-round for the Trust, which awarded the development rights for the pier back in 2005 to the Witkoff Group.  read more »

New York’s own organic-farming real estate mogul Douglas Durst is getting into the distressed asset-buying business, with plans to invest up to $300 million of his own moolah in a fund that he’s creating with his frequent collaborator, developer Sidney Fetner Associates. 

“The purpose of the fund will be to invest in distressed properties,” Mr. Durst said. “Bricks-and-mortar [properties].”

The fund should be active by spring 2009, around the time Mr. Durst expects a bunch of financially troubled properties, in the city and elsewhere, to finally be coming to market.

“It just takes a while for these things to get to the level where they are available,” Mr.  read more »

The bruising, drawn-out skirmish over the development of Pier 40 in the far West Village apparently has not scared the real estate world away from the water. A few blocks to the north, by West 15th Street, another site, Pier 57, has attracted the eyes of development heavies, as three firms submitted bids to the Hudson River Park Trust on Oct. 17 to develop the pier, numerous people familiar with the bids told The Observer.

Stephen Ross’ Related Companies, the firm that was beaten back earlier this year by Village residents from creating a mega-entertainment complex at Pier 40, is back for more, as is Douglas Durst, in a joint venture between his Durst Organization and C & K Properties.  read more »

The bruising, drawn-out skirmish over the development of Pier 40 in the far West Village apparently has not scared the development world away from the water. A few blocks to the north, by West 15th Street, another site, Pier 57, has attracted the eyes of real estate heavies, as three firms submitted bids to the Hudson River Park Trust on Oct. 17 to develop the pier, numerous people familiar with the bids told The Observer.

Stephen Ross’ Related Companies, the firm that was beaten back earlier this year by Village residents from creating a mega-entertainment complex at Pier 40, is back for more, as is Douglas Durst, in a joint venture between his Durst Organization and C & K Properties. Young Woo & Associates, a smaller developer that recently built the 20-story Chelsea Arts Tower on West 25th Street, is also bidding.

More in Wednesday's Observer print edition.

The national debt has grown so exponentially that the Durst Organization, which maintains the National Debt Clock in Times Square, will revamp its ticker to accommodate 14 digits, or more than $10 trillion, according to CNN.

"$10 trillion is a number that would just be beyond my father's imagination back in 1980," said Douglas Durst, CEO of the Durst Organization and "keeper of the clock," whose father Seymour in 1989 created the digital debt-tracker, basing its numbers on U.S. Treasury data.

In 2000, when politicians began driving down the national debt, Mr. Durst temporarily turned off the clock, saying that the rapidly dropping numbers were causing confusion amongst passers-by. But Mr. Durst was prescient, telling CNN at the time that he doubted the clock would be turned off for long.

"We'll have it ready in case things start turning around --which I'm sure they will," Mr. Durst told CNN at the time. "The politicians will do what they have always done and start spending more than we can afford."

Which brings us to today, October 2008.  read more »

The story was reported by Max Abelson, Eliot Brown and Dana Rubinstein; and written by Ms. Rubinstein.

 

New York's real estate community doesn't just love Mayor Bloomberg. It lurves him. And it's greeting the news of his third-term bid accordingly.

A sampling:

"Love him," said developer and landlord Alex Sapir. "Let's keep him forever."

"It's the best news I've heard in years," said residential superbroker Michelle Kleier, president and chairman of Gumley Haft Kleier.

"I can't think of anyone who's done more for New York... in my lifetime," said Howard Lorber, chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman owner.

"I think he's the greatest mayor we've ever had," said Douglas Durst, of the Durst Organization. Mr. Durst even thinks President Bush should call Mr. Bloomberg down to Washington to "straighten out the financial mess."

"I think the country needs him more than the city does," he said.

Thirty-something Dumbo developer Jed Walentas called Mr. Bloomberg, "the best mayor New York has had - certainly in my lifetime."

And Donald Trump said he begs the mayor ("Michael," to him) to run whenever they meet.

"Any time I see Michael I say, please run," Mr. Trump said. "I don't want to get into the details, but any time I see him. I think it's very important."

So what gives? Why all the love for Massachusetts' own, Michael Bloomberg?  read more »

If there’s any dynast in New York who can eye the ravaging fires of Wall Street with some degree of equanimity, it’s Douglas Durst, he of the just-topped-off, just-filled-up Class A tower at One Bryant Park, anchor-tenanted by none other than the impressively solvent, indeed expanding, Bank of America. Quite the power couple, eh? 

If they’re the winners in this ordeal, they are overshadowed by the carcasses littering a roadway paved by the credit crisis.

“Today’s really a crash of the New York real estate market,” said Tomasz Piskorski, assistant professor in the finance and economics division at Columbia Business School, on Monday.  read more »

“Whoever this is, I don’t want to talk to you,” said the man who answered the phone Tuesday at the offices of the Nations Academy, the private-school brainchild of former Esquire owner Christopher Whittle.

As The Observer’s Web site reported on Monday, Mr. Whittle’s plans for an academy on a West 57th Street site controlled by Douglas Durst are no more.

“There were a number of issues on which we could not reach agreement,” said Jordan Barowitz, spokesman for the Durst Organization, which has a long-term lease on the land between 11th and 12th avenues and was to build the six-story, 240,000-square-foot school.  read more »

The ambitious plans for a new, high-end private school proposed by former Esquire owner Christopher Whittle and developer Douglas Durst are no more.

Durst spokesman Jordan Barowitz confirmed that the developer is no longer involved in the project.

"There were a number of issues on which we could not reach agreement," he said. The Durst Organization controls the land on West 57th Street between 11th and 12th avenues, and was to build the school. It was to be owned and run by Nations Academy, a new, international venture run by Mr. Whittle.

   read more »

The riveting tale of one-time real estate baron Robert Durst – estranged older brother of developer Douglas Durst – has been made into a feature film starring Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling. Called All Good Things, the film will debut in 2009.

Its release will mark yet another painful episode for the otherwise upstanding Durst family, which is known in New York City for its impressive property holdings (including the new One Bryant Park and the Conde Nast headquarters at 4 Times Square), its environmentally sustainable building practices, and its upstate organic farm.  read more »

New York did a snapshot this week of Chris Whittle, the bowtie-wearing former Esquire owner who is planning to build a new 220,000-square-foot school on West 57th Street with developer Douglas Durst.

The article says the school is still now planned for 2011 (up from 2010 when we spoke with Mr. Whittle in February), and construction doesn't seem imminent. Durst spokesman Jordan Barowitz said the school, Nations Academy, had yet to receive approval from the city's Board of Standards and Appeals. And based on Mr. Whittle's plan from a few months ago, Nations will then seek get approval for tax-free financing for the construction.

Council member Melinda Katz, a candidate for city comptroller, is having a June 19 fund-raiser that will showcase strong support from black and Latino lawmakers.

The elected officials on the host committee for the event include Yvette Clarke, Jeff Aubry, Jose Peralta, Maria del Carmen Arroyo, Maria Baez, Helen Foster and Melissa Mark Viverito.

One of her strongest opponents is Adolfo Carrion, the only Latino in the race.

It’s worth noting that Arroyo, Baez and Foster are also, like Carrion, from the Bronx.

The invitation also includes a number of big real estate people who sit on Katz’s finance committee: Douglas Durst, Peter Kalikow and Richard Ravitch. Katz recently said that her connections to the real estate industry are an asset to her.

Tenants beware!  read more »

Al Gore's Generation Investment Management has finalized its lease inside Douglas Durst's One Bryant Park, the new office tower in Midtown that's among the nation's most environmentally friendly commercial buildings. (My colleague Eliot Brown broke the news of the pending lease in November.)

Generation, of which Mr. Gore is chairman, will relocate from Washington, D.C., into 5,500 square feet under the 10-year lease.  read more »

With Tishman Speyer out of the picture at the West Side rail yards, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is now headed back to the other three bidding teams (Extell Development, the Related Companies, and a joint venture of the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust); that is, if they’re still interested.

The apparent frontrunner, given that it was the runner-up to Tishman in the original bidding, would be Durst/Vornado, the only remaining team in late March with an anchor tenant, S.I. Newhouse’s Condé Nast. If Condé Nast is no longer on board with a move—The Times has reported that Tishman failed to woo them in recent weeks—that could mean trouble for the Durst/Vornado bid, or certainly the value of it.  read more »

My colleague Dana Rubinstein broke the news earlier this week that the new One Bryant Park unofficially opened on Monday. Over 300 Bank of America employees took to their desks in the 54-story, Durst-developed skyscraper in midtown.

Above is a photo of the lobby earlier today. Life! At last!

It was a bright new day at One Bryant Park this morning, when Bank of America employees showed up for their first day of work at the crystalline skyscraper on Sixth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd streets.

The new 54-story skyscraper, also known as the Bank of America tower, unofficially opened for business, after developers secured a temporary certificate of occupancy at 5 p.m. on Friday.  read more »

Douglas Durst’s Bank of America Tower is still under construction, but the number of unleased floors in the hotly desired building is growing.

How?  read more »

Conde Nast was one of the tangential losers in the West Side rail yards bidding. The magazine publishing giant was the anchor tenant for the Durst-Vornado bid, and that bid, of course, lost yesterday to Tishman Speyer's.

But! John Koblin, at our brother blog Media Mob, reports that Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal memo this morning telling employees that the company was still looking to build a new tower--somewhere--by 2016.

From the memo:  read more »

Si Newhouse's plan for a new skyscraper on the far West Side with Douglas Durst is dead in the water, but is there something else out there?

Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal email this morning reassuring employees that all hope isn't lost. At least for a new skyscraper somewhere. Here's the memo:  read more »

So that new skyscraper that Si Newhouse was hoping for? It appears dead.  read more »

Location: You’re now one of four teams left vying for the West Side rail yards, down from five. How do you feel about your chances?

Mr. Durst: I think we have a 25 percent chance. … We think we have the best bid in terms of planning and the financial terms for the M.T.A. [the yards’ owner].

How long of a build-out would there be on the site?  read more »

Joining forces with the onetime owner of Esquire, developer Douglas Durst is getting into the education business, building a large private school on a West Side lot a block from the Hudson River.

If a zoning change goes through as planned, a $200 million-plus, six-story competitive primary and secondary school will rise on Mr.  read more »

For months, large metal boxes containing the energy of the future have been sitting around on the tops of a handful of buildings, waiting to be turned on. Now, they finally can be.

A rule published in the City Record Monday ends a moratorium imposed two years ago by the Buildings Department that prohibited residential and commercial building owners from using microturbines, which are natural gas-powered electricity generators that use the heat thrown off to warm water for showers and faucets. The Observer wrote about this hiccough in the city’s environmental agenda back in April. Since then, an interdepartmental task force forged an agreement that assuaged the Fire Department’s concerns about safety (there is a flame involved, after all).  read more »

Even the developers at a Municipal Art Society panel held Tuesday night seemed a little overwhelmed by the popularity of New York and its consequences—and these were developers, speaking on what could be called “Developers Night” in the series of programs held in conjunction with the Jane Jacobs exhibit.

Douglas Durst, co-president of The Durst Organization, declared that congestion was significantly adding to construction costs by delaying deliveries and complicating logistics. (Just you try to get that concrete to its destination before it hardens.) Greg O’Connell, the Red Hook developer, complained—if it could be called complaining—that his buildings were fully rented and he could no longer accommodate his retail or industrial tenants when they want to expand. At one point, New York Times reporter Charles Bagli, who was moderating, squirmed in his seat while recounting a lengthy trip through the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn on a Saturday afternoon. (“What an idiot I was…. And then driving back, we were like lemmings: We went back through!”)

Perhaps it says something that the one participant who seemed most gung-ho about the success of New York City spends a lot of time outside of the five boroughs: Eugenie Birch, a former New York City planning commissioner and current head of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. “Go to Philadelphia," she said. "It’s a wonderful city, but they would die to have the problems that we have.”

Um, we did try to go there once, but you know, as W.C. Fields said, it was closed.

Move over Chrysler Building, a new player is assuming the No. 2 position on the New York City skyline.  read more »

The joint proposal for the West Side Rail Yards by the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust is obsessed with getting people to the far West Side. The developers propose a subterranean “people mover” below 33rd Street that would carry up to 20,000 riders an hour from Penn Station to 11th Avenue (although it was not clear just who would pay for it); a pedestrian skyway that floats over the entire site and Hudson River Park; and a new headquarters for Condé Nast.

“We felt that we wanted to maintain the kind of porosity that we get in the best parts of the city,” said architect Rafael Pelli, who designed the plan along with FxFowle. “We are really trying to relate it to Union Square, Bryant Park or even a Times Square. We are thinking about how this is going to be a diverse and useful area and attract people from a greater catchment area rather than an enclave.”

The plan, one of five submitted to purchase the yards from the MTA, envisions four office or mixed-use towers, the tallest of which will be 1,205 feet tall. (It's online here.) The new Condé Nast headquarters would go at the southeast corner of 33rd Street and 11th Avenue. Overall, the plan is heavier on residential space than the other four proposals, with about 7,000 apartments, an unspecified number of which would be affordable.

A broad low-lying kunsthalle on the southeastern flank would house a cultural institution; its 120,000-square-foot floor plates, Mr. Pelli said, would be ideal for flower and antique shows (and, one might add, provide competition for the troubled Javits Convention Center expansion plan on the other side of 34th street).

The project, in keeping with Douglas Durst’s environmentally progressive reputation, includes a number of green features, among them a co-generation plant to capture the heat thrown off by generating electricity; a treatment plant that would allow the complex to reuse wastewater for plumbing purposes; and bris soleil, a type of awning that would shade out the summer light while letting in winter light.

Vornado, with its $18 billion in assets, is lending some financial heft to the bid.

“A lot will rely on the capital strength of the bidder,” Vornado Chairman and Chief Executive Steve Roth said. “I think it is obvious that this is an enormously complex project so the success of the project may ride and fall on the financial strength of the winning bidder; that will be a very important differentiating tactic.”

Al Gore will be taking an office downstairs from developer Douglas Durst, as his investment firm Generation Investment Management is planning a move from its Washington, D.C., offices to the Durst Organization’s Bank of America Tower.  read more »

Five developers have bid on the Western Rail Yards. The bids came into the yards' owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, by 5 p.m. on Thursday, and they include the usual heavyweights of New York City building.

1. Extell Development Company
2. Brookfield Properties Developer LLC
3. The Related Companies
4. TS West Side Holding, LLC (A Joint Venture of Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley)
5. Hudson Center East LLC and Hudson Center West LLC (A Joint Venture of Vornado Realty Trust and The Durst Organization, Inc.)

For the MTA's statement on the selection process, which should drag on toward at least spring, click here.

For earlier Observer coverage of the architects who could get to shape the yards, click here.  

A fancy architect may not speak as loudly as cash, but it could give you an edge in the fight to lay claim to 26 acres of Manhattan real estate. Clearly, that’s the thought of a number of the developers who are working on proposals for the Western Rail Yards, which are due at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s offices by 5 p.m. today.

We’ve scurried up a few notes about who has hired whom from sources connected to each of the proposals.  read more »

Part of the art of winning projects like the West Side Rail Yards is creating a well-rounded proposal that touches all the right notes. The Durst-Vornado team and Tishman Speyer are already promising they will bring some jobs out to the West 30s should they win the competition. Now, the Durst Organization is saying it would add some cultural panache as well: the International Center of Photography.

“The West Side Rail Yards will showcase how sustainable construction, innovative landscape design and breathtaking architecture can form a vibrant 24-hour mixed-use community of culture, business, housing and recreation,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization, said.

Now, the ICP rents, at below-market rates, about 25,000 square feet in a Durst-owned building at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street for its museum and storage, and another 40,000 square feet across the street for its school, according to its director, Willis Hartshorn. Moving to the West Side would enable the organization to consolidate into one space as large as 125,000 square feet.

"We are anticipating growth and anticipating a future and the rail yards look to us like one of the great opportunities in New York," Mr. Hartshorn said.

Bids for the rail yards are due Thursday. Having a cultural organization in hand is not necessarily going to be a huge asset in this battle, since the city has said that it would help find one willing to move out there—but it couldn’t hurt.

Douglas Durst’s budding Bank of America Tower on 42nd Street has netted another lease agreement and is only a floor away from being fully leased, some eight months before the 54-story skyscraper opens its doors.  read more »

When Condé Nast moved its headquarters from Madison Avenue to 42nd Street in 1999, it brought instant credibility to the Times Square office market. Now, only eight years later, Condé Nast is again making plans to relocate its headquarters to another untested area for big-name Manhattan office tenants.

Condé Nast intends to move out of its home at 4 Times Square and into an entirely new tower in Hudson Yards on the far West Side by 2015, developer Douglas Durst told The Observer this week. The new tower, as sketched out as part of a proposal by the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust for the Hudson Yards development site, would be exclusively for Condé Nast and would be built to 1.5 million square feet.

Mr. Durst, the developer of 4 Times Square, said that Condé Nast would consolidate its offices in the new tower and would move out of the roughly 700,000 square feet it currently occupies in 4 Times Square. The Condé Nast lease there ends in 2018, but Mr. Durst said a deal would be negotiated to let the publisher break the lease by 2015.  read more »

Conde Nast intends to move out of its home at 4 Times Square and move into an entirely new tower in Hudson Yards on the far West Side by 2015, said developer Douglas Durst.

The new tower, as sketched out by a proposal for the Hudson Yards development site by the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust, would be exclusively for Conde Nast and would be built to 1.5 million square feet.

Mr. Durst told The Observer this afternoon that Conde Nast would consolidate its offices in the new tower and would move out of the roughly 700,000 square feet that it currently occupies at Mr. Durst’s 4 Times Square. The Conde Nast lease at 4 Times Square ends in 2018, but Mr. Durst said a deal would be negotiated to let them break the lease by 2015.

This is all under the condition that the Durst Organization and Vornado win the bid to develop the Hudson Yards site. Bids are due Oct. 11 to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the yards' owner, and other companies preparing proposals include The Related Companies, Brookfield Properties and Tishman Speyer.

The news that Conde Nast wants to build a new tower was reported by Women's Wear Daily this morning. (The New York Times also reported this morning that Morgan Stanley has teamed with Tishman Speyer on a proposal to build a new headquarters on the yards.)

Mr. Durst told The Observer that having Conde Nast already secured as an anchor tenant for one of its towers can only help the position of its bid with Vornado.

“We think it’s a tremendous advantage,” he said. “We are very excited about it. We hope it’ll help our bid. We think the team we put together has put us in an excellent position.”

A call to a Conde Nast spokeswoman was not immediately returned.

His share of new One Bryant Park now goes for some of the highest office rents in U.S. history—and only two floors left!  read more »

It’s the most lucrative era in the history of the city’s commercial real-estate market:  read more »

Despite the hype about green roofs; despite the rampant branding of luxury residences with names lik  read more »

"Everybody who called me or responded said they agreed with what we said," Douglas Durst, developer of One Bryant Park, told The Real Estate on Wednesday afternoon.

He was talking about the reaction to the ad that Mr. Durst and fellow real estater Anthony Malkin placed that morning in major New York newspapers. The ad objected to moving ahead with the Freedom Tower.  read more »

• Akin Gump Stauss Hauer & Feld, a fancy group of fancy-named lawyers, takes 203,000 square feet in the Bank of America building at One Bryant Park. The firm, god bless them, will pay over $100 per square foot for the 41st through 46th floors. Bank of America gets the tip-top 51 for itself (plus 36), and developer Douglas Durst gets to be a very happy man. (Globe St.)
• There won't be a West Side stadium for the Olympics or the Jets, but at least the rail yards will be sold for half a billion dollars. (Sometimes The Metropolitan Transportation Authority seems so powerful). Next door, little Javits doesn't look bad either. (New York Times)
• Brooklyn's transportation system, on the other hand, hasn't been so fortunate. A 200-foot stretch of rail yard between Bay Ridge and Sunset Park has been unlocked for over a year. We've got nothing against illegal dumping or prostitution, though. (NY Daily News)
• The days of our nation's overpriced real estate are finally over. In New York, however, home prices are still inflated by 43 percent--so, really, the bubble is fine. (CNN/Money)
• If 16,000 people on Staten Island lose power, does it make a sound? Apparently not--at least when Queens is hogging all the attention again. (WCBS)
Update: That happy developer is Douglas Durst, not David. - Max Abelson  read more »
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The architect Robert Fox, a partner at Cook + Fox Architects in New York, was talking about his favo  read more »

The architect Robert Fox, a partner at Cook + Fox Architects in New York, was talking about his favo  read more »

The British architect Sir Richard Rogers unveiled the design for the Javits Convention Center expansion Monday. It has certain elements of the defunct West Side stadium that was going to sit just a block away, and maybe bears some resemblance to the Pompidou Center in Paris for which Rogers is so famous. Here, a few slides:

The idea is to replace I.M. Pei’s dark-glass walls, which Rogers said made Javits look “more like a mausoleum than a great exhibition space.”

The unveiling was notable for other reasons: it shows that Charles Gargano, the chairman of the state-appointed Convention Center Development Corporation and Gov. Pataki’s economic development czar, is not going to pay much attention to alternatives raised by developer Douglas Durst and the Newman Real Estate Institute, which would have brought the convention center south (Durst), or would have torn it up and reconstructed it perpendicularly to the water (Newman), instead of maintaining a five-, growing to six-, block wall along the Hudson River. The development corporation’s president, Michael Petralia, said his appointment with Newman was tomorrow—which would be a little too late to i