Carter's View

The city's hotel market is heating up.

Sales have reportedly started at One57, the 90-story hotel and condominium apartment tower at 157 West 57th Street now under construction by Extell Development, according to an October 24, 2011 article at therealeal.com by Leigh Kamping-Carder.

The article indicated that the 1,000-foot-tall building is expected to be completed in two years and will become the city's tallest residential tower. "Extell plans to officially open a sales office at the end of this month, but foreign buyers, primarily from china - have already snapped up some of the units since the developer began shopping them privately last month, according to the source, who asked for anonymity because the information is confidential," the article said, adding that some prices hit $6,000 a square foot and that the smallest units on low floors are priced at about $3,400 per square foot.

The pretty, tree-lined Upper West Side Block on 78th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue has a new, cantilevered apartment building, two very handsome, mid-block, mid-rise apartment buildings, and several attractive, rusticated brownstones, one of which is sporting a new, large and dramatic skylight and another has recently opened a synagogue on its lower floors.

And more change is in store as William Friedland was reported this week to have recently cleared several lots south of the cantilevered apartment building, which is known as Linden 78, for a 20-story rental apartment building on the northeast corner of Broadway and 77th Street. The new planned building, which is called the Larstrand, will block most of the views to the south from the very many lot-line windows at Linden 78.

Great Blocks: 76th Street Between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue

This short Upper West Side block between Broadway and Amsterdam avenues has been largely made over in recent years and now is home to two, new, big, interesting residential apartment buildings, and a large and modern Jewish Community Center.

One of the apartment buildings has a rounded corner on the southeast corner of Broadway and the other has a rectangular grid facade in two sections, one of which is on the southwest corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 77th Street. The former is known as the Laureate and the latter as the Harrison.

There are certain stores that became very "hot" destinations in real estate like the Whole Foods store in the basement of the Time Warner Center, or the Apple Store currently being renovated in the plaza of the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue.

For some residents in the vicinity in such buildings as the Sheffield 57, or Parc Vendome at 340 West 57th Street , such stores add a lot of traffic, but for others who really like what they have to offer they are paradise.

New York City has very few "perfect blocks" so those with a lot of admirable architecture should be cherished.

29th Street between the west side of Sixth Avenue and the west side of Park Avenue is one such stretch.

It has two historically important churches, several impressive hotels and three imposing residential skyscrapers.

The newest building is the Gansevoort Park Hotel on the southeast corner of Park Avenue, a "sister" hotel to the extremely popular Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking District. Designed by Stephen B. Jacobs, its energetic form and facades magnetize this area, which already abounds in interesting projects and is just a few blocks north of the lovely Madison Square Park and its Shake Shack and Flatiron Building.

The transformation of the far western stretches of 42nd Street into a phalanx of apartment towers is nearing completion, a radical change almost as spectacular as the renaissance of Times Square and a precursor to the eventual redevelopment of the rail yards to the west of Pennsylvania Station.

Earlier this week, Steve Cuozzo of The New York Post reported that Joseph Moinian, the head of the Moinian Group, has put his huge development site at 605 West 42nd Street on the market The site is "shovel-read, has Department of Buildings permits, is registered as an 80-20 project eligible for tax abatement, and has a foundation that's 65 percent complete."

At the top of the for-sale market for apartments in Manhattan, price is not an exact science.

During the current financial uncertainties, however, reports of very expensive sales have continued to amaze most observers. While overall averages have declined, some owners have apparently been able to reap substantial profits on their recent investment in a "grand" apartment.

The litany of "location, location, location" is not chanted very much anymore as Fifth Avenue has been challenged, dramatically, by upstarts on Central Park West and as the city has significantly "discovered" new and very popular and "chic" neighborhoods in midtown and NoLita, SoHo and TriBeCa.

In its Third Quarter 2011 report on Manhattan's luxury apartment for-sale market, the Halstead Company report found that in the "downtown" market, defined as south of 34th Street, "pre-war co-ops saw an increase over a year in average price per room from $234,026 to $244,230 and post-war coops increased at a lower pace from $217,683 to $220,990."

In its report, The Corcoran Group said that resale co-op pricing in the "downtown" market "improved markedly over both last year and last quarter," adding that "median price increased 11 percent from last year to $720,000 while average price per square foot increased 7 percent to $1,224 due to higher sales of two- and three-plus bedrooms."

In its Third Quarter 2011 report on Manhattan's luxury apartment for-sale market, the Halstead Company report found that "coops and condos sold during the Third Quarter spent an average of 111 days on the market, down from the previous quarter, but 14 percent longer than a year ago."

"Sellers received 95.8 percent of their final asking price, virtually unchanged from the third quarter of 2010," it said.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission today sent the owners of the Puck Building at 295 Lafayette Street on the southeast corner at Houston Street back to the drawing board with their proposal to make rooftop additions to the landmark.

The building is owned by the Kushner Companies. Jared Kushner, the head of the company and the publisher of The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper in Manhattan, had proposed adding six penthouse units on the stepped roofs of the 1885-6 building that had been originally designed by Albert Wagner. Mr. Kushner is married to the former Ivanka Trump, whose father is Donald Trump.