Real Estate News

Giants Stadium demo begins

Construction workers gathered yesterday at an open landing in a brand new Meadowlands stadium to watch 34-year-old Giants Stadium’s demolition kickoff. The $10 project is slated to take roughly four months and began at Gate B, part of which overlaps with the concourse of the as-yet-unnamed future home of the Jets and Giants football teams. Once that area is clear, crews from Westbury-based Gramercy, the contractors in charge of the demolition project, will move on to the stadium’s interior, where seats are being sold to fans as memorabilia, and will then take apart the stadium from the top down. The new stadium, slated to officially open in May with a Bon Jovi concert, will be the third largest in the National Football League, with room for 82,500 fans, including 9,500 club seats and 222 luxury suites. [Post]

Equity Residential acquires Chelsea stalled project site

Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Residential

Equity Residential only just entered the New York multi-family market in mid-2004, but Sam Zell’s Chicago giant is now taking on the city with haste. The company, which announced earlier this week that it had acquired the last three Harry Macklowe rental towers, bringing its New York properties total to 26, said yesterday that it is also planning to build 111 market-rate apartments and 10,000 square feet of retail space near the High Line in Chelsea. Equity Residential acquired the site, at the southwest corner of 10th Avenue and 23rd Street, after the project there had been stalled for almost 18 months. The investor “had completed the foundations out of pocket but was unable to get financing to go vertical,” Equity Residential said in an earnings conference call yesterday.

City presses ahead in bid to acquire last piece of the High Line

The city isn’t wasting any time in its bid to acquire the northern third of the High Line, the last section of the railroad slated to become part of the elevated park. Last week, less than a year after the first section of the park opened to the public, the Department of City Planning began its uniform land use review procedure, a seven-month process during which the city will negotiate with CSX, the railroad company that still owns the half-mile stretch of land above West 30th Street that the completed High Line is supposed to include. The lot is comprised of the land around the rail yards from 30th Street to 12th Avenue and north to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, and the Related Companies, the High Line’s developer, has already said it will preserve the structure there. The first third of the High Line park, on city-owned land between Gansevoort and West 20th streets, opened to the public last year. The middle third is under construction. [The Villager]

Aqueduct project winner plans to get right to work ... and more

1. Aqueduct project winner plans to get right to work [Crains]
2. Debris from Milstein Towers site in Battery Park City blows into ice rink while children are skating [Downtown Express]
3. Ray's Candy Shop gets new lease on life after donations help with back rent [The Villager]
4. New $16.2M Federal Plaza slated to open in 2012 [Downtown Express]
5. Ryan McClafferty weighs in on underwater mortgages [The Atlantic]
6. To get W. Thames Park project back on track, contractors to start working from 7 a.m. seven days a week [Downtown Express]
7. Bronx condo agrees to $1M settlement for rape victim who says building covered up serial attacks [NYDN]
8. Before restoration, a look inside the Loew's Kings Theater [NYT]
9. Continuum Health Partners backs out of St. Vincent's hospital offer [Post]
10. Who is the Aqueduct Entertainment Group, anyway? [NYDN]
11. With Bronx homeless shelter closed after city opposition, community looks for alternatives [NYT]
12. Petition calls for designating NYU-area park spaces on city map [The Villager]
13. The commercial real estate fallout: Just a tease? [CNN Money]

Elliman agent receives damning voice mail in connection with Stein slay, prosecutors argue

L to R: Elliman's Louise Stocker; Linda Stein's ex Seymour Stein; Linda Stein; and suspect Natavia Lowery

A couple weeks before Linda Stein was murdered, a Prudential Douglas Elliman colleague of the one-time punk-rock manager turned high-powered broker received a chilling response from Stein’s personal assistant to a question intended as friendly small talk. “I said how’s it going to Natavia [Lowery], regarding just her working -- making small talk,” Louise Stocker, an Elliman agent who sat at the desk next to Stein's for five years, testified in Manhattan Supreme Court today. “We worked in close quarters, just being friendly and she answered in a determined voice, ‘we’re going to put an end to this.’”