McHotel on Canal
UnderCover has been hearing rumblings about a new high-rise hotel that might rise out of a parking lot at 370 Canal St., next to the Canal St. post office at Church St.
Apparently, Sam Chang, New York hotel mogul and president of McSam Hotel, a budget hotel company, has put money down and “moved into contract” on the lot, said a local developer who requested anonymity. According to our sources, there’s a “nearly 100 percent” chance McSam, known for lowbrow establishments like the Quality Inn, will own the property within a few months.
UnderCover called McSam after business hours and an operator implied they did, in fact, own 370 Canal St. But the next day, a staffer named Sandy Koste had no comment and quickly extrapolated herself from the conversation.
Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and a rumored candidate for City Council, said the U.S. Postal Service has a tendency to sell its air rights—the Canal St. post office has unsuccessfully attempted to sell its air rights to other developers in the past. Buying air rights from neighboring buildings allows developers to build higher than zoning ordinarily allows.
A few nearby residents have gotten wind of the proposal and one of them showed up at a Community Board 1 meeting Tuesday night. “The community needs to act very quickly,” Alice Blank, an architect and nearby resident, told board members. Waving computer-generated images of what a fat, bulky building plopped down on Canal St. would look like, she added: “This is a very secretive and clandestine process.”
An Observer in Tribeca
The Tribeca juggernaut known as Robert De Niro et al has its eye on the pink lady formerly of the Upper East Side, the New York Observer. The paper has been allegedly on the auction block for years, but this time publisher Arthur Carter might be serious, editor-in-chief Peter Kaplan told New York magazine this week. “This is it,” Kaplan told Kurt Andersen. “Arthur is jazzed. He wants it. He loves these people. Everyone else has only represented money. Arthur was emotionally never ready to release it until he ran into these people.”
These people being De Niro and his Tribeca Film Festival partners the husband and wife duo Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff.
It was believed Carter was emotionally connected to his other startup publications, notably The Litchfield County Times, published in the same Connecticut town where Carter has a home. But the emotional connection proved thin when he sold it to the Journal Register Company, a publishing house known for ruthless labor practices and thin local news. A third of the County Times staff was fired the first week after he sold it.
The deal is a long way from sealed, but the Observer, which relocated from an aged E. 64th Street townhouse to a Gramercy abode, might just become a Tribeca-bankrolled rag.
A Bubble of a time
The city’s gossip scribes turned up at the Bubble Lounge in Tribeca Tuesday night for a little light summer reading. With Julia Stiles and comedian Andy Borowitz milling about the audience, gossip writer Deborah Schoeneman read from her first novel “4% Famous.” Ian Spiegelman ready from his book “Welcome to Yesterday,” Alex Roy read from “The Driver” and Wendy Wasserstein’s nephew Ben ready from his aunt’s “Elements of Style.”
Downtown bling
There’s going to be some serious bling Downtown. Tiffany & Co. just leased a 7,700 sq. ft. store at 37 Wall St., between Nassau and Williams St.—tantalizingly close to William Barthman Jewelers, which will soon upgrade to a larger Broadway spread.
Tiffany will keep its famed flag ship shop on Fifth Avenue, but open the new locale, inside a 25-story Beaux-Arts building, in the fall of 2007.
Shoppers need not settle for just sparkly gems in a neighborhood that has long been lacking in luster Hermes, the leather purveyor, plans to open a store at 15 Broad St., across from the New York Stock exchange and near the new Bobby Van’s Steakhouse, which opened at 25 Broad St., where Community Board 1 Chairperson Julie Menin’s Vine restaurant once was.
Umbrella folding
It looks like an eight-year-old prediction by Carole De Saram may be coming true. In 1998, after Travelers and Citibank merged to form Citigroup, De Saram, the president of the Tribeca Community Association, told Downtown Express that the firm would remove its 50-foot neon umbrella from its Greenwich St. building as soon as the firm’s logo-loving C.E.O. left. “I guess at this moment they’re plotting their new logo, probably when Sandy Weill leaves,” she told us back then.
De Saram and other neighbors hired attorney Jack Lester to try and get the red accessory down and eventually compromised when Citigroup agreed to turn the light off and dim it during different hours in the night.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Citigroup executives are on the verge of dropping the logo now that Weill is no longer chairperson or C.E.O.
Almost 20 years ago today…
Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, the man who could have been a Supreme Court justice had he not smoked pot as a Harvard Law School professor, blew into Tribeca Thursday, June 22 to deliver the 15th annual Telecommunications Policy Lecture at New York Law School. Ginsburg, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Washington D.C. circuit and a “distinguished adjunct professor of law” at George Mason, was nominated by President Reagan for the highest court in 1987 after the Senate voted down Robert Bork. Ginsburg withdrew after the embarrassing revelation, opening the door for Anthony Kennedy to join the bench.
WWW Downtown Express
