Three NYC Real Estate Stories: Laugh or Cry?

Sometimes, I think The New York Times craves real estate stories of a certain kind. After all, Gotham's biggest business is real estate. Recently, the alleged newspaper of record published three stories whose common denominator featured multi-million dollar properties.

The articles included the following items:

• The week's top residential unit sale was over forty-seven million dollars.
• Artist Jennifer Bartlett has put her Brooklyn home on the market for $8.5 million. She'll move to her "second home" in Amagansett. Hey, who said artists don't make a living? (By the way, a shout out to someone's publicist, as the story practically read like press release.)
• The venerable Four Seasons restaurant is essentially being kicked out of its Seagram Building site next year. Why? The landlord wants three million per year rent, plus a share of the restaurant's revenues.

Pool Room/Four Seasons Restaurant
(Image: fourseasonsrestaurant.com)

The Four Seasons piece, while alluding to its clubby atmosphere, notably left out some players' names. Also, it was interesting that not one financial titan was mentioned in the article. No hedge funds, no private equity, no big, bad bankers. Nada. There was nary a hint of the zillionaires who have turned Manhattan into a sort of Monaco-lite. They remain secretive buyers of real estate: we only know what price was right.