The New Kings of New York

by Adam Piore, Stuart Elliott (Editor), Hiten Samtani (Editor)

Overview

The blood sport that is New York real estate is rife with billion-dollar feuds. There’s a story behind every eye-popping apartment sale and audacious new development in New York City, and many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly.





THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World’s Most Famous Skyline charts the extraordinary transformation of America’s greatest city from a near-bankrupt urban combat zone into the land of Billionaires’ Row and Hudson Yards—a luxury playground for the global 1 percent—and provides an inside look at the bombastic personalities behind the biggest real estate deals of this century.




The first two decades of the 21st century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs and deep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the world's biggest (and most disastrous) real estate transaction, the largest private development in U.S. history, the largest condo conversion in the history of the world, a commercial real estate nuclear winter, a $200 million penthouse sale, the world's most expensive office skyscraper, the tallest condo ever built. And then there was the pandemic of 2020: 95 percent of Manhattan’s office space sat empty, retail stores were boarded up, and restaurants went belly-up. Yet somehow, New York, and its world-famous real estate market, rose again.




Written by award-winning journalist Adam Piore and brought to you by the country's most authoritative real estate publication, The Real Deal, THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK offers a behind-the-scenes picture of what it’s like to operate at the highest levels of the industry, and what it took to pull off skyline-transforming deals. Featuring never-before-reported accounts from the larger-than-life characters at the top of the real estate food chain, it's a tale of chutzpah, greed and city-defining vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781737943402
Publisher:	The Real Deal
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	380
Sales rank:	145,939
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Part 1 23

I Come East, Young Cricket 25

Harry Macklowe and the Education of Kent Swig

II You Are Not to Talk, Young Man 37

The Rise of Steve Ross

III Unto the Sons 53

The Zeckendorfs and 515 Park

IV I, Columbus 65

The Time Warner Center Site

V A Second Gilded Age 75

515 Park, 48 Wall, and the Promise of 15 CPW

VI The Rubble 85

9/11 and Its Aftermath

Part 2 93

VII Swig Goes Big 95

A Downtown Buying Spree for the Ages

VIII The Time Warner Effect 101

The Mailing of Manhattan

IX The Full Monty 109

15 CPW, the First Super-Condo

X The Push for a "New" New York 117

Doctoroff's Olympic Dreams

XI Right Side of the Tracks 133

The High Line Effect

XII Mogul Mania 143

Cashing In on the Resi Boom

XIII Mr. Downtown Goes Uptown 153

Swig and the Sheffield

XIV "The Mama of All Residential Offerings" 163

Stay Town

XV Miracle on the Hudson 175

The Chance to Develop a Megasite

XVI Could You Spare $1 Billion? 187

Macklowe's EOP Play

XVII Marching to His Own Tune 203

Swig's Risky Game

XVIII Stood Up on Prom Night 215

Hudson Yards Heartbreak

XIX Harry's Reckoning 219

Macklowe Loses His Shirt

XX Ice Ice Baby 227

Swig and the Ice Bucket Incident

XXI High Tide 235

Lehman Collapses and Takes Real Estate with It

XXII Class Warfare 247

Troubles at Stuy Town

Part 3 253

XXIII Diamond in the Rough 255

Gary Barnett and One57

XXIV If You Love Something, Let It Go 271

A Second Chance at Hudson Yards

XXV How to Steal a Building in Broad Daylight 277

Fortress and the Sheffield

XXVI "From Russia with Love" 283

Meets "Crazy Rich Asians"

Foreign Money Invasion

XXVII City Within a City 297

The Hudson Yards Masterplan

XXVIII Redefining Rich 309

The Rise of Billionaires' Row

XXIX Family Feud 317

Mentor to Tormentor

XXX Exit Stage Left 323

From Technocrat to Progressive

XXXI West Side Story 331

Hudson Yards Takes Shape

XXXII Ill-Gotten Gains 337

The Money Laundering Question

XXXIII Three Amigos in a Room 349

Shelly Silver Goes Down

XXXIV Piper Paid 355

Swig Steps into the Sunlight

XXXV The Everything Store Checks Out 361

Amazon Dumps NYC

XXXVI Big Bird Comes Home to Roost 371

The Hudson Yards Backlash

XXXVII The Rent Riot 375

Tenants Strike Back

XXXVIII Killing the Golden Goose? 381

Defining the Future of New York

Epilogue 389

Macklowe and the Wedding Present

Acknowledgments 391

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2022

Journalist Piore’s vivid expose of the real-estate boom that transformed New York City into a playground for the globe’s wealthiest abounds with juicy, outrageous detail: the Russian oligarch who paid $88 million for a Park West penthouse to “house his college-aged daughter and hide his assets from his ex-wife.” The time developer Yair Levy, disappointed that an Amsterdam Avenue property was selling at a mere $63 million, clobbered “wily titan” Kent Swig with an ice bucket. Or the “ask-no-questions ethos” of luxury condo developers, who unlike co-ops, demand little in the way of financial disclosure from purchasers, inviting a flood of international money from sometimes dubious sources.

Drawing on extensive original reporting and interviews, Piore traces the city’s booming ‘00s, documenting the practices that developers and landlords employed to make affordable and middle-class housing all the more rare. Piore dramatically details the machinations that led, for example, to Tishman Speyer’s $5.4 billion purchase of the 1940s East Village development StuyTown—"the kind of community where cops, firemen, and teachers could afford to raise families”—and the new owners’ subsequent zeal to eliminate rent-controlled units in the interest of profitability. Piore’s somewhat wised-up language (a loan expert is a “consigliere”; planners who aid “titans” are “czars”; 15 Central Park West had once been “the alpha dog of condos”) keeps the rundowns of head-spinning schemes and gobsmacking numbers individually engaging, though the breathless accounts of record-breaking deals at times can overwhelm the broader themes.

Still, Piore never loses sight of the human and civic costs of rampant luxury. Setpiece chapters illuminate the 2010s development of Hudson Yards (“the mother of all engineering, construction, and sales jobs”) and the rise of “Billionaire’s Row,” the clutch of skinny, ultra-luxury Central Park residential towers whose financers would turn to foreign sources to finance construction. The conclusion offers illuminating consideration of the impacts of the boom and what the next era of New York might look like.

Takeaway: The lively and alarming story of New York City’s 2000s ultra-luxury real estate boom, and its human costs.

Great for fans of: Charles Bagli’s Other People's Money, Vicky Ward’s Liars Ball.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

No one knows the minutia of New York real estate like the team at The Real Deal.  In THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK, they step back and also take in the big picture of what Adam Piore calls New York’s second Gilded Age, from the depths of the late 1970s to the Icarus-like defiance of all limits by developers in the oughts. Neither a slow wet kiss nor a spitball, it’s a sweeping epic of cupidity and civic generosity, visionary brilliance and abject stupidity. Even if you can’t afford a penthouse overlooking Central Park, you can still get a great view in these pages."—Michael Gross, New York Times bestselling author of 740 Park and House of Outrageous Fortune

“To fully understand New York real estate, one must know the developers and financiers who power the industry. THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK is a captivating account of the characters who have  reshaped the modern skyline through a combination of vision, chutzpah, and bare-knuckle tactics.” —Eliot Brown, bestselling co-author of The Cult of We

"The New Kings of New York is a juicy deep dive into the moguls and monsters of Manhattan real estate. Only The Real Deal could tell a story like this with such authority (and get away with it.)" —Steven Gaines, bestselling author of The Sky’s the Limit and Simply Halston

“It’s not often one feels sympathy for the real estate moguls of New York, a ruthless, uber-competitive bunch of men whose buildings are essentially a public display of their own phallic imaginations. But in Adam Piore’s masterful, detailed reporting and storytelling, their humanity and complexities come to life. The story of Kent Swig, woven throughout, roots out the bigger yarn of the city’s changing skyline in a personal drama that will surely engender sympathy from the most cynical reader. It’s rare for a book about real estate to read like a thriller – but this does. I read it in one sitting, and already, I can’t wait for the sequel.—Vicky Ward, bestselling author of The Liar's Ball and Kushner, Inc.

"The New Kings of New York" sheds new light on the byzantine intersection of politics and real estate in New York, through reporting on the backroom deals and high-wire acts that shaped the city. Just as the robber barons turned Fifth Avenue into Millionaires' Mile 140 years ago, their successors have taken up residence along Billionaires' Row, reinventing New York in their own image with lookalike glass towers, Diller Island, The Shed and the High Line.  This book belongs alongside "Skyscraper Dreams" and "Working-Class New York" on the shelves of serious students of the city. —Charles Bagli, New York City's longest-serving real estate reporter and author of "Other People's Money"

From the Publisher

2022-03-21
An insider looks at New York City’s commercial real estate business.

In this business book, Piore profiles the dominant figures in large-scale real estate development in New York in the 1990s and 2000s and the ways in which their projects reshaped the city’s skyline and communities. The construction of Hudson Yards opens the work, which then jumps back in time to review the city’s physical decline in the ’70s and its ’90s renewal before returning the focus to the large developments of the last two decades. In addition to Hudson Yards, the volume examines the construction of commercial and residential spaces at Columbus Circle, the redevelopment of the World Trade Center, and the growth of high-rise condos selling for record-setting prices to international buyers whose identities are concealed by shell corporations. Developers Steve Ross, Harry Macklowe, and Kent Swig are the book’s main characters, with other developers, financiers, and real estate brokers playing smaller roles. The work is filled with juicy quotes and insider gossip, not only about the projects, but about the men’s personal lives as well, with Swig’s and Macklowe’s expensive divorces getting plenty of attention. Some anecdotes appear multiple times throughout the text, like Macklowe’s late-night demolition of a building, adding to the sprawling nature of the narrative. But on the whole, Piore does a good job of keeping the threads of the story clear as he moves from one project to another. The complex financial and regulatory aspects of real estate development are explained in sufficient detail, making the volume appropriate for nonspecialist readers. As the work is focused primarily on major deals and the people involved in them, the sociological implications of the resulting housing shortages and growing economic inequality are only briefly touched on. Still, the author does acknowledge the problems along with celebrating the audacity and success of the long-shot bets that have resulted in multibillion-dollar wins.

A solid and informative exploration of major New York real estate developments.

Kirkus Reviews