Peter Cooper Village And Stuyvesant Town To Replace Park Place And Broadway As Most Sought-After Real Estate Pieces

Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town could be yours . . . for five billion dollars:

Metropolitan Life is putting Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village — a stretch of 110 apartment buildings along the East River — on the auction block.

With a target price of nearly $5 billion, the sale would be the biggest deal for a single American property in modern times. It would undoubtedly transform what has been an affordable, leafy redoubt for generations of Manhattan’s middle class: teachers and nurses, firefighters and police officers, office clerks and construction workers.

MetLife, one of the largest life insurers in North America, said in July that it might sell the two complexes, which it built nearly 60 years ago with government help. It has hired a broker, who started registering bidders last week for the 80-acre property along First Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets.

Behind the scenes, the sale has already drawn interest from dozens of prospective buyers, including New York’s top real estate families, pension funds, international investment banks and investors from Dubai, according to real estate executives, even though the marketing book will not be released to bidders until next week.

. . .

Already there are signs that bidding will be feverish. As one executive involved in the sale put it, “This is the ego dream of the world: 80 acres, 110 buildings, 11,000 apartments, covering 10 city blocks in Manhattan.”

According to several bidders, the list of buyers who have signed up includes the most active developer in New York City, the Related Companies; one of the largest landlords, Glenwood Management; Tishman Speyer, which controls Rockefeller Center; two publicly traded real estate companies, Archstone and Vornado; the international bank UBS; and the Blackstone investment firm, as well as the Rudin, Durst and LeFrak real estate families.

Given the size of the deal, buyers are expected to team up. “You’ll see some interesting people stepping up to the plate for this one,” said William Rudin, whose family owns about 2,000 apartments in New York.

Congress Must Raise Taxes On The Rich . . . The Country’s Social Fabric Depends On It!

There is way too much disposable income out there:

Thousands of New York men are resorting to offering cash and prizes in return for noncommittal relationships.

The men are advertising their offers on sites like suggardaddie.com, under handles like “nice guy, bad boy.” The site describes itself as “the foundations of a great relationship.” It claims the sugar-daddy relationship “can eradicate the issues of financial stress that modern living can bring.”

Single, divorced, married — they’re all trawling for young women to shower with their millions. In return, most want their girl to be at their beck and call.

Logging onto the site using the name Maria Benson, I had some upping their bids within minutes.

Donny (all names have been changed) was looking for a “sexy woman who can go from jeans to stilettos in a flash.”

The self-employed, attached 35-year-old said he would give me $2,000 a month for dates in his first e-mail.

John, a divorced 43-year-old looking for love and claiming his yearly income is “more than you can spend!” said, “I’m tall, rich and enjoy the role of sugar dad. You have to be willing, attentive, and appreciative of me . . . I get off on being generous.”

Jay, whose picture revealed six-pack abs, said his yearly income was more than $1 million but moaned, “I am stuck in a boring, lifeless, and otherwise unrewarding marriage.”

Within 24 hours, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe on the Upper West Side meeting Scott, a boyish-looking 47-year-old who owns his own financial-consulting firm in Manhattan.

He said he was “in search of a discreet relationship with the right woman.” And he was ready to pay to make it happen.

Dressed in a suit and tie on what must have been his lunch hour, he said: “I’ve never done this before. I’ve been married 23 years, and we’re just going through a rough patch right now. I’ve gotten close but never went through with it. I’m ready to now.”

Fifteen minutes later, he agreed to pay the $1,500-a-month rent on my apartment, fund shopping sprees and take me on world-class vacations. The apartment, he said, would be for trysts.

“I just don’t want to deal with the checking in and out of hotels,” he said. “But I’d also give you the money that I would have spent on a room.”

“I don’t want to drag a hooker around town,” he told me. “I like that you seem normal, what are you looking for?”

Then he interrupted, “Just so we’re clear, I’m not leaving my wife, and I don’t plan to . . . I have to be home at night and on the weekends. I have to coach my son’s Little League games.”

If I Can’t Pay $50 Then No One Should Be Able To Pay $50!

The Neue Galerie has scrapped plans for a special no-riff raff $50 off-hours deal:

Less than a week after announcing a special $50 opportunity to view its newly purchased Klimt portrait on a day its doors are normally shut, the Neue Galerie canceled that plan yesterday, saying the offer was misread by the public.

A museum spokesman, Scott Gutterman, said that a wave of callers had contacted the Neue Galerie yesterday leaving the museum with the impression that some found the price objectionable. The Neue Galerie had described the $50 ticket, which was to be offered each Wednesday from noon to 4 p.m. starting today, as a way for visitors to avoid crowds. “It was originally intended for members, who can get in for free,” Mr. Gutterman said of the Wednesday viewings. “But then we thought that we would offer the public a chance to come on Wednesdays for $50, when it would be less crowded.”

Previously on: Congestion Pricing Is Un-American!

Congestion Pricing Is Un-American!

Who exactly pays $50 to escape the riff raff? That’s just unseemly:

Want an intimate afternoon with Adele Bloch-Bauer? The Neue Galerie announced yesterday that, on Wednesday afternoons for the duration of the Klimt exhibit that features the most expensive painting ever purchased, it will charge a higher than normal price — $50 — in an effort to keep the crowds down. At other times when the museum is open, Thursday through Monday, its normal price of $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors will be in effect.

“Because we get such a crowd, we thought we might offer a more private viewing,” a representative of the museum explained over the phone yesterday evening. Asked if there were any concerns about offering this more intimate encounter with the paintings only to those who could afford the steep ticket price, she said there were not. It’s an experiment, she explained, “and we’ll see how it goes.”

Ever heard of timed tickets? Jeez . . .

Old School

The economics of housing leads to the further infantilizing of young urban professionals:

Ms. [Kelly Frances] Cook, age 24 and from Ohio, at first could afford only a rented room in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., for $650 a month. Then she embarked on the archetypal, hair-raising New York City apartment search: feckless would-be roommates, outlandish financial demands, an offer of a room in a building with a bullet-pocked lobby.

Then she saw an ad on Craigslist for space in a 60-unit building in Harlem described as full of young professionals. The price was right; the woman on the phone was friendly. Back in Ohio, Ms. Cook’s mother had begun to think like a New Yorker: “Yeah, right, Kelly. She’s probably some mass murderer. I don’t trust her. She’s too nice.”

This month, Ms. Cook is moving in. The woman on the phone, Karen Falcon (not a mass murderer), calls the building “a dorm for adults.” It is a community of the overeducated and underpaid.

There is nothing new about having roommates in New York City. What Ms. Falcon has invented is a full-service dorm, full of strangers she has brought together to share big apartments as a way to keep housing costs down. Her approach is a homegrown response to the soaring rents bedeviling desirable cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Ms. Falcon, an informal agent for the building’s owner, says she has placed nearly 150 young people there and in two other buildings in the neighborhood in recent years. A gregarious Californian with rainbow-colored braids, she pieces together roommate groups like puzzles. Each tenant ends up paying $700 to $1,200 a month.

. . .

Wil Fenn, a 29-year-old program officer for a foundation, has been trying since college to save money to buy a home. He lived in Westchester County for six years, in order to pay less rent. Then, last year, he became bored and decided to move into Manhattan. He, too, happened upon one of Ms. Falcon’s ads.

Now Mr. Fenn pays $850 a month for a large room in a four-bedroom apartment in what he describes as a beautiful building with exposed brick walls, mosaic tiles in the lobby and a garden on the roof. His roommates include a New York City teaching fellow, a chef and a German student studying in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship.

. . .

“Everyone talks about free-market solutions,” he said, speaking of the city’s shortage of lower-priced housing. “But the solution now is the rich get richer and for everyone else it’s the equivalent of being a sharecropper in the city. I’ve been working five or six years now, trying to save up and buy something. Every time I get closer, the goal moves farther away.”

Asked how adult-dorm life differed from college-dorm life, Mr. Fenn said: “You’re not really at the same place where you were psychologically. Now, for me, I’m kind of wondering: When does this end? When do I get to be able to buy a place and settle down?”