We'll be liveblogging the MTVU Woodie Awards tonight (hopefully Jared Leto won't break our blogging fingers) -- if you're looking for something else to do though, here are some suggestions... READING: Spend an evening with Global City Review contributors Linsey Abrams, Fred Tuten, and Michelle Yasmine Valladare. The publication "celebrates the difficulties and possibilities of the 'global city' and other constructions of community...while honoring the subversiveness and originality of ordinary lives," and reflects on New......

Six years can bring more than a 300% return (or clear 200% of your initial investment in pure profit)! The NY Times reports that Tishman-Speyer sold 666 Fifth Avenue to the Kushner family for $1.8 billion. And reporter Charles Bagli points out Tishman-Speyer bought the property for $518 million. Many people that this will be the most expensive single building in the city, breaking Tishman-Speyer's then-record $1.72 billion purchase of the MetLife Building. Factoids:......

This is what a hot real estate market has wrought: One of the city's oldest Jewish cemeteries has had construction debris fall onto dozens of tombstones in Chelsea. Congregation Shearith Israel built three cemeteries in Manhattan, and the Chelsea location, at 21st Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, was in use in 1828-1851 (one is at 55 St. James Place and another is at 76 West 11th Street). It seems like mortar from The O'Neill......

Screw Paula Zahn. The city's most famous bird couple, red-tailed hawks, Pale Male and Lola whose living arrangements were a hotnest of controversy a year and a half ago, are now nesting at the swank Beresford at 211 Central Park West. Right in front of Helen Gurley Brown's apartment, and though the legendary Cosmopolitan editor loves the birds, her husband, producer David Brown, is not a fan. It turns out that Lincoln Karim, who photographs......

Want to knock down your building and build a new one? You'll get to kick out your tenants, if you do! There are two interesting stories about apartment building owners using a loophole in order to evict their tenants who rent below market rates. In Tribeca, residents at 131 Duane Street claim their landlord is falsely claiming he will demolish the building in order to evict them. In NYC real estate, owners can evict even......

Developer Bruce Ratner has tapped celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz to photograph the development of the new New York Times building on Eighth Avenue. Why? To attract other tenants for the building. The Post calls the 700,000 square feet available in the building "an entire speculative building," and says the photographs, which will be taken periodically, will be plastered in the area. Could photographs by Annie Leibovitz really attract new tenants? Maybe photographs of cash, but......

We knew that 80s icon Cyndi Lauper lived on the Upper West Side, but Gothamist didn't realize she was trying to only pay $508 in her rent! Lauper, who sublets an apartment at the Apthorp, the apartment building that takes up Broadway to West End Avenue, 78th to 79th Streets, is suing the owners of the building because they had been paying $3,250 a month for many years, while the previous owner had paid only......

In honor of the Chrysler Building's 75th birthday this spring, the NY Times ran this awesome Op-Art piece by James Stevenson that explained some of the building's beginnings. Stevenson did this an illustration of Brooklyn-born, Pratt-educated Chrysler Building architect William Van Alen wearing a Chrysler Building costume, noting that he looked "uncomfortable and forlorn," "more Pagliacci than skyscraper," and Gothamist decided to hunt down the actual photograph. And, in fact, Van Alen, who was never......

The suits at NBC are realizing that when they deal with The Donald, they are dealing with this all-consuming organism (not unlike Kang, just with a combover): The Donald is looking at a scripted series set at Trump Tower. We can hear the pitch now: "It'll be like Melrose Place, but just in a shiny apartment building in midtown Manhattan. Think Peyton Place meets The Apprentice, just with actors acting crazy." Anyway, this is a......

A small pleasure of working in midtown is that Gothamist gets to see some pretty fantastic buildings. One favorite is many people's favorite: The Chrysler Building on Lexington. We were struck by the elevator, which is as beautifully Art Deco as the exterior and interior lobby. The City Review has a great review of the Chrysler Building. And ever since seeing Cremaster 3, we can't look at the Chrysler Building quite in the same......