The Chrysler Building. The Seagram Building. The Apple Store Soho? The Center for Architecture's executive director Rick Bell made a list of 10 great buildings to see in New York City (presumably for tourists) and spoke to the AP about it. The list spans two boroughs, a classic skyscraper, a beloved transportation hub, and retail stores, and some landmarks are deliberately left off (like the Empire State Building which everyone knows about):
• Conde Nast Building, for its "environmentally correct" design by Fox & Fowle.
• Brooklyn Museum, for the modern entry pavilion and plaza, designed by James Polshek, against its Beaux Arts facade; the AP writes the addition makes makes the museum "inviting and accessible, a suitable centerpiece for Brooklyn's burgeoning hipster art scene."
• Prada New York in Soho, designed by Rem Koolhaas, for the way it "displays the merchandise, it doesn't sell it."

We've mentioned the "Restricted Access" tours put on by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Recently, a group of 20 on this tour got to see the inner workings of the 1898 Clock Tower Building with Marvin Schneider, the city's official clock watcher. He said of the tower, “If you stand here and look out on the city, you can imagine you’re in an entirely different century. If you want to do a little time travel, this is the place to come.” Given it's a unique clock in this city, being non-electric and in its original state, this must be easy to do. Read more about the inner workings in this essay written by Schneider in 1985. more ›

Another dispatch from the center of the world's most overblown real estate bubble: apartments in the soon-to-be-converted Williamsburgh Savings Bank building are going for up to THREE MILLION DOLLARS. What do you get for that price? A fairly long elevator ride and a great view of the north wall of Bruce Ratner's new Nets Stadium project. Hot! As if that news wasn't upsetting enough, the New York Post is reporting that beautiful lobby of the bank is going to be converted into a BORDERS BOOK STORE. If you want to see the building before it falls to the rampaging forces of redevelopment, Amy says you can take a tour on May 7th for $25. more ›

With Martha Stewart's new morning show debut this morning, as well as her version of The Apprentice - with more fresh flowers! - next Wednesday, Gothamist has been thinking about how her offices at the Starrett-Lehigh Building on West 26th Street (the massive brick and windowed structure that takes up a block at West 26th Street and Eleventh Avenue) have been transformed into television heaven. Because it's not just the studio for the show, but also where the Apprentice contestants are living! In the current issue of In Touch (uh, yes, we're ashamed), there are pictures of how the warehouse space has been converted for reality living; it all seems very tasteful and Martha, though the sleeping areas might not have windows (but we can't totally tell). We remember the Starrett-Lehigh Building when it was a hotbed of dot-com activity, most notably Inside.com, and the jobs offers were flying out of there...but Gothamist still wasn't convinced that the late-night shuttle van would really be that effective in pre-Crobar 2000. We're partial to the SLB, but what would you pick, living on West 26th and 11th Avenue or at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue? more ›