Wahoo!!! The Writers Guild Strike is expected to be over today and the great shows should be back, including my favorite 30 Rock with Tina Fey.

But don’t get too hopeful yet. According to the New York Times it will take weeks (maybe about 4) for the shows to get caught up. [Read more →]

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I just spent a few days in New York City for some general rest and relaxation plus a healthy dose of NY culture. While there I had a few famous people sightings… 14 members of the New York Giant’s offensive line was heading into Smith & Wollensky for a team dinner while I was there, Rob Lowe was cruising into the Ritz Carlton spa when I was strolling around Central Park, I sat next to Robert Horay at Rue 57 for lunch (nice guy) and then walked by the Writer’s Guild strike where I saw Michael Moore and my favorite… Tina Fey.

You have to understand the irony of me seeing Tina on this trip to New York. I was only recently introduced to 30 rock and was instantly hooked. The show is witty with smart humor and great characters. It has been a LONG time since I found something this hilarious and I admit I am hooked on the pretty, smart and funny Tina Fey who co-produces, writes and stars in her 30 Rock show. After checking out the online episodes from this season I filled my Netflix queue with the past season.

Just the week before some colleagues joked and were a bit surprised that Tina was in my top 5. Imagine their shock on finding out I got a chance to meet her. What an awesome profession, making people laugh. I admire her and what she does writing for 30 Rock. You just need to believe and follow your dreams… hmmmmm, maybe meeting her was a sign.

The talented Mrs. Fey was, as you would expect, very nice. I met her at the site of Columbus Circle where the writers strike line had just ended. She was with Rachel Dratch talking and preparing to head out when I introduced myself, shook her hand, and asked her how the strike was going. Her eyes sparkled, she smiled, and shared with me that she thought it would be over soon.

Tina, i certainly hope so. Good luck guys!

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Just thought it would be interesting to look at what are the biggest cities in the world in terms of population. If you look at how things change, the way we live, and our growing world cities are the hub of so much life and energy.

Here they are from Wikipedia..

• Tokyo, Japan - 28 million
• Mexico City, Mexico - 18 million
• Mumbai, India - 18 million
• São Paulo, Brazil - 18 million
• New York City, USA - 17 million
• Shanghai, China - 14 million
• Lagos, Nigeria - 13 million
• Los Angeles, USA - 13 million
• Calcutta, India - 13 million
• Buenos Aires, Argentina - 12 million
• Seoul, South Korea - 12 million
• Beijing, China - 12 million
• Karachi, Pakistan - 11 million
• Delhi, India - 11 million
• Dhaka, Bangladesh - 11 million
• Manila, Philippines - 11 million
• Cairo, Egypt - 11 million
• Osaka, Japan - 11 million
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 11 million
• Tianjin, China - 10 million
• Moscow, Russia - 10 million

Now compare this with the Denver population of 557,917 for the city or 2,359,994 for the Denver area. It is amazing to think of cities at this size and scale and the idea that Denver might at some day be this large. We have a number of New Yorkers here in Denver who love their home city, and with good reason. I can’t go for very long without a trip to the big apple myself. I also think that I would burn up if I lived there full time. It just seems that there is always something to do and not only doesn’t the city sleep… I didn’t either.

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I haven’t thrown out any good reads lately so after finishing “The Birthday Party: A memoir on Survival” I had to do a quick post.

The story isn’t fiction. This is the account of Stanley Alpert, an federal prosecutor in New York City, who was kidnapped and later released. I have to admit it isn’t the best literature in the world, but it is a story that you can’t put down and keeps you turning pages. Now on the New York Times Best Seller’s list, this book captures the curiosity and imagination of every urbanite.

What might happen to me? what are the risks I live with in the Big Apple (or other big cities). I think all these New Yorkers really are treating it as a survival guide to see what they should do. Sorry to disappoint you folks, but the bad guys are probably reading it too. Either way…. It’s just a fun read with enough interesting and entertaining characters to keep the story rolling nicely.
It is downright scary what goes on in some of the biggest cities in the world or those with the most crime. And it is certainly scary to think of being in the position that this story depicts, having your life in someone else’s hands.

Planning a spring break and need something to read on the beach…. take this and you will be glad to be sitting in the sun. You can read more and pick up the book here. Glad I’m in Denver.

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Just a cool, cool article about how new buyers are taking on the market, and setting the stage for their future in buying new homes. When I think about it, our interest rates our lower, we have less fear of credit, and we know what we want. Plus, after watching the stock market tank a couple times, the technology stock boom and bust, and the crazy antics of enron and others I personally prefer to place my bets in my real estate over the stock market. This story is about New York, but it could just as easily be Denver… except we aren’t as pricey.

What a fun ride we are on. First, the number of people in our country and the world are increasing every day. Second, folks are realizing that the city is where they want to be and are relocating to downtowns across the country. And last, it’s just fun to be in the heart of everything.

This story talks about how the current generation is looking at real estate, their homes, and their future. It’s a story I believe in as well. [Read more →]

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Seniors to get riverfront digs
Cosmopolitan Club to have amenities of five-star hotel

By John Rebchook, Rocky Mountain News
November 24, 2006
Louisville-based Balfour Senior Living plans to build a $110 million building for active seniors in downtown Denver’s Riverfront Park, in the Central Platte Valley.

Construction of the luxury 264- suite, seven-story, age-restricted Cosmopolitan Club building next to the historic Moffat Train Depot at 15th and Little Raven streets is scheduled to start in February.

Monthly rents in the club, one of the few age-restricted developments in the country in a downtown, are expected to range from about $3,500 to $8,000 a month. The club also will charge a one-time entry fee of $10,000.

“The Cosmopolitan Club will have all of the amenities of a five-star hotel,” said Michael Schonbrun, CEO and founder of the 10- year-old Balfour.

“In today’s day and age, people over 60 are very active and want to be part of the buzz and energy of the city,” said Schonbrun, a lawyer by training, who was president of National Jewish Hospital from 1981 to 1991 and worked for former Gov. Dick Lamm after coming to Colorado in 1974.

The Cosmopolitan Club will be a welcome addition to Denver, said Tami Door, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership.

“We want to ensure that we have a great diversity of people living downtown,” she said. “That is very important for the vibrancy of downtown.”

Door said she suspects that many people living there will want to participate in downtown as mentors and volunteers.

Charlie Woolley, head of the St. Charles Town Co., has put his planned 37-story senior high-rise at 14th and Stout streets on hold, saying he has too many projects on his plate.

But he said there’s room for both the Cosmopolitan Club and his development, which he hopes to resurrect next year.

“Our site is very different from their site, but I like their location very much, too,” Woolley said. “They’re going to do great. These urban locations for seniors are more appealing, as far as activities and lifestyles, than ones in the suburbs.”

Harry Frampton, CEO of East West Partners, the developer of Riverfront Park, is a small investor in Balfour and may invest in the Cosmopolitan Club.

Frampton first pitched the site to Schonbrun when they bought the property from Trillium Corp. in the 1990s.

“I think this is really pretty cool,” Frampton said. “Balfour has been successful financially, but even more important, it builds communities that are just wonderful places for people to go to when they age.”

The land was initially sold to Archstone-Smith, the Arapahoe County-based apartment real estate investment trust, but the -REIT decided to sell most of its Denver portfolio to concentrate on other parts of the country.

Schonbrun will renovate the depot and use it as the “great room” for the development.

The long-vacant 100-year-old building was partly destroyed by a fire in 1995.

Balfour may also open the 1,200-square-foot depot for an occasional public forum or event, although the retirement community also will have a separate building for that function, Schonbrun said.

When completed in 2008, the 369,000-square-foot Cosmopolitan Club building will include 214 independent-living rental apartments, ranging in size from 600 square feet to 1,900 square feet; a European- style piazza with a garden; and four dining areas, including a bistro/pub and a gourmet-style restaurant. It also will sport a a rooftop garden, a library, a billiard room, a movie theater, a performance hall, a business center, a card room, a hair and beauty salon, and an arts and crafts room.

The amenities don’t stop there - a high-end spa is also planned.

There will be around-the-clock concierge service and 130 underground parking spaces, although Schonbrun said he suspects that most residents will find they don’t need a car. They will have private town cars to ferry them to Cherry Creek, sporting events, shopping, golf and other events.

The club will be designed by a New York firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Stern is dean of the Yale School of Architecture.

His firm has designed a luxury condo at 15 Central Park West, next to the Time-Warner building, in New York; a new Ritz-Carlton hotel/condominium project in Dallas; and Aspen Highlands Village. Stern, working in Denver for the first time, will be joined by Denver- based klipp Architecture.

The interior designer, Carleton Varney, CEO of New York City- based Dorothy Draper Inc., is perhaps even better-known than Stern, at least in New York City.

Varney, known for his use of color and contrasts, has been the interior designer for such properties as the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, New York’s Waldorf Towers and Plaza and the Grand Hotel of Mackinac Island, in Michigan.

He even has his own brand of coffee.

“We went to the theater with him in New York, and you can’t walk two feet in New York without somebody stopping him,” Schonbrun said. “He told me he is at a stage in his life where he only works on projects that he thinks will be fun and special.”

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Square Feet
Where the Corner Bakery Is Sure to Be Organic

By STACEY STOWE
Published: November 8, 2006
Riverhouse, a 31-story condominium rising at the northern end of Battery Park City, has photovoltaic cells on the roof to convert sunlight into electricity, twice-filtered air in its apartments and its own $1 million wastewater treatment plant in the basement. In fact, this building, whose address is One Rockefeller Park, is so “green” that even its corner bakery is organic.

Enlarge This Image

Marko Georgiev for The New York Times
J. Christopher Daly, foreground, of the Sheldrake Organization and Maury Rubin of City Bakery at the construction site of the Riverhouse condominium.

The property’s developer, the Sheldrake Organization, wanted to continue the environmental theme and also enable those who would spend $800,000 to $4 million for a unit in the building to satisfy a taste for indulgence. The solution was to woo Maury Rubin, owner of City Bakery, to open a store on the ground floor of Riverhouse as well as a residents-only cafe off the building’s gymnasium.

The developer offered to help offset the cost of building an ecological bakery. In exchange, Mr. Rubin, a vocal proponent of organic causes, will be able to spread his gospel in a storefront that opens onto Nelson A. Rockefeller Park and is expected to draw not only the building’s residents but also commuters from the World Financial Center ferry terminal.

“I need to thank my children for finding me the perfect partner for the building,” said J. Christopher Daly, Sheldrake’s president, who said his three grade-school children raved about City Bakery’s food, especially its hot chocolate. When he learned that Mr. Rubin already had plans both to expand and to create his own green enterprise, Mr. Daly was convinced Riverhouse needed its own City Bakery.

Mr. Rubin, the kind of ardent environmentalist who avoids cotton because its production involves pesticides, was intrigued by the idea of opening a bakery in a green building. In 1990, when he opened his first City Bakery in Union Square, he said, his was one of the first bakeries in New York City using organic flour and shunning fruit out of a can for the real thing. Today, its butter, sugar and eggs are organic.

At the end of last year, Mr. Rubin went a step further. He opened Birdbath, an ultra-organic bakery on First Avenue. The 240-square-foot shop is a diminutive laboratory for environmental design and organic food. Its walls are tinted with milk paint, a 99 percent food grade pigment. The employees wear hemp. The floor is made of cork, a renewable resource.

Mr. Rubin said the enthusiastic response to his experiment had been a pleasant surprise. “On a customer, real estate and design level, and in the environmental community — all kinds of groups have responded with a lot of vigor,” Mr. Rubin said, during a recent phone interview while he was in Los Angeles, where he opened a second City Bakery in February.

At the new bakery at Riverhouse, Mr. Rubin designed the 1,200-square-foot interior space and is selecting all of its materials, including bluestone from Ulster County and recovered barn wood. He said the construction would involve minimal use of volatile organic compounds, found in adhesives, paints and carpeting, and the materials used would either be “sustainable, biodegradable, recycled, vintage or found.”

Like Birdbath, this store will have milk-paint walls, wheat board and Dakota burl, a composite board made of sunflower seeds. But it will also feature seating, wallpaper, light fixtures and fabrics of a 1950s vintage.

“It will be more polished than Birdbath,” Mr. Rubin said. “I had originally intended to take the debris from an upstate farm and use that for the interior, but the space is a lot of glass so we changed the plan.”

Perpendicular to the counter will be a “cookie box” that is six feet by eight feet, in the shape of a tic-tac-toe grid with some 40 boxes to store and display cookies. Mr. Rubin is planning two “gigantic lazy susans,” for the center of the store to display merchandise like soy-based candles, maple syrup and books.

The name of this store will also be Birdbath, but Mr. Rubin said that everyone will know it is part of City Bakery. In fact, he is printing “Birdbath, created by City Bakery,” on the store’s bags.

The new store will serve Mr. Rubin’s signature pretzel croissants and hot chocolate, as well as prepared salads, sandwiches and vegan muffins and cookies. It will be open seven days a week.

The three other commercial tenants in Riverhouse, all nonprofits, will be on the second floor. Each will be given free rent until 2069, as required by Battery Park City Authority, a public-benefit corporation established in 1969 to develop and manage the 92-acre site that encompasses Riverhouse.

The authority also selected the tenants: Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian aid and disaster relief organization; a branch of the New York Public Library; and Poets House, one of the most comprehensive poetry archives in the nation.

Although it would have cost less to comply with the already-strict environmental restrictions required by the Battery Park City Authority for the project, the developer exceeded those standards and spent more than 15 percent of the $200 million project cost on advanced green measures, according to Glen Ravn, director of design and construction for the Sheldrake Organization.

“We went very far because we wanted it to be a new paradigm in green architecture,” said Todd H. Schliemann, design partner at Polshek Partnership Architects.

Polshek’s architects conceived the exterior of Riverhouse, a design that includes a triple-glaze window wall that contains an eight-inch chamber for air flow to provide natural cooling and heating via convection. There is also a shade inside the cavity to regulate solar energy.

Rooftop panels convert solar energy into electricity, said Adrian Tuluca, a Sheldrake consultant who works at Steven Winter Associates, a building design firm that specializes in sustainable architecture. The panels augment the electrical loads in the common areas, like the corridors and the lobby.

The $1 million wastewater treatment plant in the basement recycles waste water for the cooling tower in the building’s heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system.

Although the building, which is expected to be completed by next fall, is steeped in environmental design, its interiors and price tag lean toward the trust-fund Birkenstock set. There is a wall-size fish tank in the lobby, a gym and pool, and on-site parking. The architect David Rockwell designed a children’s playhouse in the shape of a lighthouse. In addition to the bakery, there will be the cafe operated by Mr. Rubin for residents.

Mr. Daly said: “I’m thrilled we were able to marry green technology, water views and the best hot chocolate.”

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