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. The other pending worry is that the Screen Actor’s Guild negotiations are coming up and they are expected to handle the same issues about Internet revenue sharing. How much of a bummer would that be, the Writer’s strike ends and the Actor’s strike begins. That would put Tina back on the line again so keep your camera ready.

Here is the prediction for when your favorite shows will return from the Winnipeg Sun…

BACK BEFORE SUMMER

- The CSI franchise

- The Office

- The Law & Order franchise

- Criminal Minds

- Lost

- Desperate Housewives

- My Name Is Earl

- Two and a Half Men

- House

- ER

- Ugly Betty

- Grey’s Anatomy

- Gossip Girl

- How I Met Your Mother

- Cold Case

- 30 Rock

- Without a Trace

- Samantha Who

- Boston Legal

YOU’LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THE FALL OR LATER FOR THESE SHOWS

- 24

- Heroes

- Private Practice

- Dirty Sexy Money

- Chuck

- Pushing Daisies

THE WRITERS OF THESE SHOWS WON’T BE GOING BACK TO WORK, AFTER ALL

- Journeyman

- Bionic Woman

- Cane

- Cavemen

- Carpoolers

Of course, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that and the shows get back on track.

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!

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.

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.

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.

UNFAZED BY DEBT Luciana and Daniel Hyman are financing 90 percent of their $875,000 Midtown co-op.

The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: February 4, 2007

DANIEL AND LUCIANA HYMAN are quick to admit that they are insufferably sentimental about how they fell in love. Seated on the half-finished floor of their Midtown co-op, they relate every detail about how they met at a nightclub in Rio de Janiero, how he asked her to move to Manhattan in the sculpture garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and how he proposed on a trip to Paris at the Eiffel Tower — well before Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes became engaged at the same spot.

INVESTMENTS Rovic Tomás Martínez and his fiancée, Roz Silbershatz, did lots of research before they put down a deposit on a condominium at the Nina, 450 East 117th Street.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Daniel and Luciana Hyman say that if they ever need to, they can easily rent out their apartment.

But Mr. Hyman, a 27-year-old trader at Credit Suisse First Boston, and Mrs. Hyman, a 24-year-old elementary science teacher at the Grace Church School, lose all of their sentimentality when they talk about real estate.

After online research into the financial state of more than 100 apartment buildings, tours of 30 condos and co-ops and analysis of minutiae like projected future maintenance payments, they recently closed on an $875,000 two-bedroom co-op in Midtown. As owners in a building with relatively lenient policies, like 10 percent down payments and flexible sublets, the Hymans talk about their apartment as a strategic investment that they someday plan to turn into cash.

“We’re more comfortable with taking on debt and paying tomorrow,” Mr. Hyman said. “If the cards topple, you can rent your place out and go somewhere cheaper.”

There is little talk about the apartment as a romantic nest for newlyweds, and in that they are not unusual. Brokers say that younger buyers, especially those under 30, often approach their first home with cold calculation and an appetite for risk more often associated with real estate moguls.

While this approach to buying may be typical of Wall Street analysts and bankers who are used to approaching deals with extensive research, younger buyers with jobs far from financial fields — wedding photographers and advertising executives, for example — are not relying only on the advice of their brokers. In addition, they are coolly investigating the backgrounds of their developers and their buildings’ histories. They treat these purchases first as portfolio diversifiers and only second as homes. With that in mind, they are keeping their money in the bank and borrowing as much as possible.

“You have a new kind of buyer today,” said Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “Twenty years ago, it was ‘Pay everything off in cash and have no debt.’ Ten years ago, it was ‘Have some debt.’ If they want something now, they figure out a creative way to finance it.”

The mind-set of younger buyers may dominate the patterns of buying in New York City for years to come. Their liberated attitude toward borrowing is helping to keep prices stable. While buyers of the past may have coveted co-ops, younger buyers find condominiums more appealing because they allow for flexible financing and their sales don’t require board approval.

At the same time, younger buyers are exposing themselves to more risk because they are taking on so much debt that if prices fell, they could be caught with no equity in their homes.

“The whole attitude is different today,” said Barbara Fox, the president of the Fox Residential Group in Manhattan, who started her real estate career before these under-30 buyers were born. “These buyers have never lived through bad times.”

Younger buyers have such different approaches to real estate that they are prompting developers to change the way they sell apartments. Some are hyping condominiums with the promise that buyers can eventually rent them out. Others are making sure that their prices are as close as possible to similar projects because they know younger buyers have researched every comparable condominium in the neighborhood before they walk through the door.

Real estate developers and brokers are also using this information to shape how they negotiate deals and approach future projects.

Louise Phillips Forbes, a Halstead broker who represents the converters of 296 East Second Street, sent the developer the feedback she got from a potential buyer about the building’s penthouse, which was lingering on the market. The bidder, a Goldman Sachs investment banker and first-time home buyer, put together a one-and-a-half-page analysis justifying her bid, which was 11 percent lower than the asking price.

She based her case on data from PropertyShark.com, an online real estate company, and interviews with brokers about how long it had taken to sell apartments in five nearby buildings. The bidder argued that she should pay less because it would be harder to resell a luxury apartment on the Lower East Side. The argument was valid enough that Ms. Forbes thought the developer might want to negotiate.

Since then, Ms. Forbes has received three higher offers, and last week, the developer accepted one for the full asking price.

Ms. Forbes said the experience had made her take younger buyers — and their Wall Street bonuses — far more seriously and had made the developer realize how closely younger buyers were examining prices. “He might just need to negotiate on the product,” she said. “It’s a very valid argument.”

Jessica Cohen, the Prudential Douglas Elliman broker who represented the Hymans, said the two dozen text messages she received from them every day was standard for clients in that age group.

She had another couple who were interested in an apartment in a new building visit other projects by the same developer, as well as those built by the same construction company, to examine the quality of the work. One buyer who spent two years looking for an apartment kept thick files on the developers and projects that he had followed.

“They tell me what the developer paid for the land before they walk into the building,” Ms. Cohen said. “My older buyers want me to feed them information. My younger buyers — as much as I give to them — they do more research.”

In the case of Rovic Tomás Martínez, that research extended to all the investments made by developers, not just their real estate holdings. When he and his fiancée, Roz Silbershatz, started to look for a condominium in East Harlem, they subscribed to local real estate trade publications and researched every detail they could about the buildings.

Mr. Tomás, a 24-year-old associate at Morgan Stanley, and Ms. Silbershatz, a 27-year-old publications specialist at Pfizer, visited 10 apartments on the Upper East Side and in East Harlem before they became interested in the Nina condominiums at 450 East 117th Street.

They asked the developer, Martec Development, for more information about the company. They said they were a little concerned when they found out that Martec didn’t have a long track record, but when they learned that its financial backer had stakes in two popular gyms, they felt more comfortable.

They put down a deposit for a 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom loft selling for about $500,000. Mr. Tomás said that while they would probably have bought the apartment anyway, they felt better gathering as much information as they could about their purchase.

“It pretty much eases your mind knowing that someone behind the project has the financial means,” he said.

Some younger buyers go beyond the financials to all of the intangibles that may determine how well an apartment will hold its value.

Naomi LaHaie, a 24-year-old art director in the Connecticut office of an advertising agency, spent six months searching brokers’ Web sites for apartments. Each Sunday, she traveled from Milford, Conn., to visit as many as seven open houses. (Thanksgiving weekend was her only break.)

Even with some help from her parents in putting together a deposit, she knew she would need a roommate, so she looked at places with two similarly sized bedrooms. She ruled out buildings where she found that the doorman on duty was less than friendly, thinking that would make it less attractive to a potential roommate. She also avoided the Lower East Side and the East Village because she thought a quieter neighborhood would be more attractive for resale.

After visiting 61 Manhattan apartments, she recently put down a deposit for a two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 555 West 23rd Street, priced at $1.1 million.

“It was brand-new, and it was all feng shui-ed, and there was a gym, and it was all friendly,” she said. “If the doorman is really friendly, you get a good vibe.”

Nora Ariffin, the Halstead broker who helped Ms. LaHaie find her apartment, said younger buyers were often more willing to search for listings, instead of relying on her to do that. Still, she often encouraged Ms. LaHaie to let her follow up to weed out apartments with problems. Ms. Ariffin said she had not run into this situation with older buyers.

“The younger buyers like Naomi will do their own research,” Ms. Ariffin said. “They’re more adventurous. Older buyers haven’t e-mailed me listings outside of what their parameters are. In general, they don’t do their research as much as Naomi was.”

The Hymans, while leading a reporter on a Saturday morning through the dimly lighted rooms of their new apartment at 140 West 58th Street, peppered their talk of romance with mentions of their extensive research and of Excel spreadsheets that calculate the monthly costs of their new home.

They visited two other apartments in the building to compare how those units were laid out and to determine what renovations would increase the value of their apartment. They chose a sponsor-owned co-op over the other units partly because it would allow them to put down only 10 percent and bypass board approval. They found a mortgage broker who managed to knock a quarter of a percentage point off their mortgage.

After the couple spent $35,000 on a number of changes, including expanding the closet in the master bedroom and installing new floors, Mr. Hyman predicted that they could easily rent the place out and cover the mortgage.

His wife is ready for any move. “His work can take us many places,” she said. “I can teach English as a second language.”

While many buyers under 30 are getting financial help from their families, they are also turning to aggressive financing. Data collected by the National Association of Realtors show that nearly 65 percent of first-time home buyers finance more than 95 percent of the cost. A first-time buyer is also far more likely to have a mortgage that begins with an attractive interest rate and adjusts periodically.

Because co-ops in New York often require deposits of 20 percent, younger buyers tend to look at condominiums that require only about 10 percent and allow for creative types of mortgages.

In the most extreme cases, Joseph Gallagher, a Corcoran Group broker in Brooklyn, has had clients with high credit scores finance everything, even their closing costs. He finds that some developers are willing to take down payments as low as 5 percent to fill their apartments.

In the wake of the recent record Wall Street bonus season, brokers say that buyers who have made enough money to put down 20 percent are choosing to keep their money in their pockets.

“Younger buyers want to retain their cash,” Mr. Gallagher said. “They don’t want to empty their bank accounts for a deposit. They want to finance 100 percent if possible.”

One of his clients, Charlotte Lewis, a Brooklyn-based photographer, was more conservative than most about financing her condo. She spent six months looking at nearly two dozen apartments in Brooklyn. With her savings and help from her parents, she put down 20 percent for a $340,000 one-bedroom on the outer edges of Williamsburg that she thought was distinctive enough to retain its value, even in an area with many new buildings.

She sought help from a mortgage broker in her rental building to negotiate the best interest rate, and now pays about $1,630 a month. But even with all this thoughtful research, she rattled her family when she told them about the kind of mortgage she had chosen for what she considers a five-year investment.

“My parents freaked out when I said I was doing a seven-year, interest-only ARM,” she said. “They’ve always bought properties that they’ve owned for life.”

In the end, they agreed with her that it was smarter to own than to rent — they even paid for the crown moldings. Since she moved in December, Ms. Lewis has painted her walls a creamy Edgecomb gray and has framed watercolors she painted as a child. She’s feeling more comfortable with her decision every day.

“I really think that real estate will not go down,” she said. “At the very least, it will stay the same. In the meantime, I need a place to live. So the worst-case scenario still isn’t that bad.”

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.”

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.”