Word: flatiron
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...Italian real estate investor has nabbed one of the crowns of New York City property, a sale that echoes the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center in 1989. Valter Mainetti has confirmed to TIME that his company, the Sorgente Group, has acquired a majority share in Manhattan's historic Flatiron Building...
Among the first and at the time tallest of New York City's signature skyscrapers when it was completed in 1902, the 22-story Flatiron, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway and 23rd Street, is instantly recognizable for its triangular shape. Though it was dwarfed 30 years later by the Empire State Building, 11 blocks up Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron is a favorite of architecture buffs and a lasting star in the skyline, featured in the opening credits of the Late Show with David Letterman and serving as the fictional headquarters for the Daily Bugle in the recent Spider...
...Michelangelo Fund around investments in so-called trophy properties, which have historical or architectural value beyond the typical calculation of location and square footage. In 2005, he bought a 27% stake in the company that owns the Chrysler Building. A year later he acquired a minority share in the Flatiron, which today is valued at a total of $180 million. With the latest deal, he holds a 53% share of the famous building. "The Flatiron is expensive, but with the [cheap] dollar, it made sense to increase our share," says Mainetti. "The stability of the New York real estate market...
...investment. "They're less rattled by the subprime crisis and short-term gyrations in the market," Seton explains. "Their horizon is longer, which in the end is good for the real estate business. These are properties that are meant to be held onto." The new Italian owners of the Flatiron say they're in for the long haul and plan to seek city approval for a new project to illuminate the exterior by Vittorio Storaro, the Oscar-winning director of photography for Apocalypse Now and Little Buddha. Just a touch more glamour, perhaps, for the real-life publishing-company employees...
Instead of bringing in a conventional consultant to help him, Palestrant visited a loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. In a series of meetings there, Palestrant rattled off his ideas--an outpouring he likened to "intellectual bulimia"--while Elizabeth Pastor and Garry VanPatter, the team behind the firm Humantific, furiously drew and took notes. "He was really deep in the trees," Pastor says. The pair made sense of Palestrant's fuzzy ideas and turned them into huge, glossy posters with icons representing how the parts of his business fit together. Diagrams in hand, Palestrant went to venture-capital funds...