Real Estate (Commercial)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Times Square May Get One of the Few Spectacles It Lacks: A Casino

      by

      The battle to win a New York City casino license has heated up in Manhattan, with real estate and gambling giants offering competing proposals for Times Square and Hudson Yards.Times Square, New York City’s famed Crossroads of the World, could hardly be considered lacking. It has dozens of Broadway theaters, swarms of tourists, costumed characters and noisy traffic, all jostling for space with office workers who toil in the area.Now one of the city’s biggest commercial developers is pitching something that Times Square does not have: a glittering Caesars Palace casino at its core.The developer, SL Green Realty Corporation, and the gambling giant Caesars Entertainment are actively trying to enlist local restaurants, retailers and construction workers in joining a pro-casino coalition, as the companies aim to secure one of three new casino licenses in the New York City area approved by state legislators earlier this year.The proposal has enormous implications for Times Square, the symbolical and economic heart of the American theater industry, and a key part of the city’s office-driven economy. Although foot traffic in Times Square was almost back at 2019 levels during recent weekends, theatergoers and office workers have been slower to re-embrace a neighborhood where violent crime has risen.Overall attendance and box office grosses on Broadway are lagging well behind prepandemic levels, and there is considerable anxiety within the industry about how changes in commuting patterns, entertainment consumption and the global economy will affect its long-term health.A casino in Times Square faces substantial obstacles. There is already a competing bid for a casino in nearby Hudson Yards from another pair of real estate and gambling giants, Related Companies and Wynn Resorts.And with casino bids also taking shape in Queens and Brooklyn, there is no assurance that the New York State Gaming Commission will place a casino in Manhattan, let alone Times Square, one of the world’s more complex logistical and economic regions.Few things change in Times Square without notice or protest. When the city installed pedestrian plazas in the area more than a decade ago, the move was widely condemned and even lampooned by late-night talk show hosts, before being eventually embraced as an innovative foray in urban design. When the neighborhood’s army of costumed characters gained a reputation for aggressive solicitation, the city restricted them to designated “activity zones,” raising free speech concerns.Now critics worry that putting a casino at 1515 Broadway, the SL Green skyscraper near West 44th Street, would alter the character of a neighborhood that can ill afford to backslide toward its seedier past, and further overwhelm an already crowded area.In a copy of a letter soliciting support for the casino, which was obtained by The New York Times, the companies promised to use a portion of the casino’s gambling revenues to fund safety and sanitation improvements in Times Square, including by deploying surveillance drones.Yet the idea of a casino has already found an influential opponent: the Broadway League, a trade association representing theater owners and producers. On Tuesday, the league sent an email to its members saying it would not welcome a casino to the neighborhood.“The addition of a casino will overwhelm the already densely congested area and would jeopardize the entire neighborhood whose existence is dependent on the success of Broadway,” the league said in a statement. “Broadway is the key driver of tourism and risking its stability would be detrimental to the city.”The congestion in Times Square is both a closely watched sign of vibrancy and a potential irritant, particularly for commuters and theatergoers who sometimes cite the crowds and the cacophony as reasons to stay away.For New York, Times Square is an important financial engine — the city relies heavily on tourists to spend money at the neighborhood’s hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment venues.There are ample indicators that Broadway is still struggling: Several productions, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is the longest-running Broadway show in history, and “A Strange Loop,” which won this year’s Tony Award for best musical, have announced plans to close.Last week, there were 27 shows running on Broadway, seen by 225,731 people and grossing $29 million; in the comparable week in October 2019, before the pandemic, there were 34 shows running that were seen by 286,802 people and grossed $35 million.Still, the Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing actors and stage managers, is among those supporting the casino bid, suggesting a contentious road ahead for a proposal that will face a lengthy approval process.“The proposal from the developer for a Times Square casino would be a game changer that boosts security and safety in the Times Square neighborhood with increased security staff, more sanitation equipment and new cameras,” Actors’ Equity said in a statement. “We applaud the developer’s commitment to make the neighborhood safer for arts workers and audience members alike.”The simmering tensions between local power brokers, months before the formal bidding process has even begun, foreshadow the fight ahead for developers hoping to cash in on what could become the most lucrative gambling market in the country, at a time when traditional office-using tenants have become more scarce.A state committee formed this month to review casino applications said the process would open by Jan. 6, and that no determinations on locations would be made “until sometime later in 2023 at the earliest.”In their letter seeking support for the casino, SL Green and Caesars said that gambling revenues could be used to more than double the number of “public safety officers” in Times Square and to deploy surveillance drones.The letter said a new casino would result in more than 50 new artificial intelligence camera systems “strategically placed throughout Times Square, each capable of monitoring 85,000+ people per day.” The safety plans were developed by former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, according to SL Green.Mr. Bratton did not respond to a request for comment.“As New Yorkers, it’s incumbent on us to keep making sure Times Square is keeping up with the times, and doesn’t go back to what I’ll call the bad old days of the ’70s or the early ’90s,” said Marc Holliday, the chief executive of SL Green. “And we all remember what that was like, when it comes to crime, and, you know, open drug use.”The casino is expected to include a hotel, a wellness center and restaurants, right above the Broadway theater that is home to “The Lion King” musical and a stone’s throw from the site of the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.Earlier this year, the state authorized up to three casino licenses for the New York City region. Legislators have touted the union jobs, tourists and tax revenue that a casino would attract, citing the fact that the bidding for each license will start at $500 million.Two existing “racinos” — horse racetracks with video slot machines but no human dealers — are considered front-runners for two of the three licenses: Genting Group’s Resorts World New York City in Queens and MGM Resorts International’s Empire City Casino in Yonkers, N.Y.The competition for the third license features many of the country’s major casino companies. Steven Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, has been talking with Hard Rock about a casino near the baseball team’s stadium in Queens. Las Vegas Sands has been finalizing plans for its preferred casino location in the area, and Bally’s Corporation has been scouting for a development partner.The Wynn-Related proposed casino would be on the undeveloped western portion of the Hudson Yards, which was supposed to be completed by 2025 and include residential units and parks. Related, the developer of Hudson Yards, said it plans to fulfill all of its prior housing and public space commitments for the area.In a private pitch deck obtained by The Times, Wynn and Related wrote that Hudson Yards, near the Javits Center, was the ideal location to target “diverse upscale” guests for a casino resort complex.“Because it attracts the upper tier of gaming consumers, Wynn is able to dedicate less than 10 percent of its resort space to gaming, yet still generate significant gaming revenue and tax benefits for municipalities,” reads a slide in the deck.The deck also features photos of an outdoor man-made waterfall — and of a couple enjoying cocktails while watching a cigarette-holding animatronic frog, apparently from Wynn’s “Lake of Dreams” show.In their pitch letter, SL Green and Caesars said the casino was a “once in a lifetime opportunity to once again solidify Times Square as the world’s greatest entertainment area.”Community support is an integral ingredient to winning state approval for a casino license.The Broadway League’s “influence and clout and understanding of what theatergoers want is crucial to the future of Times Square, and if they’re opposing this proposal, I don’t see how it proceeds,” said Brad Hoylman, the state senator representing the district that encompasses Times Square.But Andrew Rigie, president of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents the city’s restaurants and bars, said the group would support a casino in Manhattan if it used local restaurant operators or provided vouchers to nearby eateries. A major question surrounding the economic impact of casinos is whether they incentivize guests to stay and eat inside the building, which could hurt surrounding businesses.Alan Rosen, the owner of Junior’s Cheesecake, a restaurant chain with locations in Times Square and at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, said he was unconcerned.“I can’t see it hurting my business,” he said. “Look at Las Vegas. What do people do? They eat. They go to shows. It’s a lot more than gambling these days.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Why the Costumer of 'The Gilded Age' Is Being Driven Out of Business

      by

      Helen Uffner has dressed Broadway, Hollywood and TV shows for more than 40 years. But high-rise developers and Amazon distribution centers are making it impossible to store her extraordinary vintage collection.Helen Uffner began her love affair with old clothes as a young teenager, wandering into estate sales near her family’s home in Queens, unnerving her father, who had immigrated to this country as a Holocaust survivor and worried that people would think he could not afford to outfit his daughter properly. As a high school student in the mid-1960s, she would go to auction houses in Greenwich Village to buy vintage clothes and antique jewelry, using her babysitting earnings. With the prospect of a career in period fashion lacking promise, she sensibly joined a management consultancy after college. Soon enough the sexism got to her so she quit and decided to monetize her passion, drawing from the large collection she had already amassed which, at the time, focused on Victorian lingerie.Over the next 40 years or so, Ms. Uffner established a celebrated business renting out vintage clothes to theater, film and television productions from an inventory considered unparalleled. Initially, she ran the business out of her apartment — supplying the wardrobe for “Out of Africa,” “Zelig,” “The Color Purple.” By the late 1990s, when that model was no longer sustainable, she moved to a 6,000-square-foot space in the garment district, which made it easy for Broadway costume designers to visit and for actors to come in for fittings. Within a decade though, the unforgiving pace of real estate development in New York would threaten her viability, and now, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the pandemic economy was taking an extinction-level toll.It was a paradox though because even as the performing arts have suffered immeasurably during the past two years, film and television production in New York City has mostly returned to prepandemic levels and is ramping up. In September, Netflix opened a 170,000-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, and Ms. Uffner has been involved with one of the most anticipated series of the year, “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” set in turn-of-the-century New York (and starting Monday on HBO).Challenges began for Ms. Uffner in 2006, when the landlord of the building she occupied in Midtown “invited” her, as she put it, to break her lease early. He was selling the building and wanted her out, but moving thousands of racks of clothing was going to be an ordeal. At the same time commercial rents were soaring and the city’s garment industry had all but disappeared, large loft-like spaces given over to corporate offices. Eventually, in 2008, Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing moved to Long Island City, after its proprietress faced fines of $1,000 a day if she did not vacate her existing space.The transition was not easy. Fashion houses, which also rent from the collection as a means of inspiration, began returning things by FedEx, Ms. Uffner told me, “as if we were in another state.” But over the next several years, Long Island City became popular enough that it was now a place where a marketing executive at Ralph Lauren might actually live. So by 2018, Ms. Uffner inevitably found herself in the same predicament she had faced earlier — the building she was in near Queens Plaza would be redeveloped and she would have to move. She ultimately settled into another space in Long Island City only to confront the drama all over again — her current building is planned for demolition to accommodate the construction of a high-rise.In the past, Ms. Uffner had several competitors, also independently owned, but nearly all have fallen away. If she shut down, the impact on the costume industry would be profound. Tom Broecker, an Emmy Award-winning costume designer who has relied on Ms. Uffner for decades described her collection of women’s wear from the early 20th century as extraordinary. “In the entire world, Helen is the only person who has cotton dresses from that period,” he told me.Even a move to Industry City, in Brooklyn, where the city has been trying to revive garment manufacturing, would be difficult from his point of view. In addition to film and theater projects, Mr. Broecker works on “Saturday Night Live,” where he might have to come up with a piece of old clothing in a span of two hours, making a trip from Rockefeller Center to a semi-inaccessible quarter of Brooklyn unfeasible.Understanding the importance of her enterprise to New York’s creative life, the city via the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has said it is trying to help Ms. Uffner relocate, but without broad commercial rent regulation, there is little that can be accomplished. Over the years, she told me, landlords have added fees to monthly rent bills with impunity. In the beginning she was paying rent, electricity and property tax. In a subsequent space, the landlord added gas, and then came requirements to contribute to the local business improvement district.While Covid has tanked the price of office leasing, vast warehouse space of the kind Ms. Uffner needs is at a premium because of the demand coming from Amazon and other e-commerce sites that have become even more attractive to consumers during the pandemic. The city suggested a space in Hudson Yards, she told me, that was going to cost more than five times what she was paying.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Lionsgate Studios Yonkers Could Become the 'Burbank of New York'

      by

      A new film and television facility, once fully open, will be ‘hands-down the largest in the Northeast,’ the leader of the project said.“Run the World,” a Starz television series about four 30-something Black women navigating work and love, is set in Harlem. In its first season, the camera lingers over landmarks in the neighborhood, like the Harriet Tubman statue on West 122nd Street, as well as locations across New York City.But when the show begins filming its second season in two months and Ella (Andrea Bordeaux), Sondi (Corbin Reid), Renee (Bresha Webb) and Whitney (Amber Stevens West) reunite to go clubbing, commiserate over cocktails and tumble into bed with their latest flames, they will be doing much of it slightly north of the city, inside a big film production facility that officially opens today in Yonkers.Great Point Studios, which has created the $500 million campus, Lionsgate Studios Yonkers, claims the ever-expanding facility, scheduled to be completed next year, will surpass anything New York City has to offer.Built around the site of an old Otis elevator factory overlooking the Hudson River in newly invigorated downtown Yonkers, the complex currently houses three soundstages, six “talent suites” for actors, dozens of dressing rooms and hair-and-makeup stations, dedicated writers rooms, a carpentry shop for set construction and office spaces. But that’s just the beginning.By the end of next year, the 14.5-acre campus plans to have a backlot (for outdoor scenes), two screening rooms, a postproduction area for editing and a total of 11 soundstages, several of them already claimed by Lionsgate.And now Great Point says it is in contract to buy land for a second production facility in Yonkers. The combined properties, with eight additional soundstages, “will be hands-down the largest in the Northeast,” said Robert Halmi Jr., the company’s chief executive and president, and a longtime producer.The second, soon-to-be acquired site is a 19th-century orphanage, built on grounds landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.Great Point StudiosAll of which will go toward fulfilling the decade-long dream of Mayor Mike Spano: making Yonkers “the Burbank of New York,” a reference to the California city outside Los Angeles that is home to major film studios. “We are going to be Hollywood on the Hudson,” he said in a phone interview.But the television production business is already booming in New York City. And while it’s certainly common in the industry to shoot in a different place from where a show is set, will moving the production of “Run the World” and other programs set in New York City to Westchester County be a snub to the Big Apple?“Not at all,” said Anne del Castillo, New York City’s media and entertainment commissioner. “I think there is enough production to go around.”Indeed, the goings-on in both cities are part of a wider surge in film production in the metropolitan area, where the industry got its start in the 1890s before decamping to California.But film production has been trickling back for some time, lured by tax incentives and the fact that so many actors, directors and other film professionals live in and around New York.The city has over 250 soundstages — essentially, black boxes in which any sort of scene can be conjured. Some are quite small, however, and may have low ceilings or freestanding columns that interrupt space, having been built in converted warehouses or other industrial buildings. New York still lags behind Los Angeles in terms of square footage for soundstages but is ahead of Atlanta, according to the real estate services firm CBRE.But now the proliferation of streaming platforms and seemingly insatiable appetite for content — driven in part by binge-watching during the pandemic — has set off a frenzy of building soundstages, so-called because they are soundproofed. Netflix, for instance, is planning a major production hub on an old army base in Fort Monmouth, N.J.From left: Andrea Bordeaux and Corbin Reid in “Run the World,” the first television show whose production is relocating to Lionsgate Studios Yonkers.Cara Howe/Starz EntertainmentIn New York, existing facilities are expanding and new ones are being built. In the latter category, Wildflower Studios in Astoria, Queens — a project Robert De Niro is a partner in — will have 11 soundstages when it is completed next year. And Steiner Studios (based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard) will begin work on an eight-soundstage facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, this spring.Statewide, there are over 130 qualified production facilities containing over 450 soundstages and over five million square feet, according to Empire State Development; more than half of these properties have opened or been certified in the last five years.Technology has fed the explosive growth in soundstages; with advances in computer graphics and so-called green screens, artificial backdrops have become ever more lifelike.For Lionsgate, which owns Starz, the new Yonkers facility offers “certainty,” said Kevin Beggs, the chair of Lionsgate Television. “We don’t have to spend six weeks canvassing the city of New York and environs” for locations, he said.On a tour last week, however, the new facility was not quite ready for its close-up. “Run the World” is scheduled to begin filming in March on two soundstages, one of them an expansive 20,000 square feet. But in a third soundstage, men in protective gear were still applying a crumbly, black echo-canceling substance. Furniture for support spaces had yet to arrive.One 20,000-square-foot soundstage in Yonkers, which was still undergoing construction last week.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThe pandemic delayed the project for nearly a year, said Mr. Halmi. Lockdowns stopped construction and steel and concrete were in short supply owing to supply chain issues.At the complex, new low-rise buildings have a jazzy blue paint job and big Lionsgate logo. The factory’s brick buildings, built around the turn of the 20th century, are being repurposed as offices, and the factory’s old power plant, where you can see the base of its still-intact smokestack, will one day be a grand entrance.The three completed soundstages are already spoken for, although there is some office space still vacant, said Mr. Halmi, who founded the Hallmark Channel. Mediapro, a Spanish-language content provider, has claimed at least one of the soundstages being built this year.Mr. Halmi is hoping that prop, music production and special effects companies will lease offices at the facility. Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications is starting an internship program this spring in a loftlike space with a small classroom.A classroom for Syracuse University public communications students in Yonkers.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesLionsgate sits in an industrial park next to a Kawasaki plant that assembles subway cars. It is also steps from the Yonkers train station, making it a quick commute from Manhattan’s Grand Central Station or Penn Station.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Cherry Lane Theater Is Back on the Market After Sale Falls Through

      by

      It seemed as if the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation’s purchase of the theater was a done deal in July. But now the property is back on the market.A contract was signed, both the buyer and seller authorized a sale announcement, but the deal — involving the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village — was not quite done.The sale, to the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation for $11 million, has fallen through, Bloomberg first reported on Monday. Now Cherry Lane, the oldest continuously running Off Broadway theater in New York City, is on the market for $12.95 million.The closing had not taken place when the deal was announced in July, Sam Rudy, a spokesman for the theater, said on Wednesday. The theater and the foundation disagreed over the price of the property after the foundation requested a valuation from an additional real estate firm while doing due diligence. (The foundation had conducted an initial appraisal of the property that supported the asking price of $11 million.)George Forbes, executive director of the foundation, confirmed Wednesday that the deal fell through because of the valuation.Rudy said that when the foundation challenged the theater over its price, Angelina Fiordellisi, the theater’s executive director, hired a lease lawyer. That lawyer upheld the original valuation, and in the end, the two sides couldn’t come to terms.“The seller had always had in mind to ask something in excess of $12 million,” Rudy said, “but because of her longstanding relationship with the buyer, agreed to $11 million.”Forbes added, “We are continuing to do research on our end and we hope that we will ultimately be able to move forward.”Mary Vetri, a real estate agent in charge of the sale, said in an email on Tuesday that Fiordellisi had expressed a preference for a buyer with ties to the theater.The foundation, which has been managing the 97-year-old theater for the last decade, had been set to take over the theater’s buildings. Forbes would have succeeded Fiordellisi as the theater’s executive director.“It has been a great run,” Fiordellisi said in a statement when the sale was announced. “To stand on the stage where so many of our greatest artists, crews and theater providers have stood is to know what theater history feels like.”The listing includes a 179-seat main stage at 38 Commerce Street and a renovated 60-seat studio theater, as well as eight apartments that are housed at 40-42 Commerce Street.Cherry Lane was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has produced work by Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Under Fiordellisi, Cherry Lane has mentored writers including Katori Hall, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “The Hot Wing King”; Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, whose play “Pass Over” premiered on Broadway this summer after being presented at Cherry Lane in 2016; and Jocelyn Bioh, whose “Merry Wives,” a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” ran at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park this summer.Fiordellisi had announced plans to sell the building in 2010, citing financial challenges. At the time, she told The New York Times that the theater was operating at a deficit of $250,000.But eight months later she reversed her decision because of a significantly reduced deficit, the support of the theater’s neighbors and a new managing agent. Cherry Lane Alternative, the resident theater company Fiordellisi established in 1997, was running a deficit of $100,000, Rudy said in July. But now, he said, the debt was retired thanks to money from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program.Neal Brennan’s stand-up show “Neal Brennan: Unacceptable” is at the theater through Nov. 21, and that will be followed, Dec. 1-19, by Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us” — about a meeting of neo-Nazis that Edelman attended in New York. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

      by

      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Rough Trade Record Store Has an Unlikely New Home: 30 Rock

      by

      The Brooklyn shop is downsizing and moving across the river, bringing 10,000 vinyl albums and its live events to Rockefeller Center in Midtown.When the Rough Trade record store housed in a 10,000 square foot warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, announced it was closing and relocating in January, few could have imagined its new home would be adjacent to the gleaming neon lights of NBC Studios and the towering marquee of Radio City Music Hall.But starting June 1, commuters (should they return) and tourists exiting the subway at 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan will find stacks of vinyl behind the window of the latest Rough Trade record shop, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.“Midtown certainly was not in the script,” said Stephen Godfroy, one of Rough Trade’s owners, in a video interview from his home in Oxford, England, last week. “That’s what makes it exciting for us — to champion emerging artists in a place where people wouldn’t expect it.”Last Tuesday, tubs of Sheetrock, power tools and a small dumpster still filled the 2,100-square-foot space — a former shoe store just under a quarter of the size of Rough Trade’s old Williamsburg location — that will soon house some 10,000 new vinyl records. The windows facing out onto Avenue of the Americas were covered in messaging from its new landlords, the real estate giant Tishman Speyer, advertising an app called Zo, which a representative from the company described as its “tenant amenities platform.”Rockefeller Center may seem a curious spot for Rough Trade, a shop born of mid-1970s London counterculture that spun out into a record label of the same name in 1978. But the Rough Trade stores of 2021 are by now a long way removed from their scrappy beginnings, having split from the label in 1982.“Not being obvious bedfellows, we had to look at the details,” said Godfroy, who has been with Rough Trade since 2003. That included the specifics of the location, sandwiched right at street level between the subway station and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”The original Rough Trade shop in London.Rough TradeAs with their other four shops, all in the United Kingdom, the new Rough Trade will continue to host live events, but its partner will no longer be the concert promoter the Bowery Presents. Instead, Rough Trade will be part of the programming at Rockefeller Center, and its Midtown gigs will be held on the building’s 65th floor in the ritzy Rainbow Room, and at surrounding spaces such as the plaza and, in summertime, the ice skating rink.Godfroy said Rough Trade had been considering a move across the East River since the summer of 2019, to better access the ever-growing number of people who want to buy new releases and reissued favorites on wax. Weekday foot traffic was never great in Williamsburg. (Not that Midtown is doing much better at the moment.) And though Rough Trade had maintained its sales numbers online through 2020, the move was “really precipitated by the pandemic,” Godfroy said, which put the necessity of keeping busy every day “into sharp relief.”While Midtown is mostly synonymous with office towers and Broadway theaters, it also has a rich and varied history of record stores — like the former album- and sheet-music emporium Colony Records in the Brill Building, the eclectic D.J. hub Rock and Soul near Penn Station and chains such as Disc-O-Mat. The hostile nature of Manhattan real estate has contributed to many shuttering this past decade.Tishman Speyer and Rough Trade declined to comment on the specifics of Rough Trade’s lease. (Its Brooklyn spot, which it occupied for seven years, is currently available to rent for about $50,000 a month.) But Ben Van Leeuwen, an owner of the store’s soon-to-be neighbor at 30 Rock, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, said his business received a generous deal even before the pandemic, allowing it to open there in 2019 at a lower risk.“Tishman makes a lot of their money off the office space above,” said Van Leeuwen, which creates flexibility for the ground-level stores. “I imagine there are a lot of bigger brands that would have taken that space in a heartbeat and paid a lot more than we’re paying,” he said, but added that it was his understanding that the real estate company wanted to have storefronts that were “local and more artisanal.”Rough Trade’s new neighbors on Sixth Avenue will include Radio City Music Hall and a Van Leeuwen ice cream shop.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesGodfroy said the store’s significant downsize in square footage, coupled with its status as a tourist destination, will mean that “the cost-benefit analysis is pretty much the same.” To bolster its smaller size, the shop will use mechanical Vestaboard displays to share real-time gig ticket info, sales charts and music news — “They make that chk-chk-chk sound that you get sometimes in airports and train stations,” Godfroy said — and it will also hold records at a new online fulfillment center in Greenpoint.30 Rock was first called the RCA Building when it opened in 1933, and some lost New York City music lore lingers in the neighborhood. In the 1970s, the engineer Don Hünerberg rented a studio above Radio City — previously used by the NBC Symphony Orchestra — and the first Blondie and Ramones albums were tracked there. The avant-garde fixtures John Zorn and Glenn Branca also worked there, as did Sonic Youth for its 1982 debut EP. “The Rockettes would rehearse down the hall which always gave the place a certain ‘kick,’” Thurston Moore, a singer and guitarist for Sonic Youth, recalled in an email.More recently, the arts space National Sawdust presented an “immersive, site-specific choral and movement piece” called “The Gauntlet” at Rockefeller Center in 2019. The internet station NTS Radio hosted live broadcasts there that year; it also programs, with complete creative control, the background music played inside the buildings.Back in Brooklyn, the borough’s biggest record store is now Academy Records, which is currently located in Greenpoint. Its owner, Mike Davis, said that Rough Trade’s departure from the neighborhood had so far not impacted his sales numbers. “We’re both ostensibly record stores, but we’re sort of in a different business,” he said, noting Rough Trade’s emphasis on new releases and his own store’s focus on used vinyl. “They’re kind of catering to a slightly different market.”Josh Madell, a former co-owner of the beloved, now-closed East Village shop Other Music and the current head of artist and label strategy at Secretly Distribution, proposed that this could be “a branding move” for Rough Trade, who might be looking “to drive music fans to their web store as much as to their new brick and mortar shop.” (That’s not dissimilar to what happened when Sub Pop opened its Sea-Tac Airport store in 2014, according to the retail director there.)Madell sees Rough Trade’s move as a positive one for the independent music industry, even as he finds it hard to imagine local record heads traveling to 30 Rock to flip through the stacks. “I don’t think that’s who they’re trying to attract,” Madell said, noting that he had only been to Rockefeller Center in the past decade to visit the Lego store with his daughter. “They’re reaching a different audience.”“Vinyl’s not really an underground medium anymore,” he added. More