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    Jazz Has a New Home in Seattle. One Caveat: The Place Is ‘For Lease.’

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    The nonprofit Seattle Jazz Fellowship has carved out a performance space in the historic Globe Building — for now — and is putting its economic model to the test.The Pacific Northwest might be synonymous with grunge rock, but Seattle’s music scene has historically maintained a rich undercurrent of jazz. Even in the 1990s, with plaid-clad darlings riding high on barre chords, the trumpeter Thomas Marriott recalls an ideal downtown scene for budding improvisers to “pay dues,” a sort of low-cost, low-pressure musician’s utopia where rent could be made in a single weekend’s worth of gigs, and “you could just take your horn, walk up and down the street and see people you knew.”Marriott, 48, is a longtime fixture in the area’s jazz community and knows better than most what makes an operable scene. “Bandstands and elders and youngsters,” he said. “The whole cycle.” Soft-spoken but fiercely opinionated, often wearing his signature orange-tinted glasses, Marriott won the prestigious Carmine Caruso Trumpet Competition in 1999 and used the prize money to move to New York. After several years, he returned to Washington State to build a livable career.But two decades later, art is barely sustainable in Seattle. Small and midsize jazz venues are floundering. Marriott calls the city’s musical pay scale “abysmal.” “The whole crux of the problem,” he said, “is that economically, local jazz is not really much of a commercial enterprise.” Rent is too high. Tables don’t turn over enough. Tastes have shifted.Tired of watching the scene ebb, Marriott plotted a solution: the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, a nonprofit he founded in 2021 with the goals of building community, increasing mentorship and reducing barriers to entry for performers and listeners. The Fellowship entered a new phase this year when it moved into historic Pioneer Square, a waterfront neighborhood that originated as a Gold Rush-era den of vice and still endures exacerbated booms and busts. The landscape architect Ilse Jones, a Pioneer Square advocate with an ownership stake in the rustic 1891 Globe Building, was searching for a new tenant last winter and thought the struggling block would benefit from jazz artists. Someone to “enliven the place,” as she put it.“We’re an ideal tenant for a less than ideal space,” went Marriott’s pitch. “We really only need four walls and a bathroom.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Home With – Kecia Lewis

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      “I feel like with the kind of work we do as artists, we are literally giving ourselves — we’re giving our body and voice and spirit,” said Kecia Lewis, who recently won a Tony Award for her performance as the tough-minded but inspirational piano teacher Miss Liza Jane in the musical “Hell’s Kitchen.” What with […] More

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      in Theater

      Second Stage to Leave Its Rem Koolhaas-Designed Off Broadway Theater

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      The company said that it was leaving its space in a former bank in Times Square after 25 years because the rent was too high and the lease had unfavorable terms.Second Stage Theater, a leading nonprofit that presents work by living American writers both on and off Broadway, is giving up its Rem Koolhaas-designed Off Broadway home in a former bank near Times Square, saying its rent was too high and its lease had unfavorable terms.The theater company, which has nurtured multiple Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning shows over the years, until recently operated three theaters: the Hayes Theater on Broadway, an Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side and an Off Broadway theater, the Tony Kiser Theater, in a former bank building at the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue.Last year, Second Stage gave up the lease on its Off Off Broadway space. Now it is also relinquishing the Kiser Theater, a 296-seat theater space where it has been presenting plays and musicals since 1999. The Broadway house has been unaffected by the changes. The company said it was committed to continuing to produce work Off Broadway, and was searching for a new place in which to do so.Second Stage is letting go of the Kiser at a time of significant strain on nonprofit theaters everywhere, and at a time of transition for the organization. Carole Rothman, one of the company’s founders and now its president and artistic director, is leaving the organization this summer after a 45-year tenure; the board is conducting a search for her successor.The Second Stage board had agreed to an 8-year lease renewal for the West 43rd Street building in 2021, but decided late last year to exercise a one-time option that allowed it out of the lease at the end of this year.Lisa Lawer Post, the company’s executive director, cited financial concerns in explaining the decision by the organization’s board to terminate the lease for the West 43rd Street building, which is where the company presented early productions of shows including “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Wild History of the Real ‘Only Murders’ Building

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      Viewers of the Hulu series know it as the Arconia, but the Upper West Side building has a name — and a dramatic story — of its own.Fans of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” which returns for its second season this week, know the building at the center of the drama as the Arconia, where Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez play an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast. But the Renaissance-style apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is actually called the Belnord, and it has been making headlines for more than a century.The creators of “Only Murders in the Building” renamed the building the Arconia for the Hulu series, which stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, above, and Selena Gomez as an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom the get-go, the Belnord was a newsmaker — an edifice of excess, a home for hyperbole. When it was finished in 1909, covering a full city block at West 86th Street and Broadway, the architect boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country, and maybe the world. Newspapers, including this one, touted the interior courtyard as the biggest in Manhattan — a half acre of open space, with a garden and a lawn “for a score of children to romp on,” crowned with a bountiful, tiered marble fountain.They marveled at its capacious rental apartments, 175 of them, each 50 feet deep, stretching from street to courtyard, with interior decoration “in the style of Louis XVI” — pale, painted paneling and “harmoniously tinted silks” on the walls — and the most up-to-date modern conveniences. The refrigerators had ice machines, so no iceman would ever invade the Belnord, as one paper put it. On the roof, each apartment had a private laundry, a low-tech luxury that included a tub, ironing board and clothesline — for the convenience of one’s maid.It would be its own city, this paper noted, with a population of more than 1,500. Over the years, there were notable tenants: Lee Strasberg, the dictatorial father of Method acting, who was often visited by his shy protégée Marilyn Monroe; Walter Matthau, when he was an up-and-coming theater actor with a young family; the actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning author, who liked to jog around the courtyard in a three-piece suit.When the Belnord was built in 1909, its architect, H. Hobart Weekes, of Hiss & Weekes, boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country.via The New York Public LibraryBut by the 1970s, that city was in chaos. The ornate limestone-and-terra-cotta structure was crumbling, the roof was leaking and the plumbing cracked. Ceilings were collapsing. Stalactites, The New York Times reported in 1980, had formed in the basement. The fountain had been broken for years, and the garden was a fenced-in jungle, off limits to residents.The building’s owner, Lillian Seril, would earn the dubious distinction of being one of the city’s worst landlords: By all accounts, she was both litigious and recalcitrant, refusing to fix even the simplest issues, but energetic enough to sue not only her tenants but also the landlord association that threw her out for not paying her dues. (Tenants recalled buying their own refrigerators and sneaking them in with the help of sympathetic building staff, because Mrs. Seril would not allow their broken appliances to be repaired or replaced.)The Belnord’s residents, many of whom paid just a few hundred dollars a month for their enormous, house-like apartments, organized and revolted. In 1978, they began what would be the longest rent strike in the city’s history.For the 16 years that it went on, the Belnord battle was so contentious that one housing court judge declared that the two sides deserved each other, before washing his hands of the case when a settlement he had brokered collapsed. “I’m convinced the tenants and the owner are going to litigate the building to death,” he said. A city official likened the situation to the siege of Beirut.LEFT: When the building was constructed, The New York Times touted the courtyard’s lawn as a space for “a score of children to romp on.” RIGHT: Gary Barnett, the developer who bought the building in 1994, spent $100 million restoring it and also resuscitated the fountain at enormous expense.From left: via The Belnord; Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe battle ended in 1994, when the developer Gary Barnett, who was then only 38, bought the building with a group of investors for $15 million. (As part of the deal, Mrs. Seril insisted on retaining a 3,000-square-foot rent-controlled apartment for herself — at her death, in 2004, she was paying just $450 a month.) A decade later, Mr. Barnett and his company, Extell Development, would build One57, the funnel-shaped, blue-glass skyscraper on West 57th that was the city’s first supertall tower and, in so doing, incur the ire of preservationists, urban planners and civic groups. But in those years, he was a hero. The Belnord was his first Manhattan property, and he would spend $100 million shoring it up.He made various deals with individual tenants as he attempted to turn the place into a luxury rental building, with some apartments that leased for up to $45,000 a month. For a rabbi and his family who were paying $275 for a 4,000-square-foot apartment, Mr. Barnett bought a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Then there was the penthouse dweller who hankered for the desert: He flew her to Las Vegas to pick out a house with a pool, arranged for its purchase and paid her moving expenses. Other tenants opted to keep their low rents, but agreed to swap their vast, 11-room apartments for smaller ones.Mr. Barnett once joked that the fountain he had resuscitated at enormous expense — a project that involved disassembling and carting it away for repairs — was the fountain of youth, because nobody ever seemed to die at the Belnord.“It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. It was quite a picture.”LEFT: A detail of an iron gate that Mr. Barnett restored in the 1990s. “It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into.” RIGHT: Through the gilded B, you can see the mosaic on a vaulted entrance.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBy 2015, Mr. Barnett was out of the picture, in a deal worth a reported $575 million.Like everything else at the Belnord, the terms of Mr. Barnett’s mortgage had been problematic, and for a time, after he stopped making the loan payments, the city classified the property as “distressed.” (The calculus of the building’s debt and its rental revenue never quite added up.) And so a new group of investors swooped in — the cast of which kept changing, as various players dropped out because of insolvency, lawsuits and other calamities — to turn the place into a high-end condominium, converting the 100 or so available apartments into showplaces with Italian kitchens sheathed in marble.Robert A.M. Stern, the architect whose firm handled the conversion, described the process as “a very high-class Botox treatment.”Prices for the revamped units ranged from about $3.6 million to more than $11 million, although some tenants bought their own apartments at deep discounts. After a rocky start, the condos are now selling briskly, keeping pace with the high-end market in the city, said Jonathan Miller, the veteran property and market appraiser.And now the Belnord is once again in the limelight, thanks to the Hulu series. John Hoffman, who created the show with Mr. Martin, was delighted and stunned to have scored the place for his production, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. While the atmospheric apartments of Mr. Martin, Mr. Short and Ms. Gomez’s characters were built on a sound stage, the story needed a building like the Belnord, with its grand appointments and panopticon of a courtyard.“I was obsessed,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I knew we could make something as elevated as that amazing building. It’s a cliché to say that the building itself is a character, but I like the challenge of getting beyond that cliché a bit. What pulls us out of our apartments to meet people? How well do you know your neighbors? Do you only connect when it’s necessary? The ways in which we get pulled together when we live in these spaces is what’s really interesting.”Debbie Marx grew up in the classic seven where she now lives — a time capsule of 1959, the year her parents moved into the building. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne Friday evening in early June, Debbie Marx, a Latin teacher and longtime Belnord resident, led a visitor through her unrenovated classic seven, its meandering, book-lined hallways a time capsule from 1959, the year her parents moved in. Her father, Josef Marx, was an oboist and musicologist who had his own music publishing company; her mother, Angelina, had been a ballerina. Ms. Marx moved back into her childhood apartment in the late 1980s, when she was pregnant with her first child and her mother was living there alone. Ms. Marx’s father had died in 1978, a victim, in a way, of the Belnord battle, having suffered a heart attack in the courthouse during a hearing with his fellow tenants.Ms. Marx recalled growing up in the building — playing handball in the courtyard, which was forbidden by Mrs. Seril, and slipping through the bars of the fence to the off-limits garden, by then a riot of shrubs and trees. She had her own courtyard gang, with Walter Matthau’s daughter Jenny and others, but their transgressions were mild: nicking the hat from a doorman, commandeering the service elevator, dropping the odd water bomb.“It’s like an archaeological site,” Richard Stengel said of the building. “The further you burrow down, you get a different culture and history.”Mr. Stengel, the author, journalist and former State Department official, has been a tenant since 1992, when he moved into an apartment that had been charred by a fire and left vacant for years. (If you see Mr. Stengel on MSNBC, where he is a contributor, with a deep red bookshelf behind him, he is broadcasting from his apartment at the Belnord.)John Scanlon, the wily public relations man who died in 2001, was also a ’90s-era tenant. In those days, Mr. Scanlon was embroiled in another long-running New York City real estate battle: the first Trump divorce. (He was Ivana Trump’s spokesman.)Like Mr. Stengel, Mr. Scanlon was a member of a Belnord demographic that you might call literary-and-publishing adjacent. He liked to tease Mr. Stengel, who was then the editor of Time magazine, when they collided in the courtyard: “How does it feel to be on the cutting edge of the passé?”LEFT: A Renaissance-style mosaic at the building’s entrance. The entire structure was landmarked in 1966. RIGHT: Debbie Marx and her son, Nicolas Held, in the courtyard.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesEarlier waves of tenants included Jewish European émigrés, unreconstructed Socialists and scores of psychoanalysts.“When we moved in, it had the feel of an Eastern European shtetl,” said Peter Krulewitch, a real estate investor who arrived 35 years ago with his wife, Deborah, a retired Estee Lauder executive, and soon formed what became known as the Belnord 18, one of the many splinter groups of building tenants who tried to negotiate with Mrs. Seril. “There were these wonderful aging lefties that had been there for years — and fought Mrs. Seril for years.”In many cases, those tenants had succession rights for their children. So despite the influx of condo buyers, Mr. Krulewitch said, the Belnord is a city that still — although just barely — has a population more culturally varied than the monolithic moneyed class that has taken over much of Manhattan.As Mr. Krulewitch put it, “It has been quite an adventure.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Television

      Why an NPR Quiz Show Panelist Loves Her ‘Messy Apartment’

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      Faith Salie, known for, among other things, her role on ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,’ is ‘evangelical about the Upper West Side.’Faith Salie — a panelist on the NPR quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” a contributor to “CBS News Sunday Morning,” a podcast host (her latest, “Broadway Revival,” debuted Nov. 18), an actor, an author, a baker (her Coca-Cola cake, made from her mother’s recipe, is serious business), a Rhodes scholar (life isn’t fair) and a charmer — lives with her two children and one husband, as she puts it, in a postwar high-rise near Lincoln Center.“We love this area so much that it’s hard to look elsewhere for something more spacious or more affordable,” said Ms. Salie, 50, whose solo show, “Approval Junkie,” based on her 2016 essay collection of the same name, runs through Dec. 12 at the Minetta Lane Theatre. (It will also be recorded as an Audible Original.) “I’m evangelical about the Upper West Side.”She could probably learn to warble hosannas about other parts of town — yes, Ms. Salie can sing, too — but since moving to Manhattan from Los Angeles in 2006 to be the host of the short-lived news-and-entertainment radio show “Fair Game,” she has lived exclusively in a square-mile-and-a-half area bordered by Central Park West and Broadway.The art wall in the dining area is very well populated.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesFaith Salie, 50Occupation: journalist, performer, authorManhattan matriculation: “A friend told me, ‘You are so lucky to live in this apartment, because when you live in New York it’s like you’re at university, and the whole city is your campus and your home is your dorm.’ I try to remember that.”“When I came here, I was separated from my wasband, which is what I call my first husband,” Ms. Salie said. “And over a period of four years, I sublet three furnished apartments. That was my journey until I met my second husband,” she said, referring to John Semel, an education technology executive, whom she married in 2011.“I felt some sort of comfort in the transience of the places I was living,” Ms. Salie continued. “I was actually relieved, because I didn’t feel settled personally. I had so many questions: When is my divorce going to come through? Am I going to marry again? Will I ever become a mother? How will I become a mother on my own?”There was one question she didn’t have to answer, she said: “What kind of furniture do you want? The furniture I want is whatever is here.”The living room in the two-bedroom rental that Faith Salie shares with her husband, John Semel, an executive in education technology, and the couple’s two children, Augustus, 9, and Minerva, 7, is a permanent construction site.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMs. Salie was pregnant at her wedding, something she loves to mention because, she said, it makes her sound modern. Thus, there was some urgency to finding a rental in her preferred neighborhood and settling in before baby Augustus, now 9, was born. (Daughter Minerva followed two years later.)“John had always lived on the Upper East Side,” Ms. Salie said. “And he always tells me, ‘You were adamant about staying on the Upper West Side, and I was adamant about staying married to you.’”Besides being a good guy, Mr. Semel is good with spreadsheets. He laid out all the possibilities and found the right place: a two-bedroom with nice light and a terrace. Also, fortunately, he came to the union with some “grown-up man” furniture “that he was very proud of,” Ms. Salie said.The haul included a Minotti sofa, a Ligne Roset glass-fronted curio cabinet that was a floor model, a Ligne Roset dining table and chairs, and a pair of Charles Pollock chairs, along with an Eileen Gray marble-topped coffee table that had been in Mr. Semel’s childhood home.“John’s furniture was just fine,” Ms. Salie said. “It’s not my taste, but I don’t know that I have such fully formed taste that I can articulate what my taste actually is. When you’re renting and when you have kids, there are many times when you say, ‘It’s fine.’”To be sure, many things here are a good deal more than fine to Ms. Salie. They tend to be pieces from her travels with Mr. Semel: two rugs and a fanciful painting from the Medina in Fez; a Berber door, also from Morocco, that sits atop the credenza in the entryway; cushions from Paris, London, Venice and Hong Kong that line the sofa; and a large cloth napkin from a restaurant in Florence, Italy, that hangs over Minerva’s bed.The dragon cushion is a replacement for the one Ms. Salie and Mr. Semel bought on a trip to Hong Kong. “We loved it hard,” Ms. Salie said of the original.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“The chef heard that we were on our honeymoon,” Ms. Salie recalled, “and he came out from the kitchen with a box of markers and made the most whimsical drawing on the napkin, put his hand in John’s espresso and threw some on the picture, then brought out some limoncello and sprinkled that on the picture.”But Ms. Salie seems to derive the greatest pleasure from the furniture and objects that speak to the discreet charms of family life: the purple recliner in the bedroom that she sat in to nurse her children; the artwork taped or pushpinned to a wall in the dining nook; the battery of Legos; the picture books arrayed on a library-style cart in the living room; the photos and magnetic alphabet letters affixed to the refrigerator; Augustus’s stuffed animals gathered on a section of his bed that Minerva, 7, calls “the dairy-o” (perhaps a reference to “The Farmer in the Dell,” but no one in the family is certain).The blessed patch of fresh air otherwise known as the terrace is where Mr. Semel smokes one of the more than 300 pipes in his collection, where he and Ms. Salie snap the children’s first-day-of-the-school-year photos and where they gathered every evening during the height of the pandemic to cheer for frontline workers.“It’s a very emotional place,” Ms. Salie said.A large, framed cloth napkin from a restaurant in Florence, Italy, hangs over Minerva’s bed; it’s a memento from her parents’ honeymoon.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesWhen she and Mr. Semel moved into the apartment, the space seemed ample. Ten years on, they’re bursting at the seams. It helps some that Ms. Salie has rented a one-bedroom unit a floor below to use as an office and as a studio where she records her podcasts.When she is feeling most frustrated — perhaps she has just stepped on an errant Lego piece or is futilely trying to make room on a wall for her children’s latest masterpieces — she quickly regroups.“I think, ‘You know what? If I were a set designer for a play and I wanted to show a house that was fun and not too fancy and a place of joy with parents who treasured their children, what would it look like?’” Ms. Salie said. “And I think it would probably look just like our messy apartment.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Moving to the Theater District and Finding His Community

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      A musical theater educator and audition coach discovers how great it can be to live across the street from “Wicked.”Peace and quiet don’t come easy in Midtown, but Alexander Tom has managed to find it across the street from the Gershwin Theater’s wicked witches.Mr. Tom, 29, is the associate program head of the musical theater program at Pace University in Manhattan; he also moonlights as an audition coach, working out of his apartment and local studios.Moving from his previous apartment in Harlem to one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods this May has, for him, meant surrounding himself not just with theater, but with his community: He’ll often leave his home and see a friend dipping into a theater for rehearsal. West 51st Street can feel, at times, less like a two-way thoroughfare and more like a small town. Moving before rental prices started to rebound from the pandemic slump turned out to be the right move for Mr. Tom.Mr. Tom prefers to decorate his apartment with abstract art, which gives him a “creative mind break” while he’s working at his desk or piano.  Katherine Marks for The New York Times“It’s quiet, but it feels like I can make it as loud as I want,” Mr. Tom said of his one-bedroom apartment. His biggest pandemic purchase was a Kawai piano, which he can play with gusto thanks to his building’s prewar walls. In fact, his next-door neighbor plays the piano too — they could duet, if only they could hear each other.“I don’t hear the hustle and bustle of Midtown,” he said, “but I can walk outside and be just where I want to be.”$2,025 | Midtown WestAlexander Tom, 29Occupation: Associate program head of the musical theater program at Pace University in Manhattan.Favorite local coffee shop: “Bibble and Sip is an AAPI-owned coffee shop, with a llama as their mascot,” Mr. Tom said. “They’ve got great cream puffs, the coffee is great — I love me my Bibble.”The show you need to see right now: Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over.” “The writer does an amazing job of having a conversation onstage, but also provoking the audience to have the conversation with themselves,” he said.Earlier this year, while living in a studio on 125th and Broadway, Mr. Tom found himself itching for more space. The studio was so small that it had taken him months to properly arrange all his furniture in a way that felt livable. He had plans to spend two months this summer in South Carolina, to work on a student production of “Hello, Dolly!” and he worried that rents would increase significantly by the time he returned to the city.Moving downtown was a top priority. The commute from Harlem to Pace’s campus in the financial district — which could take up to an hour and a half, depending on the whim of the M.T.A. — had begun to put a strain on Mr. Tom. Many of his workdays began with 9 a.m. classes and ended with rehearsals that went late into the night, meaning that he would arrive home after midnight and need to be up at 5 a.m. to start all over again. “I’m young and sprightly,” he said, “but I’m not that young, and I’m not that sprightly.”Mr. Tom is still waiting on the marble-topped kitchen island he has ordered, which will double as a dining table. “At a certain point I just said: Ikea is cute, Amazon is cute, but I do need to get real human furniture,” he said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe commute would need to shorten. So he set his eyes on an apartment below 72nd Street and above 14th, looking primarily at apartments in Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown West, or near Lincoln Square. In Harlem, he had become accustomed to certain amenities that he knew he wouldn’t want to part with, namely a dishwasher and a gas stove, which helped narrow down his options. (He loves to bake and regularly makes fresh pasta by hand.)He ultimately found a one-bedroom apartment on 51st street in the heart of the Theater District, with laundry in the building and a small but well-appointed kitchen. The part-time doorman was a bonus, and he was thrilled to be across the street from the Gershwin, where he has plans to see “Wicked,” his favorite musical, for the eighteenth time. It’ll be a celebration of his birthday in early September, but also his first musical post-Covid, and a return to the second musical he ever saw as a child growing up in Arizona.His new living room is about the size of his old apartment, and filled with light despite the density of the neighborhood, which has allowed him to develop his plant-rearing skills. “I’m no longer an over-waterer,” he said with cautious pride. “Some of the plants are thriving, but with some of them, I’m unsure if they’re the angry middle child or just don’t want to exist.”The ample light in his apartment has allowed Mr. Tom to develop his skills as a plant owner. Next, he hopes to buy a larger tree or monstera for his living room.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesWith an influx of plants and an upgraded couch, Mr. Tom has been careful not to crowd his apartment with too many plants, given the importance of acoustics to both his personal piano practice and his work as a coach. When a room includes more things that sound can bounce off, the sound fades more quickly. In his relatively spare living room, he said, “I can play music, and I feel like I’m immersed in the music.”The one piece of art hanging in the room is a large abstract piece that Mr. Tom commissioned from the painter Ariel Messeca, who is a friend. A trio of abstract paintings from Joseph Dermody, a Connecticut-based artist, hang in his bedroom. Abstraction appeals to Mr. Tom: “I sit at my desk and my piano a lot,” he said, “and I like to look at something that doesn’t have a prescribed meaning to it, so I can give myself a creative mind break.”Beyond the ample space and saner commute, this new apartment has allowed Mr. Tom a better work-life balance even when he works in the neighborhood. The location has allowed him to take freelance coaching jobs he would have previously turned down for commuting reasons. Now, when he gets a break for lunch and dinner, he can go home to recharge.For those in the theater industry, “the pandemic forced us to ask: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if the industry was better to us?’ And I think part of that is making sure you can advocate for yourself, and take care of yourself,” Mr. Tom said. “Being around theater is great because I can step into it, but also step out of it for a moment when I need to.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Television

      A New Way of Looking at Vacation Rentals

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      A number of home improvement shows now focus on where you stay when you’re away from home.After more than a year of staring at the walls, Americans are booking vacations again. To help them pack, home-improvement television is offering a summer lineup of shows about where to go and where to stay.TV, it seems, wants to get out of the house as much as the rest of us.Netflix is premiering “The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals” on June 18, showcasing quirky and unusual spots around the globe — a Mexico City apartment building shaped like a snake, an igloo in Finland, a lighthouse in Alaska. HGTV has renewed two of its vacation shows for second seasons, both airing in June — “Renovation Island,” about a couple remodeling a rundown resort in the Bahamas, and “Vacation House Rules,” about how to fix up your vacation rental to make it more profitable.And when Magnolia Network launches digitally on July 15 as a joint venture with Discovery Inc., it will feature a lineup (available on Discovery+ and the Magnolia app) of shows aimed at rusty vacationers, giving us a refresher on what’s out there and what goes into making a vacation rental shine. Among the on-the-road offerings are “RE(Motel),” which profiles funky roadside motels; “Van Go,” a series about Brett Lewis, who turns people’s vans into tiny mobile homes; and “Inn the Works,” which follows a young innkeeper as she fixes up a retreat in Big Bear Lake, Calif.Lindsey Kurowski, the scrappy star of “Inn the Works” on Magnolia, staining wood as she and her siblings restore a resort in Big Bear Lake, Calif.Magnolia NetworkBut even as these shows whisk us to faraway places, the focus is less on the sights we can see and more on making temporary homes away from home. As we venture out as tourists again, they aim to help us experience travel through the places we book through Airbnb or other sites.“It’s likely no accident that what resonated with us were stories of travel and possibility and wanderlust,” said Allison Page, the global president of Magnolia Network, about how so many travel shows made their way onto a network led by Chip and Joanna Gaines, the darlings of HGTV.The timing for these shows is unexpectedly fortuitous. The network was supposed to launch last October, but was delayed by the pandemic, and its cable television debut, where it will replace the DIY Network, is still on hold until January 2022. Its lineup couldn’t be more on trend, offering viewers “this fantasy that feels attainable: that they could get in their car, shed this sedentary period of life and find something beautiful,” Ms. Page said.In an email, Ms. Gaines, Magnolia’s chief creative officer, said, “I know for us, these shows have served as timely reminders of what makes life so beautiful: family, adventure, and possibility. When you hear these stories and watch how they unfold, you can’t help but want to go out and create or experience something special.”Of all the shows, “The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals” feels like the one made for this moment. The first episode was filmed in Bali in January 2020, set to the crowded, dynamic backdrop of a prepandemic Indonesia. But in the episodes that follow, mostly filmed after the pandemic began, the world feels strangely empty. Then again, who needs other people when you can stay in a 4,300-square-foot floating mansion in Miami, or a 6,000-square-foot lodge carved out of a cave in the Ozarks?The hosts, Luis D. Ortiz of “Million Dollar Listing,” YouTuber Megan Batoon and travel writer Jo Franco, explore a world on pause. They marvel at their destinations, yet they rarely encounter a hotelier, let alone another guest or local, in their travels. One episode features a luxury private-island resort in the Bahamas, a destination as opulent as you would expect for $15,000 a night. You get the feeling that this island isn’t the only place that’s deserted.On an episode about treehouses, the hosts of “The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals” stay in one on an alpaca farm in Atlanta.Netflix“We were in these middle-of-nowhere places having the time of our lives,” said Ms. Franco, 28. And maybe that’s a good thing. Our collective anxiety about late-stage pandemic travel could lead to “a really interesting shift in the way we travel now,” she said. “We can dive into the experience, we can get more secluded, we can feel private and safe.”Unlike Anthony Bourdain, who introduced a generation of viewers to rich cultures through the street food found in teeming markets and cramped cafes, this version of travel offers a vacation centered around where you stay, not what you do. Covid restrictions may be loosening, but many travelers are still looking for shelter that’s at a safe social distance.“I think a well-designed vacation rental can offer people a lot of comfort to know that something can be safe, if they are fearing Covid,” said Ms. Batoon, 30, a designer whose YouTube videos frequently focus on do-it-yourself home-improvement projects.While “The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals” is all about where to stay, shows like “Inn the Works” focus on the elbow grease involved in turning hotels into places you would actually want to visit. “Inn the Works” chronicles how Lindsey Kurowski enlists her three siblings to help her restore a historic lodge with 13 cabins near the Bear Mountain ski resort in Southern California.In the first episode, as she and her siblings discuss how to renovate the lodge, Ms. Kurowski approaches two guests as they arrive, asking for their understanding about the state of renovation. “In return, I will give you guys a discount,” she tells them. After they shrug off the construction noise and an extension cord that will run out of their room, she hugs them (the first episode was filmed pre-Covid), saying, “I’m so lucky!”The rest of the series was filmed during the pandemic, as Ms. Kurowski continued to rent cabins while a crew filmed the renovations of the four-acre property. “Maybe that isn’t my smartest idea,” Ms. Kurowski, 33, told me. “It’s not ideal to stay at a hotel that is being renovated.”Despite the mess and the pandemic, Ms. Kurowski said the hotel “has been insanely busy” over the last year, which she attributes to the stand-alone cabins that make for an ideal socially distanced destination. She has since bought a second inn, a motel in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, near where she grew up.Vacationers are looking for something different in the places they stay, and it’s not just the pandemic that is driving the shift. Instagram and home-improvement television have managed to turn even our getaways into something demanding the photogenic quality of a big reveal. Ms. Kurowski, who also produces events for corporations, sees the value of “some styling tricks” and a well-staged photo.“People are changing the way they travel, the way they book hotels, everything is different,” she said. “People want bang for their buck, they want the most amenities they can get. They want a personalized experience.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      For Chloe Flower, the Décor Always Serves the Music

      by

      With a few exceptions, the composer and social media influencer’s walls are bare. But who needs art when you have Liberace’s piano?The test of a first-rate intelligence, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time while still managing to function.Chloe Flower (neé Won), the composer, pianist and influencer can relate: For the past three years, she has lived happily on the 63rd floor of New York by Gehry, an apartment tower in the financial district. And yet, she is also “really scared of heights.”But Ms. Flower, 35, the spirited, couture-clad presence at the keyboard when Cardi B performed “Money” at the 2019 Grammys, is nothing if not pragmatic. The music videos she shoots in her two-bedroom rental — the cityscape a key element — have helped her build a robust following on social media.“I took one for the team because of Instagram,” said Ms. Flower, whose repertoire includes hits by the likes of Drake, Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar, played in the style of Bach and Beethoven — or, as Ms. Flower characterizes it, pop-sical. “But really, when you look out the window and straight across, you don’t have a sense of depth.”Chloe Flower was born Chloe Won, but was nicknamed Flower as a child, and flowers are always close at hand. An arrangement sits atop the bedazzled Baldwin concert grand, a loaner from the Liberace estate.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesChloe Flower, 35Occupation: Composer and pianistSpecial Delivery: “During Covid, I was buying cabinets online from Restoration Hardware, and I forgot to remove the bed I had put in the shopping cart. When the guys from the shipping company arrived, they said, ‘We have your bed,’ and I said, ‘What bed?’ So now I have an accidental blue bed.”Also, up there in the stratosphere, Ms. Flower is at a considerable remove from ambient street noise. She was, thus, able to record most of her self-titled debut album at home. It’s due out July 16.Location. Location. Location. So goes the real estate mantra. To which Ms. Flower responds: Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? “Whenever I’m looking for an apartment, I’m never concerned where it is, because I’m either working from home or working in a studio,” she said.“I prefer certain areas of New York, of course,” added Ms. Flower, who previously rented in Union Square and Gramercy Park. “But New York has everything everywhere. Same with Los Angeles.”In fact, she was living in L.A. when she and her boyfriend, Michael Sepso, a New York-based entrepreneur, decided to move in together and began looking for suitable quarters.It was the musician Questlove who introduced his pal Ms. Flower to New York by Gehry. He is a tenant, “and when I saw his place, that was it,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Wait. Hold on. The view.’ I was so excited.”One attraction was the bay window in the living room, which “makes the apartment feel much bigger,” Ms. Flower said of the space, which is almost 1,400 square feet.Much of it is ceded to the Steinway Spirio|r, a piano that can record and play back performances, and to a Baldwin SD10 concert grand with a transparent lid and a cladding of hundreds of glass tiles, a loaner from the estate of Liberace to add flash to those Instagram videos. The man known as Mr. Showmanship often took it on tour. “Aesthetically, it doesn’t look like any piano you’ve ever seen. It’s really, really cool,” Ms. Flower said.“I love Liberace,” she added. “I know he’s not a traditional classical pianist, but he used his flair and drama and passion to break into the mainstream pop world. I like to celebrate him.”Ms. Flower loves having friends and family visit. Pre-Covid, everyone in her orbit referred to the second bedroom, now an office-slash-workout area, as Hotel Chloe. But visitors don’t have too many places to perch. There are no easy chairs, and Ms. Flower ditched her purple Ligne Roset sofa two years ago, when the Liberace joined the Steinway.“It was beautiful,” she said. “But when I had to choose between a second piano and a couch, it was, like, ‘A piano, of course.’”To be sure, there are other things in the living-and-dining room: a wood dining table; a teak tree-trunk console, a Yamaha keyboard, a pair of sculptural bookshelves, a vase or three of flowers, and many white candles. Ms. Flower buys them by the dozen from Amazon, lighting and shuffling them around as the spirit moves her.“I love their glow. I like the way they look when they’ve burned down,” she said. “They’re romantic and I think they set a mood, especially at night against the city lights.”But the décor must always serve the music. “When I’m composing, I don’t like to have a lot of distractions, and clutter is distracting,” she said. “I like the space to be clear, so I feel I have a clean slate.”Ms. Flower wrote her latest composition, “Tamie,” on the Steinway.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesConsequently, with the exception of a gilded mirror and a TV screen that doubles as a canvas to display digital art, the walls are bare. So are most surfaces.The annotated piano books and sheet music that Ms. Flower has had since childhood — “if there were a fire, I’d take them out first” — were briefly on a shelf in the living room.“But they just looked a little messy, a lot of loose paper,” she said, so she consigned them to a Restoration Hardware cabinet in the couple’s bedroom. She even turned down the offer of a candelabra from the Liberace estate because it would block the view — a key source of inspiration during the creative process.Ms. Flower describes herself as a homebody. But she would be that much happier at home if it had a dedicated recording studio and sufficient space to show off some of her mother’s artwork.“And,” she said, “there’s a third piano I want to buy. I asked my boyfriend, ‘What if we got rid of the dining table?’”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      A ‘Blue Bloods’ Regular on the Importance of ‘Yes’

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      For the actor Vanessa Ray, what makes a one-bedroom near Lincoln Center home are a few essentials: Bill Nye, blankets and one three-letter word.Vanessa Ray has lived in New York City on and off for the past decade, renting or subletting in the theater district, on the far reaches of Upper West Side, in Brooklyn and, more than once, in Lincoln Square.“I had always watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television, and when I was starting to pursue being an actor, I was like, ‘I’m going to shoot my shot in New York,’” said Ms. Ray, 39, who plays feisty policewoman Eddie Janko, now a regular around the Reagan dinner table, on the long-running CBS police procedural “Blue Bloods.” (The Season 11 finale airs May 14.)It was the beginning of a great love affair.“This is where my heart is,” said Ms. Ray, who was raised in Portland, Ore., and subsequently moved to Los Angeles where, thanks to roles on “Pretty Little Liars,” “Suits” and “Blue Bloods,” she owns a house in the hills. “I love California. When I have three months off, I go and soak up the sun and swim in the pool, and then I come back here to real living.”Ms. Ray is very big on the affirmation of “yes” signs. She is equally big on photos of family and friends. Haley BondVanessa Ray, 39Occupation: ActorLip service: “When I was first on ‘Blue Bloods,’ I was subletting a place in the theater district. You walk around there and you run into just about every actor you know. I was dating different people, and one guy went to kiss me on Ninth Avenue, and I was like, ‘You can’t kiss me on Ninth Avenue. That’s saying something. Let’s take it to 10th Avenue when it’s a new relationship.’”Not long after her 2015 marriage to Landon Beard, a Los Angeles-based musician who comes to New York as frequently as possible, Ms. Ray took it into her head to try Brooklyn on for size. It didn’t fit, even if the two-bedroom she rented in Williamsburg, near McCarren Park, was an easy walk to the “Blue Bloods” set in Greenpoint.“I was going through a tough time emotionally, and because of that I knew I needed to return to Manhattan,” Ms. Ray said. Fortunately, one of her best friends, Jessica Waxman, is a real estate agent. Ms. Waxman presented three or four options, all near Lincoln Center and all near her own apartment, so the two women could easily meet for morning coffee and walks in Central Park.The light tan sectional, bought several years ago at Crate & Barrel, was Ms. Ray’s first big furniture purchase.Vanessa Ray“Jess was like, ‘OK, Vanessa, you need a kitchen that’s big enough to cook all the things you like to cook and big enough for me to watch you while you’re doing it,’” Ms. Ray said. “She also knew I needed outdoor space and a view of some kind.“I like to wake up and look outside and think, ‘I’ve got to get in it. I’ve got to get out there,’” she said. “That’s the driving force of any success I’ve had in New York.”A year and a half ago, Ms. Ray moved into what she describes as “a nice, healing space”: a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony in a full-service postwar building, where she can see the Hudson River from the windows in the living room and bedroom.In the entryway, there is a photo of Ms. Ray and Mr. Beard walking on the beach in Santa Monica in the early days of their courtship, and another of them on their wedding day in Pala, Calif. Make no mistake. They look very happy.But (and you’re reading it here first): She has a thing for another guy, a science guy. His portrait — and it’s a big one — also hangs in the entryway.“I love Bill Nye,” said Ms. Ray, who bought the likeness at a vintage shop in Portland. “I was home-schooled as a kid. Bill Nye did a segment on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club,’ and he was always doing stuff and blowing things up. It got my brother and me excited about science, and we’ve really leaned into it over the years. If I could meet Bill Nye, I would be speechless.”When it comes to blankets, she can’t possibly say no.Vanessa RayUntil then, she’ll take what she can get. Some years ago, when her “Blue Bloods” co-star Will Estes met Mr. Nye at an industry event, he scored an autographed coaster for Ms. Ray. It’s tucked into a corner of the picture frame.When Ms. Ray became a series regular in 2013, she latched onto a very substantial tan sectional from Crate & Barrel. “This couch is huge. It’s practically a twin bed,” she said. “It was the most expensive thing I had ever bought in my life.”Perhaps in the interest of getting her money’s worth, Ms. Ray has brought it along to every apartment she has rented in the intervening years. “I will say, I don’t need a lot,” she said. “If I have a couch and a blanket, I’m pretty thrilled.”Those who know Ms. Ray will laugh at the above declaration about “a blanket.” She has, at last count, about a dozen blankets in the apartment, all stashed in baskets — among them, Mexican blankets, Pendleton blankets, camp blankets and a white polyester number from Restoration Hardware of surpassing softness and coziness.“My husband is like, ‘Enough blankets, babe,’ but I like to switch things up,” she said.She feels the same way about kitchen towels. She has them for every holiday: Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween. “I’ve got them all,” Ms. Ray said. “I think I was a school receptionist in another life.”Her collection of essential kitchen utensils is, by contrast, positively austere. The most frequently used are a citrus squeezer (she squirts lemon on pretty much everything) and a couple of pairs of tongs: “You can stir with them. You can sauté with them. You can toss a salad. You can flip a steak. You can use them to get something out of the oven real quick.”Those tools are stored in the drawer of a butcher-block-topped kitchen cart that also holds a Nespresso machine and an Aicook juicer, a recent acquisition. “This is the key spot,” Ms. Ray said of the cart. “It was the perfect size. The story of my life is that I’m always one inch off, but this really nailed it.”Ms. Ray doesn’t require many kitchen tools, but she’d be utterly lost without tongs and a citrus squeezer. Vanessa RayWatching over her in the kitchen are photos of her grandfather, a master of the barbecue, and her uncle, Scott Smith, who taught her the joys of spices and sushi.If the kitchen is the apartment’s center of activity, the living room is a place for reflection. There, Ms. Ray sits on a pouf near the TV cabinet, writes in her journal and reads. If affirmation is what she’s after at the end of a tough day, she need look only as far as the table next to the sectional, where “yes” is spelled in wood blocks.“I have ‘yes’ signs everywhere,” she said. “When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had a friend who did that growing up, and I was like, ‘I want to do that, too, so I can remember to stay positive.’”There’s another ‘yes,’ in brass letters, in the bedroom. Ms. Ray and Mr. Beard are currently in talks about getting a neon ‘yes’ sign. “But,” she said with a sigh, “we haven’t said yes to it yet.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More