One day before delivering a State of the State address that focused on building a new convention center in Queens, Governor Andrew Cuomo quietly entered a nonbonding agreement with the Genting Group to build a Queens center that includes an expansion of the gambling already present at Aqueduct, the Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, Hell’s Kitchen residents are already pushing a housing and parkland plan to replace the Javits Center, DNAinfo said. [more]

The developer of the Aqueduct racino in South Ozone Park, Queens is considering building a convention center to rival the Javits Center, too. According to the Post, gaming company Genting New York, which operates Resorts World Casino at Aqueduct, has proposed building on the land surrounding the racino once the first facility is complete. (The project is slated to wrap up this year.) The limited space in Javits, which is undergoing renovations and just added a new wing with another 80,000 square feet of exhibition space last year, has long been the source of complaints from the business and tourism industries. [more]

The state’s Public Authorities Control Board voted yesterday to give the city control of the long-delayed Brooklyn Bridge Park project, the New York Post reported. In exchange, the city will fill $55 million of the project’s $120 million budget shortfall with money set aside for the stalled Javits Center expansion. The plan, which will infuse the 85-acre property with much-needed cash and ensure that the park can stay open longer, was approved by the Bloomberg and Paterson
administrations in March. The park is being built piecemeal as funds become available, with the first sections at Piers 1 and 6 in Brooklyn Heights open since April. [Post]

[more]

The state’s Public Authorities Control Board voted yesterday to give the city control of the long-delayed Brooklyn Bridge Park project, the New York Post reported. In exchange, the city will fill $55 million of the project’s $120 million budget shortfall with money set aside for the stalled Javits Center expansion. The plan, which will infuse the 85-acre property with much-needed cash and ensure that the park can stay open longer, was approved by the Bloomberg and Paterson
administrations in March. The park is being built piecemeal as funds become available, with the first sections at Piers 1 and 6 in Brooklyn Heights open since April. [Post]

[more]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s capital budget allocates $104 million for a Javits Center overhaul that has been shelved for years, according to the Observer. The original 2006 plan was a $1.6 billion modernization and expansion of the convention center, for which the city pledged $350 million. In 2008, that idea was scaled back to a $463 million renovation, paid for by a hotel room tax, but the Javits Center has since remained in the city’s budget, albeit at a diminished sum. [more]

From the February issue: As New York City construction firms get slammed by the downturn, they are turning to more modest projects, in some cases taking on multimillion-dollar renovations rather than the multibillion-dollar skyscrapers. While it’s clear that the collapse of the New York development market has taken a toll on builders and brokers, there may be nobody in the industry hit as hard as construction firms. As banks have largely cut off financing for new projects and cranes have been mothballed, thousands of contractors have lost their jobs. “It’s having a devastating impact on the construction market,” said Lou Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, which represents 1,700 construction management and contractor firms. “There are very few, if any, new projects moving forward.” To combat that lack of work, major New York construction firms are bidding for much smaller projects and diversifying into public-sector work, while other firms have been forced into bankruptcy protection.[more] [more]

Jazzy renderings are all well and good, but which ambitious city projects will actually come to fruition? Crain’s put six of the most talked-about developments under the microscope — the Hudson Yards development, Moynihan Station, Javits Center, Willets Point, Atlantic Yards and Ground Zero — examining which was most likely to go from rendering to reality. Hudson Yards gets a top rating from Crain’s, which pointed out that the city has actually out-paced the private developer, Related Companies, also involved in the project. The plans for Ground Zero, however, appear “grim,” with delays likely to continue hampering the project’s progress. The remaining four projects have mixed outlooks. The well-tempered expectations for the Javits Center could help matters in the long-run, although numerous past attempts to move the expansion project forward have ended in failure. As for Moynihan Station, it may be too early to tell, but Crain’s pointed out that the developers are now taking a “phased approach” toward garnering approval, a move that could help them garner approval and financing. Willets Point and Atlantic Yards, meanwhile, both suffer from a lack of community support and financing difficulties.

From left: K. Thomas Elghanayan and brother Frederick started TF Cornerstone

Now that the division of Rockrose has been finalized, the two younger Elghanayan brothers are looking to snap up distressed assets. “Our plan is to look for properties that are in some form of incomplete state,” K. Thomas Elghanayan, who with his brother Frederick is now doing business under the name TF Cornerstone, told The Real Deal.
“We can take something that’s half-built and we can finish it, manage
it, rent it out, sell it, and do whatever we need to do. We’re looking
at a couple of opportunities like that, where we’d be buying these
[properties] from financial institutions.” In fact, he said, TF (for Thomas and Frederick) Cornerstone is close to making a deal on two properties in the New York metro area: one is a “broken condo,” and another is a development deal where construction started and stopped. [more]

The New York Observer interviews Dan Tishman, chairman and CEO of
Tishman Construction. The firm has had or will have a hand in a number
of upcoming projects, including the Javits Center renovation, One Bryant Park and
the World Trade Center redevelopment. Tishman lives part-time on a llama farm in
Maine and had considered a career working with wildlife, but chose to go
into business instead. Tishman said he expects the real estate
industry, and the world as a whole, to see a “resettling” as the
recession continues. His company has not taken on a lot of debt, he
said, but it is still in the middle of a backlog of projects taken on
during the boom. [more]

The long-delayed renovation plans for the 23-year-old Jacob K. Javits
Convention Center received final approval yesterday from the Public
Authorities Control Board in Albany for construction to begin on the
$463 million project. Plans for the original project were shelved
during the Spitzer administration when original calculations put the
price at over $3 billion. Hotel Association of New York member hotels
added a $1.50 nightly surcharge to all guest bills to raise an
additional $150 million for the renovations, which are expected to
create 9,000 jobs. Some improvements to the center will include repairs
to the leaky roof and a 100,000-square-foot expansion, which will be
used for more exhibition and food service areas. The expansion will be
built on the block bounded by 39th and 40th streets and 11th and 12th
avenues. [more]