The penthouse at 1 York Street

The sprawling 15-room penthouse on top of the new condominium project in Tribeca at 1 York Street sold for $23.7 million, or [more]

If at first you don’t succeed, try flying to China. After boosting its price to $34 million from $25 million in June this year, the brokers behind One York’s penthouse apartment are hitting the road to find buyers. The Tribeca condo building, designed by famed architect Enrique Norten, is cropping up in the South China Morning Post, which reported that the building’s brokers have already spent time in Shanghai and Beijing searching for potential takers.

From the December issue: Everyone loves cash. Nothing new there. But in this market, cash deals are even sweeter. In some cases, a onetime payment could even be the only way to close a sale, according to brokers, attorneys and developers. And discounts often await all-cash buyers. There are other benefits: less paperwork and fewer delays in getting deals done. No long waits for banks to pore over buyers’ financial records, only to reject them on the eve of closing. “Cash used to be king, but now it’s the emperor,” said Luigi Rosabianca, a real estate attorney who says 50 percent of his clients have paid cash so far this year versus 20 percent in 2007 at the market’s peak. The exact number of cash deals is difficult to determine; property records on file with the city’s Department of Finance don’t specify how apartments are paid for. And the sheer number of cash deals doesn’t seem to be increasing, as the volume of all deals remains depressed.

Michael Hirtenstein has closed on his $16.8 million, five-apartment purchase at One York Street, on the corner of St. Johns Lane, in Tribeca. Telecommunications mogul Hirtenstein had earlier walked away from a deal to buy six units for more than $25 million in the Enrique Norton-designed building. He ended up purchasing a 9,000-square-foot residence with 6,000 square feet of outdoor space. He told the New York Post he plans to use the home for philanthropic events.

This past week, Mexican starchitect Enrique Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos announced that he had designed no fewer than four new projects for New York City.

That is surely interesting and would be even more exciting were it not for the fact that Norten’s noble and elaborate plans for buildings in the Big Apple have a strange, meandering way of coming up empty and then fizzling out.

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