From left: 146 West 47th Street (center) and Kevin Salmon of Khizer Salmon

A prime bit of Times Square retail, next door to the Witkoff Group’s massive planned retail and hotel project, is in contract for $10.6 million, The Real Deal has learned. [more]

Tim Tompkins and the old New York Times building

Times Square may be experiencing a mini technology boom, with tech companies including Yahoo and Microsoft snapping up 633,000 square feet of space in the neighborhood over the last 18 months, according to data provided to The Real Deal by the Times Square Alliance, a business improvement district group. [more]

Times Square

Retail rents for Times Square are starting to give Fifth Avenue a run for its money, according to Crain’s. Rates in the tourist hub reached as much as $2,400 a square foot in the fourth quarter of last year, a 42 percent increase from 2011′s final three months. Last month, the Sunglass Hut inked a deal with Vornado Realty Trust for 1540 Broadway, between 45th and 46th streets,  at $2,025 a square foot. [more]

Times Square

Hotels in Times Square had nearly 90 percent occupancy after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, DNAinfo reported, citing Times Square Alliance data. In addition, average room rates increased to amounts more typically seen in peak travel season. In November alone, hotels in the area reached their highest occupancy rates since 2003, with average room rates ticking in at $307. [more]

Times Square

Asking rents in the bustling center of Times Square more than doubled over the last year, pulling even for the first time with the city’s most expensive district on Upper Fifth Avenue, commercial firm Cushman & Wakefield reported Tuesday. Landlords are asking an average of $2,283 per square foot in the Bowtie — where Broadway crosses Seventh Avenue — a 117 percent increase from last year, when it was $1,052 per square foot. [more]

Rendering of Times Square project (Snohetta)

For the next three years or so (assuming, as we should not, that things go according to schedule) the fabled Crossroads of the World, Times Square, will go through the usual hell on earth that is construction in Manhattan. The entire place, from 42nd street to 47th, including Broadway and Seventh Avenue, will be torn up and repaved, at a cost of $40 million, according to the vanguardist whims of Snohetta, the Norwegian architectural firm responsible for the 9/11 Museum at the World Trade Center Site. Although, I confess, it is beyond me why what looks to be essentially a repaving job should take three years, into 2015, apparently there will be certain infrastructural changes that go along with it, including the removal of trolley tracks that now lie buried under the asphalt of Times Square. Some of the changes include the introduction of energy outlets that will remove the need for those annoying generators that invariably accompany the big events that increasingly occupy the site. [more]

1501 Broadway

Vermont-based ice-cream giant Ben & Jerry’s is set to bring its famously radical collection of flavors to the country’s most high-profile retail center: Times Square.

The ice-cream retailer has signed a 10-year-lease for 750 square feet on the 44th Street side of the Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Jeffrey Roseman told The Real Deal. [more]

Coney Island boardwalk

Despite a city-encouraged facelift and a jump in visitors, Coney Island is far from the Brooklyn version of Times Square that many feared it would become. So far, park patrons told the New York Times, Coney has strayed from becoming too sanitized and “Disneyfied.”

As previously reported, the clean-up of Coney Island shed some of its gritty attractions for new rides and shops that attract tourists, family-friendly entertainment and new development. [more]

Rendering of revamped Times Square

The $40 million Times Square upgrade will begin this fall, according to a new timetable released by the city cited by DNAinfo, and will be complete this fall. The project will make the pedestrian plazas and benches along Seventh Avenue and Broadway permanent, add electrical outlets and repave the roads with a mosaic design embedded in the concrete. All the while, a 15-foot wide path will be open to pedestrians, two lanes will be open to vehicular traffic, the annual New Year’s festivities will go on as planned and access to all buildings will be maintained. [more]

The Elk Hotel, at 360 West 42nd Street

The Elk Hotel, a living landmark to the Times Square of old, at 360 West 42nd Street, at Eighth Avenue, will be closing its doors permanently, the blog Vanishing New York reported.

The seedy hotel, reported in a 2004 New York Times article to have fine accomodations “other than the mice, the hookers and the transvestites,” is a relic of a bygone era in some ways. [more]