NYC’s diverse monied class

Stuart ElliottBusiness in New York makes strange bedfellows. There are many paths to riches in the Big Apple, as you can see by looking at our cover this month.

Indeed, not only does New York City have one of the most diverse populations on the planet (just ride the No. 7 subway if you haven’t already figured that out), but there’s also serious variety in the kinds of wealthy people who live here, including real estate players.

Billionaire investor Ron Burkle, who we profile in “Burkle’s billions,” represents one particular breed of wealth. I like to call this style of tycoon the “Entourage” mogul. (Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and billionaire record executive David Geffen, for example, would also fall into this camp.)

The California supermarket tycoon — who was once dubbed the “billionaire party boy” — owns a professional sports team, is reportedly godfather to P. Diddy’s children, and even started a venture capital fund with actor Ashton Kutcher.

It’s a decidedly West Coast approach, which is now coming east to invest in real estate. Burkle has been shopping for and developing hip boutique hotels in the city — he’s already snapped up Soho House New York and provided backing for the NoMad Hotel in the Garment District, which opened last month. “He is probably one of the first calls that people make in this sector [right now for investing],” one broker told us.

Incidentally, the billionaire was mentioned in my favorite Page Six item of all time: He was sighted breaking bread with Bill Clinton (his one-time close friend before an apparent fallout), Bono and Jay-Z for dinner at the Spotted Pig in the West Village. Talk about a power foursome.

A more East Coast approach (about as East Coast as you can get, actually) is embodied by Elizabeth Stribling, head of the high-end brokerage Stribling & Associates, who we profile in “Stribling, the next generation.”

Stribling, who epitomizes the Upper East Side, and once might have seemed likely to burst into flames if she crossed south of 42nd Street, has been in the process of broadening her firm’s reach beyond just that neighborhood, as well as jettisoning the brokerage’s “stuffy” image.

The firm is undergoing a rebranding, and Stribling — who made headlines in 2009 when she moved from the Upper East Side to a $6 million Brooklyn Heights condo that the firm was then marketing — claims she can run with the “blue-jean set.” (She admitted, however, that she still buys all her groceries on the Upper East Side.)

It’s an issue that other white-shoe Upper East Side firms have had to tackle in trying to appeal to a bigger market. Brokerage firms Gumley Haft Kleier and Warburg Realty, for instance, chose to reach a wider demographic by signing on to appear in reality TV shows about real estate. That’s something that probably would have once been frowned upon by many in the Upper East Side set — in addition to their aversion to dungarees.

Finally, our ranking of Manhattan’s top retail firms, “Who reigns in retail?”, shows a different path to success, and a different way money spreads its wings in the pursuit of more money, through new partnerships and mergers.

The first-place finisher on our retail brokerage list, the newly renamed Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, brokered more than half-a-million square feet of store leases in Manhattan in 145 deals in the past year.

Local New York guys Jeffrey Gural and Barry Gosin have built the firm up over the past several decades from its humble beginnings. But lately, they’ve been involved in a flurry of corporate deal-making that’s resulted in the firm’s ever-expanding name, including the sale of the company to Howard Lutnick’s BGC Partners last year and a merger with bankrupt brokerage Grubb & Ellis last month. Here’s to coming up with a new name if they merge with anyone else.

Finally, if you don’t already know about it, check out the premiere of The Real Deal’s documentary, “Building Stories — New York Through the Eyes of an Architect,” on PBS this month. It’s the story of Manhattan’s most prolific architect, Costas Kondylis, and the battle between art and commerce in how the skyline gets shaped. That battle gets played out between architects and developers — in our film, between Kondylis and Donald Trump — who often make strange bedfellows. The documentary — which was directed by Toni Comas, produced by TRD publisher Amir Korangy and written by me — premieres on Wednesday, May 2, at 7 p.m. on WLIW21 and Sunday, May 6, at 7 p.m. on Thirteen.

Enjoy the documentary, and enjoy the issue.