Crain's New York Business

Local nonprofit group the Upper West Side Cinema Center finalized a $6.9 million deal to acquire the beloved Metro Theater at 2626 Broadway with the help of a combined $4 million in grants from state elected officials and film buffs that was announced Sunday. Gov. Kathy Hochul gave the nonprofit group — founded by producer Ira Deutchman and advised by a number of actors and directors, including Ethan Hawke, Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Martin Scorsese — $3.5 million, while state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who represents the Upper West Side, allocated an additional $500,000. Read more here: Read more here: https://lnkd.in/geJtBcZE

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is giving New Yorkers an early look at the vision for a $5.5 billion, 14-mile light-rail project to connect Brooklyn and Queens. Transit officials are hosting a series of public open houses in April and May on preliminary designs for the Interborough Express, a rail link between Bay Ridge and Jackson Heights that’s designed to give New Yorkers more options to directly commute between the boroughs. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gNVJcSah

New York reigns supreme in the legal industry — and an important subset of that community are the litigators and trial attorneys who ensure access to the civil justice system.

State lawmakers are urging their peers in Albany to pass a bill that would force chronically reckless drivers to install speed-limiting devices in their vehicles after an unlicensed driver fatally struck a mother and her two children as they crossed a Midwood intersection on Saturday. Brooklyn State Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assembly member Emily Gallagher have reintroduced a bill that would force drivers who have at least six speeding tickets in the last year to install a device that would prevent their car from exceeding the speed limit by more than five miles per hour. The device would be required in vehicles registered to those who have had their license suspended for reckless driving infractions. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gaA4Xi62

An art dealer is hoping for a masterpiece of a deal in Greenwich Village. Gordon VeneKlasen, an owner of the global Michael Werner Gallery, has listed his 3-story townhouse in the gated cul-de-sac MacDougal Alley for about $20 million, according to an ad that appeared Thursday. He paid about $6 million for the 1,900-square-foot property in 2009, according to the city register, and so could more than triple his investment. But VeneKlasen invested in a major renovation. Working with architect Annabelle Selldorf, with whom VeneKlasen became friendly after she designed his gallery’s outpost at 4 E. 77th St. in 1990, VeneKlasen converted what was a three-bedroom site into a one-bedroom dwelling, according to a 2014 profile in W magazine. The makeover also apparently turned a wine cellar into a library, added a glass-walled vestibule and installed a roof deck. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gWHQ_eBx

Editor’s note: On Monday, KBRA backed off a report it issued last week noting that Fox Corp. was planning to leave behind part of its office space at 1211 Sixth Ave. Fox will retain all its space at its Midtown headquarters, KBRA said in an update. This post’s original caption follows. Fox Corp. plans to vacate a quarter of its space at 1211 Sixth Ave., a move that would come only three years after Rupert Murdoch’s media empire agreed to stay in the Midtown tower until 2042. Fox intends in November to leave 330,000 of its 1.25 million square feet in the building, credit-rating agency KBRA said in a report Wednesday in which it downgraded 1211 Sixth’s $1 billion mortgage, citing an “impending decline in the property’s occupancy.” The building houses the corporate headquarters for Fox and News Corp., studios for Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal and New York Post newsrooms. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ghUE3f5C

Compass is taking the old concept of whisper listings—homes available for sale to those in-the-know without their hitting the public market—to a whole new level, even as industry bigwigs are loudly opposed. A curated, Compass-brokers-only website that potentially allows the brokerage to keep the buyer- and seller-side brokers’ fees in-house, the program is intended to give homebuyers and -sellers a lift in a tight housing market. Prospective buyers can bid without being muscled aside by as many competitors, while sellers can tweak pricing without coming across to the general public as desperate, the thinking goes among its fans. But just about everybody in the real estate industry—brokers, appraisers, data providers such as StreetEasy and even the Real Estate Board of New York itself—says privatizing listings at a time of limited inventory will make the housing crisis worse. Particularly harmful to buyers, who rely on transparency, the service may also run afoul of fair housing laws with its VIP-focused approach, the critics say. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gqKeRSaY

Up on Broadway, Succession star Sarah Snook is breaking the rules of traditional theater (and bringing the house down while she’s at it) in a revolutionary production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. At Lincoln Center, you can hear a pin drop during the entire second half of Ghosts, a haunting nepo-baby phantasmagoria from the Swedish master of effete dismay, Henrik Ibsen. And that’s on top of ongoing delights such as little-urchin-that-could Little Shop of Horrors, Titus Burgess’ chaotic twirl in Oh Mary!, adorable robots in love at Maybe Happy Ending, the dueling divas of Death Becomes Her and much more coming to the theater scene this season. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gBxxmvyr

S&P Global downgraded the credit rating for 1515 Broadway, saying its future bodes ill unless SL Green snags a casino license for the big Times Square tower. The property is where Carson Daly hosted “Total Request Live” in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and MTV’s offices are still there. However, “sustainable” cash flow at the building has fallen nearly 10%, S&P said in a report late Thursday, adding that one measure of the 1.7 million-square-foot tower’s value has fallen by 40%, to $634 million. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dpmTKRan

New York City is preparing to embrace the more than 1 million soccer fans expected to flock to the region for the 2026 FIFA World Cup by spending $20 million on promotional events to lure economic activity to the five boroughs, city officials said Monday. Because World Cup games held in the Garden State are projected to generate more than $2 billion in economic activity for the tristate area, according to state officials, the city’s Economic Development Corp. is chipping in to promote the tournament. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gJs7tT8V