1) Modern 23, the Chelsea building we always get confused with Chelsea Modern, has fired its in-house sales staff and closed its sales office. The developer's new strategy? Assigning each of the new 23rd Street building's 13 unsold units to specific individual brokers. Can these rivals work together? They say they can. How...modern. [Big Deal/'Team of Rivals']
2) For brokers, the competition to write the most over-the-top luxuriofabuloustastic listing copy died with the collapse of Lehman Brothers: "The new propriety frowns at luxury, lifestyle and the fetishistic focus on designer brands and architects. Instead, brokers say they are trying to recast their listings in terms of responsible spending, comfort and, most especially, value." "Set up for comfortable living" has replaced "no expense spared," and "trophy" has replaced "reduced" as a naughty word. ['Adjectives Get Evicted']
3) Betty Jo Casey, the director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, bought the most expensive apartment at Harlem's 2056 Fifth Avenue ($1.25M), just before some epic PriceChoppage in the building. She says she's not bummed: "There has been no buyer's remorse. I didn't get such a bad deal." [The Hunt/'A Wish List Fulfilled for an Apartment Hunter']
4) These are frugal times, so this week's Living In focuses on a frugal 'hood: Inwood! Yep, the tippy top of Manhattan is getting rediscovered all over again, says a local broker: "As more and more people have come up here, it's always somewhat amusing to me that people say that Inwood is being 'discovered.' I've been hearing that since 1980. It's always being discovered by a new crop of people.” The latest crop: outdoorsy lesbians. [Living In: Inwood/'Northern Zone, South-of-the-Border Flavor']
5) Though neighbors, parishioners and some of the bishops oppose it, the grand Russian Orthodox Church at Park Avenue and East 93rd Street is pushing ahead with what sounds like a fairly shlocky addition to the landmark building, in order to move the bishops' quarters and rent out part of the original mansion to make more cash. The Landmarks Preservation Commission will soon weigh-in, but said one bishop at the Carnegie Hill landmark: "It wouldn’t bring in all that much revenue. It would just wreck the place and upset the parishioners." [The City/Carnegie Hill]
6) Bronx native Andre Licursi has been an elevator operator in a Lower Fifth Avenue co-op for the past 22 years, and as the building switches to an automatic elevator and he gets bumped to doorman, he reflects on the experience: "Knowing when to strike up a conversation comes naturally. Sometimes, I see a person and I say, 'Wow, you smell great.'" [The City/The Voice]
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