rising stars - Crain`s New York Business

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®
VOL. XXVIII, NO. 13
www.crainsnewyork.com
MARCH 26-APRIL 1, 2012 PRICE: $3.00
HERE THEY
ARE! THIS
YEAR’S 40
UNDER 40
DoSomething.org’s
ARIA FINGER
‘Her energy is almost
contagious,’ said a fan
of the 29-year-old
0
NEWSPAPER
71486 01068
5
13
MEET THEM ALL: Pages F1-F25
ELECTRONIC EDITION
ALSO INSIDE
Andrew Cuomo:
NY’s take-charge guv?
Or control freak?
It all depends on
where you sit
Action! Film studios
running out of space
A not-so-wonderful
turn for stellar bank
I am
Indian Point.
I am Theresa Motko, one of 1,200 workers at the
Indian Point Energy Center who takes personal pride
in helping to provide New York City and Westchester
with over 25 percent of our power. That power is clean,
it’s reliable, and it’s among the lowest cost electricity
in the region.
We are New Yorkers. We are your neighbors, our
children attend the same schools, and we support
many of the same causes. For example, our employer,
Entergy, proudly supports the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce’s Hiring Our Heroes program, whose
goal is to connect 100,000 returning veterans with
job opportunities.
Theresa Motko, 33, is an
Electrical Engineer at the
Indian Point Energy Center.
Lately a few people have been talking about replacing
Indian Point with electricity from sources yet to be
developed. According to experts, without Indian Point
air pollution would increase, our electricity costs would
increase, and blackouts could occur.
We believe that you should have all the facts you
need to make an informed decision about these ideas
and about New York’s electric future. And that any
plan to replace Indian Point needs to clearly answer
the following questions: Will it decrease electric
reliability? Will it add pollution to our air? Will it
increase our electric rates?
Visit our website, www.rightfornewyork.com, to see
for yourself what we do and how we do it.
Indian Point Energy Center
WE’RE RIGHT FOR NEW YORK
INSIDE
40
UNDER
40
TOP STORIES
®
VOL. XXVIII, NO. 13
WWW.CRAINSNEWYORK.COM
Read all
about them
PAGES F1-F25
MARCH 26-APRIL 1, 2012 PRICE: $3.00
NY studios
casting
for extra
space
LARGE AND IN CHARGE:
Observers describe an
intense management style
unlike anything New York
has ever seen.
Sweet project
in danger of a
total meltdown
A record number of
TV, film productions
keep stages booked as
pilot season heats up
PAGE 2
More red ink
on the books at
Reader’s Digest
PAGE 2
BY MIRIAM KREININ SOUCCAR
Bank in the tank:
Bad bet on rates
sinks Hudson City
With a record number of film and television productions coming to New
York, and another unusually busy pilot
season, the city’s soundstages are overflowing with work.
To keep up with the boom—which
started when the state renewed its 30%
tax credit for film production a year
and a half ago—studios are racing to
expand both their physical plants and
their ancillary businesses, like lighting
rental services.
Executives at Long Island City,
Queens-based Silvercup Studios are
scouring the entire city for more spaces
that are large enough for soundstages.
PAGE 3
Really dumb move,
Upper West Side
GREG DAVID, PAGE 11
BUSINESS LIVES
newscom
See STUDIOS on Page 42
GOTHAM GIGS
Hip-hop photograher
keeps it real P. 47
ANNE FISHER How to
shield your business
from cybercrooks P. 47
●
●
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Times Square BID’s
Tim Tompkins P. 48
GAEL GREENE Chef goes
back to his roots P. 49
●
INDEX
NEIGHBORHOOD JOURNAL _________________7
THE INSIDER___________________________________________________8
SMALL BUSINESS ______________________________________9
VIEWPOINT ___________________________________________________10
REAL ESTATE DEALS _____________________________12
CLASSIFIEDS ______________________________________________40
HOT JOBS ______________________________________________________47
EXECUTIVE MOVES _________________________________47
THE WEEK AHEAD ___________________________________49
THE BOSS
Nothing gets done in this state without his
say. It’s the Cuomo school of management
BY JEREMY SMERD AND DANIEL MASSEY
During a radio interview last fall, Gov. Andrew
Cuomo proclaimed,“I am the government.” He didn’t mean to brag. But to those familiar with the inner workings of the Cuomo administration, his quip
was simply a declaration of fact.
“He is so unbelievably involved in almost everything,” said an Albany insider of Mr. Cuomo. “On
one level, it’s very impressive because he’s a machine
in the way he works. But it’s also completely paralyzing and debilitating because [agencies] can’t go to
Wanted:
a few huge
tenants
Developers hunt for
that special someone
to get projects going
BY THERESA AGOVINO
the bathroom without him giving the go-ahead.”
Mr. Cuomo is not the first executive to involve
himself in the minutiae of state operations. But in
dozens of interviews,people inside or close to his administration portrayed an intense, micromanaging
style that has kept his agencies almost perfectly in
lockstep with his agenda. It has impressed longtime
observers of Albany but also frustrated some state
officials accustomed to more autonomy,sources said.
To carry out an agenda that includes making the
state more welcoming to business, Mr. Cuomo depends on a handful of trusted advisers ensconced in
It’s a very exclusive club, with about 12
huge, closely watched, highly coveted
corporate members.Each has the power to have a potentially major impact on
the city’s skyline for years to come.
They are the kingmakers, megatenants such as Credit Suisse, L’Oréal
and Viacom. Each faces a major lease
expiration in the coming years that
gives it the power to transform building plans into concrete and glass by
agreeing to become a tenant. With the
real estate industry keen to shake off its
See CUOMO on Page 42
See WANTED on Page 44
SWEET PROJECT
COMMENTARY
He changed
the times
I
nsane hair, jeans, white shirt, boots and black
jacket: The image goes back to 1965, but
could be that of a hipster in 2012.” So begins
a story in the latest French Elle, declaring this
a Bob Dylan Spring. Even granted his nearconstant touring in recent years (he’ll be in South
America in April), it is an unusually busy season for
both the Minnesota-bred singer, who turns 71 in
May, and his
fans.
Chimes of Freedom—a four-CD
set of 50 covers of
Dylan songs by a
wildly eclectic
group of performers (from
the obvious, Patti
Smith and Johnny Cash, to the
odd, Miley Cyrus
and Ke$ha), released to mark
the 50th anniversary of the
founding of Amnesty International—is, as I write, No.
22 on the Amazon charts
(and No. 1 in oldies). “Bob
Dylan, L’Explosion Rock 6166,” an exhibit of Dylan photographs and memorabilia
created by the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, opened
a few days ago at the Cité de
la Musique in Paris. And last
week marked another golden
anniversary, this one of the
release of Dylan’s first eponymous LP, the kind of flop that
today might send
a career into the
dustbin.
There were no
dustbins for Dylan,who had come
to New York in
1961 with a burning ambition that
kindled several
musical revolutions.They culminated in the one
celebrated in that
exhibit title, when he famously went electric in 1965,
melding folk music’s earnest
eloquence with rock’s demanding cacophony, earning
him both brickbats and the
biggest hit in his career to
date. “Like a Rolling Stone”
hit No. 2 on the Billboard
chart that summer. Only the
Beatles’ “Help” topped it.
A decade ago, despite the
epic damage already being inflicted on the music business
by the Internet, it was still
possible to believe that music
could change the world, or at
least a slice of it. I remember
thinking that Eminem, a
white man making African-
American music
broadly accessible and earning
the moniker of
hip-hop’s Elvis,
was really its Dylan, doing his
verbal trapeze act
with the greatest
of ease.
But
since
then, vapid and
formulaic pop,
often
pretty
(Adele)
but
rarely profound (Amy Winehouse), has poured from
radios, and when my wife
complains about my Dylan,
Stones and Dr. Dre-stuffed
playlists and demands something new, I have two words
for her: “Katy Perry?”
Siriusly?
Which brings me back to
1965, and why this Dylan
moment may be cause for celebration as much as nostalgia.
As nitpicking critics have
long claimed, Dylan’s music
was not always, strictly
speaking, original. The singer
who debuted 50
years ago was a
take on the great
folkie
Woody
Guthrie, but in
the aftermath of
the failure of
Dylan’s first LP,
he hosted a series
of … let’s call
them genetic mutations … that led
to Dylan ’65 and l’explosion
rock that followed.
The petri dish for all this
was New York City, in a moment when anything seemed
possible. Nowadays, financiers, lawyers and entitled
NYU students fill the Greenwich Village sidewalks Dylan
once tramped and have
crowded out the creators of
that moment as surely as formula pop has trumped creativity on the charts.
But the kids on the L train
with their insane hair, boots
and black jackets have kept
the form alive. All it will take
is one more mutation to make
rebel music again.
LATE BLOOMER:
Eight years after the
site was purchased,
work has yet to begin.
MICHAEL
This Bob
Dylan
Spring is
cause for
celebration
in New York
2 | Crain’s New York Business | March 26, 2012
buck ennis
GROSS
Red ink flows at
Reader’s Digest
Third CEO in the
past year tries to stem
losses at the storied
magazine publisher
BY MATTHEW FLAMM
Leafing through the April Reader’s
Digest, people may think for a moment they’ve stumbled on an old issue. The 90-year-old flagship of the
Reader’s Digest Association has
brought back “Laughter, the Best
Medicine,” “Humor in Uniform” and
other signature features that haven’t
been seen in years.
What shows no sign of returning,
however, are the Reader’s Digest Association’s days as a profitable business. While the company has done a
decent job of dusting off its namesake
title, it has yet to update the way it
does business or figure out how to
wring profits from an operation that
brings in about $1 billion less in rev-
enue than it did eight years ago.
Even with waves of layoffs and restructurings that followed a 2009
bankruptcy filing, the company has
never gotten its costs in line. Reader’s
Digest’s new chief executive says
that’s what he plans to accomplish
over the next couple of years.
“Despite all the efforts to catch up
on the cost structure, we never really
have,” said Robert Guth, who is the
third CEO since the company
emerged from bankruptcy in February 2010. “It’s not a question of how
much we have to cut, but in what way.
It’s about taking what amounts to
hundreds of IT platforms and winnowing them down to dozens.”
Net losses for 2011 came to $393
million on revenue of $1.44 billion,
which was down about 2% from the
prior year, the company reported last
week. The losses were driven by declines in its international directmarketing businesses and a $262 million write-down from earlier in the
year, mostly of the company’s European assets. Its North American busi-
GOOD NEWS: Advertising rebounds at flagship.
ness remains fairly solid. Boosted by a
partnership with health insurance
giant Humana, advertising pages at
Reader’s Digest spiked 17% in 2011,
compared with the prior year, while ad
revenue across the company rose 7%.
Major changes
This is an old story for Reader’s
Digest, which was a direct-marketing
powerhouse until its sweepstakes promotions led to legal troubles and were
discontinued early in the last decade.
See RED INK on Page 46
Grand plans to remake
Domino sugar site come
unstuck as partners war,
financial woes mount
GOES SOUR
BY AMANDA FUNG
When Rafael Cestero took the helm of
CPC Resources Inc. in mid-January, the
development firm’s ambitious plan to
transform the sprawling remains of the
Domino Sugar factory on the Williamsburg waterfront into a vibrant residential
complex was at a standstill. Worse, the project’s $125 million land loan had come due
a month earlier and there was no cash to pay
it off.
Last week, the picture darkened still further when CPCR’s partner, the Katan
Group,filed a suit claiming that CPCR mismanaged the project and asked the court to
block last-ditch efforts
HUGE
to rescue the project by
converting much of
the project’s debt to
equity.
ORIGINAL cost
If Katan triumphs,
estimate for the all bets are off for Mr.
Cestero, the former
development
commissioner of the
city’s Department of
Housing Preservation and Development,
who is hoping to turn things around.
“From the day I was offered this job, I
knew this was one thing I had to tackle,”
said Mr. Cestero.
He is taking on stewardship of plans unveiled five years ago to convert the 11.2acre sugar-factory site into a $2 billion
mixed-use development that will include
2,200 apartments—30% of them affordable—and four acres of open space. Those
plans also include restoration of the 100year-old industrial landmark’s famous sign
looming over the East River.
Over the years, the project, which began
in 2004 when CPCR and Katan paid
$2B
See SWEET DEAL on Page 43
IN BRIEF
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL WILL BECOME
EVEN GRANDER NEXT YEAR WHEN IT
celebrates its 100th year of operation with several
major initiatives, including a new restaurant in
Vanderbilt Hall, a renovated 42nd Street
entrance and a historic exhibit of rare trains. The
festivities will kick off Feb. 1, 2013, 100 years to
the day after the landmarked building opened. A
centennial committee comprising nearly 30
business leaders, celebrities and government
officials will determine details of the celebratory
year. Its honorary chair is Caroline Kennedy,
whose mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,
saved the building from demolition in the 1970s.
BROOKLYN’S BARCLAYS CENTER WILL SELL
TICKETS STARTING THURSDAY FOR THE FIRST
hockey game to be held at the new area. Fans
will be able to buy seats for the Oct. 2 NHL
preseason game, which will pit the New York
Islanders against the New Jersey Devils. It’s an
important milestone for the facility, which has
been in the making since 2003, when Bruce
Ratner of Brooklyn-based developer Forest City
Ratner Cos. first announced he would be
purchasing the New Jersey Nets. 䡲
BY THE NUMBERS
Weekly shift of the city’s economy
SOLE SUCCESS American firms are hiring again.
The rub is that the world’s No. 2 economy,
China, is cooling, and Europe’s is getting
downright frosty.
689 $110B 32K
ANNUAL
RISE IN NY STATE
TB CASES
reported in NYC in economic activity high-school grads
generated in
between 2002
2011, lowest on
Times Square
and 2009
record
Source:
Source: NYC
area
Department of
Health and Mental
Hygiene
Source:
Times Square
Alliance
MORE IS LESS While the number of women-owned
businesses has shot upward in NYC in the past decade, the
total number they employ has sadly gone the other way.
Employment*
Number of firms
Once America’s best-managed
bank. Now, a different story
bloomberg news
A bad interest-rate bet
on $30 billion in loans
suddenly upends
Hudson City’s ride
BY AARON ELSTEIN
When the financial system nearly collapsed
in 2008, Hudson City Savings Bank stood
out as a bastion of sober, responsible banking. For steering clear of subprime mortgages and complex derivatives, Chief
Executive Ronald Hermance was praised
by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as the “George
Bailey Banker of the Year,” after the character played by Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. The New York Times chimed in
with its own admiring profile. Forbes lauded New Jersey-based Hudson City as the
best-managed bank in the nation.
Perhaps the ultimate tribute came the
day after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy: Hudson City’s stock hit an all-time
high as investors embraced just about the
only bank in the world whose profits were
Jim Cramer called
longtime CEO
Ronald Hermance
his ‘George Bailey
Banker of the Year’
growing. The company’s earnings jumped
50% in 2008 and continued rising over the
next two years, crossing a half-billion dol-
lars annually,as the stock soared 400% during the 10-year stretch ended in 2010.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end
there.
Last year proved to be an absolute disaster for Hudson City—and the future of
a local financial institution that dates back
to 1868 is now very much in doubt. It posted a whopping loss of nearly $750 million
in 2011 after a bet that interest rates would
rise soured, and the fallout from that fiasco may be a long way from over. In addition, Hudson City got smacked by a key
government response to the financial crisis that forced the modest institution with
$45 billion in assets to compete against the
federally controlled mortgage guarantors
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“The cure to the crisis is what’s hurt us,”
acknowledged Hudson City’s acting CEO,
Denis Salamone, a longtime executive at
the bank who assumed the top job last
month after Mr.Hermance,64,took a leave
of absence for a bone-marrow transplant.
Some of what ails Hudson City is
shared by the nation’s thousands of community banks, which have seen profits
Building a Grad
Nation
670,100
604,678
510,692 521,585
2002
508,301
2007
499,100
2012 (est.)
*Employment figures do not include business owners
Source: American Express Open
ADDICTED TO NUMBERS?
GET A DAILY DOSE AT @STATSANDTHECITY
CORRECTIONS
Valerie Geller was program director at WABC after Rush Limbaugh
launched his national show from New York in 1988. That fact was
misstated in the March 19 “Groups aim to crush Rush.”
Hartford Realty Co. owns 309 Columbus Ave., which is managed
by Five Star Management Co. That information was misstated in
the March 19 Real Estate Deals.
Doug Moore joined FSO Onsite Outsourcing as executive director
of client services and solutions. His name was listed incorrectly in
the March 19 Executive Moves.
The Mufson Partnership is one of a handful of interior-design
firms that specialize in hedge funds. The full name of the firm was
misstated in the March 12 article “Hedges draw a crowd.”
Gruzen Samton-IBI Group, a New York General Partnership, which
ranked 11th on the 2012 Largest Architecture Firms list, was the
architecture company for the modernization of the Emanuel Celler
U.S. Courthouse. The project name was unclear in the Feb. 27 list.
vol. xxviii, no. 13, march 26, 2012—Crain’s New York Business (issn
8756-789x) is published weekly, except for double issues the weeks of
July Fourth, Labor Day and Christmas, by Crain Communications
Inc., 711 Third Ave., New York, NY 10017. Periodicals postage paid at
New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send
address changes to: Crain’s New York Business, Circulation Department, 1155 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit, MI 48207-2912. for subscriber
service: Call (877) 824-9379. Fax (313) 446-6777. $3.00 a copy, $99.95
one year, $179.95 two years. (GST No. 13676-0444-RT)
©Entire contents copyright 2012 by Crain Communications Inc.
All rights reserved.
See HUDSON CITY on Page 46
March 26, 2012 | Crain’s New York Business | 3
IN THE MARKETS
by Aaron Elstein
Beware investor confidence game
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See New Yor k Cit y Our Way.
t long last, investing is
getting fun again.
Standard & Poor’s 500stock index is trading at levels
unseen in four long years.
Bank of America’s beaten
and bloodied stock has
doubled in value in recent
weeks, to nearly $10 a
share, and may not be a
single-digit midget for much
longer. Even individual
investors are getting their groove
back, with polling firm Rasmussen last week reporting that its
investor confidence index registered its highest reading of
market optimism since 2008.
Be afraid, folks, be very afraid.
Simply put, almost any time individual investors are feeling frisky is a
good time to sell stocks. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist—or even a
Wall Street strategist—to figure out why.The best time to buy stocks is when
they’re hated and, by extension, cheap. Yet individual investors tend to pile
into the market well after rallies already have taken place.
Data from the American Association of Individual Investors drive this intuitive
point home. The association has conducted weekly surveys of its members
for more than 20 years, and its data show that when 40% or more are optimistic that stocks will be higher in six months, it’s usually a good time to sell
shares. Conversely, when the optimism number slips below 40%, it’s typically a buying opportunity. Last week’s number: 42%.
In another sign of a market top, Wall Street’s cheerleader squads are
swarming the field again. Last week, the chief global equities strategist at
none other than Goldman Sachs proclaimed,“The prospects for future returns
in equities relative to bonds are as good as they’ve been in a generation.” He
went on to say in his report—punningly titled “The Long Good Buy”—that
“we expect [stocks] to embark on an upward trend over the next few years.”
At high times like this, it’s worth hearing from someone like Henry Blodget, the editor in chief of the Business Insider blog who rose to fame a decade
ago as a Merrill Lynch analyst touting dotcom stocks. Upon reporting last
week’s rise in investor confidence, Mr. Blodget tweeted, “Look out below.”
BATS all, folks: it’s one looney IPO tune
The Kansas-based stock exchange
BATS Global Markets, which competes
with the New York Stock Exchange and
Nasdaq, had a most miserable day
last Friday as it attempted to complete its initial public offering.
It started with The Wall Street
Journal reporting that regulators are
looking into whether certain highspeed trading firms used their relationships with BATS and similar
marketplaces to gain an unfair advantage.Things only went downhill
from there. Due to technical glitches, inaccurate prices were posted on
BATS for not only its own shares,
but also for Apple. Trading in
BATS’ stock was halted not long after the market opened. The company ultimately pulled the plug on the
IPO.Talk about your freaky Fridays.
The question now is whether the
mess caused any lasting damage to
BATS’business.If it did,a big writedown looms.
That’s because about a third of
BATS’ assets—$186 million, to be
exact—is what accountants call
goodwill. It’s a balance-sheet item
that reflects the value of the BATS
brand and the price it paid abovemarket for acquisitions. Under accounting rules, goodwill must be
written down if auditors determine
the assets won’t generate as much
cash as had been expected. And
that’s a possibility if institutional investors were to start feeding orders
to the NYSE or Nasdaq instead of
BATS in light of Friday’s snafu. 䡲
The decline in
compensation awarded
last year to employees at
Credit Suisse Group. Chief
Executive Brady Dougan
(pictured) saw his pay cut in half, to $6.3 million, as
the bank’s earnings sank by 62% in 2011.
-18%
Commercial Banking Group
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NEW YORK,NEW YORK
edited by Valerie Block
Eatery extends stay at the Pierre
newscom
L
e Caprice, the London import at the Pierre, will be
staying at the posh property longer than expected.
Both the hotel and restaurant announced late last year
that Le Caprice would be checking out when the eatery’s
three-year lease ended in the spring. Now it appears that it
will remain at least through the summer. ¶ Caprice Holdings
Ltd., which owns the restaurant and about 15 others abroad,
is securing a new location in Manhattan, a spokeswoman
said. ¶ Meanwhile, Sirio Maccioni (below left) of Le Cirque
fame will open an Italian eatery in the space after Labor
Day, when Le Caprice finally exits, confirmed Mauro
Maccioni (below right), who is working with his father. They
have recruited chef Filippo Gozzoli from the Park Hyatt in
Milan to run the
kitchen, and they will
open a sidewalk café. ¶
“We have very exciting
developments
happening this year,”
said Heiko Kuenstle,
general manager of the
Pierre, which is owned
and operated by Taj
Hotels Resorts &
Palaces. For example,
the property’s new
executive chef, Ashfer
Biju, hails from the
Falaknuma Palace,
India’s only seven-star
hotel.
—lisa fickenscher
Looking high and
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New Jersey will open its first
medical marijuana dispensary in
the fall—nearly three years after a
medical marijuana bill was signed
into law—but according to writer
Mark Haskell Smith, whose new
book is a personal tour of the
cannabis industry, the East Coast
has a lot of catching up to do.
“The University of California
put out an agricultural guide to
California, and
far and away,
marijuana is
the state’s
biggest cash
crop,” said the
author of Heart
of Dankness,
which
Broadway
Books will
publish next
week (the
official pub date is April 20, also
known as Weed Day). “It’s [worth]
$2 billion to $3 billion in L.A.
County alone.”
Mr. Smith’s search for the
perfect weed—which is described
as “dank”—took him to
Amsterdam and to dispensaries in
the U.S. and Canada. Though
liberal drug laws gave the Dutch a
head start on cultivation, he
believes American growers are
now on the cutting edge.
“Colorado is going to be the
[No. 1] place,” he said. “They’re
more progressive with their
medical laws. People who used to
have shops in Amsterdam have
moved there.”
He argues that medical
marijuana is not a cover for overall
legalization, which he supports.
“There are hundreds of things it
can treat,” he said.
—matthew flamm
Footwear walks
into lead role
Forget The Hunger Games. For a
real emotional experience, check
out God Save My Shoes. The 70minute documentary, which
includes interviews with designers
Manolo Blahnik and Christian
Louboutin and aficionada Fergie
from the Black Eyed Peas,
examines the passionate
relationship women have with
their footwear.
New York-based producer
Thierry Daher came up with the idea
for the film after releasing a
documentary about sneakers and
hip-hop culture in 2006.
“After talking to my girlfriend,
I realized guys were nothing
compared to women with their
shoes,” he said, noting that one of
the film’s subjects owns a
whopping 1,100 pairs.
Six years and $500,000 later,
the film premieres March 30 and
is scheduled to run for a week at
the Quad Cinema on West 13th
Street, before a nationwide VOD
and DVD release in May. Mr.
Daher just scored a sponsorship
deal with discounter DSW, which
will supply prizes for a Facebook
contest related to the film.
—adrianne pasquarelli
TEAM COCO
COCO CAFE, a new beverage fromVita Coco, made
from coconut water, espresso, low-fat milk and cane
sugar, just launched in local shops, including
Gourmet Garage and Fairway. Founded by Elan
Eifer and Brian McCaslin, Coco Cafe was
purchased by New York-based Vita Coco last year.
The founders relocated here from California last
month. The company expects sales of more than
$20 million in the next 24 months.
NEIGHBORHOOD JOURNAL
Will vote on security
cameras, performingarts studio, other
budget proposals
BY SHANE DIXON KAVANAUGH
J
umaane Williams calls it a
crash course in city government. Six months ago, the
freshman city councilman
kicked off an unusual civic
experiment with his constituents in the central
Brooklyn neighborhoods of Midwood, East Flatbush and Canarsie.
He set aside $1 million of his district’s expected $3 million to $6 million capital budget for this year and
asked residents how they’d like to
see it spent.
“It’s their neighborhood,” said
Mr. Williams, who points out that
he’s borrowing on a practice pioneered years ago in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, which has since spread as far
afield as Montreal and Córdoba,
Spain. “At the end of the day, it’s
their money, too.”
From seniors to students, people
in Mr. Williams’ largely AfroCaribbean district have responded
vigorously to the process known as
participatory budgeting. They
packed churches, school auditoriums and community centers to
pitch everything from solarpowered greenhouses in apartment
complexes to roof repairs for the St.
Paul Lutheran Church on Avenue J
and a city-funded food cooperative.
All told, after months of effort
and dozens of meetings, 278 proposals were collected. In recent
weeks, that number has been whittled down to 13 finalists. Among
them are security cameras for dangerous street intersections, additional air conditioners for P.S. 198
and a performing-arts studio at the
Tilden Educational Campus.
One of the few
Mr. Williams is among four city
council members experimenting
with participatory budgeting as
New York becomes only the second
U.S. city to pick up the idea. The
other council members are in Park
Slope, East Harlem and Far Rockaway. In 2009, a lone alderman in
Chicago put that city on the map as
the first place in the nation to try.
The results there proved wildly popular, said the alderman, Joe Moore.
Early indications are that it’s working well here, too.
“It’s been a somewhat new and
wonderful adventure,” said Morgan
Gabriel, a community organizer in
East Flatbush, who has helped by
fielding volunteers to perform such
tasks as organizing meetings and
coordinating logistics.“This is a real
opportunity for people to participate, discuss real issues and make
real decisions.”
Now Mr. Gabriel and others are
gearing up for the hard part: getting
residents 18 and older to come out
and actually participate by casting a
ballot. Descriptions of the 13 final
proposals were widely distributed,
beginning in February. Next, the
Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum, the
Rugby Library and a handful of
other spaces will serve as polling stations from March 25 to April 1.
“It’s the biggest battle we have,”
Mr. Gabriel said. To win it, he and
others are redoubling their efforts.
Teams of volunteer canvassers and
interns are out in the streets spread-
ing the word.They’ve put up signs in
storefronts and spoken to block associations to educate people on the
process. And they’ve unleashed a
blizzard of fliers on housing complexes, churches and schools.
A positive response
On a recent afternoon, a trio of
canvassers stopped Helen Kettrell
on the street while she was walking
to her single-family home on Tilden
Avenue and East 58th Street, and
got an enthusiastic response.
“I thought it was wonderful,”
said the 78-year-old Ms. Kettrell.
“It’s the way it should be.”
Mr.Williams admits he’s not setting his hopes too high. He insists
he’d be thrilled to have 2,000 people
vote by April 1—that’s 1,400 fewer
than the number who voted for him
in the six-way primary he won three
years ago.This is not, he said, necessarily about the numbers.
“We’re achieving what I hoped
office of councilman jumaane williams
B’klyn residents have say on spending
PARTICIPATING: Central Brooklyn residents
meet to discuss spending proposals.
we’d achieve,” he said. “We’re engaging our community and empowering them.” 䡲
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THE INSIDER
bloomberg news
by Jeremy Smerd and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
Congestion ahead
for Gridlock Sam
T
ransportation maven Sam Schwartz had not
intended to roll out the master plan for city traffic
he’s been concocting just yet. He’s still tinkering
with it and hasn’t briefed all the key politicians
and interest groups. But it was outed this month
by New York Times columnist Bill Keller, who was tipped off by
a fan and persuaded Gridlock Sam to walk him through it.
Mr. Schwartz now finds himself riding a wave of interest in
his proposal, which he has been honing for two decades. Last
week he detailed it to Crain’s and The Wall Street Journal and
expects to pitch it to editorial boards.
The logic of his benignly named
“Equitable Transportation
Formula” has impressed the experts
and laymen who have seen it.
That’s not a surprise: Mr. Schwartz
has been part of New York’s traffic
cognoscenti for 40 years, and the
city’s road and bridge network has
much room for improvement. But
will the plan find traction with the
public?
Unlike the congestion-pricing
scheme rejected by the state
Legislature in 2008, Mr. Schwartz’s
proposal is a broad rethinking of
how people and goods move across
the metro area. Despite the
transportation network’s illogical
design, however, proposed changes
always draw an outcry.
One politician who viewed
Mr. Schwartz’s PowerPoint
presentation deemed it the best
traffic plan he’d seen because it
would lower tolls for his constituents—but said he could never
vote for it because it would charge
for some trips that are now free.
But Mr. Schwartz need not
persuade every politician, just
enough of them. On the plus side,
his plan reduces driving costs in the
districts where opposition to the
2008 plan was strongest. But it
adds costs in areas that supported
the last plan, namely by tolling the
East River bridges, which drivers
last paid to cross in 1911.
The Bloomberg administration
is studying Mr. Schwartz’s
proposal. But the Cuomo
administration and the Legislature
will not take it up before the state
budget is done, and perhaps not at
all in 2012, because it is a lot to
digest, especially in an election year.
GOODWILL INDUSTRIES
OF GREATER NEW YORK
AND NORTHERN NEW JERSEY
presents
Policy,
Economy,
Training and
Employment
JANE OATES
KEYNOTE
ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF LABOR
Friday, April 20, 2012
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Lighthouse International Building
Academy Theater
111 East 59th Street,
New York, NY 10022
Limited Seating Available
RSVP Erika Jeffers 718.371.7251
[email protected]
ECONOMISTS PANEL
Paul Harrington, Drexel University
The Honorable Edward Montgomery,
Georgetown University
Moderated by:
Henry E. Gooss, Investor Growth Capital, Inc.
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT PANEL
Kim Jasmin, JP Morgan Chase Foundation
Pat Jenny, The New York Community Trust
Elaine Katz, Kessler Foundation
Chauncy Lennon, Ford Foundation
Moderated by:
Stephanie Powers, Council on Foundations’
Public - Philanthropic Partnerships Initiative
HOSPITAL WOES Trustee takes over
THE NEW Chapter 11 trustee for
Peninsula Hospital Center received
all necessary approvals late last
week from the state Department of
Health to begin operating the
Queens facility. The trustee, Lori
Lapin Jones, now has complete
authority at Peninsula.
She replaces a former Revival
Home Health Care executive who
took the helm when Revival came to the hospital’s financial rescue.
On Feb. 23, the state closed Peninsula’s laboratory after deeming
conditions a threat to patient safety, and stopped the hospital from admitting
patients. Hundreds of workers lost their jobs.
Richard Cook, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Health’s
Office of Health Systems Management, said his agency recommended
approval of Ms. Jones by the Public Health and Health Planning Council
because swift action is required. But what that action will be is up to Ms.
Jones, as a neutral party to the bankruptcy. She supplants Peninsula’s
existing board and management.
During the proceedings, Mr. Cook and Ms. Jones fielded questions about
whether the hospital will reopen. The Department of Health will assess
whether the hospital’s laboratory is safe. The hospital’s lab could then be
recertified, or it may be decided that the hospital will remain closed because
there are no financial resources to operate it.
Mr. Cook noted, “This has to move very rapidly, given [that] Peninsula has
been closed for two or three weeks, and there is no revenue.”
Mr. Cook was asked if the lab work could be outsourced, allowing
Peninsula to reopen. He responded that Peninsula’s board and management
team “have yet to come up with a comprehensive plan to address it.” He
added that the Department of Health had “a process that had to have been
acted on, but [Peninsula has] not come back to us.”
City serves up
BID lite
The number of the city’s business
improvement districts has grown to
67 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
up from 23. But smaller commercial
corridors often need extra hands to
pick up garbage and plant flowers—
not provide security, marketing and
other services that add costs.
Small Business Services
Commissioner Robert Walsh told the
City Council last week that the
Bloomberg administration will
create a kind of BID lite.
BIDs will be able to purchase
sanitation services through a
centralized manager and forgo an
executive director and office space.
Beating pension
reform’s debut
Adam Lisberg’s first day as the
Metropolitan Transportation
Authority’s director of external
communications will be March 30,
meaning the outgoing City & State
editor will get in ahead of the
state’s new scaled-back pension
tier by 48 hours. “That
happens to be a consequence
of my decision,” he said, “but
not the reason for my timing.”
Mr. Lisberg won’t be the
only one to get in under the
wire. Public-sector unions like
DC37 and the AFL-CIO are
urging members to enroll
in public-pension
programs before Tier
VI, which increases
the retirement age
and employee pension
contributions, takes effect April 1.
Budget politics
The Assembly isn’t seeking many
changes to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s
proposed budget, but did not pass it
early so as not to appear to be in the
governor’s pocket, a Democratic
legislator said.
The budget, due by April 1, is
still expected to be on time,
assuming disgruntled Senate
Democrats don’t leave their
chamber to prevent a quorum.
Assembly Democrats will
essentially accept the governor’s
budget because Mr. Cuomo
delivered on several of their
priorities last December, including
a millionaires’ tax and funding for
flood relief, summer jobs and
displaced homemakers, the
legislator said.
Scarlett fever
A source close to Scott Stringer’s notyet-official mayoral bid said actress
Scarlett Johansson won’t just raise
money for the Manhattan
borough president, “she
will play an active role
in a variety of areas.”
Ms. Johansson’s
grandmother was a
housing activist who
worked with Mr. Stringer
when he was an aide to
then-Assemblyman
Jerrold Nadler. The
actress will
appear at another
Stringer fundraiser
April 5. 䡲
For daily political and government news, subscribe to
CRAIN’S INSIDER @ www.crainsnewyork.com/insider
SMALL BUSINESS
They find that
practical support
is more abundant
BY DIANE HESS
W
hen Tereza Nemessanyi, founder
of online Q&A
platform Honestly Now, argued about a year and a half ago on
a venture capitalist’s blog about the
need for a “startup accelerator” focused on women in their 40s, her
comments went viral.
The former PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant pointed out that
it’s not always viable for those with
children to relocate to Silicon Valley
to participate in prestigious programs like Y Combinator.
Since then, Ms. Nemessanyi, 41,
has been surprised by the increasing
activity to support women entrepreneurs, especially locally. In August,
she secured nearly $1 million in a
first-round investment led by Canrock Ventures and Golden Seeds, a
local angel investor network for
women business owners.
businesses win city contracts. Since
2005, the number of such businesses in the city has grown to more than
3,400 from 700, with those firms
winning more than $2.5 billion in
city contracts. The city, working
with American Express Open,
hopes to teach clients to win bids.
Certainly, there’s still progress to
be made. American Express Open
estimates that women own 8.3 million companies nationally and start
new businesses at 1.5 times the na-
tional rate. However, only 1.8% of
women business owners will have
annual sales over $1 million in 2012.
And women-owned businesses represent just 12% of the firms presenting to angel investor networks,
noted Jeffrey Sohl, director of the
Center for Venture Research at the
University of New Hampshire.
But many say the situation is
changing rapidly. Shazi Visram, 35,
the founder of organic baby-food
maker HappyBaby, said that a series
of high-profile awards for women
entrepreneurs have helped her boost
revenue to $36 million in 2011,from
$115,000 in 2006.
In 2010, Ms. Visram won the International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge, an initiative of the
Manhattan Chamber of Commerce
and overseas groups. “The IWEC
made so many opportunities for
me,” Ms. Visram said, noting that
the award led to participation in
World Trade Week and ultimately to
buck ennis
Starting up gets easier for women
TEREZA NEMESSANYI of Honestly Now
pushed for a startup accelerator for women.
finding an accounting firm. “There
is a snowball effect, and HappyBaby
has benefited from that trend.” 䡲
West Coast attention
Some of the support is coming as
players in the West Coast entrepreneurial world pay more attention to
New York’s percolating digital startup scene. For instance, Women 2.0,
a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that
promotes women technology entrepreneurs, helped call attention to
Ms. Nemessanyi’s startup through a
profile of her on its site.
“There has never been a better
time to be a woman entrepreneur in
New York,” said Ms. Nemessanyi.
The New York metropolitan area
now has 670,100 woman-owned
firms, the greatest number in the nation, according to new research commissioned by American Express
Open, the company’s small business
arm. The state had the secondlargest representation of womanowned firms, up from third place last
year, with most of them based in the
New York metro area.
“We have seen incredible change
in the past two years,”said Amy Millman, president of Washington,
D.C.-based Springboard Enterprises, a startup accelerator for womenowned businesses that has 10 New
York-based businesses in its program.
Ms. Millman credits the $22 million
New York City Entrepreneurial
Fund, created by Mayor Michael
Bloomberg in 2010,as a catalyst.“For
women, there is now infrastructure,
support and even involvement at the
university level,” she said.
The aid goes beyond funding.
Mr. Bloomberg just announced an
initiative called Compete to Win to
help minority- and women-owned
To sign up for Crain’s
SMALL BUSINESS newsletter, go to
www.crainsnewyork.com/smallbiz.
VIEWPOINT
Power up the electric grid
from existing plants in these areas would increase
employment where it is desperately needed and save
downstate the trouble and expense of building new facilities.
In his State of the State speech in January, Mr. Cuomo
pledged to issue a request for proposals to implement a
master plan addressing the state’s power needs for the next
50 years. The governor spoke of an “energy highway” system
costing $2 billion and financed by the private sector. He
didn’t mention that end users would ultimately pay at least
some of the bill. One issue he must resolve is how the
expense would be shared by the various beneficiaries.
But significant
progress can be made
relatively quickly
without spending a
fortune. Eliminating all
the choke points—
notably near Utica and
Albany—would take
eight to 10 years and
cost an estimated
$1 billion to $2 billion,
according to a study commissioned by transmission-line
owners. The upgrades that have the highest payoffs and
use existing rights-of-way should be identified and
completed first. Gains would be realized as work continued.
This would be a worthy investment in economic
development that also promises to help the environment by
making more sustainable energy sources, like wind farms,
feasible upstate. Mr. Cuomo should get started.
Now is the
time to build
NY’s energy
superhighway
Protect West Side stores
ZONING PLAN HAS BROAD SUPPORT
The premise of the article on the proposed
Upper West Side rezoning (“Victims of their
own success,” March 19) is that freezing the
number of storefronts wider than 40 feet would
occasion rent increases that force out some
businesses. Since there is no current restriction
on raising commercial rents on stores large or
small, correlating hypothetical rent increases
with the rezoning is at best speculative.
What is certain is that absent the proposed
limitation, landlords would remain able to
aggregate smaller storefronts into larger ones,
creating rent pressure on smaller tenants or
displacing them altogether. The proposal
directly addresses this squeeze, leaving
merchants now in wider stores in no materially
different position. Little wonder that so many
merchants support it.
The proposal was tailored to ensure that a
mix of stores can continue to flourish on the
Upper West Side along with larger stores, as
demand and the market permit.
The story’s predictions of dire rent increases
rely on an estimate by a broker who represents
CRAIN’S WELCOMES SUBMISSIONS to its opinion pages.
Send letters to [email protected].
Send columns of 475 words or fewer to
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building owners and who is a board member of
a BID that opposed the measure. It cites the
experience of a hardware store owner whose
shop is not within the affected zone and who
was forced to move twice—hardships that
might have been averted if the new zoning were
in place. Similarly, three of the other five
businesses given as examples of a possible rent
disaster are not within the area proposed for
changes.
The zoning amendment has the
overwhelming support of the community and
elected officials. Predictions of economic
disaster have no place in a serious effort to plan
for a sustainable future.
—mark diller, richard asche,
e thel sheffer
The writers are chair of Manhattan Community
Board 7, co-chair of the CB7 Land Use Committee
and former CB7 chair, respectively.
ARE DEMOCRATS TO
BLAME FOR RISING
GAS PRICES?
Date of poll: March 19
419 votes
No.
Production’s
up,
consumption’s
down, and the
Keystone XL
pipeline’s
consultant said
it would have
little effect on
gas prices.
58%
.
COMMENTS
42%
.
T
he most sensitive energy issue in New York
is Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desire to close
the Indian Point nuclear plant, which he
considers an unacceptable safety threat but
which the business community wants
open so the city won’t go dark. While that
is a worthwhile debate, it’s moot until New
York addresses another problem: the electric grid.
The state’s network of transmission lines is outdated and
underperforming. Bottlenecks in the grid prevent power
from being moved efficiently downstate from the northern
and western parts of the state. If New York City is to grow by
1 million people over the next quarter-century, as the
Bloomberg administration envisions, it will need more
electricity than it can get today.
The approach taken in recent years has been to build more
power plants in and near the city, which has resulted in a 30%
expansion of local generating capacity. But it’s only a partial
solution, and an imperfect one at that. Building plants can be
an expensive proposition that invites community opposition,
takes forever and gobbles up waterfront land that is better
used for housing, office space, retail and recreation. Witness
the renaissance that these uses have sparked in such Brooklyn
neighborhoods as Red Hook, Williamsburg and Dumbo.
A faster and more economical answer to our power needs
is to improve and add to the transmission lines that crisscross
the state. Generating stations in western New York have
about 4,000 megawatts of surplus capacity, and others in the
North Country and Quebec can also produce more
electricity than can be delivered. Generating more kilowatts
editor in chief Rance Crain
publisher, vp Jill R. Kaplan
Yes. Their actions
have curtailed
future supply and
caused
speculators to
drive up the price
of oil.
RUSH TO JUDGMENT
What Rush Limbaugh said is wrong. What
bothers me more is that the media choose
whom to pick on. Your article (“Groups aim to
crush Rush,” March 19) didn’t mention the
treatment Sarah Palin got from Bill Maher,
David Letterman and others. They go after
every woman who is a Republican using much
worse words than Limbaugh did.
This looks like a joint effort to help the
For this week’s online-poll questions: Go to
www.crainsnewyork.com/poll to have your say.
Democrats and divert the conversation away
from the real issues—like the economy, foreign
affairs and the national debt. The way this
article reads shows that Crain’s is joining the left
to demonize people the left doesn’t like.
—dov matz
EDITORIAL
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columnists Greg David, Michael Gross,
Alair Townsend
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senior reporters Theresa Agovino,
Aaron Elstein, Lisa Fickenscher, Matthew Flamm,
Daniel Massey, Miriam Kreinin Souccar
reporters Amanda Fung, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh,
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PUBLISHED BY CRAIN COMMUNICATIONS INC.
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OPINION
UWS zoning plan
ignores Econ 101
H
ow is it possible that a proposal from the Department of City Planning designed to preserve
mom-and-pop stores on the Upper West Side
will almost certainly result in the demise of the
beloved Popover Café?
The answer is actually quite simple. City Planning is ignoring how markets work as it rushes headlong into its worst decision since the ill-fated effort to preserve the garment district in
the late 1980s (see “Garment district policy fails
the city,” Feb. 20). The
plan would rezone retail
strips on Columbus and
Amsterdam to preserve
small retail sites and
would specifically limit
bank frontages.
Here, briefly, is
what’s wrong with this
plan.
City Planning has
decided to pick winners
and losers among both
retailers and landlords. It plans to
stack the deck in favor of small retailers rather than letting consumers
on the West Side decide who stays
and who goes, according to where
they shop. Landlords who currently
have large spaces will
benefit because they
will be able to charge
much higher rents;
landlords who are stuck
with small spaces will
get less rent.
The Popover Cafés
in the area are doomed
precisely because they
have become successful
enough to justify bigger
stores (see “Victims of
their own success,”
March 19). National
chains shut out elsewhere will be
willing to pay premiums for grandfathered stores and can easily outbid
the locals—even the ones that are
thriving or are just outside the restricted area. City Planning’s job is to
GREG
DAVID
Pension wild card
threatens reform
T
he pols in Albany ground out the sausage of pension reform buffeted by a union campaign asserting that workers were being asked to give up a reasonable retirement, even as they were prodded by
a drumbeat of editorial commentary insisting that
it was past time for bringing public-worker pensions more in
line with private-sector practices and with what the public could
afford.
The result is less
than the bold breakthrough proposed by
Gov. Andrew Cuomo,
but takes several significant steps in the right
direction. The new provisions apply only to
workers hired after
April 1; no current employees will be affected
because of restrictions
in the state constitution.
Most employees will
have to contribute more
to their pensions, thereby reducing
the taxpayer burden.The retirement
age for most workers was raised to
63, not 65 as the governor proposed.
Pension-padding by counting overtime and unused sick leave in the
base for pension calculations was re-
duced, although by far
less than the governor
wanted. The pension
formula was adjusted, so
most pensions will be
somewhat smaller.
One provision added
late in the game is a nod
to local officials who
have watched the Legislature sweeten pensions for their employees year after year over
their objections, with
localities forced to pay
for the provisions. Now these mandates will have to be funded by the
state. In the past, state officials have
wildly underestimated the cost of
their sweeteners, and there is no
guarantee they won’t do so in the future. But paying for the goodies they
ALAIR
TOWNSEND
determine the appropriate amount of
retail space,not which retailers ought
to be favored.
Finally, the plan is clueless about
retailing trends. Banks are likely to
start abandoning branches given
how lousy their consumer business is
these days. It also ignores the role
played by drugstores. The reason
they’ve been getting bigger is because
they no longer serve just as pharmacies, but as convenience stores providing a fast shopping experience and
a wide range of products at good
prices. Even the Upper West Side
needs more of them, not fewer.
City Planning defends its proposal as a carefully calibrated one
that will have only a modest impact.
If so, why take such a step at all? It
also insists that it addresses an extreme situation in a specific area of
the city and that it is not setting a
precedent. The department is deluding itself. If this proposal is
adopted, other areas will clamor for
similar treatment, and City Planning will have to agree,having abandoned a key principle of zoning.
The mystery of this plan is why
the Bloomberg administration is
pushing it. It is nothing less than a
repudiation of the mayor’s constant
refrain that the market, not the city,
should decide which retailers operate in New York. To be clear, it undermines the mayor’s support for
Walmart in a fundamental way.
It is past time for the grown-ups
in the administration who understand economics to get involved.
hand out is a sound principle.
The governor proposed offering
a 401(k) benefit to all state and local
employees, recognizing that portability is a valuable feature at a time
when few workers stay with the same
employer for their entire careers.
SUNY professionals now enjoy this
kind of plan. But union leaders, in a
burst of paternalism, succeeded in
limiting this benefit to nonunion
employees making $75,000 or more.
The net result is that instead of
saving $123 billion over 30 years as
envisaged by the governor, the reform plan will save $80 billion, including an estimated $21 billion for
New York City.
Thrown in, probably at the last
minute to assuage union leaders, is a
wild card that could undo much of the
progress. This “benefit enhancements” language hands the governor
and the mayor the power to approve
union petitions enabling workers to
retire on full pensions at age 57 after
30 years of service. The legislation
stipulates that the cost of any such enhancements must be covered by employee contributions.But it is unfathomable why, after all this Sturm und
Drang, such power would be given to
anyone. And it is impossible to believe that, in the end, the calculations
for higher employee contributions
would truly hold taxpayers harmless.
It’s a safe bet that petitions are
being prepared now. It’s also a safe
bet that Mayor Michael Bloomberg
won’t grant them, but who knows
what his successors will do—or even
the governor, for that matter.
R E A L E S TAT E D E A L S
BACK IN GEAR
New tenants bring 7 WTC to capacity
Telemetry, Casey
Family Services are
sold on the location
A
British
technology
firm opening its first
permanent U.S. office
and a nonprofit centered on improving
children’s lives signed
deals for a total of
12,400 square feet at 7
World
Trade
Center,
scooping up the last
available smaller spaces
at the tower. Those two
leases follow a 2011
deal for 125,000 square
feet that claimed the
last of the sizable
acreage in the 52-story,
6-year-old
tower
owned by Silverstein
Properties.
The two newest
tenants have a couple of
things in common.
Both will move onto
the 46th floor in the
summer, and the asking rent on
each deal was $70 a square foot.
One of the differences between
them is that one wanted to be
downtown while the other did not.
Telemetry, a London-based firm
that measures the effectiveness of
digital ads, signed a seven-year lease
for 5,400 square feet, or 13% of the
floor. Originally, Telemetry wanted
to locate in midtown south, near
many other tech firms, but it also
wanted to occupy recently built
space, according to the company’s
broker, Sam Seiler of
CBRE Group Inc. An
extensive search turned
up nothing that fit the
bill. However, when
Telemetry executives
visited 7 World Trade
and saw the design and
the views, they were
hooked.
“It is their first permanent office in the
U.S., so they wanted
something that made a
statement,” Mr. Seiler
said. “They wanted
something splashy.”
In contrast, Casey
Family Services, which
provides family advocacy, adoption and foster care services,
wanted to stay downtown. With its
lease at 1 Liberty Plaza nearly up
and no additional room available
there, the agency signed a six-year
deal for 7,000 square feet. It, too,
was drawn to the views,as well as the
building’s LEED status,said its broker Bill Iacovelli, also of CBRE.
Silverstein Properties was represented by CBRE brokers Brad
Gerla and Christie Harle.
—theresa agovino
Designer pushes
the envelope
The fashion hub of the meatpacking
district is drifting northward onto
altogether artier ground. Designer
Steven Alan inked a 10-year deal for
2,600 square feet at 144 10th Ave.
(right), at West 19th Street. The
asking rent for the
space, which is a new
building just down
the street from the
High Line, was $99 a
square foot. A small
storage basement was
included in the deal.
“We think it
stretches the bounds
of the fashion district
up into the art district,” said Rafe
Evans, the Walker Malloy & Co.
broker who represented landlord
Highline 19.“It kind of unites meatpacking with gallery.”
This will be the fifth Manhattan
outpost for the 13-year-old Steven
Alan brand. It should open for business in early summer, according to
Keith Fencl, the McDevitt Co. broker who represented the tenant in
negotiations.
Media outfit roosts
in financial area
Journal Register Co.is getting its first
official Manhattan office. The Yardley, Pa.-based local news and information provider has signed a sevenyear lease for 9,800
square feet at 5 Hanover
Square. The asking
rent was $37 per
square foot.
The tenant plans
to take over the entire
top floor of the 25story,
50-year-old
building by July.
Journal Register
currently subleases
space at 590 Madison
Year-end average asking rent per
square foot
Upper
Madison
Ave.1
Upper
Fifth
Ave.2
2008
$1,016
$1,874
2009
$769
$1,553
2010
$778
$2,200
2011
$1,013
$2,550
1-From 57th to 72nd streets. 2-From 49th to
59th streets.
Source: CBRE Group Inc.
Ave. and occupies a fully outfitted
office suite that it rents in a workspace center operated by Regus in
the Helmsley Building, said Gordon
Ogden, a broker at Byrnam Wood.
Mr. Ogden and his colleague Benjamin Mohr represented the tenant.
“The top-floor presence was
great, and they found affordable
space,” said Mr. Ogden, adding that
Journal Register looked at midtown
south, where rent is more expensive.
Frank Cento, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield Inc., represented
the landlord, Savanna.
—amanda fung
BUILDING MEASUREMENTS are more
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CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS
www.crainsnewyork.com/40under40
Photography by Buck Ennis
NEW YORK’S R I S I N G S T A R S
New York’s rising stars Alphabetical index of the 40s
EDITOR’S NOTE
25 is the new 40
W
Welcome to Crain’s annual “40 Under 40” list. Every year
for the past 25 years, Crain’s has been identifying 40 of
New York’s most ambitious young achievers. This year is
no exception. Inside this report, readers will find concise
profiles of talented individuals who represent the best of
what this city’s business community has to offer.
This year’s group includes tech entrepreneurs, nonprofit
leaders, political go-getters and real estate mavens who are
rebuilding New York after three years of troubled
VALERIE
economic times. Our honorees share an intense passion
BLOCK
about their careers, they are tireless cheerleaders for their
industries, and they pursue their goals with tenacity.
We received nearly 700 nominations for this year’s list. Choosing the
winners is a process that takes more than three months of careful review and
reporting. It is a challenge that our editorial staff takes seriously. Once again,
we believe we have honored 40 of the most deserving individuals. We hope
you enjoy reading their stories as much as we enjoyed writing them.
To catch up with 40s alumni who’ve been in the news this past year, please
check out “Where are they now?” on Page 39.
valerie block
Deputy Managing Editor
LISTEN to a discussion at CrainsNewYork.com/audio
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F2
March 26, 2012 ❘ www.crainsnewyork.com/40under40 ❘ Crain’s New York Business
Rory Albanese..................F10
Steve Crutchfield................F6
Jennifer Hyman ..............F16
Scott Alper ......................F24
Will Dean ........................F24
Neal Kwatra ....................F12
Eva Price..........................F20
Paula Anderson................F10
Bhairavi Desai....................F8
Robert Lopez....................F18
David Rhodes ..................F12
Nadim Barakat ................F14
Nicole Dosso....................F18
Bobby Marks....................F23
Charlotte Ronson ............F23
Kevin Beiner ......................F8
Aria Finger..........................F4
Hilary Mason....................F12
Jonathan Rosen ..............F22
Brad Bender ....................F22
Melissa Fisher..................F14
Ryan McInerney ..............F10
Nate Silver ......................F23
Erica Berthou ..................F16
Pablo Heras-Casado ..........F6
Brian O’Kelley ..................F18
Josh Tyrangiel....................F4
Nick Cannon ......................F8
Caswell Holloway IV ........F16
Sukanya Paciorek ............F24
Shazi Visram....................F20
Huey-Min Chuang..............F6
Michael Houston ..............F21
Christopher Palmieri ........F20
Willy Wong ......................F14
Shirley Cook ....................F20
Daniel Humm ....................F4
Melissa Pianko ................F22
Aric Wu ............................F21
CONTRIBUTORS
SECTION DESIGNER Carolyn McClain
PHOTOGRAPHER Buck Ennis
COPY EDITORS Steve Noveck,
Watch 40s videos online
WHAT’S IT LIKE to work in the glare of the public eye as a star chef or a
political reporter? How does one make a mark behind the scenes, say, of a
Broadway show? What are the challenges of building a better New York
City? We talked with several of this year’s rising stars to find out. See the
interviews at www.crainsnewyork.com/40svideo.
You can also check out additional photos and browse our archives for
profiles of past 40s, dating back to 1991, at www.crainsnewyork.com/
40under40. Learn what Crain’s had to say about Rachel Maddow, Thelma
Golden, David Bouley and other “40 Under 40” alumni before they were
household names.
Thaddeus Rutkowski
VIDEO EDITOR Conor McBride
MOTION GRAPHICS ARTIST
Songe Riddle
VIDEO Elisabeth Butler Cordova,
Steve Raddock, Buck Ennis
SENIOR PRODUCER Kira Bindrim
WEB DEVELOPER Chris O’Donnell
GRAPHIC IMAGES Istock photos
ON THE COVERS
Clockwise from left: ROBERT LOPEZ, composer, lyricist, MICHAEL
HOUSTON, Grey New York, NEAL KWATRA, Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman’s office, SERKAN PIANTINO, Facebook, BRAD
BENDER, Google, EVA PRICE, theater producer, PAULA ANDERSON,
Shearman & Sterling, CHARLOTTE RONSON, fashion designer
Serkan Piantino................F20
ARIA FINGER
DoSomething.org
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36 USC 220506
Daniel Humm, 35
Co-owner, chef
ELEVEN MADISON PARK
E
Even as a child, Daniel Humm knew exactly
what he wanted to do with his life. At 14, to
the dismay of his family, he quit school in his
native Switzerland to begin working in
restaurant kitchens.
“When I believe in something, I don’t really care
about other people’s opinions,” said the chef.
He continued to make dramatic, lifeupending decisions. After becoming the
youngest chef in Europe to garner a
prestigious Michelin star, he moved in
2003 to San Francisco to the acclaimed
Campton Place
eatery. It was his
work there that
caught the attention
of restaurateur
Danny Meyer, who
recruited him to
take over the
kitchen of the
swanky Eleven
Madison Park.
“We set about the
entire country to
hire someone who at
a young age had
accomplished much
but still had an
entire career ahead
of him,” said Mr.
Meyer. “There is a
small field of people
who fit that
description.”
Not only did Mr.
Humm excel in the
Lending a hand
to those in need
Aria Finger, 29
Chief operating officer, DOSOMETHING.ORG
F
Five years ago, when Aria Finger walked into the office of Scott Birnbaum, senior vice president
of marketing and e-commerce for Aéropostale, the retail executive had never heard of
DoSomething.org—a nonprofit focused on youth philanthropy. One hour later, Ms. Finger had
persuaded the clothing company to create a national campaign in its stores in which shoppers
who donate a pair of used jeans for charity receive 25% off a new pair.
“Her energy is almost contagious,” Mr. Birnbaum said. “When you talk to her, you get lifted
because she wants to make it happen so bad.”
Since that fateful meeting, the now annual Teens for Jeans campaign has collected more
than 2.3 million jeans for 800 homeless shelters, and is Aéropostale’s No. 1 philanthropic
program.
That was just the beginning for Ms. Finger, who has been promoted
four times in six years. She helped increase corporate funding from
$840,000 in 2007 to more than $2.6 million in 2011, and has increased
the number of teens who participate in DoSomething’s 30 annual
campaigns by more than 400% in the past four years, to 2 million.
The six-foot-tall, fast-talking executive says she got the socialactivism bug from her father—a former hippie who protested the
Vietnam War—and her self-assurance from her close-knit family and
a childhood marked by achievement.
“I was valedictorian in high school and I was good at sports,” said
Ms. Finger, who was recently one of 10 people under 30 from the United
States chosen to present at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. “That gave me the confidence to hopefully change the
world a little bit.”
—miriam kreinin souccar
WHO
KNEW?
Aria
Finger, at
six feet,
is the
shortest
person in
her family
F4
Josh Tyrangiel, 39
Editor
BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
F
For his senior-year project at Baltimore’s
Park School, Josh Tyrangiel did something
different. While his classmates trotted off
to office jobs, he cold-called his way into a
spot on the grounds crew for the Baltimore
Orioles and worked for six months in the
hot sun alongside dirt-poor groundsmen
and millionaire baseball players. He recalls
two things: the job’s fascinating “class
dynamics” and his classmates’ extreme
envy. “They figured out pretty fast that I’d
won the senior project of the year award,”
he said.
It was vintage Tyrangiel, a consummate
polymath with an infinite ability to surprise and an
unstoppable urge to win. “On the rare occasions
when he’s beaten in any game, it will never
be the last game of the evening,” said Matt
Selman, a former University of Pennsylvania
classmate, who is executive producer of The
Simpsons.
At Bloomberg Businessweek in 2009, the
shock only started with the fact that a
veteran of Rolling Stone, Vibe, MTV and
Time, with a master’s in American studies
from Yale, had been offered the job of editor.
What surprised many was that—despite
little known interest in business—he took it.
But the biggest eye-opener is the one he
delivers 40,000 words’ worth of each week, a
magazine that combines zippy graphics and
authoritative news coverage in its early pages,
and then leaves the rails of predictability in
FACTS
21
15
ARE
MARRIED
HAVE
CHILDREN
job, he led the renaissance of the grand
restaurant, earning a coveted three-star
review in The New York Times in 2007, which
was upgraded to four stars in 2009.
Last year, he and
General Manager
Will Guidara bought
Eleven Madison Park
from Mr. Meyer. The
partners formed their
own enterprise, Made
Nice, and opened
the NoMad
restaurant in the
NoMad Hotel, just
four blocks away.
Will he be an
empire builder like
his former boss?
“Eleven Madison
Park is the most
beautiful restaurant
in New York, and I
don’t want to get in a
situation where I can’t
be here,” Mr. Humm
insisted.
—lisa
fickenscher
the latter ones with long pieces on everything
from valuable sperm-whale excretions to
rampant corruption in Indonesia. “He
delivers surprise,” enthuses Norman
Pearlstine, Bloomberg’s chief content officer.
And it works. Subscriptions are up, ad
pages jumped 19% last year, design awards
have rolled in, and Bloomberg Businessweek,
astonishingly, has become a hot title, despite a
dual-name logo that has cost it on the
newsstand.
—erik ipsen
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In tune with his talent
Pablo
Heras-Casado, 34
Nobody was
going to give
me anything, so
I had to do it
myself
Principal conductor
ORCHESTRA OF ST. LUKE’S
A
At just 17 years old, Pablo Heras-Casado
knew he wanted to become a conductor. But
instead of spending years studying, he
founded his own ensemble, followed by
others. For the next decade, the young
entrepreneur handled everything for his
amateur groups, from designing posters to
carrying the instruments. Though he had no
money to pay his musicians—and he had to
live with his parents and give piano lessons to
stay afloat—they performed all over his
native country of Spain.
“I knew I wanted to conduct and nobody
was going to give me anything, so I had to do
it myself,” said Mr. Heras-Casado, who got
his start in music as a choir singer at the age
of 7. He was so talented that his workingclass parents spent their savings to buy him a
piano.
Those years seem a distant memory now
for the maestro, who is one of the fastest-rising
stars in the classical music world. He was just
named principal conductor of the
Manhattan-based Orchestra of St. Luke’s,
Huey-Min
Chuang, 39
Senior director
EMPIRE STATE
DEVELOPMENT CORP.
H
Huey-Min Chuang understands resilience.
At the age of 10, Ms. Chuang moved with
her family from Taiwan to Buenos Aires.
Unable to find work, her parents went back
home after a few months, leaving their four
children alone for five years with just
biannual visits and a monthly allowance. Ms.
Chuang, the second youngest, was left in the
care of her older siblings, then 15 and 13.
“There were rules we had as a family so we
weren’t broken apart,” she said. For starters,
they couldn’t talk to outsiders about their
home life.
Growing up fast, Ms.
Chuang opened a grocery
store in Buenos Aires when she
was just 13. That experience
helps guide her in her role
today as the senior director
of business and economic
development at the
Empire State
Development Corp. Ms.
Chuang last year codesigned a $55 million,
three-part program to
provide small businesses,
seed companies and
contractors with access to
$1 billion in capital.
When the BP oil spill
devastated coastal
Louisiana in 2010, the
White House selected Ms.
F6
‘‘
his first titled
appointment
with an
international
orchestra.
Though not a
household
name, the
orchestra
performs
regularly at
Carnegie Hall
and its
—Pablo
summer
home, the
Heras-Casado
Caramoor
International
Music
Festival in
Westchester. It just built a $37 million stateof-the-art rehearsal center in midtown
thanks to a major capital campaign.
In addition to his new post, Mr. HerasCasado will continue to conduct the world’s
most prestigious orchestras, including an
upcoming engagement with the New York
Philharmonic.
Musicians who play with him are dazzled. “He’s
unusually exciting and has an extremely
winning personality,” said acclaimed pianist
Emanuel Ax. “Orchestras love him, audiences
love him. He will become one of the great
masters.”
FACTS
37
19
7
GRADUATED
FROM
COLLEGE
HAVE
ADVANCED
DEGREES
HAVE
AN
M.B.A.
Chuang as one of three economicdevelopment specialists to assess the impact
of the disaster for the state’s Plaquemines
Parish. She also led a group that provided $12
million in grants to 12,000 flooded upstate
New York businesses from 2006 to 2008.
Even off the clock, Ms. Chuang, who
speaks seven languages, can’t help but assist
others. In 2004, she
founded an all-girls
charter school in the
South Bronx. Inspired by
the recent passing of her
mother, she is currently
creating a group to help
others cope with death.
“When she believes in
something, that’s what drives
her,” said Sue Lee, an
executive director at the
city’s Department of
Small Business Services,
who worked with Ms.
Chuang in 1999 at a
Chinatown nonprofit that
helped disadvantaged
women and minorities
become entrepreneurs.
—emily laermer
Steve
Crutchfield, 35
Chief executive
NYSE AMEX OPTIONS
V
Video games are a big reason for Steve
Crutchfield’s success. Another, in a
roundabout way, is Barack Obama.
First, the video games. After pouring
thousands of quarters into Ms. Pac-Man and
Gauntlet machines, the teenage Mr.
Crutchfield invented his own video offering
in the 1990s: BeamWars, which was a hit in
early versions of the Apple Macintosh. He
generated a few thousand dollars in sales, but
the real payoff came when a Johns Hopkins
University admissions officer admitted his
son loved the game. “I’m pretty sure that’s
why Hopkins gave me a scholarship,”
recalled Mr. Crutchfield.
He used his expertise as a computer
programmer to become a partner at an options
trading firm in his native Chicago at age 25.
Yet his career seemed to have petered out by
2004, when he got a call from Blair Hull, a
veteran trader who was looking to launch a
new firm after he was defeated by Mr.
Obama for the U.S. Senate.
“Steve’s the complete package,” Mr. Hull
said. “He writes code well in a variety of
languages, he understands markets deeply, he
manages people well, and I’d like to get him
back.”
After he spent five years running Mr. Hull’s
firm, the parent company of the New York
Stock Exchange came calling and put Mr.
Crutchfield in charge of an options trading
venture it co-owns with Goldman Sachs, Bank
of America and other institutions.
Today, Mr. Crutchfield’s division, NYSE
Amex Options, is the nation’s fourth-largest
options exchange by volume and has seen its
market share increase by 10 percentage points
over the past two years. “We’ve got a lot of
opportunities in front of us,” he said.
—aaron elstein
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Nick Cannon, 31
Founder
NCREDIBLE ENTERTAINMENT
getty images
T
The entertainment industry has its share of
dabblers, but Nick Cannon’s dabbling
amounts to at least four full-time jobs. The
31-year-old invented a word to sum it all up:
“entrepretainer.”
His gigs include hosting America’s Got
Talent and a syndicated top-40 radio
countdown show, programming
Nickelodeon’s TeenNick network and
running his own production company,
Ncredible Entertainment. He does it all
while raising year-old twins with his wife,
Mariah Carey.
Kidney failure, caused by an autoimmune
disease that he is currently battling, forced
him to give up his job as a morning-show
host on WXRK earlier this year.
Mr. Cannon grew up in San Diego but
entered the limelight in North Carolina,
where his father, a minister, let him speak to
the congregation. “I had the
ability to get in front of people,
but it wasn’t about becoming a
star,” Mr. Cannon recalled.
Michael Goldman, Mr.
Cannon’s partner at Ncredible,
came across the then-16-yearold performing stand-up at a
comedy club in Los Angeles
and became his manager.
“Nick’s first goal wasn’t to be
on Nickelodeon,” Mr. Goldman
said. “It was, ‘Can I become a
staff writer on All That?’ He
wanted to learn the business
from the ground up.”
Mr. Cannon got the job, and then went
on to headline his own programs on
Nickelodeon and MTV. He has also starred
in several movies, including
Drumline and Love Don’t Cost a
Thing. Ncredible, which he cofounded a little more than two
years ago, has already launched
docu-series Son of a Gun on MTV
and sold a sketch show to
Cartoon Network. It will produce
its first feature film this year. The
entertainer has a net worth of
about $25 million, according to
Celebritynetworth.com.
“Nick’s success model is never
WHO
KNEW?
Nick
Cannon
boxes
as a
hobby
A union leader
with drive
Bhairavi Desai, 39
Executive director, NEW YORK TAXI WORKERS ALLIANCE
T
There’s a long list of reasons why Bhairavi
Desai shouldn’t be the leader of yellow cab
drivers in the world’s biggest taxi market.
She’s a woman in an overwhelmingly
male industry. The Gujarat, India, native
grew up in New Jersey, so she isn’t a recent
immigrant. Plus, she doesn’t even have a driver’s
license.
But still, she’s been able to lead a group of
independent contractors—who lack the right
to formally unionize—to big gains in battles
with the city, garage owners and medallion
leasing agents.
“Her great strength is that drivers really
respect her,” said Ed Ott, a lecturer in labor
studies at the CUNY Murphy Institute.
“She’s the most interesting and accomplished
union leader of her generation.”
After graduating from Rutgers and
working briefly at an organization for battered
women, Ms. Desai took a job with a South
Asian community organization that provided
social services to taxi drivers. She wanted not
F8
Kevin Beiner, 33
Executive director
MANHATTAN EYE, EAR &
THROAT HOSPITAL
W
just to help the drivers, but also to organize
them, and in February 1998 she helped form
the TWA, with 700 members.
Since then, the union has grown to 15,000
members, who pay $100 a year to fund the
bulk of their organization’s $600,000 budget.
Ms. Desai led the fight for a fare increase in
2004 that resulted in the first raise for drivers
since 1996; won passage of a Bill of Rights
that represents the first city regulations
designed to protect drivers; received a charter
from the AFL-CIO to expand nationally, the
first nontraditional labor group in half a
century to join the federation; and even
married a driver. She has no plans to stop:
Winning collective-bargaining rights and a
fare increase that would help seed a health
fund for the drivers are next up.
“We’ve never allowed our exclusion from the
labor laws to dishearten us,” she said. “I couldn’t
care less. The workers decide whether or not
we’re a union.”
—daniel massey
Watching a nursing attendant struggle to
push a wheelchair up a ramp at the entrance
of the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat
Hospital one sunny morning, Kevin Beiner
asks if chairs are easier to push on rainy days,
when the hospital lays down a rug for safety.
Yes, she says, the extra traction does make
that incline less troublesome. Mr. Beiner jots
down a note to himself: Bring back the rug.
An eye for detail and a personable manner are
traits that helped rocket Mr. Beiner to the top of
his field. Seven years ago, he was a physical
therapy aide; now he’s the top executive at
the Manhattan hospital, which has 260
employees and projected 2012 total
operating revenue of $54 million.
This year, he
will directly
oversee $100
million of
upgrades and
construction at
the hospital, an
ambulatory care
center affiliated
with Lenox Hill
Hospital, part
of the $6 billion
North ShoreLIJ Health
—Kevin Beiner
System.
“Kevin is
‘‘
There is
no manual
on how
to run
a hospital
losing his understanding of what youth
culture feels is cool and fresh and
relevant,” Mr. Goldman said.
—ali elkin
unbelievably innovative and is a change
agent,” said Michael Dowling, North ShoreLIJ’s president and CEO. “He’s a leader in
training, and he will be leading a major
institution one day.”
One of five siblings growing up on Long
Island with a crane-operator father and a
school-nurse mom, Mr. Beiner joined North
Shore-LIJ in 2005 as an accounts receivable
representative and was a director for health
system operations by 2009. His rise was
meteoric, even without the medical degree
many of his peers possess.
“There is no manual on how to run a
hospital. But I have co-workers to turn to,” he
said. “My humility and ability to work with
people has been critical to me. I’ve been good
at building relationships.”
—barbara benson
A funny way to get to the top
Rory Albanese, 34
Executive producer THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
S
Since starting as a production assistant fresh out of college in 1999, Rory Albanese has held
many jobs at The Daily Show. But what really prepared him for the show-runner spot—which
requires him to watch over everything from production deadlines to sketch ideas—was going
out on the road as the 22-year-old opener for Daily
Show regular Lewis Black.
“I’d get destroyed, and he’d be, ‘I knew you were
going to bomb,’ ” recalled Mr. Albanese, who grew up
on Long Island in a family that expected him to get a
“real” job after college. “I learned how to write jokes, how to
perform and how to save myself onstage.”
Those skills are critical not just because Mr.
Albanese now writes jokes on a daily basis. He also
knows about connecting with a live audience, and can
help host Jon Stewart create the energy in the studio
that knocks out viewers at home.
In addition, Mr. Albanese has found that a well-run
team makes for a better show, though developing his
management skills has been another challenge. “We
don’t have managers here,” said the executive producer,
who brings his dog, Parker, to the office every day. “We
have funny people who are learning to be managers.”
—
The Comedy Central show’s success is no joke. For
‘‘
We don’t have
managers here.
We have funny
people who are
learning to be
managers
Rory Albanese
the second year in a row, Mr. Stewart is No. 1 in late-night
comedy, beating Jay Leno and David Letterman among
the advertiser-friendly audience of adults 18 to 49 years old.
Mr. Stewart said that Mr. Albanese contributes fresh ideas “and a constant re-evaluating of
what we’re doing.” But just as important, he has risen to the top without arousing resentment
among the staff. “Typically there would be a lot of revenge killings,” the host said. “But he has
somehow avoided that.”
—matthew flamm
Paula
Anderson, 35
Partner
SHEARMAN & STERLING
D
Driving to law school from New York City,
Paula Anderson found herself sitting with
her entire extended family in a van. Plastered
on the outside of the vehicle was a billboardsize poster of her face with “Guess who’s
going to Harvard?” printed in big letters.
All she could do was laugh. “It reminded
me that I should never be ashamed of where I
came from,” said the 35-year-old litigator,
F10
who was raised in Barbados by her
grandparents.
Ms. Anderson always wanted to be a
lawyer, inspired by Matlock, which was
shown on the island’s one television station
every afternoon. She earned a scholarship
from the Barbadian government and went to
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which
brought her close to her parents, who lived
in New York.
Now she handles foreign-corruptpractices cases and complex litigation,
often doing internal investigations. She’s
thwarted government cases against Big
Four accounting firms, and defended
Daimler AG in a lawsuit brought by
Chrysler’s creditors, getting the
multibillion-dollar case dismissed with
prejudice—an unlikely result for such a
high-profile suit.
“Paula can boil down the most
complicated matters into their real-life
consequences,” said Paul Hecht, director of
global litigation for Daimler. “Compared to
other lawyers, Paula has developed an art.”
Her pro bono work in international human
rights has taken her to
Rwanda, Sierra Leone
and Tanzania.
When not
weighed down by
legal matters, Ms.
Anderson goes back
to her roots and dons
the heavy feathers of a
calypso costume—
she’s danced in
Carnivale parades all
over the Western
Hemisphere.
—hilary
potkewitz
Ryan
McInerney, 36
CEO, consumer banking
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.
W
When he was starting out as a McKinsey
consultant more than a decade ago, Ryan
McInerney worked for a client who spent
millions shipping out CDs in the hopes that
folks would sign up for a new Internet dialup service meant to compete against AOL.
But the CDs had a big problem: No one
who opened them could find the code
needed to register, and Mr. McInerney, who
oversaw production, had to deliver the grim
news that the money was a total waste.
“That was an expensive lesson,” he
remembered. “I learned that you really have to
sweat the small stuff.”
Today, Mr. McInerney oversees Chase’s
5,400 bank branches and 17,000 ATMs from
coast to coast. It’s an enormous job, but it’s
FACTS
14
14
PLAY
AN
INSTRUMENT
WERE
IN
A BAND
5 GUITAR
8 PIANO
2 VIOLIN
really all about the small stuff, mainly keeping
20 million customers happy and 76,000
employees motivated. It also calls for a deft
touch when problems erupt, such as when a
Dallas branch decided to get rid of a donated
Christmas tree last year because of bank rules
against accepting gifts. After a media
firestorm, Mr. McInerney decided it was best
to let local employees make such a call.
A Michigan native, Mr. McInerney’s star
has been on the rise since he joined JPMorgan
Chase in 2005. Two years ago, he was tapped
to run Chase’s consumer division, and within
the bank, his people skills are considered so
formidable that he’s become one of its go-to guys
for dealing with customers and consumer advocates.
There was even talk about sending him to
Zuccotti Park in the fall to talk to the Occupy
Wall Street demonstrators. “Don’t think we
haven’t thought of that,” quipped his boss,
Todd Maclin, who heads Chase’s commercial
and consumer banking unit. “Todd has
tremendous people skills, and he’s got a very
bright future at Chase.”
—aaron elstein
We see where financial salaries
are going before they get there.
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© 2012 Robert Half. An Equal Opportunity Employer. 1111-9011
Revenge
of the nerd
Hilary Mason, 33
Chief scientist, BITLY
H
Hilary Mason loves to call herself a nerd. But
don’t be fooled. The seemingly antisocial
epithet belies Ms. Mason’s intimate
knowledge of the ways in which millions of
people consume and share
content online.
As the chief scientist for
Bitly, the 33-year-old
Manhattan native analyzes
some 80 million website links
that pour through the tech
company’s URL-shortening
service each day. While users
post their bite-size links on
social networking sites like
Facebook and Twitter, Ms.
Mason attempts to read the digital
tea leaves they leave behind.
She’s found, for instance,
that iPad, PlayBook and other
tablet owners use their
handheld computers most often before
bed—not before work. And while people
prefer to share breaking news and current
events, they’re more likely to read celebrity
gossip, watch viral videos and ogle cutekitten slideshows.
“It’s like I’m at mission control for the
Internet,” said Ms. Mason, who honed her
computer science chops at Grinnell College
and later at Brown University. “I am
watching this whole human theater unfold.”
Businesses, brands and celebrities are
eagerly watching as well—for
$995 a month, they can now
monitor their online reputations
thanks to a host of products and
services that Ms. Mason has
developed. Last year, clicks to
Bitly links grew to 300 million
a day, up from 100 million a day
in 2010.
When she’s not buried
beneath an ever-expanding
universe of data, Ms. Mason
bakes gingersnaps and makes
the rounds of the city’s thriving
tech scene.
She also co-founded
HackNY, a nonprofit group that
connects student techies with startups
across the city.
“She’s really the perfect poster child for the
New York tech community,” said Charlie
O’Donnell, a partner with Brooklyn Bridge
Ventures, a venture capital firm. “She has a
natural inclination to share what she learns.”
—shane dixon kavanaugh
WHO
KNEW?
Hilary
Mason’s
first
job was
as a ski
instructor
Neal Kwatra, 38
Chief of staff
OFFICE OF NEW YORK STATE
ATTORNEY GENERAL
ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN
L
Last summer, Neal Kwatra and his boss,
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, flew
west to talk California Attorney General
Kamala Harris out of a mortgage settlement
that went easy on banks. She would not
budge.
So Mr. Kwatra mobilized unions and advocacy
groups, mounting a national campaign to
pressure Ms. Harris, and she eventually
relented. The banks settled charges of robo-
David Rhodes, 38
President, CBS NEWS
H
He’s the youngest network news president in
television history, but a more interesting fact
about David Rhodes might be that he’s the
only CBS news executive whose career began
at Fox News. Even more important, the
executive who has helped make the CBS
Evening News competitive again is as much
at home with the ghost of Edward R.
Murrow as he was with conservative cable
news pioneer Roger Ailes.
And for that, Mr. Rhodes can thank his
Manhattan upbringing at the hands of a
mother from the Upper East Side and a
father from Baytown, Texas. “We always had a
diversity of views at home,” he said.
That diversity would be reflected in their
sons. Younger brother Ben—now deputy
national-security adviser—worked on the
Obama presidential campaign while Mr.
Rhodes was directing political coverage at
Fox News. “That’s the book we could write
that we never will,” he said.
Mr. Rhodes considers his own “eclectic”
voting record of no consequence to his job.
Since his arrival last year, he has been
rebuilding the last-place evening and
morning news programs with a hard-news
approach.
It’s been working. CBS Evening News
With Scott Pelley—the only network newscast
to show audience growth this season—
recently spent a week in second place among
viewers 25 to 54 years old. CBS hadn’t been
F12
signing foreclosures, but other malfeasance
remained fair game.
“Everything in life is organizing, building
relationships, understanding what motivates
people and figuring out the power dynamics,”
Mr. Kwatra said.
A son of immigrants from India, the
Queens native grew up in New Jersey and got
hooked on organizing after college while
campaigning with janitors and riverboat
casino workers in St. Louis. He came to the
hotel workers union in New York from Unite
Here, where he had orchestrated deals that
paved the way for unionization drives at
dozens of hotels across the country.
In less than three years as political director
at the Hotel Trades Council, Mr. Kwatra
helped turn its 30,000 members into prized
campaigners.
They were key
to Mayor
Michael
Bloomberg’s
2009 reelection,
numerous City
Council
election
victories and
Mr. Schneiderman’s run for
—Neal Kwatra
attorney
general.
“He’s really
one of the smartest people of his generation,” said
Kevin Sheekey, a former deputy mayor who
tried to hire Mr. Kwatra. “He has an
incredible ability to create political
organizations where none existed.”
Mr. Kwatra now oversees what is arguably
the most powerful law office in the country,
with a staff of 1,700 and a budget of $215
million. But his career, according to Mr.
Sheekey, has yet to peak. “He’s certainly
poised to take the national stage,” he said.
—daniel massey
‘‘
Everything
in life is
organizing
and building
relationships
second since 2006.
Mr. Rhodes has plenty more to do. The
relaunched CBS This Morning has yet to see a
ratings turnaround. And he’s hoping to
improve on what already works. Face the
Nation, for instance, will expand to one hour
in April.
“David is unassuming, he’s funny, and he
has amazing instincts about the news,” said his
boss, CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager.
—matthew flamm
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Melissa Fisher, 34
Chief operating officer
FRIENDS OF THE HIGH LINE
A
About 4 million people walk on the High
Line each year, making the fledgling park one
of the most visited places in New York City.
Melissa Fisher helped build it and now runs it.
The former suburban Ohio high-school
volleyball star—who fell in love with farming
at Dartmouth College—was hired as deputy
director of horticulture in 2008, before the
park was built, finding a way to follow her passion
even in the concrete jungle. Since the
organization was in startup mode, Ms. Fisher
handled everything from buying the
equipment to building a
30-person grounds staff.
In a year and a half, she
was promoted to director
of park operations and
horticulture. This past
fall, she became the No. 2
executive at the
nonprofit, overseeing
both administration and
operations.
“At times I’ve felt this
place was my child,” said
Ms. Fisher, who moved
from Brooklyn to
Chelsea with her
husband to be close to
work. “Trying to figure
out how to best get the
grout in the bathrooms
cleaned is as interesting to me as making sure
the park is pleasing to multimillion-dollar
donors.”
On call 24 hours a day, Ms. Fisher—who
rides motorcycles in her free time—has
chased trespassers off the High Line at 11 at
night. Her can-do style didn’t start there. As a
Peace Corps volunteer after college, she lived
in rural Tanzania, learned to speak fluent
Swahili and singlehandedly developed the
first school-lunch program in the region
where she worked.
“Her most remarkable feature is her range—
her ability to focus on detail while dealing
with very sophisticated strategic questions,”
said John Alschuler, chairman of the High
Line board. “She will someday run a major
New York City not-for-profit.”
Nadim
Barakat, 39
Managing director
CREDIT SUISSE
N
Nadim Barakat graduated from high school at
16 and, for the commencement ceremony,
built a battery-powered cap and mortarboard
that spun around, a family member recalls.
Today, he’s applying his talents to more
sophisticated pursuits by using some of the
fortune he’s amassed during his dozen years on
Wall Street to build a school for 325 students in a
Ugandan village.
He’s taken a particular interest in the
school’s building materials, recently deciding
that construction would proceed with 25,000
interlocking stabilized-soil bricks. It’s a big
commitment for the villagers, because the
bricks must be pressed locally and need a
long time to cure. But the building should
last longer, and making the bricks doesn’t
require much water or cement.
“He liked the idea that people would go
to such lengths to build a school,” said
George Srour, founder of Building
Tomorrow, the nonprofit that’s overseeing
the project.
It’s the sort of strenuous effort that Mr.
Barakat demands of himself as chief
investment officer for a Credit Suisse
division that invests $28 billion in private
equity funds on behalf of state pension funds
and other institutions. Mr. Barakat oversees a
team of more than 60 people who scour the
world for investment opportunities. They’ve
significantly outperformed both the S&P
500 and the top 25% of similar PE funds.
It’s taxing work, but Mr. Barakat keeps his
perspective. He immigrated to the U.S. with
his family at 13 after growing up in civil-wartorn Beirut. He remembers living with
electricity and water shortages and retreating
to the center of buildings to avoid attacks.
“When you have security and the ability
to plan for a future,” he said, “you know that’s
a gift.”
—aaron elstein
Branding the Big Apple
Willy Wong, 34
Chief creative officer
NYC & COMPANY
W
Willy Wong takes pride in the fact that a
record 50 million visitors traveled to New
York City last year. As the chief creative
officer of the city’s lauded tourism bureau,
where he has been promoted four times in as
many years, his efforts have made an impact.
“His touch permeates everything we do,” said
George Fertitta, chief executive of NYC &
Company, who brought Mr. Wong to the
agency when he took the reins in 2006.
Mr. Wong oversees global branding,
advertising and new-media development for
the agency. His work has netted several
prestigious honors, including the People’s
Voice Webby Award in 2010.
The Dartmouth College graduate, who
earned a master’s degree in fine arts from
Yale University, combines an artist’s
sensibility with the savvy business acumen he
developed while experimenting with careers
in finance and computer programming
before settling on design and marketing.
“My parents didn’t go to college, but they
always valued education and hard work,”
said Mr. Wong, whose parents emigrated to
the U.S. from Hong Kong when he was 5
years old.
That ingrained work ethic caught Mr.
Fertitta’s attention six years ago at his former
advertising firm, where Mr. Wong was the
art director. “I used to work at the office all night
and still be there when George arrived at
6:30 a.m.,” recalls Mr. Wong.
When he’s not promoting the Big Apple,
Mr. Wong designs books for Rizzoli
Publications, including a collaboration with
singer Lou Reed and artist-filmmaker Julian
Schnabel.
—lisa fickenscher
FACTS
19
12
16
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ARE
JETS FANS
ARE
YANKEES FANS
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METS FANS
F14
Caswell
Holloway IV, 38
Deputy mayor for operations
CITY OF NEW YORK
A
A desire to bring U2 to Central Park put
Caswell Holloway on the path to becoming
deputy mayor for operations, a perch from
which he’s rocking city government with
innovation. As a Harvard senior in 1996, he
responded to a recruitment pitch from the
Parks Department to market events and
create sponsorships. The Irish band never
came, but Garth Brooks did.
“I’m always looking for ways to make
things work better and solve problems,” Mr.
Holloway
said.
Rising to
chief of staff
in the
department,
Mr. Holloway
left to get a
law degree
from the
University of
Chicago. He
clerked for a
federal judge
—Caswell
and worked at
a white-shoe
Holloway IV
firm, but
missed the
satisfaction of
improving
New York—for example, he had parts of
Union Square resurfaced two days before a
Rock ’n’ Rollerblade event in 1997.
Hardworking and affable, Mr. Holloway
has brought stability to Mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s initially tumultuous third term,
using his knowledge of government’s inner workings
to pave the way for new ideas.
The deputy mayor, who grew up in
suburban Philadelphia, is implementing a
plan he drafted in his prior post as
environmental protection commissioner to
green the city so it absorbs more rain and
doesn’t dump so much sewage into
waterways during storms. Mr. Holloway is
also bringing more solar power to the city
and is initiating a plan to double the
residential recycling rate.
“He’s 100% the case that you would cite of
an appointment based on merit, not
seniority,” said Henry Stern, the former parks
commissioner who first hired Mr. Holloway.
“He’s doing terrific. He’s a very honest,
decent fellow.”
—jeremy smerd
‘‘
I’m always
looking for
ways to make
things work
better
Lawyer courts
life on the edge
Chief executive
RENT THE RUNWAY
Erica Berthou, 36
Partner, DEBEVOISE & PLIMPTON
F
For about 20 minutes last November, Erica Berthou was lost in the Borneo jungle with her
brother. They were amateur competitors in the Sabah Adventure 100k Ultra Marathon, a 19hour race. But she refused to give up. “I knew I was in second place, and there was no way I was
going to let anyone pass me,” said the mother of two. She finished second among women,
17th overall.
She brings the same determination to everything she does. One of the few women in
private equity law, Ms. Berthou has already made her mark: She’s
advised clients on raising more than $30 billion in private equity
funds, and is the Carlyle Group’s go-to lawyer for setting up
funds in emerging markets.
Growing up in Sweden, Ms. Berthou was a competitive
horseback rider poised to join the national team. Instead she
followed her hero—her dad—and became a lawyer.
She was at a small Stockholm firm when a client joined a
private equity consortium. Debevoise & Plimpton represented
another investor in the group. The New York legal team noticed
her immediately. “Here was this superstar junior associate who
had never done this before, but it was like working with one of
our own people,” said Rebecca Silberstein, a partner at
Debevoise. “You know how someone can be like a lightbulb in a
room? Forget the bulb. Erica is like the sun.”
Ms. Berthou accepted the job at Debevoise having never been to New York City. “We
wanted an adventure,” she said, adding that her husband, who is from Zimbabwe, was through
with Stockholm winters anyway.
“Given the choice between doing something where nothing is at stake, or where there’s a lot
at stake, I’ll always choose the risk,” she said. “It’s what energizes me.”
—hilary potkewitz
WHO
KNEW?
Erica
Berthou is
training for
an Ironman
competition
F16
Jennifer
Hyman, 31
T
Three years ago, Jennifer Hyman set out to
“democratize” fashion by launching Rent the
Runway. The business offers women the
chance to wear couture dresses they could
never afford for special occasions like proms
and weddings—and then return them.
“There are these key, marquee moments in a
woman’s life where you can give her this
aspirational experience,” explained the West
Village resident. At first, high-end designers
feared that Rent the Runway would
cannibalize their business. But Ms. Hyman
convinced them that customers would feel
like supermodels for a day, cherish the
memory and become loyal to the brands.
Thirty labels, including Lela Rose and
Badgley Mischka, signed on.
“It was a pretty heretical concept when
she came up with it,” said Scott Friend, a
managing director at Bain Capital Ventures
and an early investor in the company.
Ms. Hyman had faith. “In order to be an
entrepreneur,” she said, “you truly [cannot] care
about what people think.”
The gamble is paying off. Less than three
years in, the 100-employee company offers
175 brands and rents dresses and accessories
to more than 3 million members
nationwide. Revenue for 2011 was
reportedly near $20 million, triple that of
2010; on a typical weekend, more than
15,000 items are shipped. Ms. Hyman, who
co-founded the company with Harvard
Business School classmate Jenny Fleiss,
recently opened a 40,000-square-foot
warehouse in New Jersey and is planning a
similar facility in L.A. next year. In addition,
the company opened a pop-up shop in L.A.
last month.
Great News!
Congratulations, David,
on being named to
Crain’s 40 Under 40.
From your CBS family.
David Rhodes
President, CBS News
The book of Bob
Robert Lopez, 37
Composer, lyricist
R
Robert Lopez was 7 when he saw his first Broadway show, A Chorus Line. By fifth grade, he
had been in a school production of West Side Story. At 11, he wrote his first opening number,
about kids getting into a high school for gifted students. “That was the moment I knew what I
wanted to do. It was magic,” recalled the Greenwich
Village native.
When Mr. Lopez arrived at Yale, he majored in
English and avoided any class that could prepare him
for a career in law or medicine so he wouldn’t be
tempted to fall back on something. “I had no career
options,” he said.
Supporting himself in the city with temp jobs where
he’d “steal office supplies and use the phone,” Mr. Lopez
moved back in with his parents for four years while he
participated in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre
Workshop for songwriters. The result: Avenue Q.
Co-writing Avenue Q won Mr. Lopez his first Tony
Award, for best score in 2004, the year Avenue Q was
—
named best musical. Tonys two and three came last year
for co-writing the book and score of The Book of Mormon.
He picked up a Grammy last month for Mormon’s cast
album.
“Bobby is funny,” said Mormon producer Scott Rudin. “Seriously funny—smart,
sophisticated, sly, wicked, inventive, original and really very [expletive] funny.”
Success means it’s never been more hectic at the Brooklyn home Mr. Lopez shares with
his wife (fellow composer Kristen Anderson-Lopez) and their two young daughters. “My one
fear,” Mr. Lopez said, “is, will there be too many projects to juggle well while being a good
father and husband?”
—barbara benson
‘‘
That was the
moment I knew
what I wanted
to do. It was
magic
Robert Lopez
transforming the city. As the technical
coordinator on the project for the city’s fifthlargest architecture firm by number of
architects, Ms. Dosso is almost single-handedly
responsible for ensuring that 1 WTC is built to her
firm’s specifications. That means managing a
Nicole Dosso, 37
Associate director
SKIDMORE OWINGS
& MERRILL
W
When Nicole Dosso began studying
architecture at Syracuse University 20 years
ago, she quickly felt overwhelmed. She had
no idea how to use some of the tools she’d
been told to buy, and it seemed that many
classmates had far more experience.
“There were many phone calls home
where I’d say I made a huge mistake,” recalls
the Westchester native.
Her parents weren’t especially
sympathetic. Neither of them could afford to
attend college until they were adults, and they
wanted their daughter to take advantage of
the opportunity they never had.
Did she ever. Today, her work on projects,
including what will be the tallest building in
the country, 1 World Trade Center, is
F18
team of 50 architects and designers while
resolving issues with engineers and
contractors, so the 1,100 workers constructing
the 1,776-foot tower stay on schedule.
She can address engineering issues, design
challenges or construction problems with
equal aplomb, according to Mel Ruffini, an
executive vice president at Tishman
Construction, which is building the tower.
“That is really unique.”
It is also something that Ms. Dosso, who
is putting her skills to work at another huge
project, the 40-story office tower going up at
250 W. 55th St., enjoys doing.
“When you finally see the buildings taking
shape, you feel like you are contributing something
to the city,” said the 14-year SOM veteran,
who ran her first marathon last year and can’t
wait to repeat the feat again. She also
unwinds by taking photographs and
spending time at the beach in Spring Lake,
N.J., where she owns a home.
—theresa agovino
Brian O’Kelley, 34
Chief executive
APPNEXUS
T
Take it from Brian O’Kelley: There’s a future
in advertising. And as the CEO and cofounder of AppNexus, he’s likely to be at the
center of it.
In less than five years, Mr. O’Kelley has
built the online ad exchange into a forceful
player in the world of real-time display
advertising dominated by DoubleClick and
Google. The Flatiron-based company counts
eBay and Microsoft among its swelling list of
customers, as well as eight of the top 15 ad
networks in the world.
“Advertising is how consumers get
connected,” said Mr. O’Kelley, whose outsize
personality tops his towering six-foot-fiveinch frame. “It is the core lifeblood of the Internet.”
AppNexus aims to keep that lifeblood
circulating. Last year, it auctioned more than
10 billion ad impressions a day, up from 4
billion in 2010. The spectacular growth was
aided, in part, by $50 million in Series C
funding from an A-list group of venture
35
FACTS
16
26
LIVE IN
THE CITY
ARE NATIVE
NEW YORKERS
OWN THEIR
HOMES
capital firms that included Boston’s Venrock
and Union Square’s First Round Capital.
AppNexus has taken that cash infusion to
expand globally, while industry insiders
chatter about an IPO in the near future.
“We love to back entrepreneurs who think
really, really big,” said Mike Tyrell, a partner
with Venrock. “Brian doesn’t want to just
build a successful company. He wants to build
an absolutely killer company.”
It isn’t Mr. O’Kelley’s first. The Princeton
grad and Eugene, Ore., native has been
credited for creating the first lucrative ad
exchange, as the chief technology officer for
Right Media. Yahoo acquired the company in
2007 for $850 million. That made Mr.
O’Kelley millions and cemented his position
as a pioneer in the field before the age of 30.
“Brian knows this business inside and
out,” said Mr. Tyrell. “I mean, he sort of
invented it.”
—shane dixon kavanaugh
Serkan
Piantino, 29
do that,” he said.
Mr. Piantino graduated from Carnegie
Mellon in 2004 and spent a few years in
finance before applying to Facebook. Upon
joining the tech firm, he played a major role in
the development of News Feed and Timeline,
two of the website’s most important features.
“Serkan has this uncanny ability to ask
questions that cut right to the heart of the matter,”
said Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s director
of engineering. “He doesn’t tell you how it is
but leads you down the path to realizing that
he’s right.”
In 2011, Mr. Piantino’s path brought
him back to the Big Apple, where he is now
heading up Facebook’s New York City
engineering office. Announced by Mayor
Head engineer, New York
FACEBOOK
W
When Serkan Piantino got a gig at Facebook
in 2007, he did something few new hires
would: He asked for six months to finish out
his Yankees season tickets and run the New
York City marathon before moving to Palo
Alto, Calif., where the social networking
giant is headquartered.
“I don’t know where I got the nerve to
Shirley Cook, 32
Chief executive
PROENZA SCHOULER
M
Success is all
in the Family
Shazi Visram, 35
Chief executive, HAPPYFAMILY
I
In six packed years, Shazi Visram founded HappyFamily, raised $30 million in financing from
famous business leaders and celebrities, and starred in national television ads promoting her
business—oh, and she had her first child, too.
HappyFamily, which offers a line of organic cereals, frozen meals and healthy snacks aimed
at babies and toddlers, was Ms. Visram’s brainchild while she was pursuing a graduate degree
at Columbia University. It was there that she reached out to such successful CEOs as Seth
Goldman, of Honest Tea, for advice. “Shazi is a competitor who
has a tremendous passion and a refusal to give up,” said Mr.
Goldman, who is an investor in and director of HappyFamily.
Ms. Visram was able to attract other backers—including
Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio and actress Demi Moore—after she
won a contest to appear in a national American Express TV
commercial that sought to find the most inspiring business in
the country. A year later, she was selected again by AmEx to be
featured in a second ad promoting its Gold Card.
“It was like being on Oprah every day,” said Ms. Visram.
The exposure has ignited sales at HappyFamily, which has
its products in 14,000 stores in more than 30 countries. Revenues,
which reached $35 million in 2011, are on track to double this
year.
—Shazi Visram
Her entrepreneurial drive—she previously started a mediabuying firm—comes from her parents, who own motels in
Alabama, where Ms. Visram was raised (though she has no
trace of a Southern accent).
“Watching my parents, I always knew that I wanted to be my own boss,” said Ms. Visram.
—lisa fickenscher
F20
‘‘
I always
knew that I
wanted to
be my
own boss
Most people who know the luxury fashion
house Proenza Schouler have heard of the
label’s two designers, Jack McCollough and
Lazaro Hernandez. But few are familiar with
Shirley Cook, the brains behind the business.
Ms. Cook, an NYU graduate who met
Messrs. McCollough and Hernandez
through a mutual friend, has led Proenza
from its modest roots as a Parsons School of
Design senior project in 2002 to a worldwide
brand selling at more than 200 stores.
The company, which designs
womenswear, handbags and shoes, generated
more than $50 million in annual revenue last
year—two and a half times that of 2010—and
has won four Council of Fashion Designers
of America awards.
Yet Ms. Cook remains modest.
“We were lucky from the day we started the
company,” she said. “Anna Wintour and
Barneys were always very supportive. It
means a lot having both of those
powerhouses behind you.”
This summer, Ms. Cook will open
Proenza’s first freestanding retail store in
Manhattan. More locations are planned for
Los Angeles, Paris, Seoul and Tokyo. Not
having a fashion business background—Ms.
Cook majored in religious studies—hasn’t
impeded her progress.
“She’s learned on the job and has grown with
the company. She’s curious and, like a sponge,
picks up things very quickly,” said Rose Marie
Bravo, Ms. Cook’s mentor and the former
CEO of Burberry.
It’s not all runways and razzle-dazzle for
Ms. Cook. The Fort Lauderdale native, whose
father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease
15 years ago, also serves on the Leadership
Council for the New York Stem Cell
Foundation. “There are so many inaccuracies
and myths that surround stem-cell research,”
she said. “The more breakthroughs they have,
that’s how they’re going to educate people.”
Christopher
Palmieri, 37
President, VNSNY CHOICE
HEALTH PLANS
W
With two of his siblings and an uncle
involved in nursing homes, Chris Palmieri
knew early on that he wanted to be in health
care. Managed care, he soon decided, “would
be how insurers paid providers—it was not a
fad.” By age 20, Mr. Palmieri was negotiating
managed-care contracts in the nascent field.
At 22, he bought his first Porsche.
Eva Price, 33
Theater producer
W
When Eva Price told her parents she was
leaving her prestigious job at ABC News
after five years to follow her dream of
becoming a Broadway producer, they were
stunned.
“I’ll never forget the look on their faces,”
said Ms. Price, who got the theater bug at
the age of 8 after seeing her first show, South
Pacific, and spent her youth in summer
theater camp and the high-school drama
club.
They didn’t worry long. Ms. Price
networked her way into her first Broadway
show in 2006, The Grinch Who Stole
Christmas. She raised her allotment—
$500,000—for the production in two
months, and the show recouped its
investment. Since then she has produced 16
shows both on and off Broadway, and on tour.
Together, 50% of her productions, which
range from The Addams Family to Colin
Quinn’s Long Story Short, have recouped
their investment, well above the industry
standard of 30%.
“I don’t know how to sit still,” said Ms.
Price, who is lead producer on this spring’s
Peter and the Star Catcher and a producer on
the fall revival of Annie, among other projects.
Her specialty is finding ways to mount
Michael Bloomberg and Facebook Chief
Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in
December, the office is expected to add local
engineering jobs and comes as the
company prepares for a potentially
record-breaking IPO. Facebook
currently has 845 million active
monthly users and saw its revenue
double last year, to $3.7 billion.
With $1.8 billion in 2011
operating income, its operating
margins are nearly 50%.
Although he gives credit to
Silicon Valley’s techie culture, Mr.
Piantino says that Facebook and
New York are already a great fit.
“People who live in New York City are
kind of here for the crazy,” he said. “And we’ve
built a company that is very crazy.”
—kira bindrim
“I was never a kid, going out for drinks on
weeknights,” Mr. Palmieri said. “When I was
20, I bought suits and acted 50 because I wanted
these big jobs.”
Mr. Palmieri had early success upstate—
he grew up in Utica, the youngest of four—
but wanted more. Days after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, he was on one of the first
flights to New York City for a big job
interview.
“I thought long and hard about it,” he
recalled. “But it is more difficult to break
into New York if you aren’t from here. I
decided that the time to come here was
when everyone was leaving and I’d be on
equal footing.”
He has his wish. Mr. Palmieri heads the
profitable, $1 billion-in-revenue health plan
subsidiary of Visiting Nurse Service of New
York, the country’s largest nonprofit
provider of home- and community-based
health services. When he became president
of VNSNY Choice Health Plans in 2009,
revenue was only $450 million.
“Chris fell in early with the managedcare model and stuck with it; now, he is
arguably one of the leaders in the field,” said
James Introne, the state’s deputy secretary
for health and director of its health care
reform efforts.
A decade later, Mr. Palmieri still has a
Porsche—and a top job in the city.
—barbara benson
Michael
Houston, 39
Trial by fire
forges career
Aric Wu, 38
Partner, GIBSON DUNN & CRUTCHER
A
A hotshot plaintiff ’s lawyer was seeking $6 million in damages in a medical-malpractice suit
against Aric Wu’s father, an obstetrician in suburban Virginia. The Wu family was stunned.
Though the medical evidence was in Dr. Wu’s favor, the trial was harrowing to watch,
especially for 14-year-old Aric. “The whole experience stuck in my mind,” he said, and set him
on the path to becoming a litigator.
During college and law school, he focused on educational and human-rights issues and
taught in programs for low-income students. He still sticks to those themes in his pro bono
work, taking cases involving voting rights and religious freedom.
His first securities class-action case, in 2000, changed the course of his career. It was a trial
by fire, but somehow he came up with a novel, untested argument, and the judge dismissed the
case. “I think because I didn’t have a background in securities, it allowed me to look at things
differently,” he said.
When the subprime mortgage crisis exploded in 2008, Mr. Wu became a go-to lawyer for
financial institutions facing class-action suits.
He represented First American Corp. in a securities-fraud suit, defeating class-action
certification, and got a shareholder suit against Marsh & McLennan Cos. thrown out as
unconstitutional, another novel approach.
“Aric has the ability to reason through something, weave multiple cases into a single theme and
distill it down to simple, logical points for the court,” said Peter Beshar, general counsel of Marsh &
McLennan Cos. “That’s what judges like.”
As co-chair of the subprime working group at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Mr. Wu
helped the firm win the 2011 Litigation Department of the Year award from The
American Lawyer.
—hilary potkewitz
Managing director
GREY NEW YORK
M
Michael Houston’s love for advertising began
in grade school.
“I was one of those nerdy kids who would
cut out all the ads I liked in magazines and
wallpaper my room,” said the Kansas native,
shows for less. Ms. Price took over a flailing
touring show, Irving Berlin’s I Love a Piano,
and reconfigured it, cutting its weekly
running cost to $35,000, nearly half what it
was. The show recouped in eight months
and returned 160% to investors.
“She’s competing at a level beyond her years
and is being taken very seriously by a very
cynical theater
community,” said
Stuart Oken, a
Broadway
producer who ran
Disney Theatrical
Eva Price is Productions for
‘completely nine years.
—miriam
petrified’ of
kreinin
heights
souccar
WHO
KNEW?
who didn’t believe he was creative because he
couldn’t draw.
He hasn’t let that stand in his way. Since
graduating from the University of Kansas,
Mr. Houston has served in several top ad
houses, including Kirshenbaum Bond +
Partners and Young & Rubicam. In 1998, he
even launched his own company, called &
Partners, with a colleague from Young &
Rubicam, which focused on corporate
identity rebranding. Their breakthrough
project was an overhaul of The Corcoran
Group.
Since taking the helm at Grey New York
as the company’s managing director last year,
revenue is up 17.1% and operating profits
rose 30.6%, Mr. Houston said. He would not
disclose actual figures, but added that the
unit of WPP has scored $600 million in new
business since his arrival, including the $200
million Ally Bank account, one that Mr.
Houston called “personal.”
“He has this innate creative sensibility and
sense of style that makes him important and
good at business,” said Jim Heekin, chief
executive of Grey Group, who hired him.
Mr. Houston credits his ability to
empathize with others as a key to his
success—something he says he learned from
his parents, both academics. “It’s an
appreciation for turning things on their head
and looking at things from all angles,” he said.
—emily laermer
Crain’s New York Business ❘ www.crainsnewyork.com/40under40 ❘ March 26, 2012
F21
FACTS
Jonathan
Rosen, 33
Principal, BERLINROSEN
J
Jonathan Rosen owes a debt of gratitude to a
collection of besieged subway token booths.
He was a summer intern at a law firm when
Eric Schneiderman, then a state senator, came
in to help avert the shutdown of the booths.
After the campaign, Valerie Berlin, who
was Mr. Schneiderman’s chief of staff, was
impressed enough to ask the law student to
work with her on Mark Green’s mayoral
campaign. “Law school was really not my
thing,” he said. “I did not take time off, even
though professors thought I did because I
barely showed up.”
He served as a field coordinator in Mr.
Green’s runoff and then worked for Ms.
Berlin on campaigns for Liz Krueger and Mr.
20
26
31
ARE ON
LINKEDIN
ARE ON
TWITTER
ARE ON
FACEBOOK
Schneiderman and as director of the state
Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
In 2005, the two founded BerlinRosen
out of their apartments.
In just six-plus years, their communications
consultancy has grown into a team of 20
strategists that is in the middle of campaigns
shaping public policy in the city, the state and,
increasingly, the country. Its revenues have
increased every quarter as the firm has
expanded well beyond its roots on the left.
Mr. Rosen is a top strategist for Assembly
Speaker Sheldon Silver, New York State
Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch
and real estate titan Bruce Ratner. Recent
clients include the nationwide group Rock the
Vote and a coalition of Brookfield Properties
and tenants looking to buy Stuyvesant Town.
Perhaps his most impressive victory came last
year in helping Cornell University win the
mayor’s tech-campus competition.
“Jonathan Rosen is an outstanding strategic
communicator with a sharp sense of the big
picture, but also how the detail can make all
the difference,” said Cornell President David
Skorton.
—daniel massey
Brad Bender, 38
Director of product
management, GOOGLE
T
The son and grandson of engineers, Brad
Bender was coding BASIC programming
language by the time he was in elementary
school. But the skills he would find most
useful in helping to build Google’s displayadvertising business were the ones he learned
at a dinner table that included younger twin
sisters and a former biology-teacher mother.
“I grew up in a very analytical, pragmatic,
inquisitive family,” Mr. Bender recalled of his
Brooklyn childhood. “Managing that dinner
table I learned translation, negotiation,
compromise.”
He was so good at intellectual give-andtake that he considered law school following
graduation from Cornell with a degree in
industrial and labor relations. But after
landing at the display-ad technology pioneer
DoubleClick in 1997, he gravitated to the
“hub role” of product management—
harnessing the engineering, marketing and
sales teams to develop tools for advertisers to
reach their target audiences.
Mr. Bender has performed a similar role at
Google—on a hugely magnified scale—ever
since the search giant bought DoubleClick
four years ago. Working on products that
make it easier for small businesses and big
marketers to create effective campaigns, he
has helped put display—which includes
banner and video ads—on track to bring in
$3.7 billion in revenue next year, according to
eMarketer. It is Google’s second-biggest
revenue generator after search ads.
“We’ve taken the advertising expertise from
DoubleClick and the science from search and
applied it to the art of display,” he said.
Mr. Bender had no trouble fitting in at
Google, according to Susan Wojcicki, the
company’s senior vice president of
advertising. “He embodies [our] quirky, creative
culture,” she said, praising his “clever
Halloween costumes” and noting that he has
traveled on all seven continents. “Brad is not
your typical advertising executive.”
—matthew flamm
She’s building
a bright future
Melissa
Pianko, 35
Executive vice president
of development
GOTHAM ORGANIZATION INC.
B
Back in 2005, when Melissa Pianko got a job
offer from developer Gotham Organization
to be an assistant vice president, she had
news for the firm’s president, David Picket.
She told him she was already making two
times what he was offering her. When he
refused to budge, Ms. Pianko swallowed her
pride and took a job that she figured would
give her room to grow—and prove that she
was worth more.
Her bet, and a lot of hard work on her part, paid
off. Within a year, Ms. Pianko got the salary
she thought she deserved and became the lead
executive behind Gotham’s huge 1,260-unit
residential development covering an entire
block between 10th and 11th avenues and
44th and 45th streets.
“I could have been quiet, but I inserted
myself in meetings and negotiations and never
sat on the sidelines,” said the Chicago native.
F22
‘‘
In fact, she
not only
shepherded
the project to
its closing of
$520 million
in financing in
June, but also
gave birth to
two children
along the way.
—Melissa Pianko
Construction
is now under
way.
“She is an expert juggler,” said Jonathan
Mechanic, a partner in the real estate
department at law firm Fried Frank Harris
Shriver & Jacobson, who represented
investors in the Gotham project. “Whatever
the problem, she dealt with it.”
Prior to joining Gotham, she worked in
NYC for a Denver-based redeveloper of
brownfield sites, after earning her M.B.A.
from Stanford. She started her career as an
analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she became
an associate and worked for four years.
“She’s unafraid to stick her nose in
different areas of business and learn them on
the fly,” said Mr. Picket. “She is a force of
nature.”
—amanda fung
I could have
been quiet ...
but I never sat
on the sidelines
Nate Silver, 34
Editor, FiveThirtyEight blog
THE NEW YORK TIMES
N
Nate Silver made his mark soon after
graduating from the University of Chicago by
developing and selling a number-crunching
system that prognosticates the likeliest winner
of the World Series. But it was four years ago
that he changed how political campaigns are
understood, showing that in a data-saturated
world, the masses hungered for someone who
could make sense of it all.
Mr. Silver’s first blog post on FiveThirtyEight got 300 hits. Two months after he
founded the blog, he correctly predicted
Barack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton in
the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.
His website registered 10,000
visitors. Aggregating other polls
and using his own weighted
analysis, Mr. Silver went on to
correctly predict every state—
and Senate race—during the
general election except one: Mr.
Obama beat John McCain in
Indiana by 0.9%.
The site got 3 million hits
that night. His accuracy showed
that data could explain voter
habits better than demographic
clichés like soccer moms and
NASCAR dads.
It also attracted the attention
of The New York Times, which licensed the
blog in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.
“In politics, there’s a lot of partisan
screaming and conventional wisdom that’s
conventional but not very wise,”
said Mr. Silver, who blogs from
his Brooklyn Heights apartment
and landed a $700,000, two-book
deal in 2008. He is expected to
finish the first, on the art of
prediction, just as the 2012
presidential election approaches
its November climax.
“Part of the reason he was
wildly popular was because
Obama supporters felt they
weren’t going to win,” said Ben
Smith, editor of Buzzfeed and a
rival political reporter. “Nate’s
WHO
KNEW?
Nate
Silver was
born on
Friday
the 13th
Charlotte
Ronson, 34
Designer
CHARLOTTE RONSON
W
While a student at New York University in
2000, Charlotte Ronson spent many
evenings in the top-floor bathroom of her
mom’s Gramercy home, using the tub to dye
T-shirts she would later refurbish and sell.
After expanding into her own knitwear
creations, she began pitching the collection
to stores such as Scoop.
“I’d bring just a few sample pieces that I
liked,” said Ms. Ronson. “I was like a
traveling
saleswoman.”
Eventually,
enough
retailers took
notice for her
to build a
brand.
Fastforward to
last month’s
New York
Fashion
—Charlotte
Week, when
the LondonRonson
born designer
showed her
fall collection
to a packed house and received favorable
reviews for the line’s move from grunge into
grown-up sophistication.
“She’s tapped into what young women are all
about,” said Aaron Nir, Ms. Ronson’s
business partner, who gave the company a
boost by coming onboard in 2005. And not
just the high-paying set: Ms. Ronson sells an
‘‘
Each season
gets better,
how it all
comes
together
basic message was: Here are the
numbers. Obama will win. And he did.”
—jeremy smerd
exclusive line at J.C. Penney, and she recently
launched her own beauty line at Sephora.
The fashion house, which sells womenswear,
footwear and handbags at 100 stores
worldwide, generated $15 million in revenue
last year, a 25% increase over 2010.
Through it all, Ms. Ronson—who is no
stranger to fame as the daughter of real estate
tycoon Laurence Ronson, stepdaughter of
Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, sister of
Grammy-winning record producer Mark
Ronson and twin sister to celebrity DJ
Samantha Ronson—remains levelheaded.
“She’s an old soul—somebody you feel like
you’ve known your whole life,” said Liz Sweney,
chief merchant at Penney. “She’s extremely
authentic.”
Competitive
game player
Bobby Marks, 38
Assistant general manager, NEW JERSEY NETS
T
The Nets’ efforts to land Carmelo Anthony
had fizzled, but Bobby Marks had no time to
mope. With Mr. Marks maneuvering under
the National Basketball Association’s
complex salary cap, the Nets promptly
landed Utah Jazz star Deron Williams—
unloading a package that included a draft
pick Mr. Marks had stolen from the Golden
State Warriors in an earlier deal.
As a Nets intern 16 seasons ago, Mr.
Marks clipped articles about the team, never
imagining he would one day be in those
stories. The former Marist College football
player wanted to be a police officer.
“I caught a lot of breaks,” Mr. Marks said.
“I learned the business from the startup level.
That’s how I got my foot in the door.”
Nets General Manager Willis Reed kept
him on after his internship. He learned
under John Calipari and Rod Thorn, rising
to vice president for basketball operations at
34 and, when Billy King became general
manager, assistant GM at 38.
Mr. Marks became indispensable by
mastering the salary cap and collective
bargaining agreements. He plays leading
roles managing the Nets’ $60 million payroll,
scouting, trades, long-term planning and its
Developmental League affiliate. And he’s
media-savvy: As reporters waited out a
lengthy negotiating session during last fall’s
lockout, he sent pizza.
His fairy-tale climb has one unwritten
chapter. “I’d love to run a team,” he said. He
was considered for the Portland Trail Blazers’
GM job in 2010, and ESPN’s Chad Ford
called him one of “five guys who should be
running their own teams,” according to the blog
Nets Daily.
“He has the ability,” Mr. King said. “I’ve
taken it personally to help prepare him for
that. I try to give him as much responsibility
as possible.”
—daniel massey
F23
Scott Alper, 37
Real estate’s
green giant
Principal
THE WITKOFF GROUP
E
Even as a kid, Jericho, L.I., native Scott
Alper always managed to make money,
whether as a newspaper delivery boy,
supermarket cashier, valet parking attendant
or at other jobs.
“I was hungry and focused,” said Mr. Alper,
who signed on with real estate investment
firm The Witkoff Group in 1997, a few
months after graduating from the New York
University Stern School of Business.
A partner in the company since 2005, Mr.
Alper has been busy putting millions of
dollars to work. This past year, he helped his
firm invest about $400 million in properties
in New York and other major cities. One of
the biggest of those deals grew out of a golf
game with Adam Spies, a senior managing
director at Eastdil Secured, the firm handling
the auction of 1107 Broadway. Mr. Alper saw
enough potential in the property to put in a
$190.75 million winning bid in June, in what
became Witkoff ’s biggest deal since 2008. It
plans on converting the office building into
apartments.
“He is methodical and detail-oriented,”
said Mr. Spies. “He is the glue behind
Witkoff.”
Often described as the understated
partner of the firm, Mr. Alper has,
nonetheless, been behind major deals, such as
the residential conversion of downtown’s 10
Hanover Square, which was then sold for
Sukanya Paciorek, 33
Vice president, corporate sustainability
VORNADO REALTY TRUST
F
$261 million. Currently, he is working on the
redevelopment of the landmarked
Woolworth Building, as well as the
construction of a 231-room Hilton in Miami.
Keeping his eyes on the prize helps.
According to Mr. Alper, besides his wife,
Randi, and newborn, Sienna London, “my
career defines who I am.”
—amanda fung
TO VIEW VIDEOS, photo galleries, play with an interactive fact chart
and learn even more about Crain’s 40 under 40 class of 2012,
go to www.crainsnewyork.com/40under40
Will Dean, 31
Chief executive
TOUGH MUDDER
W
Will Dean conceptualized Tough Mudder
while he was at Harvard Business School. In
his plan, participants would pay to enter a
10-mile obstacle course that included
crawling under barbed wire, plunging into
ice water, darting through flames and, just
before crossing the
finish line, getting
shocked by 10,000
volts of electricity.
Harvard was
skeptical.
“My question
was whether there
were customers for
this thing,” said
professor David
Godes, Mr. Dean’s
independent study
adviser at Harvard.
He got his
answer: Tough Mudder
made more than $2
million in revenues in
its first year and
about $25 million in
its second. Now, in
year three, the event
is expanding
internationally to
Europe, South
Africa, Japan,
Australia and New
Zealand. The staff of
F24
45 is also expanding—the company received
4,000 job applications in January alone. Mr.
Godes, now at the University of Maryland,
has become a believer and remains an adviser
to the business.
Mr. Dean, a native of Sheffield,
England, attended the University of Bristol,
where he graduated first in his class. He
then worked in counterterrorism for the
British government for five years before
heading to Harvard. The job required him
to complete United Kingdom Special
Forces training, which is meant to measure
“mental grit” as
opposed to pure
physical fitness.
The course
became the
inspiration for
Tough Mudder.
“It’s not like
saying, ‘Can I run
a hundred miles?’ ”
Mr. Dean said.
“It’s, ‘Do I have it
mentally?’ ”
Participants get
free souvenir
headbands after
finishing the
event.
“It’s an
awesome thing to
be riding on the
subway in New
York City and see
all these orange
headbands
bobbing around,”
he said.
—ali elkin
From the rolling blackouts she endured
visiting her grandmother in India, to the
miles-long lines at gas stations she saw in
Iraq while working as a political adviser for
the U.S. Mission to the U.N., Sukanya
Paciorek was struck by all the energy
problems she encountered in 2003. Inspired,
she shelved plans for a diplomatic career and
enrolled in a master’s degree program at
Columbia University in international affairs,
with a concentration in energy management.
Two years after she graduated, Vornado,
one of the country’s largest landlords, tapped
her to spearhead the greening of its portfolio.
Now she combines her technical skills with the
diplomatic ones honed in her five years at the
mission to push energy conservation.
“Saving energy is cheaper and faster than
increasing the supply,” said the Ohio State
graduate.
Ms. Paciorek began by retrofitting
Vornado’s existing buildings to make them
more energy-efficient, a task experts say is
trickier than constructing new LEEDcertified towers. To date, she has shepherded
20 buildings, including 10 in Manhattan,
through the process to earn certification. At
one building, she installed a cogeneration
plant that cuts
the tower’s
reliance on the
energy grid.
Because of
Vornado’s vast
scale—$2.8
billion in
revenues in
2010—and its
100-millionsquare-foot
portfolio, her
actions are
closely tracked
across the
industry, as well
‘‘
Saving energy
is cheaper and
faster than
increasing the
supply
—Sukanya
Paciorek
as by the company’s boss.
“Sustainability is both a business
imperative and social responsibility,” said
Vornado Chairman Steven Roth, so “it’s
really important that we have a very talented
executive leading this effort.”
Ms. Paciorek also advises numerous real
estate organizations on sustainability policy
and is a sought-after speaker at greenbuilding conferences.
—theresa agovino
R I S I N G S TA R S
Where are they now?
Jason Ackerman, class
of 2006, was named
CEO of FreshDirect.
The company also
announced that it
will move to the
Bronx to expanded
facilities. The online grocer got
more than $125 million in tax
breaks and other incentives.
Madonna Badger, class of 1996,
suffered a Christmas Day 2011
tragedy. The well-known advertising
executive’s three children and
parents died in a fire that engulfed
her Connecticut home.
Joshua Bell, class of 2005, last May
was named music director of the
prestigious London orchestra
Academy of St Martin in the Fields,
making him the first person to hold
the title since Sir Neville Marriner,
who founded the ensemble in 1958.
Scott Bessent, class of 2001,
returned to Soros Fund
Management as chief investment
officer to oversee the Soros family’s
$25 billion fortune.
Maile Carpenter, class of 2010, editor
in chief of Food Network Magazine,
bucked a bad trend. While
industrywide single-copy sales fell
an average of 10% for the six
months ended Dec. 31, 2011,
compared with a year earlier, sales
of her monthly cooking title
jumped 16% on the newsstand, to
438,000 copies.
Marc Cenedella, class of 2009, CEO
of TheLadders, almost ran as a
Republican against U.S. Sen.
Kirsten Gillibrand, but news of
racy blog posts ended his political
aspirations.
Vishaan Chakrabarti, class of 2001, in
March became a partner at SHoP
Architects.
majority stake in The New Republic.
With the title of editor in chief and
publisher, he plans to shepherd the
magazine into the iPad era. Last
August he sold Jumo, his struggling
nonprofit website, to GOOD.
In tough economic times,
the best investment is in yourself!
Andrea Jung, class of
1996, will step down
as CEO of troubled
Avon Products Inc.
after a search for a
successor is
completed. She
remains executive chairman.
Kenny Lao, class of 2007, opened a
Rickshaw Dumpling location
across the street from Grand
Central Terminal.
Sarah Tomassi Lindman, class of 2007,
was named senior vice president,
program strategy, for NBC’s
Oxygen Media in March.
Benjamin Millepied, class of 2010,
dancer/choreographer, and actress
Natalie Portman tied the knot, it
was revealed at the Oscars. Their
first child, Aleph PortmanMillepied, was born June 14, 2011.
Christina Norman, class
of 2003, last May was
dismissed as the
CEO of Oprah
Winfrey’s OWN
cable network, which
has suffered from
poor ratings. In August, she was
named executive director of
Huffington Post’s Black Voices.
Today, business is lean and mean. Whether you are involved in financial analysis or financial planning, investment banking,
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Jordan Roth, class of 2010, Jujamcyn
president, had a walk-on role on
NBC’s Smash Feb. 13.
Jessica Rovello, class of 2010,
president of game developer
Arkadium, inked a partnership deal
with Microsoft Game Studio in
January to develop multiplatform
games and expand Arkadium’s staff.
Danielle Chang, class of 2011, will
expand her LuckyRice Festival to
Las Vegas and Los Angeles this
summer, and will mark its third
year in New York in May.
Ken Davenport, class of 2008,
producer, last November brought
Godspell back to the Great White
Way for its 40th anniversary and
first Broadway revival.
Christian Siriano, class
of 2010, fashion
designer, in January
debuted a line of
wedding dresses for
Nordstrom.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, class of 2011, a
New York Times editor, joined
CNBC’s Squawk Box as co-anchor
last July.
William Degel, class of 2005, owner
of Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse, landed
a Food Network show, Restaurant
Stakeout, that debuted in March.
Philip Seymour
Hoffman, class of
2004, picked up the
lead role in Death
of a Salesman on
Broadway. The first
preview performance
was canceled when Mr. Hoffman
called in sick.
Chris Hughes, class of 2011,
Facebook co-founder, just bought a
Michael Steib, class of 2008, a former
Google ad executive, was named
CEO of flash sale site Vente-Privee
in the U.S. last July.
Amar’e Stoudemire, class of 2011, a
New York Knick, appeared on
Shalom Sesame, a Sesame Street
production, to teach the Hebrew
word tov, which means “good,”
during the NBA lockout last year.
Jason Wu, class of 2009, fashion
designer, launched a capsule
collection at Target in February.
—valerie block
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apps & components util C++ on Linux
& Windows for use in a front office
environ. All stated exp must incl the
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incl use of WPF; providing obj-oriented
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in support of invstmnt mgmt activities.
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Citadel LLC, 131 South Dearborn Street,
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Notice of Qualification of 195
Broadway Property Manager LLC.
App. for Auth. filed Secy. of State of
NY (SSNY) on 3/5/12. Off. loc.: NY
County. LLC formed in Delaware (DE)
on 3/1/12. SSNY designated as
agent of LLC upon whom process
against it may be served. SSNY shall
mail process to: c/o L&L Holding
Company, LLC, 142 W. 57th St., NY,
NY 10019, Attn: Robert Lapidus. DE
address of LLC: c/o Corporation
Service Company, 2711 Centerville
Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington, DE 19808.
Arts. of Org. filed DE Secy. of State,
401 Federal St., Ste. 4, Dover, DE
19901. Purpose: any lawful activity.
Notice of Qualification of 1000 Dean
LLC. Authority filed with NY Dept. of
State on 12/5/11. Office location: NY
County. Princ. bus. addr.: 200 West St.,
15th Fl., NY, NY 10282. LLC formed
in DE on 11/30/11. NY Sec. of State
designated agent of LLC upon whom
process against it may be served and
shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation
System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011,
regd. agent upon whom process may
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Corporation Trust Co., 1209 Orange
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Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401
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Purpose: all lawful purposes.
Notice of Qualification of ARC
TPCANNY001, LLC. Authority filed
with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on
02/28/12. Office location: NY County.
LLC formed in Delaware (DE) on
05/10/11. Princ. office of LLC: 106
Jenkintown Rd., Jenkintown, PA
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NY 12207. DE addr. of LLC: 2711
Centerville Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington,
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Purpose: Any lawful activity.
Notice of Formation of BARCLAIS
ACCOUNTING SERVICES, LLC.
Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State
of NY (SSNY) on 03/05/12. Office
location: NY County. Princ. office of
LLC: One Grand Central Pl., 60 E.
42nd St., 13th Fl., NY, NY 10165.
SSNY designated as agent of LLC
upon whom process against it may
to c/o Deborah A. Nilson, PLLC, 10
E. 40th St., Suite 3310, NY, NY
10016. Purpose: Any lawful activity.
Notice of Formation of Robyn Kai
LLC, Art. of Org. filed Sec’y of State
(SSNY) 11/3/11. Office location: NY
County. SSNY designated as agent
of LLC upon whom process against
it may be served. SSNY shall mail
copy of process to c/o Melinda
Cheng, 15 Bank St., NY, NY 10014.
Purpose: any lawful activities.
Notice of Formation of Soho Mercer
Unit 21 LLC. Arts. of Org. filed with
Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on
2/22/12. Off. loc.: NY County. SSNY
designated as agent of LLC upon
whom process against it may be
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LLP, 270 Madison Ave., NY, NY
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Purpose: any lawful activity.
Notice of Formation of RTTB
TECHNOLOGY, LLC. Arts. of Org.
filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY)
on 02/22/12. Office location: NY
of LLC upon whom process against it
may be served. SSNY shall mail
process to Corporation Service Co.,
80 State St., Albany, NY 12207-2543.
DANSKER CAPITAL,LLC Art. Of Org.
Filed Sec. Of State of NY 02/29/2012.
Off Loc.: New York Co. SSNY designated as agent upon whom process
against it may be served. SSNY to
mail copy of process to THE LLC c/o
Andrew Dansker, 222 W. 83rd St.,
Apt. 15F, New York, NY 10024.
Purpose: Any lawful act or activity.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF “10
FINGERS 10 TOES, LLC” Arts. of
Org. filed with the SSNY on 2/2/2012.
Office location: NY County. SSNY is
designated as agent upon whom
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REAL ESTATE
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Notice of Formation of ASC SALES &
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to the LLC, 1220 N. Market St., Ste.
808, Wilmington, DE 19801.
MARSA HOLDINGS LLC a domestic
LLC, Arts. of Org. filed with the SSNY
on 1/17/12. Office location: New York
County. SSNY is designated as
agent upon whom process against the
LLC may be served. SSNY shall mail
process to: Deepak Khullar, c/o Ark
LLP, 1120 6th Ave., 4th Fl., NY, NY
10036. General Purposes.
Notice of Qualification of MIDTOWN
CAPITAL SERVICES, LLC. Authority
filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY)
on 03/16/09. Princ. office of LLC:
305 E. 47th St., NY, NY 10017. SSNY
served. SSNY shall mail process to
Mark Zafrin, Esq., Michelman &
Robinson, LLP, 800 Third Ave., 24th
Fl., NY, NY 10022. DE addr. of LLC:
2711 Centerville Rd., Ste. 400,
Wilmington, DE 19808. Arts. of Org.
filed with DE Secy. of State, 401
40 | Crain’s New York Business
|
March 26, 2012
REUNION ISLAND LLC, a domestic
County. SSNY is designated as agent
upon whom process against the LLC
process to: Jacqueline Kosofsky, 812
S. Beverly Glen, Los Angeles, CA
90024. General Purposes.
Notice of Conversion of 870 Hunts
Point Realty Group, a partnership, to
870 Hunts Point Realty LLC.
Certificate filed with Secy. of State of
process to: c/o Jenel Management
Corp., 275 Madison Ave., NY, NY
NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION of
Goren 5 LLC. App for Auth filed with
the Secy of State of NY (SSNY) on
11/23/11. Office loc: NY Cty. LLC
formed in DE on 10/20/11. SSNY
designated as an agent upon whom
process may be served and shall mail
process to the principal business
address: 31 W 11th St. Apt 8A, NY,
NY 10011. DE address of LLC: 874
Walker Rd., Ste.C, Dover, DE 19904.
Certificate of LLC filed with Secy of
State of DE loc at 401 Federal St.,
Ste. 4, Dover, DE 19901. Purpose:
any lawful acts.
VINEYARD PARTNERS LLC, a
domestic LLC, Arts. of Org. filed
with the SSNY on 1/25/12. Office
location: New York County. SSNY is
process against the LLC may be
The LLC, 240 E. 79th St., Apt. 16A,
NY, NY 10075. General Purposes.
Notice is hereby given that a
license (#TBA) for BEER & WINE
has been applied for by DELITE
FOOD SERVICE INC., at retail, in a
RESTAURANT, under the ABC Law
at 106 E. 60 ST. NY, NY 10022 for
on-premises consumption.
Notice of Qualification of KIMERA, LLC.
Authority filed with Secy. of State of NY
(SSNY) on 11/10/11. Office location:
NY County. LLC formed in Delaware
(DE) on 09/15/09. Princ. office of LLC:
464 Riverside Dr., Apt. 82, NY, NY
LLC upon whom process against it
process to c/o Corporation Service
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Filings Incorporated, 108 W. 13th St.,
Wilmington, DE 19801. Arts. of Org.
filed with Secy. of State, DE, DE Div.
of Corps., John G. Townsend Bldg.,
U/Y LLC; Arts., of Org., filed with NY
Sec. of State (“SSNY”) 11/22/11.
Office in New York County; SSNY
designated agent for service of
process with copy mailed to Pryor
Cashman LLP, 7 Times Square, New
York, NY 10036, Attn: Howard Siegel,
Esq., As amended by Cert. of Amend.,
filed with SSNY on 11/23/11, the
name of LLC is Mystic Eyes LLC., All
lawful business purposes.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF
Twinbull Entertainment LLC. Arts
of Org filed with Secy of State of NY
(SSNY) on 1/19/12. Office location: NY
upon whom process may be served
and shall mail copy of any process
against LLC to principal business
address: 231 W 13th St #1, NY, NY
10011. Purpose: any lawful act.
Notice of Formation of a Professional
Service Limited Liability Company
(PLLC) Name: ALEXANDER LEV DDS
LLC Articles of Organization filed by
the Department of State of New York
on: 12/01/2011 Office location: County
of New York. Purpose: Dentistry.
Secretary of State of New York (SSNY)
designated as agent of PLLC upon
served. SSNY shall mail copy of
process to: 200 West 57th Street,
Suite 310, New York, NY 10019.
WGBKLNY002, LLC. Authority filed
Jenkintown Rd., Jenkintown, PA 19046.
upon whom process against it may be
c/o CSC, 80 State St., 6th Fl., Albany,
Notice of Qualification of 1000 Dean
SLL LLC. Authority filed with NY
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location: NY County. Princ. bus.
addr.: 200 West St., 15th Fl., NY, NY
10282. LLC formed in DE on 3/6/12.
NY Sec. of State designated agent of
may be served and shall mail
process to: c/o CT Corporation
System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011,
regd. agent upon whom process may
be served. DE addr. of LLC: 1209
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Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of
State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE
19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.
Notice of Qualification of TRANSPARENT
VALUE, L.L.C. Authority filed with
08/03/06. SSNY designated as agent
process to c/o National Registered
Agents, Inc., 875 Ave. of the Americas,
Ste. 501, NY, NY 10001. DE addr. of
LLC: 160 Greentree Dr., Ste. 101,
Dover, DE 19904. Cert. of Form. filed
with DE Secy. of State, Div. of Corps.,
John G. Townsend Bldg., 401 Federal
St., Ste. 4, P.O. Box 898 (19903),
Dover, DE 19901. As amended by
Cert. of Amendment filed with SSNY
on 01/25/08, name was changed to
TRANSPARENT VALUE ADVISORS,
L.L.C., effective 01/09/08. Purpose:
Any lawful activity.
Notice of Formation of NS PROPERTIES
(NOHO) LLC. Arts. of Org. filed with
Princ. office of LLC: 55 W. 14th St.,
Apt. 4L, NY, NY 10011. SSNY
c/o Corporation Service Co., 80
State St., Albany, NY 12207-2543.
Pana Consulting LLC Articles of Org.
filed NY Sec. of State (SSNY)
1/23/2012. Office in NY Co. SSNY
desig. agent of LLC upon whom
process may be served. SSNY shall
mail copy of process to 205 East
77th St, Apt.14A, NY, NY 10075.
Purpose: Any lawful purpose.
DOBBINS & WRIGHT CREATIVE LLC
Art. Of Org. Filed Sec. of State of NY
10/27/2011. Off. Loc.: New York Co.
David Wright designated as agent
be served. SSNY to mail copy of
process to THE LLC, 116 Avenue C.
#14, New York, NY 10009. Purpose:
Any lawful act or activity.
K&K LOUNGE, LLC, a domestic LLC,
Arts. of Org. filed with the SSNY on
12/30/11. Office location: New York
agent upon whom process against
the LLC may be served. SSNY shall
mail process to: The LLC, c/o Anita
Miceli, 10 Sherman Ct., Manalapan,
NJ 07726. General Purposes.
THE SLATIN GROUP, LLC Articles of
Org. filed NY Sec. of State (SSNY)
3/5/12. Office in NY Co. SSNY desig.
agent of LLC upon whom process
copy of process to 255 W. 108th St.,
#8A1, NY, NY 10019, which is also
the principal business location.
Purpose: Any lawful purpose.
DEAN C. POLISTINA, M.D. PLLC, a
domestic PLLC, Arts. of Org. filed
with the SSNY on 1/30/12. Office
location: New York County. SSNY is
process against the PLLC may be
The PLLC, 200 W. 57th St., Ste. 1410,
NY, NY 10019. Purpose: Medicine.
Latest date to dissolve 11/22/2077.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF Real
Estate Developers and Consultants,
LLC. Articles of Organization filed with
the Secretary of State of NY (SSNY)
on December 7, 2011. Office location:
NEW YORK. SSNY has been designated as agent upon whom process
against it may be served. The Post
Office address to which the SSNY
shall mail a copy of any process
against the LLC served upon him/her
is: 150 E 69th Street, 6A, New York,
NY 10021. The principal business
address of the LLC is: 150 E 69th
Street, 6A, New York, NY 10021.
Purpose: any lawful act or activity.
PUBLIC & LEGAL NOTICES
Notice of Qualification of PEAK
MANAGEMENT SERVICES LLC.
Authority filed with Secy. of State of
NY (SSNY) on 03/19/12. Office
location: NY County. LLC formed in
Colorado (CO) on 03/15/12. SSNY
CO addr. of LLC: c/o BetaWest, Ltd.,
1050 - 17th St., Ste. 350, Denver,
CO 80265. Arts. of Org. filed with
CO Secy. of State, 1700 Broadway,
Denver, CO 80290. Purpose:
Restaurant management services.
JPM-LOUVALE HOLDINGS, LLC Art.
Of Org. Filed Sec. of State of NY
09/19/2011. Off. Loc.: New York Co.
SSNY designated as agent upon whom
process against it may be served.
SSNY to mail copy of process to THE
LLC C/O Law Offices of Mitchell J.
Devack, Pllc, 90 Merrick Ave., Ste.
500, East Meadow, NY 11554.
Purpose: Any lawful act or activity.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF Agnes
Jacobs Designs, LLC. Arts of Org
filed with Secy of State of NY (SSNY)
and shall mail copy of any process
address: 333 E. 57th St, 13A, NY, NY
HUDSON FAIRFAX GROUP, LLC,
Authority filed with the SSNY on
03/05/2012. Office location: NY
County. LLC formed in DE on
01/07/2010. SSNY is designated as
mail process to: C/O the LLC, Attn:
Manish Thakur, Ceo 54 Thompson
St, 4th Fl, NY, NY 10012. Address
required to be maintained in DE: 2711
Centerville Rd, Ste 400 Wilmington
DE 19808. Cert of Formation filed
with DE Div. of Corps, 401 Federal
St., Ste 4, Dover, DE 19901.
Purpose: Any Lawful Purpose.
Notice of Formation of NIMIT
SABHARWAL LLC. Arts. of Org. filed
Princ. office of LLC: 55 W. 14th St.,
Apt. 4L, NY, NY 10011. SSNY
Meredith Henderson LLC. Arts of Org
filed with Secy of State of NY (SSNY)
upon whom process may be served.
PO address to which SSNY shall
mail copy of process against LLC:
260 Riverside Dr. 9E NY, NY 10025.
Purpose: any lawful act.
Notice of Formation of HVRMINN
LLC. Arts of Org filed with Secretary
of State of NY (SSNY) on 3/8/12.
Office location: NY Co. SSNY
whom process may be served and
shall mail process to The LLC at 262
W. 38th St., #1204, New York, NY
Name of LLC: SUPER V LLC. Art. of Org.
filed Dept. of State of NY on 10/27/2011.
Off. Loc. in NY: New York Cty. Secy.
of State designated as agent of LLC
be served. Sec. of State shall mail a
copy of process to: The LLC, 535
Madison Avenue, 30th Fl., NY, NY
Notice of Formation of PRIMARY
VIOLATOR LLC. Arts. of Org. filed
Princ. office of LLC: c/o Primary
Wave Music Publishing, 116 E. 16th
St., 9th Fl., NY, NY 10003. SSNY
the LLC at the addr. of its princ.
office. Purpose: Any lawful activity.
GSBRKNY001, LLC. Authority filed
York Rd., Jenkintown, PA 19046.
c/o CSC, 80 State St., 6th Fl., Albany,
Name of LLC: Wordfix Ph.D. LLC.
Arts. of Org. filed with NY Dept. of
State: 2/16/12. Office loc.: NY Co.
Sec. of State designated agent of LLC
served and shall mail process to: c/o
Business Filings Inc., 187 Wolf Rd.,
Ste. 101, Albany, NY 12205, regd.
agt. upon whom process may be
served. Purpose: any lawful act.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF Albion
International Marketing LLC. Arts of
Org filed with Secy of State of NY
upon whom process may be served.
The PO address to which SSNY
shall mail copy of process against
LLC: United States Corporation
Agents, Inc. 7014 13th Avenue, #202,
Brooklyn, NY 11228. Princ business
address: 245 E 63rd St, Apt 924, NY,
NY, 10065. Purpose: any lawful act.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF LIMITED
LIABILITY COMPANY. NAME: 450
CEDAR VIEW LLC. Articles of
Organization were filed with the
Secretary of State of New York
(SSNY) on 02/29/12. Office
Location: New York County. SSNY
has been designated as agent of the
may be served. SSNY shall mail a
copy of process to the LLC, 450 East
83rd Street, Apartment 21D, New
York, New York 10028. Purpose:
For any lawful purpose.
Notice of Formation of ORANGE
APARTMENT INVESTORS 4, LLC. Arts.
of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY
(SSNY) on 03/07/12. Office location:
NY County. Princ. office of LLC: 360
Madison Ave., Ste. 1902, NY, NY
LLC upon whom process against it may
to Edward D. Feldstein, Esq., 10
Weybosset St., 8th Fl., Providence, RI
NICHOLAS PATRICK PRODUCTIONS
LLC, a domestic LLC, Arts. of Org.
filed with the SSNY on 1/20/12.
Office location: New York County.
SSNY is designated as agent upon
whom process against the LLC may be
Nicholas Patrick, 211 E. 10th St., Apt
4, NY, NY 10003. General Purposes.
Dynamic Administration, LLC. Arts of
Org filed with Secy of State of NY
and shall mail copy of process against
LLC to principal business address:
247 W 30th ST., Ste 10R, NY, NY
SAUCE PROPERTIES LLC, a domestic
mail process to: The LLC, c/o Alan
Fontevecchia, 721 5th Ave., Ste. 37A,
NY, NY 10022. General Purposes.
NOTICE OF FORMATION OF Waverly
& Co. LLC. Arts of Org filed with
Secy of State of NY (SSNY) on
SSNY designated as agent upon
whom process may be served. The
PO address to which SSNY shall
mail copy of any process against
LLC: 2950 W 12th St., Ste 50, Erie,
PA 16505. Principal business
address: 30 Christopher St., NY, NY
Notice of Qualification of Port
Imperial Racing Associates, LLC. App.
for Auth. filed with Secy. of State of
on 8/8/11. SSNY designated as agent
process to: 405 Lexington Ave., 48th
Fl., NY, NY 10174, Attn: Mark J.
Coleman. DE address of LLC: c/o
National Corporate Research, Ltd., 615
S. DuPont Hwy, Dover, DE 19901. Arts.
of Org. filed with DE Secy. of State,
BLISS888, LLC, a domestic LLC.
Arts. of Org. filed with the SSNY on
02/14/2012, name amended to:
BLISS 888, LLC on 03/07/2012.
Office location: NY County. SSNY
has been designated as agent upon
whom process against the LLC may
to: Constance S. Cassin, 58 W 58th
St. Apt. 5B, NY, NY 10019. Purpose:
Any Lawful Purpose.
NOTICE OF FORMATION AND
CONVERSION OF EX & Co., LLC.
Certificate of Conversion filed with
Secy of State of NY (SSNY) on
SSNY designated as agent upon
whom process may be served and
shall mail copy of process against
LLC to principal business address:
The Bank of New York Mellon,
Securities Dept., P.O. Box 11,003, NY,
NY 10286. Purpose: any lawful act.
NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION of Golf
Council, LLC. App for Auth filed with
Secy of State of NY (SSNY) on 2/17/12.
Office location: NY County. LLC formed
in DE 1/23/12. SSNY designated as
agent upon whom process may be
served and shall mail copy of process
address: 111-09 76th Rd, Apt. C-5,
Forest Hills, NY 11375. DE address: c/o
CSC, 2711 Centerville Rd, Ste. 400,
Wilmington, DE 19808. Cert of LLC
filed with SSDE: PO Box 898, Dover,
DE 19903. Purpose: any lawful act.
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Studios need space
Continued from Page 1
Now that its 18 stages are completely booked by shows like Gossip Girl
and Unforgettable, Silvercup has had
to turn away three pilots so far this
spring.
Broadway Stages, the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facility that is
home to a number of series, including The Good Wife and Blue Bloods, is
already in the process of adding
more studios. So is Steiner Studios
at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The 7year-old facility is investing $85
million to double the size of its lot
and expand its number of soundstages to 16 from five.
And the list doesn’t end there.
Kaufman Astoria Studios, which
recently opened a new 18,000square-foot soundstage and 22,000
square feet of support space, is now
seeking approval to gate off its entire
lot, a $3 million project that would
allow producers to build exterior
sets like the ones in Los Angeles.On
top of that,it has spent about $4 million in the past year to buy more
equipment for its lighting rental
business.
“The New York industry outlook
is huge,” said Hal Rosenbluth, president of the Astoria, Queens, studio.
“The unions are at full capacity, the
stages are filled, and everybody’s
very, very busy.”
Critical moment
In fact, if the industry doesn’t expand both its physical space and its
workforce,film executives say,its future growth could be imperiled.And
of course the looming expiration of
the tax credit at the end of 2014—
which the industry will no doubt
fight for again—is another worry.
“For the first time in years, New
Yorkers in this business are now
working 12 months a year,” said
Douglas Steiner, chairman of Stein-
Cuomo in control
the executive suite on the second
floor of the Capitol. Beneath state
agency heads Mr. Cuomo has installed deputies who act as direct
lines of communication to his office.
In many cases, the agency heads act
more as operating, rather than executive, officers. On some Thursdays
and Fridays, they travel the state
making speeches that promote the
governor’s agenda.
“The attempt to control the message has been a hallmark of other governors—it’s not unprecedented,” said
Gerald Benjamin, a SUNY New
Paltz political-science professor.“But
the discipline and focus on delivering
the message and staying on the agenda, I think, are more coordinated and
new in their manifestations.”
‘We’re assumed to be wrong’
While Mayor Michael Bloomberg delegates authority and holds
his commissioners accountable, the
reverse is true in the Cuomo administration,said one agency head,who,
like many of those interviewed,
asked not to be identified for fear of
retribution.
“Other than the people who surround the governor, everything we
do is assumed to be wrong,” said the
agency head. “That attitude is great
for the short term—everybody’s on
message. But unless things loosen
up, you’re going to see staff at the
agency level leave office before the
first term is up.”
Sometimes agencies do stumble.
Last September, the Department of
Motor Vehicles announced that drivers could “self-certify” that their vision was adequate. Intended to save
the state money, the plan was
ridiculed as dangerous. Mr. Cuomo
shelved it within 72 hours.
Yet such episodes have been rare,
according to a senior administration
official, who said the second floor
doesn’t interfere with 95% of what
agencies do, but gets involved when
policy issues come up.
Officials justify their approach by
saying Mr. Cuomo was elected to
turn around a government that had
become a laughingstock.Backers say
Mr. Cuomo’s high approval rating
and string of legislative victories—a
no-growth budget, gay marriage,
pension and tax reform—validate
his methods.
“Judging from results,this governor is the most effective governor
that we have seen in my lifetime,”
said Dennis Mehiel, who recently
resigned as Mr. Cuomo’s vice chairman of the Empire State Development Corp. “He prioritizes. He focuses. He takes the trouble to
understand the nuances. And in the
end he’s batting a thousand.”
Mr. Cuomo’s grip could get
tighter still. The governor’s proposed budget would allow him to
move money among agencies—a
move that critics say would usurp
the Legislature’s authority to approve spending. The administration says it’s needed to consolidate
agency functions. This follows an
attempt last year by Mr. Cuomo to
win power for his newly founded
Department of Financial Services
to investigate crimes under the
Martin Act, a signature tool of the
attorney general’s office. The effort
was abandoned in the face of opposition organized by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Managing the message
Mr. Cuomo’s desire to shape
public perception sometimes means
injecting his staff into otherwise
mundane departmental actions.
A former chief engineer in the
Transportation Department said
the agency had to run press releases
on highway-lane closures through
the second floor. An administration
spokesman said that order was specific to the floods caused by Tropical
Storm Irene. “We wanted to announce them in a forceful and coordinated way,” the spokesman said.
Last fall, the Department of Financial Services bought three
$2,000 tables at an insurance indus-
er Studios. “We need to train more
people.”
There are 13 pilots already
shooting or getting ready to start
filming in the city this spring, according to the Mayor’s Office of
Film and Television, and that number could grow as more cable networks—which don’t need to finish
in time for the May upfronts—
make their plans. Last spring, 16 pilots were filmed in the city, according to the film office, though
production executives say the number was higher.
Though pilots typically shoot for
only six to eight weeks and have relatively low budgets of $4 million to
$6 million, the numbers add up. Additionally, filming a pilot in New
York improves the chances that the
series will be shot in the city if it gets
picked up by a network. A series
generally costs at least $45 million a
season and films from June through
April, creating job stability.
Production executives say the
number of pilots may have dipped
slightly this year because eight of
last year’s New York pilots were
picked up for television series and
are shooting here,leaving little room
for newcomers. Those new shows,
including Smash and Pan Am, joined
an already full roster of established
series like 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie.
In fact, in 2011 New York had a
record 23 television series in production, compared with nine a
decade ago. Smash, the NBC series
about Broadway starring Debra
Messing, was renewed for a second
season last week.
try event where Commissioner Benjamin Lawsky was speaking. The
agency expected to bring 30 employees, but a call came in from the governor’s office, which was worried
about the appearance of a conflict of
interest. Mr. Lawsky ultimately
brought just three staff members.
Yet another example came last
month, when an angry pizzeria
owner outside Albany complained
to the media that the Department of
Labor ordered him to reimburse
employees $5,500 for not providing
them with enough uniforms. After a
scathing newspaper editorial questioned Mr. Cuomo’s claim that New
York is “open for business,” the administration swung into action.
Officials turned to Rachel Demarest Gold, a former Bronx prosecutor who worked for Mr. Cuomo in
the attorney general’s office and is
now the Labor Department’s special
counsel.
Handpicked by the administration, she effectively calls the shots at
the agency,which is nominally run by
Paterson administration holdover
Colleen Gardner, four sources said.
Ms. Gold called the pizzeria owner,
Christian King, who felt employers
should be warned before being fined.
“She said, ‘I can’t agree more.
Stop sending money,’ ” said Mr.
King, president of KNC Holdings,
which owns businesses in the Albany area.“She said they’re trying to
change the culture over there.”
Mr. King, who had already made
two of his three required payments,
added:“She said they got killed with
this in the media.”
The Labor Department might
have been following the letter of the
law, but as Steven Cohen, the governor’s former secretary, put it, “I
don’t care if you’ve done stupid for
20 years. We don’t do stupid.”
A Labor Department spokesman
said the agency “has not reversed any
decision or made any final determination” in the pizzeria case. He said
Mr. King was contacted and an investigation is ongoing,but would not
comment further on the conversation. Ms. Gardner was not available
for an interview, he said.
As a result of the negative pub-
licity, the second floor ordered that
all Labor Department announcements of fines or settlements go
through a higher-level review, a
union official familiar with the department said. A senior administration official said the extra reviews
are done within the department and
are intended to bring order and accountability to the agency.
The union official had a different
take.“They neutered the DOL,” the
official said. “It’s only a matter of
time before cases get backed up.”
A workplace safety expert told
Crain’s that citations issued by the
agency’s bureau overseeing workplace safety and health for public
employees statewide must first be
reviewed by Mr. Cuomo’s top advisers. A department spokesman denied that.
A senior Cuomo administration
official said enforcement remains a
cornerstone of the Labor Department. “We are a state that is trying
to show we’re not implementing
regulations in a knee-jerk fashion,”
the official said.
Business leaders have been
pleased with Mr. Cuomo’s approach. “We have a reputation for
being a state with a lot of hoops, a
lot of red tape,” said Heather Briccetti, president of the Business
Council of New York State.“This is
a culture change.”
heads were hamstrung because
Cuomo confidants with the power
to make decisions were preoccupied
with the disaster response.
But the administration considers
its response to the tropical storm a
highlight of its first year, and the
public seemed to agree, boosting
Mr. Cuomo’s approval rating to 72%
a month later. Ms. Briccetti marveled at how quickly a collapsed
road and bridge near her home were
repaired. When she called with a
question, a commissioner phoned
her back. “We’re getting that responsiveness because it’s coming
from the top,” she said.
But some elected officials complain that agency heads are not empowered. Despite misgivings,
members of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus signed on to Mr. Cuomo’s deal last year to extend rent
regulations because the governor
promised he would strengthen tenant protections administratively.
When the changes were slow in
coming, state Housing Commissioner Darryl Towns—who was appointed despite his lack of housing
expertise—confessed to housing
advocates and elected officials last
fall that he was not authorized to
handle the issue.
“My response is, ‘What the hell
are you here for?’”one lawmaker said.
A top-down approach
In a role reversal, it’s now regulators who must jump through
hoops. Some bristle at needing approval from the second floor to pursue their ideas because, with the
governor focused on his own agenda, their suggestions are often ignored or brushed aside.“To some
extent, this is a bandwidth issue,”
said David Gahl, deputy director of
Environmental Advocates and a
longtime Albany observer. “In a
centralized decision-making structure, there’s only so much that can
rise to the level of executive attention. Some things get elevated and
some things don’t.”
When crisis hits, that bandwidth
is tested even further. During last
year’s flooding upstate, some agency
Staff departures
The governor has little incentive
to change if he continues to enjoy
victories and high ratings. But the
defections that one agency head predicted may be materializing. The
Labor Department has lost five top
administrators, including a leading
health and safety official. Others,
such as a former top employee of an
elected official and a well-known
lobbyist, are in talks about working
for Mr. Cuomo but are hesitant because of concerns that they won’t
have autonomy.
“You can’t run a government like
New York and not have good, talented people around you,” the insider said. “That’s where micromanagement is going to come back to
bite him.” 䡲
Overbooked
The space crunch is so tight that
some pilots have been forced to split
locations. Trooper, a pilot for CBS
about a mother turned New York
state trooper starring Mira Sorvino,
is renting office and support space at
Kaufman Astoria, but has had to
shoot at Broadway Stages because
Kaufman’s stages are booked.
Alan Suna, chief executive of Silvercup, said his studio could house
only two pilots this year. “We don’t
have an inch to spare,” he said.
Even the smaller studios are
getting a piece of the boom. Cine
Magic Studios expanded about a
year ago from a small space in SoHo
to a large facility in Brooklyn with
an 18,000-square-foot soundstage.
Seret Studios, a real estate company
in Brooklyn that rents out warehouses and lofts, is buying more
buildings and allocating them for
the film industry.
About four months ago, Seret
added 50,000 square feet to its holdings in Greenpoint, and before that
the company took over a 12,000square-foot space in Vinegar Hill
that it had rented to a cabinetmaker, to create a film production facility. Now that space is being used by
Boardwalk Empire.
“I remember how slow it was
when we didn’t have the tax incentive,” said Uri Zucker, a manager at
Seret. “We are keeping many of our
spaces for filming because we’re so
busy now.” 䡲
LISTEN to a discussion at
CrainsNewYork.com/podcasts
A sweet deal comes unstuck
$55 million for the site, has faced
more than its share of difficulties.
They began with a long and costly effort to have the site rezoned to residential. As part of the eventual deal
with the city in 2010, CPCR agreed
to scale back some building heights.
A suit challenging the environmental reviews of the project also
posed a threat, but the biggest blow
of all resulted from Lehman Brothers’ collapse in late 2008, setting off a
chain reaction that saw both demand
and financing for housing dry up.
Now with rumors swirling that
CPCR wants to exit the project
completely or at least sell off portions
of the site, and the developer’s own
partner threatening to block the next
move Mr.Cestero makes,community leaders are wondering if the project will ever see the light of day.
“It is frustrating, because as a
community we want to get this project built,” said Rob Solano, executive
director of Churches United for Fair
Housing, a nonprofit that has long
supported the Domino project.“The
groundbreaking needs to happen.”
Mr. Cestero vows that construction for the first phase of the project
could start as early as the end of next
year. That first phase would involve
construction of 300 affordable units
on the former parking lot across the
street from the old plant. At the
same time, work should start on an
environmental cleanup of the plant
Even if work did
begin next year,
it would still be
a year behind
and immediate surroundings, as
well as putting in sewers and water
pipes and improving drainage.
None of that will happen, however, unless CPCR can reach an
agreement with the project’s biggest
lender, Pacific Coast Capital Partners, a West Coast real estate investment and finance firm, to convert its
loan into an equity stake. CPCR
also needs to raise as much as $40
million in fresh cash.
Seeking deep pockets
“To go forward, we need to bring
in a well-capitalized and seasoned
mixed-income developer,” said Mr.
Cestero, who hopes to find a commercial savior by the end of June.
Katan is fighting that move, and
if the judge hearing the case grants
an injunction, Mr. Cestero’s rescue
efforts will be stymied. The first indication will come April 4, when the
judge is expected to rule on the motion involving a possible deal with
Pacific Coast.
Skeptics note that the development’s partners have a history of
failing to deliver on promises. Even
if work does begin next year, it
would still be a full year behind
schedule. Others note that the real
estate market has changed so much
since the relatively giddy days of
2005 that it may not be financially
feasible for the developer to build so
many market-rate apartments and
affordable housing, a condition of
the site’s rezoning.
“A lot of commitments were
made in 2005, and the community
has yet to see those promises materialize seven years later,” said City
Councilman Stephen Levin, who
initially opposed the Domino plans
because of the buildings’ heights
and sheer bulk. “So you have a community that is justifiably upset and
skeptical.”
For now, Mr. Cestero insists that
CPCR remains committed to its
plan.
“Our priorities are to ensure that
this project is an economic success
for all those invested and to create a
development that the city and
neighborhood can be proud of,”
he said.
On the other hand
At least two things are on his
side—timing, as the economy finally starts growing again—and location. The Domino site is one of the
last pieces of prime waterfront prop-
erty left in Williamsburg. To date,
most of the construction along the
waterfront has taken place on the
north end of Williamsburg, and
those projects, both rental and sales,
have bounced back since they were
restarted or completed postdownturn. With that backdrop, any
number of developers may be willing to throw in their lot with Mr.
Cestero for a piece of the hot
Williamsburg action.
“We are looking at it,” said Jeffrey Levine, chairman of Douglaston Development, the developer of
The Edge, a 565-unit waterfront
condo on the north side, who is
about to begin building a 500-unit
rental nearby. “There is value in the
Domino site.” 䡲
TOUGH SPOT: Fledgling developer Rafael
Cestero is struggling to save his key project.
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The Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC 2) project is a new multi-story building
to be operated by the Police Department (NYPD), the Fire Department (FDNY) and
the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT).
The new building will consist of (5) occupied floors and an occupied mezzanine, a
basement level and (3 1/2) levels of mechanical and electrical equipment. The
building footprint is about 56,000 sq. ft. It will be approximately 490,000 sq. ft. in area
on a lot that covers approximately 8.75 acres.
The goal of the project is to attain a USGBC LEED Silver rating in conformance with
NYC Local Law 86. Due to the nature of the facility, specialized systems have been
included for emergency power, A/V, security; IT, fire suppression, and fire alarm public
address systems.
The City of New York, through its Department of Information Technology &
Telecommunications (DoITT) is releasing a Request For Information (RFI) to solicit
information for The Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC 2) project.
A copy of the RFI can be downloaded at:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/html/miscs/rfipsac2.shtml
Wanted: big tenants
recession-induced slump, such tenants are being vigorously courted by
a trio of developers eager to get their
proposed towers built.
“We know who everyone else is
talking to,” said Jeremiah Larkin,
senior vice president of leasing at
Brookfield Office Properties.
He is seeking tenants for the first
two of a total of four towers that
Brookfield plans to erect on a site
just west of Penn Station.The company has said that it needs to lease
800,000 square feet before it will
start putting up a tower. In the
meantime, the developer this summer will start building a platform
over the rail yards that is necessary
for the project to proceed.
Farther west, The Related Cos.
faces a similar task on an even grander
scale. It is looking to lease 1 million
square feet of office space so it can
build an even bigger rail-yard platform for what will be the developer’s
second office building there.Late last
year, the company snared Coach as
the anchor tenant for its first tower at
the Hudson Yards, the only one that
doesn’t require a platform.
Both developers face major competition from Silverstein Properties,
which has the right to build three office towers at the World Trade Center site. Larry Silverstein’s edge,
even competing brokers concede, is
that he has something to show tenants: rising buildings. The developer’s first tower stands just eight
floors shy of its planned 64-story full
height and is slated to be completed
next year. But in order to construct
the second tower, Silverstein needs
to lease at least 400,000 square feet.
Without that, the planned 80-story
edifice will be capped at just seven
stories sometime in 2013.
Time is crucial for the developers if they want to land a tenant
whose lease expires in 2015 or 2016,
such as L’Oréal, which is seeking
about 500,000 square feet, or Viacom, which needs about twice that.
To allow enough time for construction, a lease should be signed by the
end of this year for a tenant whose
current lease runs out in 2015. In
Related’s case, it needs a company
that can afford to wait until 2017.
No hurry at all
The mega-tenants are in no big
rush, since their position gets
stronger as the number of competitors fades. For example, Morgan
Stanley is about to renew its lease for
about 800,000 square feet at 1 New
York Plaza.
“There are less than a dozen tenants looking for more than 500,000
square feet who are in the market
now,”said Joseph Harbert,chief operating officer for the New York
metro region of Cushman & Wakefield Inc.“Last year there were probably double that number.”
He advises, however, that large
companies constantly review their
real estate options, so a deal could
crop up at any time. For example,
Condé Nast’s lease wasn’t close to expiring when the media firm signed on
last year to become the anchor tenant
at 1 World Trade Center. Similarly,
officials at Time Warner Inc.are eval44 | Crain’s New York Business | March 26, 2012
buck ennis
SOLICITATION:
MISSING INGREDIENT: Brookfield’s
Jeremiah Larkin is on the prowl for renters.
uating options for its 4 millionsquare-foot Manhattan portfolio.
That comes despite the fact that it
owns the nearly 1 million square feet
it occupies at its Time Warner Center headquarters and that the rest is
spread among nine buildings, where
leases don’t begin to expire until 2017.
But the company could always move
sooner. News Corp.’s lease at 1211
Sixth Ave. doesn’t expire until 2020,
yet it has been seen out in the market.
Buy now and save
In fact, acting now has its advantages for tenants in search of state-ofthe-art facilities, where it is easier to
achieve huge economies by packing
more people into less space. If they
wait too long, the price could go up.
“Whoever moves in first gets the
best deal,” said Mary Ann Tighe,
chief executive of CBRE’s tristate
region, who represents News Corp.
and Group M, a media company
looking for about 500,000 square
feet, among others.
She and other high-level brokers
involved in these deals declined to
discuss clients, but they don’t have
to.In the notoriously gossipy real estate world, brokers ferret out which
tenants are meeting with which
landlords with the same doggedness
as paparazzi chasing movie stars.
Many brokers, including some
representing big clients, don’t expect
any major deals to be done this year
because the economic outlook is still
too cloudy to sign 20-year leases.
Moreover, moving is very expensive,
costing an average of $200 a square
foot, sources said. That means a
500,000-square-foot tenant would
spend about $100 million to move.
For example, brokers said Credit Suisse would be considered a
good candidate to go to the West
Side because it has made unconventional moves before, including its
current home in the Flatiron district. Yet the bank’s net income last
year fell 62%. As a result, many expect it will stay put.
Meanwhile, other sources said
that if Time Warner decides to consolidate, they would expect it to
move to Related’s Hudson Yards
site. Related developed the Time
Warner Center, so it has a relationship with the media giant. 䡲
Early on in his career,
Joseph Weilgus worked as an intern
at a top consulting firm. He used
CRAIN’S annual Book of Lists
as the ultimate prospecting tool,
eventually building
enough of a client base
to start his own business.
Today, as Chief Executive Officer of investment and financial advisory firm New Legacy Group and founder of Project
Sunshine, a multi-national children’s non-profit organization, Joe continues to use CRAIN’S assets to build his growing empire.
Hudson City troubles
squeezed as customers take advantage of rock-bottom interest rates to
refinance their mortgages and other
loans. But Hudson City’s biggest
problems are self-inflicted and go
back to a boom-era decision that in
retrospect was terribly misguided.
To fuel growth after completing
its conversion in 2005 from an oldschool depositor-owned bank to a
publicly traded institution, Hudson
City borrowed $30 billion from
global banks and the Federal Home
Loan Bank of New York, a
government-chartered institution
that provides funding to community banks. The borrowings carried a
pre-crisis-era interest rate of 4%,
and locking in the long-term rate
seemed wise at the time. After all,
the housing market was roaring, and
Hudson City officials were concerned the Federal Reserve would
raise interest rates to slow it down.
Of course, the exact opposite
happened. Housing collapsed, and
to save the rest of the economy the
Fed drove rates down to essentially
zero. Suddenly, Hudson City was
stuck with billions’ worth of expensive long-term debt on its books.
“They made a big bet on interest
rates, and it blew up on them,” said
Matthew Kelley, an analyst at investment banking boutique Sterne
Agee & Leach.
Last year, Hudson City bit the
bullet and paid off about $15 billion
worth of debt before it matured, although doing so cost nearly $2 billion in prepayment penalties. Those
expenses pushed the bank deep into
the red and forced its parent, Hudson City Bancorp,to cut its dividend
in half while its stock price sank by
nearly 50%.Alarmed federal regulators ordered the bank to beef up its
risk-management procedures, and
Mr. Salamone has hired five people
with doctorates in mathematics to
better monitor interest-rate risk.
Painful as it all was, Hudson City
still has another $15 billion of longterm borrowings on its books. With
the Fed recently forecasting that interest rates will remain near zero until 2014, analysts fear Hudson may
be forced to restructure its balance
sheet again, although Mr. Salamone
insisted there are no plans to do so.
Yet even as it grapples with its
debts, changes in the competitive
landscape make it harder for Hudson City to recover.
For many years, the bank focused
on a single product: jumbo mortgages, which are home loans too big
to be acquired by Fannie or Freddie.
Because banks couldn’t offload
these mortgages easily, fewer elected to compete against Hudson City,
enabling it to charge higher rates
and lend to only the most creditworthy. Yet during the heat of the financial crisis, the government dramatically upped the size of loans that
Fannie or Freddie could buy from
banks. Suddenly, Hudson City had
a lot of new competition. Observers
believe its customer loan balance
will decline by $1 billion this year.
“A big part of their mortgage
business got nationalized,” Mr. Kelley said.“There’s really nothing they
can do about that.”
Mr. Salamone said Hudson City
is exploring new strategies and examining “all options.” Asked if that
means management is looking to
sell the bank, he said that option is
not being “actively pursued.”
The brokerage Compass Point
Research & Trading estimates
that Hudson City and its 135
branches in suburban New Jersey,
Westchester County and Connecticut would fetch up to $11 a share in
a takeover—a hefty 50% premium
over its current market price.
For now, Hudson City is trying
to wait out the storm. Mr. Salamone
said he’s confident the government
will ease itself out of the mortgage
business and is encouraged that
banking giants also are paring back.
Earlier this year, MetLife decided to
close its mortgage business, and last
year Bank of America shut its unit
that bought home loans originated
by third parties.
“When the mortgage business
comes back—and it will—we’ll be
very well positioned,” Mr. Salamone vowed. “In the meantime, it is
what it is.” 䡲
Presto! Here are
bigger offices
Space inflation
allows for collection
of more rent
BY THERESA AGOVINO
It’s often been said that New York is
a magical city. So maybe that ex- Loss for tenants
Landlords have long charged tenplains how so many of its buildings
get bigger every year without adding ants for space such as hallways and
lobbies that they don’t use exclusiveso much as a single brick.
In fact, more than half of a sample ly as a way to pay for the upkeep of
of 50 midtown buildings grew signif- the building’s common areas and systems. It’s called loss factor,
icantly in the past two
and it’s the difference bedecades, while only one of
tween the space the tenant
them was actually physicaloccupies and the space
ly expanded, according to a
they are charged for.
new report by Commercial GROWTH RATE
The tower in the samTenant Real Estate Repre- for a third of
sample midtown ple with the largest statissentation.
tical growth spurt was
The brokerage found buildings over
that 34% of the buildings the past decade 1140 Sixth Ave. It grew
41% from 1990 to 2011.
grew by 5% or more over the
The increase occurred in
past decade. If that magnitude of so-called space inflation were one leap in 2010. A spokesman for
extrapolated over the entire Manhat- owner the Blackstone Group didn’t
tan market, that would translate to a return a call for comment. The only
total annual rent hike for tenants of building that actually increased in
physical size was 666 Third Ave.,
$775 million.
In New York, landlords measure according to the report.
Steven Spinola, president of the
space as they see fit, since there are
no industry standards or regulations Real Estate Board of New York,
dictating how to do it. Space infla- said the property’s exact size or loss
tion tends to pick up in weak real es- factor isn’t what propels tenants to
tate markets, such as those of recent rent space. He said they consider if
years, because it helps bolster a the space suits their needs and
building’s revenue, noted Marisa the total cost. 䡲
5%+
Red ink at the Digest
After years of struggling as a public
company, it was taken private in a
$2.4 billion leveraged buyout in
2007, and former Fairchild Publications CEO Mary Berner was put in
charge.
She moved the headquarters
from Pleasantville, N.Y., to Manhattan, sold off money-losing divisions, launched new properties and
reorganized old ones. She also lowered Reader’s Digest’s bloated rate
base—the circulation figure promised to advertisers—to 5.5 million,
from 10 million.
Selling off assets
The bankruptcy put an end to
her plans, and a new board, backed
by new investors, replaced her last
spring with then-Chief Financial
Officer Tom Williams. Already a
board member, Mr. Guth took the
reins in September.
A longtime telecommunications
CEO with no experience in publishing, he plans to sell off all but the
core properties. Recently he unloaded giant food website AllRecipes.com, which Meredith
Corp. bought for $175 million.
Most of that is being used to pay
down debt and buy Mr. Guth time
to make his changes.
He’s also looking to shed the
money-losing Lifestyle & Enter46 | Crain’s New York Business | March 26, 2012
Manley, president of CTRR, which
used published data provided by
landlords to make its calculations.
“What tenants really focus on is
the rent per square foot,” said Ms.
Manley. “Sometimes it is easier to
increase the rentable square footage
than it is to increase the rent.”
tainment Direct division, which
sells Time Life products. In the end,
he’ll be focused on the so-called
master brands. Along with the flagship magazine, these consist of Taste
of Home and The Family Handyman,
both published in Milwaukee by a
division that also puts out cookbooks and runs cooking schools
around the country.
“We serve Middle America,”
Mr. Guth said. “Where we got into
trouble in the past,partly,is when we
Management
understands
what it has
to do
ignored that.”
But sticking to its knitting may
not be enough. Some observers say
a turnaround remains a challenge,
requiring a lot of investment at a
time when the company has to keep
its core businesses from eroding.
“We believe management understands what it has to do,” said
Standard & Poor’s analyst Minesh
Patel, who—prior to the sale of All-
Recipes.com—voiced
concerns
about Reader’s Digest’s liquidity.
“But it’s a very complex restructuring.”
Obsolete direct-marketing business
In addition, there are questions
about how much growth can ever
come from the traditional directmarketing side of the company.
“Talk about a business that is being
rendered obsolete by the Web,” said
Peter Kreisky, a management consultant who advises media companies on digital strategy. “Restoring
its prominence in today’s marketplace would require a massive transformation.”
But Dan Lagani, president of
Reader’s Digest North America, argues that the transformation is already happening, and offers as evidence what he says is a new hit
franchise, The Digest Diet.The book
is being sold through a dedicated
website and marketed through the
magazine.
Mr. Lagani also expects sales of
Reader’s Digest’s digital editions to
equal newsstand sales—about
210,000 copies—by the end of the
year.
Mr. Guth insists that the core
U.S.businesses are stable,and he believes they will find ways to increase
their revenue. But right now, he’s focused on making the company
profitable.
“If we can do that well and build
a healthier company, the top line
will take care of itself,” he said. 䡲
BUSINESS LIVES
1in3
companies predict
renewed growth
and increased
hiring for 2012
Source: Right Management
HOT JOBS
EXECUTIVE
INBOX
IN THE PICTURE:
Jonathan Mannion
has shot all of Jay-Z’s
album covers.
Anne Fisher
VP OF ENGINEERING
COMPANY GramercyOne
JOB DESCRIPTION Build, lead
and motivate team of engineers
MOST IMPORTANT TASKS
Design, develop, release and
scale connected applications
CREDENTIALS NEEDED Experience building and scaling large
websites; strong operational and
project management skills; bachelor’s in electrical engineering or
computer science preferred
SALARY Mid-$100,000s
RECRUITER Internal
DOWNSIDE Maintaining high-level
work product in a fast-paced environment
UPSIDE Enjoying latitude to
recruit, hire and develop the engineering, infrastructure and data
teams
GramercyOne is a New York City
startup and leading provider of
cloud-based business management and marketing solutions for
companies around the world.
—SUZANNE PANARA
Shield your
business from
cybercrooks
Blesso Properties:
Albert Price, 43, joined
the real estate
development and
investment firm as
president and chief
operating officer. He
was previously
managing director and partner at
Goldman Properties.
Rocket Fuel: Eric Porres, 37, joined the
advertising technology provider as chief
marketing officer. He was previously
chief marketing officer at Lotame.
Fab.com: Scott Ballantyne, 44, joined the
design firm as chief marketing officer.
He was previously chief marketing
officer at Vonage.
ING U.S.: Kevin D.
Silva, 58, joined the
financial services firm
as executive vice
president and chief
human resources
officer. He was
previously chief
human resources officer at Argo Group
International.
Johannes Leonardo: Jenny Gadd, 39,
joined the creative agency as head of
integrated production, a newly created
position. She was previously executive
producer at North Kingdom.
Marsh Inc.: Doug Dundas, 48, joined the
insurance brokerage as global head of
marketing and communications. He was
previously the owner of Doug Dundas
Communications.
NBCUniversal: Krishan Bhatia, 37, was
See EXECUTIVE MOVES on Page 48
buck ennis
EXECUTIVE MOVES
GOTHAM GIGS
Shooting Stars
‘I’m not
about
gimmicks,
but
knowing
how to ask
for things’
Right after Jonathan Mannion’s 1993 Kenyon College graduation, a
group touring the school’s photo department discovered him making
prints while his classmates were out celebrating. That year, famed
New Yorker photographer Richard Avedon had received an honorary
degree from Kenyon. Hearing about Mr. Mannion’s work ethic, Mr.
Avedon gave him his first break: an apprenticeship. ¶ When he
wasn’t assisting Mr. Avedon, the Cleveland native was infiltrating
New York’s rap scene as a photographer and superfan. He heard
Jay-Z was about to shoot the cover for his 1996 debut album,
Reasonable Doubt, and Mr. Mannion wanted in. ¶ “I just showed up
with my book and said, ‘I’ll take $300 less than your lowest quote,’ ”
Mr. Mannion, 41, recalls. ¶ He’s since shot each of Jay-Z’s album
covers and portraits of virtually every prominent hip-hop artist, as well
as other musicians and athletes. He shot the recent Bushmills whiskey
“Since Way Back” campaign, featuring the band Bon Iver and actor
Elijah Wood, among others. ¶ Mr. Mannion’s goal is to capture their
personalities. “I’m not about gimmicks, but about moments and
knowing how to ask for things,” he said.
—ali elkin
CAN YOU RECOGNIZE a
potentially disastrous breach of
your computer system’s security
when you see it? Let’s find out:
An old friend sends you an
invitation to join his or her
network on LinkedIn. Do you click
on the link in the email?
If you answered “yes,” you
need a crash course in
cybersecurity. The link could
contain malware that gives
criminals control over your
computer network, at which
point “they can do anything they
want with it,” said Stu Sjouwerman, founder and CEO of KnowBe4, a training firm with many
clients in and around New York.
Mr. Sjouwerman is the author
of Cyberheist, a computer
security guide for small business.
He points to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study released last
month that says nearly one in
four U.S. companies have been
victimized in the past year alone.
Most data breaches (about
70%, by some estimates) are the
result of “social engineering,” a
hacker term that refers to the
practice of tricking people into
clicking on links that come
loaded with spyware, malware
and assorted other kinds of
trouble. As a general rule, he
advocates advising staffers
not to click on any email link
they didn’t specifically
request.
As for the LinkedIn example
above, Mr. Sjouwerman said,
“Go to the LinkedIn website. If it
is a genuine invitation, it will
show up there.”
Curious about how skilled you
are at foiling cybercrooks? You
can take a free security test at
www.knowbe4.com/phishingsecurity-test.
HAVE YOU EVER been the victim ofhack-
ers or online scammers? Tell us at
www.crainsnewyork.com/execinbox.
Also: Are you an entrepreneur or nonprofit executive with a question about
hiring, firing or motivating employees, or another workplace issue? Starting soon, Executive Inbox will have
answers. Ask us at cnyb-execinbox@
crain.com. We’ll keep you anonymous,
if you wish.
Times Square’s big booster
BID president works to
keep Macy’s parade,
upgrade plazas
BY LISA FICKENSCHER
A
s president of the Times
Square Alliance, Tim
Tompkins is leading the
effort to keep the
Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day Parade marching through Times
Square; he’s involved in the final design of the controversial pedestrian
plazas; and he is speaking out about
the Jacob K.
Javits Convention Center plans. A
MOVERS & former yoga
SHAKERS
instructor, Mr.
Tompkins, 48,
recently started teaching
urban development
at
NYU Wagner.
the consensus is not to tear it down.
Will the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade
travel through Times Square this year?
We have been told that it will not.The
decision has been made, but we will
continue to make the case in future
years that the best thing for the city is
for it to come back to
Times Square.
made it more pleasant. People were
walking in the streets to get through
Times Square. While we have a
ways to go to make it a world-class
space, it’s a far better environment.
What’s the status of the design plans for
the plazas?
How have the
pedestrian plazas
changed life in
Times Square?
We are in the final stages of design.
It’s mostly a project to improve the
painted asphalt into attractive paved
surfaces. There was a partial unveiling in the fall, and in the next month
they’ll be going through the final
design.
The most important thing is that
they
have
What would you do if you weren’t running
the BID?
Tim
Tompkins
What do you think about the plan to tear
down the Javits Center?
Like most people in the travel and
tourism industry, I think Javits
ought to remain.
Does the Alliance have a position on this
issue?
We haven’t formally voted on it, but
Last fall I taught a graduate
course at NYU on urban development. I’m fascinated
and passionate about
cities
and
public
spaces. I’m going to
teach next fall,
too. If I could
teach yoga
and get paid
to sail people
around New
York harbor,
that wouldn’t
be bad. I own
a boat.
Where did you teach yoga?
I taught at the Citicorp company gym in TriBeCa at 6 a.m. If
I could get a better time slot, I’d
teach again. 䡲
RÉSUMÉ REVIEW
Is your job search all it could be?
We ask the experts.
NAME GABRIELLE RIERA
SUMMARY
Strategic partnership and business
development specialist with a global
market focus.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Eco-Auger, multiple locations, 2011-present
Vice president, international business development
Secured MOU with New Jersey Meadowlands Commission in two
months; created all investment pitching and marketing materials;
executed agreements with distributors for territories in three continents
New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE), 2005-2010
Investment manager-renewable energy and cleantech
Facilitated multimillion-dollar deals and developed C-level relationships
with companies; created the first renewable energy and cleantech value
proposition for New Zealand, adopted worldwide for NZTE
EDUCATION
Thunderbird School of Global Management, M.B.A., international
management
University of Florida, B.A.
Résumé appears in condensed form.
EXPERT ADVICE
Gabrielle has had a very interesting career both domestically and abroad.
Given that she is an executive, she needs a title so the reader can
understand immediately what next step she wants to take. Her executive
summary is too short and needs more detail around sector and industry
interests. Reading the role of her work, I was surprised to not see any
quantifiable accomplishments, such as how much capital was raised. And
what type of investors is she dealing with? Lastly, given her level of
experience, she needs to go back only 15 years. Gabrielle should
condense the work she did from 1986 to 1996 into two or three lines of
text in a section called “Early career.” If not, delete the section.
—jason levin, career coach, Ready, Set, Launch
To contact this candidate, email [email protected].
To be featured, go to www.crainsnewyork.com/section/resume_review.
EXECUTIVE MOVES
promoted to executive vice president,
digital strategy and operations, for the
entertainment and digital networks and
integrated media division. He was
previously senior vice president,
advertising strategy and operations, for
Comcast Digital Entertainment.
Hilary Smith, 41, was promoted to
senior vice president, communications
and integrated media marketing, in the
integrated media group. She was
previously senior vice president,
communications, NBCUniversal
entertainment and digital networks and
integrated media division.
Craig Coleman, 38, was promoted to vice
president, partnership marketing,
integrated media. He was previously
director of marketing, Green is Universal,
Healthy at NBC and Hispanics at
NBCU, for integrated media.
Bari Komitee, 36, was promoted to vice
president, marketing and events,
integrated media. She was previously
director, women, at NBCU, integrated
media.
Lenore Moritz, 39, was promoted to vice
president, communications, integrated
media and iVillage. She was previously
director of communications for the
integrated media group.
Prudential Douglas
Elliman: Max Dobens,
47, was promoted to
executive vice
president and manager
of the Waverly Place
office in Manhattan.
He was previously
senior vice president.
Madeline Hult Elghanayan, 44, joined as
senior vice president. She was previously
a senior associate salesperson at
Corcoran.
CBS Radio Sales and Entercom Radio
Sales: Janine Quintana, 33, was
promoted to vice president, sales. She
was previously senior account executive.
Tiffany Barocas, 30, was promoted to
senior account executive. She was
previously an account executive.
Preferred Concepts: Georgeanna Munger,
44, joined the insurance program
administrator and wholesale broker as
vice president of the ezumbrella.com
business unit. She was previously a
senior underwriter at Navigator.
Condé Nast Traveler: Lisa Weier, 41, was
promoted to advertising director at the
travel magazine. She was previously
integrated travel director.
Lance Williams, 31, was promoted to
executive director, brand strategy. He
was previously senior director of brand
development.
Katherine Churchill, 30, joined as
account manager. She was previously an
account manager at Brides.
Craig Kostelic, 26, joined as digital ad
manager. He was previously a mobile
product and solutions specialist at
Google.
AT&T: Marta Rosado, 40, was promoted
to director of Manhattan retail sales at
the telecommunication services
company. She was previously director of
retail sales for northern New Jersey and
Rockland, Orange and Bronx counties.
—callie eidler
EXECUTIVE PROMOTIONS
The fastest way to get an announcement into
Crain’s is to submit online. Fill out the form
at www.crainsnewyork.com/section/
executive_moves. The Executive Moves column
is also available online.
Gael Greene
French that’s
beyond classic
S
avory buckwheat crepes at
his simple Bar Breton were
chef Cyril Renaud’s response to the city’s financial trauma in 2009 after he
closed his 8-year-old Michelinstarred Fleur de Sel. Now he whips
off the mask of making do, revealing
the ambitious chef who won three
stars at the late La Caravelle, still in
the same downsized creperie space,
cheerleading an economic recovery.
He calls it La Quenelle, invoking
the gossamer fish dumplings from
the old days.There is no cream in the
updated ground pike batter or in its
Nantua-like sauce, except for a bit of
whipped cream at the end to lighten
it. And here, as at the late, lost Caravelle, an island of seafood risotto
with carrots and Swiss chard stems—
added for crunchiness—nests alongside. Topping all, lobster foam. The
familiar flavors fill my mouth, and I
think how close it is to perfect.If only
it were a bit less grainy.
The amuse is back, wearing tiny
broccoli flowers: two little paddlefish
caviar-topped goat cheese and artichoke ravioli, the chalkiness of the
cheese thrillingly set off by the sweet
tang of its beet slick. Rye bread arrives warmed, wrapped in a napkin.
And the price creep is not aggressive:
appetizers $13 to $17, entrées $27 to
$33, the chef ’s five-course tasting
$75. White tablecloths come off for
lunch, where there’s still a burger and
a $29 three-course prix fixe.
It’s clear from the flair and complexity of the new menu—kamut
grains and black rice, red-wine
maple sugar reductions, chocolatebraised short rib—that crepes and
burgers could never fulfill this man.
I imagine him in his signature chef
blacks, brooding and fantasizing
over his crepe pans, watching the
Dow for a sign.
During a stock market roller
coaster, he may have conceived of
planting Burgundy snails on polenta with a rivulet of red wine-maple
syrup reduction flying a Parmesan
tuile. It’s good, as is the pig and foie
gras terrine with house pickles and
Devonshire mustard ganache salvaged from Bar Breton’s offerings.
The delivery of his smoked
salmon might have been inspired by
one of Michelin-three-starred
Michel Bras’ exquisite blossomstrewn creations. The salmon is halfsmoked, half-cured like gravlax,
in-house, arranged in delicate tendrils on the plate with lemon confit,
salmon roe, green herb sprigs and a
splash of horseradish vinaigrette.
buck ennis
La Quenelle’s complex
menu rises above
tortured creperie space
A GOOD SIGN: Burgundy snails
LA QUENELLE
254 Fifth Ave.
(212) 213-4999
www.laquenellenyc.com
CUISINE French
PRICE RANGE Entrées $27 to
$33
SERVING Lunch, dinner, brunch
RESERVATIONS Advised
NOISE LEVEL Lively
I can’t wait to return.
I will definitely go back.
I’ll let them simmer awhile.
NO HATS Never again.
Exquisitely cooked scallops with
a blossom cut for extra caramelization are surrounded by pink grapefruit, curry-roasted carrots and a
curry foam, with artichoke chips for
crunch. For all the rich chemistry of
red wine and Valrhona braising, the
short ribs are slightly tough and dry.
But Long Island duck breast,
served with red plum and apple
compote and Swiss chard, is astonishingly rare and evenly cooked, almost gelatinous.“Do you cook them
sous-vide?” I ask.
Absolutely not. “But I was tired
of the chewiness of duck breast,” he
says. After he sears it on the skin
side, the skin is removed and it gets
poached in duck fat. “Then it rests.”
Listening to him describe his
techniques reminds me how French
he is, that he is a chef who actually
cooks. Balthazar’s bread is not merely
warmed. It is baked for 20 minutes.
“That removes the humidity, recrisps
the crust,” he explains.
Perhaps the orange Creamsicle is
not quite up to Creamsicles of childhood memories—it’s too icy. Still,
I’m impressed by the gooseberry jewels. And you may feel as fulfilled as
the chef himself if you end the
evening with his apple Tatin crepes
with Devonshire cream or sensational crème brûlée riding atop brioche
pudding with Armagnac ice cream,
plump raisins and salted pistachios.
Copyright © 2012 by Gael Greene.
Syndicated by www.insatiable-critic.com.
THE
WEEK
AHEAD
APRIL 2-8
CONFERENCES
AND SEMINARS
MONDAY, APRIL 2
The Columbia Business School Alumni
Club of New York will host
A CONVERSATION WITH BERKSHIRE
HATHAWAY ADVISER LI LU. Mr. Lu will
share his keys to success, lessons learned
and views of the future. The event will
take place at the UJA Federation of New
York, 130 E. 59th St., from 5:30 p.m. to
8:30 p.m. The cost to attend is $25 for
alumni club and Manhattan Chamber of
Commerce members and $40 for
nonmembers. To get more information
and to register, visit www.cbsacny.org.
TUESDAY, APRIL 3
The New York Building Congress will
host A CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
BREAKFAST FORUM featuring Joseph
Lhota, chairman and chief executive of
the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority. The forum will take place at
the Hilton New York, 1335 Sixth Ave.,
from 8 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. The cost to
attend is $75 for Building Congress
members and $150 for nonmembers. To
get more information and to purchase
tickets, call (212) 481-9230 or visit
www.buildingcongress.com.
TUESDAY, APRIL 3
Join Roy Fenichel for REPRESENTING THE
BUYER: CO-OP AND CONDO DUE DILIGENCE
AND CONTRACT MATTERS, an accredited
continuing legal-education class for
lawyers. This class will address specific
topics, including delivery-date issues, the
mortgage-contingency clause, downpayment and default clauses and more.
The class is worth three professionalism
credits and will take place at the U.S.
Trust Building, 114 W. 47th St., from
8:30 a.m. to noon. The class is free for
lawyers with preregistration, which is
required. To get more information and to
register, call (646) 695-7925 or email
[email protected].
TUESDAY, APRIL 3
The International Special Events
Society will host its second annual
SUSTAINABILITY SUMMIT. The event will
provide information, insight and updates
concerning the latest event-industry
sustainability standards. The program
will feature green-event innovators and
environmental experts, educational
workshops, keynote speakers and
networking. The summit will take place
at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W.
17th St., from 4 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Tickets start at $50 for members and
$75 for nonmembers. Student tickets are
also available. To get more information
and to purchase tickets, call (646) 8200474 or visit www.isesnyc.com.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4
Join the Science, Industry and Business
Library for COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS. Author,
educator and technologist Sean
Costigan and investor and securities
analyst Joshua Horowitz will examine
the key market and industry sources
available at the library and how to find
market resources on the Web through
better research strategies. The free
seminar will take place at the library, 188
Madison Ave., conference room 018,
from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. To get more
information and to register, visit
www.nypl.org.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4
Join the Peoples Improv Theater and
instructor Tommy Galan for INTRO TO
SMALL BUSINESS IMPROV. The program
uses the techniques of improvisation to
train attendees how to present
themselves with confidence and poise
and how to network effectively. The
seminar will take place at Simple
Studios, 134 W. 29th St., from 7 p.m. to
10 p.m. The cost to attend is $30 for
Manhattan Chamber of Commerce
members and $50 for nonmembers. To
get more information and to register, call
(516) 770-1842, or visit www.thepitnyc.com.
NETWORKING RECEPTIONS
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4
The Better Business Bureau and
Constant Contact will host DRIVING
BUSINESS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA, a
networking breakfast briefing.
Attendees will learn how to manage
social-media tools to deliver powerful
results and how to determine which ones
will work best for their needs. The event
will take place at Scandinavia House,
Volvo Hall, 58 Park Ave., second floor,
from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. The cost to attend
is $15 for BBB-accredited companies
and nonprofits, and $25 for
nonaccredited businesses. To get more
information and to register, call (212)
358-2842 or visit www.manhattancc.org.
CULTURAL EVENTS
Pick
of the
week
TUESDAY, APRIL 3
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art celebrates
the opening of “DÜRER AND
BEYOND: CENTRAL EUROPEAN DRAWINGS.”
The exhibition will be the first to offer
an extensive overview of the museum’s
holdings of early Central European
drawings, as well as works by later 16thand 17th-century artists. It will run
through Sept. 3. The museum is located
at 1000 Fifth Ave. The recommended
admission donation for adults is $25. To
get more information and to purchase
tickets, call (212) 535-7710 or visit
www.metmuseum.org.
THURSDAY, APRIL 5
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center presents NEW MUSIC IN THE
KAPLAN PENTHOUSE. The series
showcases an eclectic mix of current
composers and styles. Tonight’s
performance will feature soprano Claron
McFadden, pianist Gilles Vonsattel, the
Afiara String Quartet and clarinetist
Jörg Widmann in works inspired and
presented by German impresario Klaus
Lauer. The performance will take place
at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, 165
bloomberg news
flickr.com/chemex
INSATIABLE
CRITIC
WHAT HE’S
READING
AS PRESIDENT of Hearst
Magazines, David Carey devotes
most of his reading time to
Hearst’s 20 titles. He also finds
time for personal favorites from
other publishers, including
Hemmings Motor News (Mr.
Carey is a classic-cars buff) and
The New Yorker, where he served
as publisher. “It’s more fun to
read when you don’t work
there,” he said. “It’s all pleasure
with no business.”
Though he has little time for
books or TV, he did manage to
watch both seasons of Downton
Abbey, burning through all 16
hours during a recent trip to and
from Paris. “Everyone’s been
talking about this series,” said Mr.
Carey, who loaded up two iPads
for the flights. “It was like a very
long movie. And more television
than I’ve watched in the last 18
months.”
—MATTHEW FLAMM
W. 65th St., 10th floor of the Rose
Building, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30.
To get more information and to
purchase tickets, call (212) 875-5788, or
visit www.chambermusicsociety.org.
THURSDAY, APRIL 5,
TO SATURDAY, APRIL 7
The Baryshnikov Arts Center presents
ON THE BEACH. Five groups of emerging
artists will interpret sections of the
seminal opera Einstein on the Beach, by
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, through
dance. The performances will take place
at the Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 W.
37th St., at 8 p.m. each night. Tickets are
$20. To get more information and to
purchase tickets, visit www.bacnyc.org.
—suzanne panara
To view Crain’s classified events listings, go to www.crainsnewyork.com/events
Power Players Drink Here.
(Trophy Wives Welcome)
R
Networking & Dining
Packages Available.
Host your next corporate event.
framesnyc.com | 212.268.6909

rising stars - Crain`s New York Business

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