Following Mercedes-Benz’s departure in January from the showroom it occupied at 430 Park Avenue since the late 1950’s, ownership is demolishing the space, The Commercial Observer has learned.

The demolition began last week following the luxury car dealer’s departure on January 7, when it consolidated its operations at its national headquarters at 770 Eleventh Avenue, sources confirmed, including Roque Toribio, a security guard at the Park Avenue location who was not authorized to give The Commercial Observer a peek at the space. Read More

A few weeks back, when I called the author Rachel Kushner in Los Angeles with the number her publicist gave me, and the voice came on the other line saying “I’m sorry but the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected,” the first thing I thought—after noting that it’s an overly apologetic man who makes the announcement in L.A. instead of the stern-sounding woman you get in New York—was that it was all some kind of staged performance, a statement on the nature of interviews and profile writing and the futility of ever really connecting with someone. I was primed into this mode of thinking by Ms. Kushner’s new novel, The Flamethrowers, which is about a lot of things, but most of all authenticity and its frequent absence.

The Flamethrowers is set in Soho in 1977 and follows a young artist known around town as Reno because that’s where she’s from. She falls in with a group of artists who show at the Helen Hellenberger Gallery, whose proprietor tends to sleep with her artists, comes from a Greek family, and resembles the real-life Mary Boone, who created a gallery empire in downtown Manhattan in the late-70s. Reno is introduced to the group by Giddle, a woman who works at a skuzzy diner on Lafayette as a kind of living performance piece, “no audience to what she was doing, since it was so much like life, and no real friends since they were merely an audience to her performance.” Reno’s attentions become triangulated by her boyfriend Sandro, an idealistic artist and, despite his disavowals, heir to the Italian Valera tire fortune, and Ronnie, a photographer embarking on a doomed mission to photograph every living person. It’s a New York that’s familiar, “a mecca of individual points,” Ms. Kushner writes, “longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.” But the author’s metropolis is slightly off, its own contained world of characters and hangers-on. Read More

There are many factions of 9/11 truthers, people who believe that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center are not what they seem. While many are outspoken, none of the various groups’ members have ever defaced a famous French painting, but hey, there’s a first for everything! Read More

Sixth Avenue is a haven for corporate art, from Robert Indian’s Love to Curved Cube outside the Time Life Building, to say nothing of the massive galleries spanning the entire block between 51st and 52nd streets inside the UBS Building. The Avenue of the Americas is also home to mostly older office buildings, still very splendid and class A, but many in need of updating. It has become a hub of new elevators and air conditioners and reconfigured lobbies.

At 1133 Sixth Avenue, the Durst Organization is merging these two currents, popular public art and a sparkling new lobby, into a striking whole. The centerpiece of a new Gensler-designed lobby is an installation by light artist Leo Villareal, Volume (Durst). At 90-feet long, 12-feet high and 6-feet deep, the dazzling sculpture is Mr. Villareal’s largest three-dimensional work yet. Floating near the top of the lobby, it not only enlivens the space but the avenue, as well, fully visible through the two-story windows facing out on the plaza between the International Center for Photography on one side and a bank on the other.

“I love the chance encounter,” Mr. Villareal said at an opening reception for the lobby Tuesday night. Read More

“Whatever Philip Johnson’s legacy turns out to be, it will not rest on his buildings,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her obituary of “the king’s architect” in The Wall Street Journal seven years ago. Mr. Johnson had once told Ms. Huxtable of his desire to work for royalty. Not finding any, Ms. Huxtable concluded, he Read More

It has been an exciting year for architecture in the city, with bold projects unveiled and getting underway: the new Cornell tech campus by Thom Mayne and SOM, a vastly re-imagined (and boldly so) Hudson Yards and modular housing getting off the ground at Atlantic Yards.

But in terms of actual new, completed projects, 2012 has been a lean year. This is largely the fault of the recession. Downturns tend to stifle development generally, but especially when the heart of the slow down is a real estate bubble. Design can actually be at its best just after the bubble bursts, and the gaudiest visions are getting wrapped up. And so, there are no Frank Gehry towers or Diller, Scofidio + Renfro cultural confections this year. Read More

Tom Wolfe’s new novel, the Miami-set Back to Blood, has not been particularly well-received by book critics, but at the balmy, prosecco-soaked doorbuster sale and glad-handing jubilee known as Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, attendees armed with e-readers passed around one brief passage with gleeful approval. The scene, which comes midway through the book and is set at the same fair, introduces a character in whom many see an eerie resemblance to dealer Larry Gagosian—the art world’s widely admired, widely feared and widely resented top dog. The character, a gallery dealer named Harry Goshen (the name is perhaps a tip-off) is described as “a tall man with gray hair, although he doesn’t look all that old, and eerie pale-gray eyes like the slanted eyes of a husky.”

A bit mesmerized, Mr. Wolfe’s narrator circles back to Goshen’s eyes a few lines later: “So pale, those eyes … they look ghostly and sinister …”

Several fairgoers who encountered Mr. Gagosian in his booth in the Miami Beach Convention Center took note of his eyes as well. Not sinister, they said, just tired.

“Maybe it’s getting to him,” one art adviser surmised. “The travel, the expansion. At some point, it hits you the wrong way. It’s hard to satisfy everyone and keep all the balls in the air, and when you go to the top like that you become a target. People love to get the giant.”

It’s been an unusually challenging period for Mr. Gagosian, the art world’s silver-maned dealer-emperor, whose sharp eye for talent, business prowess and aggressive style of deal-making propelled an ascendancy from modest beginnings as a Los Angeles street peddler—hawking cheap posters in Westwood—to a position of unrivaled dominance in the international art trade, a sovereignty that some are predicting, a tad eagerly, may soon come to a close. Read More

A veteran New York art dealer recently complained to the Transom that the city’s art world has become much less fun over the past few years, citing as evidence the fact that no one drinks at business lunches anymore. We’d heard this complaint from other art types before. But could there finally be a change on the horizon? Read More

What does a dispossessed Cherokee tribe, a John Lennon-Eric Clapton supergroup and Marilyn Monroe’s unborn son have in common? All were shopping for an apartment on the Upper East Side on Monday afternoon.

Well, not exactly, but it is possible to shop for both a $4 million apartment and a $40,000 manuscript at the Douglas Elliman showroom at 980 Madison Avenue through Sunday.

Profiles in History, a middlebrow auction house (Albert Einstein’s letter’s, the desk Bram Stoker wrote Dracula on, Kate Winslett’s emerald earrings from Titanic) and Marsha Malinowski, who once auctioned off a Magna Carta for $21 million, are offering some 299 items on December 18, “the Property of a Distinguished American Private Collector.” Ms. Malinowski, after 26 years at Sotheby’s, struck out in May on her own, and her first big offering is the work of the collector she has long known. Read More

Veteran gallery-owner Barbara Gladstone doesn’t only love art and artists, she’s also shown a strong commitment to starchitects. After buying a condo at Richard Meier’s 165 Charles Street in 2005, she tapped rising star Annabelle Seldorf to design her Chelsea gallery, which opened in 2008.

But now Ms. Gladstone is leaving behind her glass house along the Hudson River. City records show that she sold her condo, which does not appear to have been listed publicly, for $6.5 million. Not bad, considering that she paid $4.86 million for it, according to city records. Read More