Betting on Star Power

One soggy November afternoon, Mario Procida - son of a construction boss, grandson of an immigrant stonemason - was stalking his natural habitat, a building site. As usual, he was doing several things at once, all of them distractedly. The 49-year-old developer had come down from his family firm's office in the Bronx to show me around his latest project, On Prospect Park, a 15-story, 114-unit luxury apartment building at the eastern edge of Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. Being who he was, however, Procida couldn't help turning our little tour of the unfinished eighth floor into an exacting inspection of the work in progress. Procida believes that his building, designed by the famed architect Richard Meier, will soon be recognized as one of the most aesthetically significant structures ever erected in the borough. At this point, however, On Prospect Park was still little more than a skeleton of round pillars and naked concrete slabs, bunted with orange netting and open to the stiff autumn breeze. Procida spotted a few imperfections, necessitating a series of gruff cellphone calls to subordinates. "I would venture to guess that this is the most complex residential building that I have ever seen," he told me.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Risk Taker The developer Mario Procida says he is confident this building, On Prospect Park, designed by Richard Meier, will be compared to Modernist masterpieces.

Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Control Complex Architects like Richard Meier propose designs that challenge cost-conscious developers. At On Prospect Park, baseboards were a point of contention.

Procida's BlackBerry buzzed. It was Sheldon Gordon, a multimillionaire shopping-mall developer who is one of Procida's two partners in the project. "Hey, Sheldon, I'm out at the building," Procida shouted. "What can I tell you? It's spectacular." After he hung up, Procida led me onto a creaky construction elevator that took us up to the penthouse level, where seven units - five of them duplexes - are selling for million to million. He darted up a concrete stairwell to the most expensive unit's roof deck, where three people were waiting for him: a gray-bearded man in a tweed jacket; his companion, a demure woman wearing a Yankees cap; and Johanna Beiter, a real estate agent who was showing them the place. Procida - stocky, balding, wearing a lavender shirt, a blue sweater vest and casual white slacks - threw open his arms as he strode toward the roof's rough edge. "It doesn't get any better than this," he said, "does it?"

Usually, the real estate agents marketing On Prospect Park don't offer such tours to prospective buyers; a building's birth, like the human kind, is a messy thing to witness. But the bearded man was a roofing contractor by profession, so he could presumably be trusted to look past the rusty nails and the stalks of protruding rebar and to focus on what was really important: the million view. The rain had stopped momentarily, and the sun was streaming through the clouds as if in a Turner landscape. To the left was the rolling expanse of Prospect Park, where red and yellow leaves were still clinging to the trees. Straightaway were the greenish church steeples of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and the Statue of Liberty was somewhere out in the foggy harbor. To the right, in the distance, was the familiar Manhattan skyline. In the foreground stood Brooklyn's landmark Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, which was in the process of being converted into luxury condominiums itself.

In fact, almost any direction you looked, some once-scruffy corner of Brooklyn was under renovation. Next to the bank building lay the Atlantic Yards site, the proposed future location of a mammoth office, housing and sporting complex designed by Frank Gehry. Down on the borough's East River waterfront, shiny glass residential buildings were sprouting like marsh grass. This decade's real estate boom has favored Brooklyn, where overall property valuations rose 26.7 percent last year. In 2005, the last year for which complete data are available, more units of housing were constructed in Brooklyn than in Manhattan.

On Prospect Park represents the climax, at least for now, of this trend. For years, well-to-do artistic types - the actress Jennifer Connelly, for instance, and the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer - have come to Brooklyn for its handsome (and increasingly pricey) brownstones. But Procida is trying to sell the richest on a very different vision of Brooklyn life. His building is located on the edge of a gentrified zone, in a ZIP code where the median household income is less than ,000 a year, at the edge of a neighborhood, Crown Heights, that is probably best known as the site of deadly race-related incidents 16 years ago. But Procida is marketing it like a little outpost of Manhattan, importing a voguish sales tool from across the river: the idea of packaging apartments as inhabitable art. In Manhattan, new residential buildings designed by famous architects like Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Jean Nouvel and the chic Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron have been marketed, at enormous prices and with varying degrees of success, as the latest symbols of cosmopolitan wealth - the kinds of places Calvin Klein and Nicole Kidman choose to rest their stylish heads. But no one tried it in Brooklyn before. The working theory is that in an uncertain economy, at a moment when the real estate market seems to be cooling, it's smartest to bet on those who worry about money the least, building for the rich and their high-end tastes. "That market's pretty much immune" to market forces, said Louis V. Greco Jr., Procida's third partner in On Prospect Park. "People are into Richard Meier, so they'll go and buy in Richard Meier's building, and they'll pay a premium."

On Prospect Park seems almost custom-designed to test the untried notion that the vaulting ambitions of great architecture are not subject to the dragging influence of supply and demand. Procida's fellow developers are watching the project with keen interest and some skepticism. "I know Mario well, I knew his dad well and Mario and I have been partners on deals before," said Carlton Brown, a developer who is building a 250-unit luxury condominium complex called the Kalahari in Harlem, another epicenter of new residential construction. "Mario is clearly a risk taker. I think the building is going to be a great building. But when Mario showed me the building, I said, ‘That's a risky building to put up in Brooklyn.' "

Procida likes to turn the implicit question "Who'd move to Brooklyn?" on its head. The revived borough is full of newly desirable locations, he says, but he owns the best one of all. "This is the most prominent site in the borough," he said proudly the day I visited the building, after we were back on ground level. He gestured out toward Grand Army Plaza, which is dominated by a Parisian-style triumphal arch. "This is the crowning piece of Eastern Parkway. You've got the arch. You've got the entrance to the park. You've got the Brooklyn Museum." Procida, who has a master's degree in architecture from U.C.L.A., said that he hoped that Meier's diaphanous glass-walled building would one day evoke comparisons to such Modernist masterpieces as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. "This is a great building," Procida said. "And there aren't that many great buildings that are built."

By the time we went down to the plaza, the bearded businessman and his companion had already driven away in their BMW. Procida quizzed Beiter, the real estate agent, who told him the couple seemed most impressed with Unit 8E, a three-bedroom with a large terrace that listed at .6 million, and Penthouse F, a larger version of the same. Though On Prospect Park's sales office had opened only the week before and the building will not be completed until the summer of 2008, Procida told me that buyers had already signed contracts on four condominiums. That left just 110 to sell.

It wasn't hard to pick the real estate guy out of the crowd loitering in front the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue a few days before Christmas. He was the puckish man in the pinstripe suit, puffing on the Davidoff cigarillo. Billy Procida - Mario's younger brother, former partner, temperamental opposite and occasional tormentor - pushed open the door to Bobby Van's Steakhouse and asked the maître d'hôtel for a table by the window.

1 2 3 4 5 6 Next Page »

Andrew Rice, a writer living in Brooklyn, has covered New York real estate. He is now writing a book about Uganda.

More Topics:
Bissell
Get information about Bissell carpet cleaning products such as vacuums, carpet and hard floor cleaners, and cleaning formulas. Also provides user guides, ...

Vacuum Outlet
Offers Rainbow, Kirby, Miele, Sharp, Panasonic, Sanyo, and Samsung vacuum cleaners plus bags, belts, and other accessories.

Howstuffworks "How Vacuum Cleaners Work"
Vacuum cleaners have cleaned our homes for over a century. ... Shopping for a vacuum cleaner? ... Vacuum Cleaner Image Gallery ...