BY DANIEL GEIGER

During a ski trip to Colorado several months ago, Michael May, an executive at Cantor Fitzgerald, remembers his eagerness to hit the slopes. He rose at the crack of dawn and found his friend Marty Burger, who had organized the trip, waiting in the lodge with the same idea in mind.

Traveling with a large group of executives, they skied all day. Mr. May remembers being exhausted, but Mr. Burger convinced him to join him and few others for some indoor tennis back at the hotel. A couple of games, at Mr. Burger’s urging, turned into a couple of sets.

Even after all that, Mr. Burger still wasn’t done with the day’s physical exertions. He arranged to take everyone back out to the ski trails, where they rode specially rigged snow bikes down the slopes with headlamps to see in the darkness. Then it was time to get to dinner. Mr. Burger planned a dining extravaganza and later insisted his 80 guests all go out for drinks, which stretched well into the night.

The next morning, Mr. May recalls staggering out of bed, sore from head to foot. Mr. Burger looked refreshed.

“He was up at 5:30 in the morning for a conference call with some investors in China,” Mr. May recalled. “But that’s Marty. I can get four or five hours of sleep for a few nights, but he’s one of those rare people who just doesn’t get tired when they don’t sleep, who just never crashes.”

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BY DANIEL GEIGER

Andrew Goldberg is a retail executive at CBRE, where he is one of the firm’s top brokers, representing both landlords and tenants. With Nordstrom’s deal on 57th Street, retail leasing has been the talk of the town. Of course, Mr. Goldberg is no stranger to big-time leasing deals, having brokered Gucci’s 50,000-square-foot flagship at Trump Tower in 2006, one of the most valuable retail deals ever done in Manhattan. Mr. Goldberg spoke with The Commercial Observer recently about last month’s huge Nordstrom deal, the Drake development site, Gucci and Westfield’s plans for the World Trade Center.

You’re very familiar with Plaza district retail, right? You did that huge Gucci deal at Trump Tower. Yes, Gucci is on 56th and Fifth. That was a tremendous deal at the time and even today that deal is a high watermark. It was just under 50,000 square feet. We had to assemble the space at the Trump Tower. It was a great deal—it gave Gucci over 100 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue in a four-story, and it gave Donald [Trump] a premier brand at fabulous economics. [Editor's Note: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, owner of The Commercial Observer]

Deals like that, and obviously Nordstrom as well, don’t come around that often, do they? It would be great to have that every year, but no. It’s not everyday that the corner of Trump Tower becomes available and Donald Trump tells you that he wants you to go and arrange a blockbuster deal for him and do whatever you have to to get it done in terms of buying out the existing tenants and assembling the space.

Is that what he said? At the time, we went to Donald and said we had a tenant in the space who we repped that wanted out of the space because maybe we didn’t need so much space and they were looking for other locations to decrease the size of the store. We moved them to Madison and 70th. At the same time we knew Gucci needed more space and we put the whole thing together. The timing worked out well. Many things had to happen all at once.

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BY DANIEL EDWARD ROSEN

A new radio show featuring Howard Stern's former sidekick and a noted comedian has built a new TV-slash-radio studio at 185 Varick Street, The Commercial Observer has learned.

The Nick & Artie Show, hosted by Artie Lange and Nick DiPaolo and produced by DirectTV, has leased a 5,000-square-foot studio for part of the 3rd floor in the Hudson Square area office building. Asking rents in the 3-year lease were in the high $40s-a-square-foot. The deal was closed earlier in the Spring.

David Glassman of Cushman & Wakefield represented landlord Benjy Federbush of Varick Realty in the deal. Bill Peters of Jones Lang LaSalle represented DirecTV.

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BY DANIEL GEIGER

During the recession, 23-40 West 23rd Street looked like another building on the verge of gaining substantial vacancy. Suffering amid the downturn, its biggest tenant, Ecko Unlimited, which had leased the bulk of the 600,000-square-foot property, appeared to be on the brink of insolvency and ready to hand back hundreds of thousands of square feet in a market where replacement tenants were hard to find.

Now, just a few years later, the building is one of the neighborhood’s biggest successes.

AppNexus, a tech firm that specializes in creating software and platforms for online advertising, is expanding by 24,500 square feet at the building, adding to the 66,000 square feet it already occupies.

The deal is one of many that Andy Roos, a top leasing executive at the real estate services firm Colliers International and a part owner of the property, has helped arrange that have filled space once held by Ecko. In addition to AppNexus, Mr. Roos and Michael Cohen, another Colliers executive who is an owner of the building, signed a 66,000-square-foot deal in recent months with a digital division of the cosmetics company Estee Lauder.

Always humble, Mr. Roos doesn’t think of himself as a visionary for seeing the neighborhood’s--and his property’s--quick transition in recent years into a destination for creative firms and tech companies, an influx that has driven up rents, lowered vacancy levels and made the area the hottest leasing district in the city.

“I looked at the success of 111 Eighth Avenue and 200 Fifth Avenue and basically wanted to emulate that,” he told The Commercial Observer during a recent tour of the property. “Those are the bookends of the neighborhood and I’m kind of in the middle.”

In this slideshow, Mr. Roos takes The CO on a tour of 28-40 West 23rd Street, showing off the building’s unique amenities, including its three lobbies, internal atrium and planned roof garden.

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