Whether we actually are or not, Americans feel like we’re busier than ever. According to Daniela Wolfe, a burnout prevention, self-care, and work/life balance expert at Best D Life, we often feel like we have a never-ending to-do list and can’t take a moment to relax because there is always something that needs to get [...]
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Dogs who are tired of being stuffed in bags when flying with their owners — or worse, crated in a cargo hold — can breathe a sigh of relief today, as Bark is launching an airline for dogs.
If it sounds like an April Fools’ joke, the brand insisted it’s not. Bark is partnering with a private jet charter company to offer flights between New York and Los Angeles as well as New York and London for dogs — and their humans.
The planes are branded with a “Bark Air” logo (and wagging tail) similar to the one used on the company’s BarkBox toy and treat subscription deliveries. Dogs will be able to roam freely on the aircraft, and will be pampered with treats and various other amenities.
The video below promotes the airline, offering a glimpse of the puppy paradise on board. (The company admits the film may exaggerate the experience a bit, but says it’s in the spirit of what will be offered.)
Bark worked with agency Tombras on the project, which has been years in the making. Indeed, Matt Meeker, Bark’s founder, was talking about a dog-friendly airline as far back as 2013.
“It is not a gag. It’s very much real. And it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for over a decade,” said Dave Stangle, Bark’s vice president of brand marketing. “There’s huge demand for this. And the obvious truth is that the airline industry doesn’t want to make the flying experience better for dogs. We’ve tried to partner with airlines for years. Now we’ve decided to build it ourselves.”
For travelers, it won’t be cheap—at least, not at first. The New York-Los Angeles route will cost about $6,000 per leg (of the trip, not the dog), while New York-London will be around $8,000.
Flights can be booked at dogsflyfirst.com.
Stangle acknowledged the cost may be a barrier to some, but said demand is still there at that price point—and the cost will hopefully come down over time.
“We did plenty of market research to figure out demand,” he said. “We have plans to really invest in this as we build it out strategically. That will allow us to lower prices and reach a bigger audience. And hopefully we’ll spur competition, which will also lower prices. Eventually, we’ll get this to a place where traveling long distances with your dog is going to be normal. This, to us, is day one of that.”
Stangle is hopeful that Bark Air will add more routes as soon as this summer. And he added that sticker shock isn’t a reason for companies not to innovate.
“When flatscreen TVs came out, they cost like $15,000. Now you mount a 15-pound TV on your wall that looks like a piece of art for $500,” he said. “We are seeing this with Apple Vision Pro. Definitely sticker shock when they announced it, but they’re setting the gold standard for what the future of VR should be like.”
For Tombras, Bark Air was a dream project — a chance to help with a milestone effort for the brand. The agency helped to create the Bark Air brand, the plane design and the overall in-flight experience.
“We were immediately like, ‘Wow,’ said Jeff Benjamin, the agency’s chief creative officer. “It embodies everything Bark is about — being ridiculously focused on the happiness of dogs — but in an experience rather than a toy or a treat.”
Stangle elaborated on some of the amenities that humans and their best friends can expect.
“We spray calming pheromones into the cabin before the dogs get on,” he said. “When we’re taking off and landing, to avoid any ear issues, we serve them all drinks of water so their ears pop and adjust. For every part of the flight experience, we said, ‘How can we make this super perfect for a dog?’ Because if you make someone’s dog happy, you make the dog person happy.”
While it’s not primarily a PR stunt — Bark says it’s in this for the long haul — Benjamin said it should have a halo effect on the brand.
“We’re solving a problem, but this is also an ad 30,000 feet in the air,” he said. “If you’re a dog looking up at this — or a human who has a dog looking up at this — you’re going to be like, ‘I want to be up there.’ But you’re also going to want other things this brand makes.”
The agency has made a series of out-of-home ads, running in all three cities, promoting the airline.
As dogsflyfirst.com goes live today, the brand and agency are optimistic that the reaction will be ecstatic — though maybe not universally so. “We think dog people are going to love it,” Benjamin said. “We’re not quite sure about cat people.”
This article originally appeared in Ad Age.
Smoother transfers at Jamaica station and procuring new, modern trains to improve service on the Long Island Rail Road are key priorities for LIRR president Robert Free, who as of Thursday has dropped “acting” from his title and took over railroad operations.
Since the launch of full service at Grand Central Madison, and a recent expansion of City Ticket discounts to encourage the use of commuter rail within the boroughs, Jamaica station in southeast Queens has become an increasingly important regional transfer point for riders to get around the city, Free said in an interview. To reflect that, Free said he’s prioritizing schedule adjustments for more seamless connections, an issue that was a pain point during the initial launch of Grand Central Madison service in early 2023.
“I don't mean adding time to the overall running of the train, that's not the answer,” said Free, who became acting LIRR president in October; he began his career with the agency as a station cleaner more than 30 years ago. “Maybe we have too much time on one end of the trip and we need to switch it to a particular location so it allows for a better flow in Jamaica, things like that we are looking at.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is working with consultant Network Rail to dissect data from Jamaica station, which features eight tracks, 93 switches and 140 signals, to better sync trains and reduce transfer confusion with improved communications, according to Free. He added that procuring new trains to retire older models and accommodate more riders is also key.
Such changes are expected to make it easier to travel into Grand Central Madison, which has enabled Long Islanders to flock to Midtown East more now than in the past several years. When service debuted at the station, transit officials estimated it would divert 45% of LIRR commuters from Penn Station to the new Grand Central stop. Initially that figure was closer to 30%, but Free said it has since consistently exceeded 40% of riders diverting to Grand Central Madison.
Despite the uptick, Free said a boost to Grand Central Madison service currently isn’t in the cards. “I think we have the right mix of service,” he said. Although Free and MTA Chair and Chief Executive Janno Lieber said they will continue to monitor traffic patterns and are open to adding service where needed.
“Our commuters tell us how to adjust service over time,” Lieber said in an interview. “If people are voting with their feet about where they want to go, we will make adjustments, but right now we are happy with how it stands.”
Smoother transfers at Jamaica station and procuring new, modern trains to improve service on the Long Island Rail Road are key priorities for LIRR president Robert Free, who as of Thursday afternoon has dropped “acting” from his title and took over railroad operations.
Since the launch of full service at Grand Central Madison, and a recent expansion of City Ticket discounts to encourage the use of commuter rail within the boroughs, Jamaica station in southeast Queens has become an increasingly important regional transfer point for riders to get around the city, Free said in an interview. To reflect that, Free said he’s prioritizing schedule adjustments for more seamless connections, an issue that was a pain point during the initial launch of Grand Central Madison service in early 2023.
“I don't mean adding time to the overall running of the train, that's not the answer,” said Free, who became acting LIRR president in October; he began his career with the agency as a station cleaner more than 30 years ago. “Maybe we have too much time on one end of the trip and we need to switch it to a particular location so it allows for a better flow in Jamaica, things like that we are looking at.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is working with consultant Network Rail to dissect data from Jamaica station, which features eight tracks, 93 switches and 140 signals, to better sync trains and reduce transfer confusion with improved communications, according to Free. He added that procuring new trains to retire older models and accommodate more riders is also key.
Such changes are expected to make it easier to travel into Grand Central Madison, which has enabled Long Islanders to flock to Midtown East more now than in the past several years. When service debuted at the station, transit officials estimated it would divert 45% of LIRR commuters from Penn Station to the new Grand Central stop. Initially that figure was closer to 30%, but Free said it has since consistently exceeded 40% of riders diverting to Grand Central Madison.
Despite the uptick, Free said a boost to Grand Central Madison service currently isn’t in the cards. “I think we have the right mix of service,” he said. Although Free and MTA Chair and Chief Executive Janno Lieber said they will continue to monitor traffic patterns and are open to adding and adjusting service where needed.
“Our commuters tell us how to adjust service over time,” Lieber said in an interview. “If people are voting with their feet about where they want to go, we will make adjustments, but right now we are happy with how it stands.”
Manhattan office owners have spent millions on new lobbies and other improvements in the last few years to make their towers more appealing. The cost is starting to hurt.
Steven Roth said that to induce companies to take space at his firm’s buildings, Vornado Realty Trust must first commit as much as $300 per square foot divided equally between tenant improvements and free rent.
“This is a killer,” wrote Roth, Manhattan’s second-largest commercial landlord, in his annual letter to shareholders released Wednesday.
The costs of securing new tenants amount to more than $40 per square foot over a 10-year lease, Roth said. That’s a painful sum considering Vornado says the weighted average rent in its Manhattan office buildings, including the impact of free rent, is $100 a square foot.
Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Goldfarb said the costs “jumped out” because they erode profit margins at Vornado, which owns 20 million square feet of office space around the city, including at 1290 Sixth Ave. and the Farley Office Building, among other locations.
“Office ain’t for the faint of heart, for sure,” Goldfarb said in a client note.
Roth, who has more than 50 years of experience in real estate, said that his firm is “clear-eyed and realistic” about near-term challenges. In the coming months mortgages will have to be refinanced at higher rates for such properties as 280 Park Ave. and 731 Lexington Ave. He advised Vornado will “certainly have a few workouts to deal with over the next couple of years.”
“That goes with the territory,” he said.
Roth said he’s optimistic Vornado will weather the storm thanks to its attractive properties; plus, there won’t be much new office space to compete with thanks to hostile financial markets. He described 245 million of New York’s 422 million square feet of office space as “old, tired, obsolete, and well past their sell-by date.”
“Notwithstanding all the noise, it’s important to note…that our business units have by and large, and in the aggregate, held up very well,” he added. “Interest rate increases and other below-the-line items have, of course, taken their toll.”
Roth also explained in his letter why he withdrew from bidding for a casino license.
He said tenants leasing space at Penn2, his recently renovated tower next to Penn Station, would not want to work across the street from a casino on the site of the demolished Hotel Pennsylvania. Penn2, he said, will generate $100 million in incremental income and more than $2 billion in incremental value. He put the odds of any bidder winning a casino license at no better than 10%.
“Two billion dollars of value creation vs. a 10% chance in a long-tailed governmental process – this was an easy call,” he wrote.
The billionaire head of a soap and shampoo company appears to have cleaned up with the sale of his uptown townhouse.
Glenn Nussdorf, chief executive officer of Long Island’s Quality King Distributors, has found a taker for 14 E. 81st St., a six-bedroom, six-floor spread on the Upper East Side, for $19.6 million, according to the city register.
Nussdorf and his wife, Claudine, had hoped to get more for the 8,200-square-foot property, a 20-foot-wide, elevator-equipped edifice from 1884 on an elegant block near Fifth Avenue. The couple listed the property, whose primary suite encompasses the entire third floor, in May 2023 for $22 million, meaning it sold after a haircut of 11%.
But the home, which features a wine cellar, a landscaped garden and a living room with a fireplace, sold in relatively quick fashion, going into contract Feb. 29 and closing April 9, according to the city register.
Some townhouses in the same price bracket have taken years to trade, even before sales slowed to a crawl amid continuing high interest rates for loans.
But the Nussdorfs paid $6.8 million for the property in 1997, according to the register, the equivalent of about $14 million when adjusting for inflation, and so appear to have nabbed a tidy profit.
In 2023 the median sale price of townhouses Manhattan-wide was $5.8 million, according to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, while the properties required discounts of more than 6% to sell.
No. 14’s buyer was the limited liability company Coriolanus, a nod perhaps to the banished Roman general and character in the Shakespeare tragedy of the same name. Signing the deed on behalf of the company was Victoria Black. The deal appears to have been all in cash; no mortgage is recorded in city records.
Adam Modlin, one of the brokers who marketed the property and the one who closed the deal, did not respond to a request for comment. And efforts to reach Nussdorf at his Long Island warehouse, which is in an industrial park in Bellport, were unsuccessful by press time.
In 1961 Nussdorf’s parents, Bernard and Ruth, founded Quality King in Queens. It sells brand-name bath and beauty products at discounted prices to mom-and-pop-type retailers.
From the get-go, the business has benefited from the fact that U.S.-made shampoos, perfumes and pharmaceuticals are often sold overseas at lower prices than they are stateside. Because the products usually don’t require the same expensive marketing campaigns that they do here, the lower prices can be justified, analysts of the company have said.
For its part, Quality King would purchase the American-made products in places such as Europe, and then import them back to this country, reselling them to stores for more than they paid but less than what the domestic versions cost.
The “gray market” strategy hasn’t always gone over well: A hair care company sued Quality King in the late 1990s for undercutting its brands in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. But the court’s justices unanimously sided with Quality King, ruling essentially that distributors could set any prices they like for resold goods.
More recently, Quality King ended up in the news for allegedly jacking up the price of some Lysol products by as much as 50% to clients including a dollar store on the Lower East Side when there was a rush on disinfectants at the start of the pandemic.
The company ultimately paid a fine of $100,000 to New York state authorities for price gouging during an emergency. Nearly 1,500 disgruntled customers received checks in the settlement.
Leases
Stock brokerage expands in Midtown
Address: 1133 Sixth Ave., Manhattan
Landlord: The Durst Organization
Tenant: Interactive Brokers Group
Lease size: 22,916 square feet
Lease length: Seven years
Asset type: Office
Brokers: CBRE’s Tim Dempsey, Roger Griswold and Chris Hogan represented the tenant. Tom Bow, Rocco Romeo and Nora Caliban represented the landlord in-house.
Investment firm leases sixth floor in SL Green property
Address: 461 Fifth Ave., Manhattan
Landlord: SL Green Realty Corp.
Tenant: Lingotto
Lease size: 11,232 square feet
Lease length: 10 years
Asset type: Office
Brokers: Cushman & Wakefield’s Ron LoRusso, Harley Dalton and Samantha Perlman represented the tenant. Newmark’s Brian Waterman, Scott Klau, David Waterman and Kevin Sullivan represented the landlord.
Sales
International eyewear firm buys commercial condo next to Midtown headquarters
Address: 420 Fifth Ave., Manhattan
Seller: Argento SC
Buyer: EssilorLuxottica
Sale price: $13.8 million
Asset type: Office
Buyout firm picks up another downtown apartment building
Address: 82 Washington Place, Manhattan
Seller: Eugene Brodsky
Buyer: Derby Copeland Capital
Sale price: $15 million
Asset type: Multifamily
A massive affordable housing project in East New York has secured $270 million to begin construction.
The project, called Innovative Urban Village, is a partnership between developers Gotham Organization and Monadnock Development, along with the Christian Cultural Center, a mega-church currently located on the site. The financing is for the first phase of construction on the project, which will turn the church's 10.5-acre campus bordered by Louisiana, Flatlands, and Pennsylvania avenues, into an affordable housing complex with several community amenities.
The financing package includes about $170 million from the New York State Housing Finance Agency and about $47 million from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Goldman Sachs is also providing more than $143 million in tax credits and environmental cleanup funding for the development.
The first phase will include 386 affordable apartments for households earning between 30% and 80% of the area median income, meaning a family of three would need to earn between $38,130 and $101,680 to spend no more than roughly one-third of their income on rent. It will include about 17,000 square feet of retail and commercial space as well, including space for a grocery store.
The full project will include 1,975 affordable housing units, including 200 for seniors and 100 for homeownership. Other amenities will include centers for workforce development, child care and the performing arts, along with several walking paths and green spaces. The mega-church will remain as well.
The church selected Gotham Organization as its development partner in 2018 following a request for proposals process, and in 2022 the city fully approved the project.
The development team plans to open the first batch of apartments in 2026 and finish work on the entire project in 2036.