00:00:00
Speaker 1: Live from the WOR LifeVac studios, The Mark Simone Show.
00:00:07
Speaker 2: Hey, Steve Cuso, the great New York Post columnist. Nobody better on Manhattan, New York City, restaurants, real estate. We'll get to all of that with him. And he's with us now. Steve Cuso, how are you doing?
00:00:21
Speaker 3: Hey, good morning. How are you doing?
00:00:22
Speaker 2: Good. There's a rumor that you've got a new book coming out that you've actually written a novel.
00:00:28
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for mentioning, not just a rumor, Mark, but a fact. And I've written my first novel.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: It won't be out.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: Till December 8th from a company called Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. And it's called Consuela's Thrill. And it's a thriller. It's an erotic, romantic thriller. And I've said a lot of it, the whole last third of the book in Coney Island, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects for my.
00:00:56
Speaker 3: Real estate column.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: And there's so much going on there right now in terms of development, new housing, et cetera.
00:01:03
Speaker 3: It's really fascinating.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: And amazingly, Mayor Mamdani, one of the few sensible things he's done is to establish a Coney Island Business Improvement District. And I don't know if he knows what that really means, but it's a great thing for the middle class. It means economic growth, development, aimed at sparring new retail, new apartments that are not just cheapest kinds of apartments, but middle class, middle income places to live. And one of the things I've done in this book is to, I've imagined something that doesn't yet exist, but might soon exist, which is a luxury condo tower on the Coney Island boardwalk overlooking the ocean. So as you know, our friend John Katsimatidis has two beautiful rental apartment buildings at the western end of Coney Island. And I've imagined that he would, well, not him, of course, but someone would put up a luxury condo tower next to them. And he actually has the land there and has always wanted to build. I think he needs a zoning change. And so it's a setting that I think makes sense for people who care about New York City and anybody who loves Coney Island the way I do.
00:02:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, but is this a good thing? You know, like when you drove to Queens, it was Queens. Now when you drive through Queens, it's high-rises, big glass, black glass skyscrapers all over the place. It looks like a financial district. It looks like Cleveland over there.
00:02:40
Speaker 3: Is this good?
00:02:42
Speaker 1: No, I love those big glass high-rises. You see them in places like Long Island City, Hunter's.
00:02:47
Speaker 3: Point, Flushing. Other parts of Queens that.
00:02:51
Speaker 1: Have been resentful over the years precisely to promote new development. No, the buildings are not equally good. Yeah, some of them can seem monotonous. If you take this number seven train or the N train out of Manhattan toward either Schumer or Astoria, respectively, you're suddenly, hey, what's going on? You come out of the tunnel. and you see, what's going on here? What are all these new buildings? Well, people have made homes there, and these buildings typically, you know, they bring stores, they bring fitness centers, restaurants.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: So their whole communities.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: Now, in Coney Island, it's another story entirely. There's no risk of, or promise, depending on how you look at it, of Coney Island becoming anything like Flushing or Astoria or or.
00:03:51
Speaker 3: Places like that, Long Island City.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Developments are different there, and they tend to be grouped along Surf Avenue, which is.
00:04:01
Speaker 3: One block in from Boardwalk, and they're good buildings. People are moving there.
00:04:08
Speaker 1: It's an exciting thing to see that middle-class people, for the first time, have embraced.
00:04:12
Speaker 3: Coney Island as a place to live.
00:04:14
Speaker 1: And, of course, you have the advantages of the amusement park, et cetera, the ocean, beach. You have the disadvantages that there's very little shopping around there. It isn't easy to get to or from from other parts of the city. But it's all moving in what I think.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: Is a good trajectory. And, you know, we'll see where it goes. Yeah.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Now, Steve Kuzo, when I talk to people all over the country, you probably get the same thing. They'll say, oh, New York, it's so dangerous. Is anybody still there? Did everybody leave? Tell us the truth. People are actually coming in like crazy, aren't they?
00:04:51
Speaker 3: Completely ridiculous. I mean, yeah. Mark, there are people out there who hate New York City. I don't know why.
00:04:58
Speaker 1: They've moved away years ago. They have racist views of Manhattan. And I know this because I get all these emails every time I write about anything new in the city. You know, I get these horrible emails. People post things online. Why would anybody want to live.
00:05:15
Speaker 3: In this raffle and all this kind of thing? But the truth is that it's the hottest place in the world now.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: And, you know, prices of everything keep going up. That's a good and also a bad thing. But it indicates the extent to which there's great demand for food.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: To live here, to be here.
00:05:36
Speaker 1: And yeah, we know the schools, the public schools stink. There are parts of town that seem resistant to even the best efforts of the NYPD to sort of tame certain corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx that are made difficult. But Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has done a phenomenal job And she hasn't even been in the job that long, about a year, reducing the.
00:06:03
Speaker 3: Number of murders, crime. We have the lowest crime, the lowest serious crime rates in history. It's amazing.
00:06:09
Speaker 1: Yes, there are problems with lower level crime, which I grant you, it's not low level if you're a victim of a mugging. Even so, those numbers are still coming down, not as rapidly as for capital crimes, but they're coming down. People compare them to the numbers prior to 2020. I don't really see the relevance of that. Obviously, conditions were different before the pandemic, but all I see is Wonderful things happening all over town. And anybody who thinks that this is a hellhole, they're just idiots.
00:06:49
Speaker 3: All right.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: But when you say that, you can actually back that up. Like, for instance, we know apartment rental is way up. But what about leasing, leasing businesses, commercial space?
00:06:59
Speaker 3: Right now, Manhattan office leasing, offices are mainly concentrated in Manhattan, of course.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: And it has never been harder for companies to find space or to expand than it is now because demand is so great. All the new office buildings fill up immediately. The greatest companies here continue to expand.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: I write about this all the funds.
00:07:28
Speaker 1: Wall Street companies, media, tech, AI, you know, Anthropic, which is one of the most in the news AI-focused companies, recently leased an entire building of 350,000 square feet on, I think, Hudson Street in the Hudson Square area.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: It's an amazing thing.
00:07:53
Speaker 1: And this reality runs contrary to the narratives that some people are still putting out about how, I don't know, New York has seen better days.
00:08:03
Speaker 3: I don't know what they're talking about.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and obviously, just walk around. Restaurants are mobbed. They're packed. You can't get a reservation in a lot of places. There's lines out the door for things.
00:08:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a good and a bad thing.
00:08:17
Speaker 2: Now, am I wrong? Are French restaurants making a little bit of a comeback?
00:08:22
Speaker 3: Totally.
00:08:25
Speaker 1: We've never been without French restaurants, but In the recent year or so, there have been a whole bunch of new openings. And my colleague, Jennifer Gould, wrote about this a few weeks ago. And there are new restaurants coming that have opened recently downtown. Danielle Balloud is opening his giant brasserie, Balloud. across from Lincoln Center in.
00:08:54
Speaker 3: A few weeks.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: And there were all sorts of smaller restaurants as well that are opening. Claudette is a wonderful restaurant down on Lower Fifth Avenue. It closed for a few years and recently reopened. It's a banner time. if you love French cuisine in all its forms. But it's also a matter of time for people who love Korean food and steakhouses. It's a phenomenal thing that we've seen recently. And the only time I've resented is when I have trouble getting a reservation somewhere.
00:09:33
Speaker 3: This happens more often than you might think.
00:09:36
Speaker 2: Hey, before we run out of time, I loved Shelley Fireman, the great restaurateur. Traderia Del Arte, Red Eye Grill, Bond 45, Fiorello. Did you report that that company was filing bankruptcy?
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're in Chapter 11, and this happened a few weeks ago.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: And they actually filed about a month ago, but nobody noticed.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: And, you know, Shelley Fireman, founder of that great company, passed.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: Away almost a year ago.
00:10:05
Speaker 1: And I think that even before Shelley died, it wasn't quite right.
00:10:12
Speaker 3: They had opened a few restaurants. It flopped.
00:10:14
Speaker 1: But they have these great long-lived restaurants like Trattoria Del Arte and Fiorello and Bond 45. Some of these restaurants have been with us for 30 years. This is almost unprecedented in New York City. Nobody has restaurants that are that, as many restaurants that are that venerable.
00:10:36
Speaker 3: And I think that they've had trouble because.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Their main restaurants are all very, very close to or across the street from major entertainment venues. And those have sort of during the pandemic, there was no entertainment. So Bond 45 is on a block with three Broadway theaters. Well, you know, there were no Broadway theaters for nearly two years. So naturally, they suffered a staggering loss of business, and they have yet to recoup that.
00:11:07
Speaker 3: Same with Trattoria dell'Arte across.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: From Carnegie Hall. I was there last night. We hope they recover. That's a great restaurant chain. Hey, we're out of time.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: They're in business. They're all still going strong.
00:11:20
Speaker 2: Steve Cuso. What's the name of the book again?
00:11:23
Speaker 3: Oh, it's called Consuela's Thrill.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: And they're actually pre-marketing it on Amazon, on Simon & Schuster website, Barnes & Noble.
00:11:33
Speaker 3: So order now.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, just go to Amazon. Just type in Steve Cuso.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: As well as thrilled.
00:11:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, type in Steve Cuso. It'll come up on Amazon. Pre-order it. Thanks for being with us. We'll do it again soon.
00:11:45
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, Mark. Take care.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Take care. Hey, don't forget, it's a three-hour show now. I'm here 9 to noon, 9 a.m. till noon every day. And, of course, 6 to 9, you've got Curtis Lewa, Larry Menti, right here on 710WOR.
Speaker 1: Live from the WOR LifeVac studios, The Mark Simone Show.
00:00:07
Speaker 2: Hey, Steve Cuso, the great New York Post columnist. Nobody better on Manhattan, New York City, restaurants, real estate. We'll get to all of that with him. And he's with us now. Steve Cuso, how are you doing?
00:00:21
Speaker 3: Hey, good morning. How are you doing?
00:00:22
Speaker 2: Good. There's a rumor that you've got a new book coming out that you've actually written a novel.
00:00:28
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for mentioning, not just a rumor, Mark, but a fact. And I've written my first novel.
00:00:35
Speaker 3: It won't be out.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: Till December 8th from a company called Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. And it's called Consuela's Thrill. And it's a thriller. It's an erotic, romantic thriller. And I've said a lot of it, the whole last third of the book in Coney Island, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects for my.
00:00:56
Speaker 3: Real estate column.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: And there's so much going on there right now in terms of development, new housing, et cetera.
00:01:03
Speaker 3: It's really fascinating.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: And amazingly, Mayor Mamdani, one of the few sensible things he's done is to establish a Coney Island Business Improvement District. And I don't know if he knows what that really means, but it's a great thing for the middle class. It means economic growth, development, aimed at sparring new retail, new apartments that are not just cheapest kinds of apartments, but middle class, middle income places to live. And one of the things I've done in this book is to, I've imagined something that doesn't yet exist, but might soon exist, which is a luxury condo tower on the Coney Island boardwalk overlooking the ocean. So as you know, our friend John Katsimatidis has two beautiful rental apartment buildings at the western end of Coney Island. And I've imagined that he would, well, not him, of course, but someone would put up a luxury condo tower next to them. And he actually has the land there and has always wanted to build. I think he needs a zoning change. And so it's a setting that I think makes sense for people who care about New York City and anybody who loves Coney Island the way I do.
00:02:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, but is this a good thing? You know, like when you drove to Queens, it was Queens. Now when you drive through Queens, it's high-rises, big glass, black glass skyscrapers all over the place. It looks like a financial district. It looks like Cleveland over there.
00:02:40
Speaker 3: Is this good?
00:02:42
Speaker 1: No, I love those big glass high-rises. You see them in places like Long Island City, Hunter's.
00:02:47
Speaker 3: Point, Flushing. Other parts of Queens that.
00:02:51
Speaker 1: Have been resentful over the years precisely to promote new development. No, the buildings are not equally good. Yeah, some of them can seem monotonous. If you take this number seven train or the N train out of Manhattan toward either Schumer or Astoria, respectively, you're suddenly, hey, what's going on? You come out of the tunnel. and you see, what's going on here? What are all these new buildings? Well, people have made homes there, and these buildings typically, you know, they bring stores, they bring fitness centers, restaurants.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: So their whole communities.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: Now, in Coney Island, it's another story entirely. There's no risk of, or promise, depending on how you look at it, of Coney Island becoming anything like Flushing or Astoria or or.
00:03:51
Speaker 3: Places like that, Long Island City.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Developments are different there, and they tend to be grouped along Surf Avenue, which is.
00:04:01
Speaker 3: One block in from Boardwalk, and they're good buildings. People are moving there.
00:04:08
Speaker 1: It's an exciting thing to see that middle-class people, for the first time, have embraced.
00:04:12
Speaker 3: Coney Island as a place to live.
00:04:14
Speaker 1: And, of course, you have the advantages of the amusement park, et cetera, the ocean, beach. You have the disadvantages that there's very little shopping around there. It isn't easy to get to or from from other parts of the city. But it's all moving in what I think.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: Is a good trajectory. And, you know, we'll see where it goes. Yeah.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Now, Steve Kuzo, when I talk to people all over the country, you probably get the same thing. They'll say, oh, New York, it's so dangerous. Is anybody still there? Did everybody leave? Tell us the truth. People are actually coming in like crazy, aren't they?
00:04:51
Speaker 3: Completely ridiculous. I mean, yeah. Mark, there are people out there who hate New York City. I don't know why.
00:04:58
Speaker 1: They've moved away years ago. They have racist views of Manhattan. And I know this because I get all these emails every time I write about anything new in the city. You know, I get these horrible emails. People post things online. Why would anybody want to live.
00:05:15
Speaker 3: In this raffle and all this kind of thing? But the truth is that it's the hottest place in the world now.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: And, you know, prices of everything keep going up. That's a good and also a bad thing. But it indicates the extent to which there's great demand for food.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: To live here, to be here.
00:05:36
Speaker 1: And yeah, we know the schools, the public schools stink. There are parts of town that seem resistant to even the best efforts of the NYPD to sort of tame certain corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx that are made difficult. But Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has done a phenomenal job And she hasn't even been in the job that long, about a year, reducing the.
00:06:03
Speaker 3: Number of murders, crime. We have the lowest crime, the lowest serious crime rates in history. It's amazing.
00:06:09
Speaker 1: Yes, there are problems with lower level crime, which I grant you, it's not low level if you're a victim of a mugging. Even so, those numbers are still coming down, not as rapidly as for capital crimes, but they're coming down. People compare them to the numbers prior to 2020. I don't really see the relevance of that. Obviously, conditions were different before the pandemic, but all I see is Wonderful things happening all over town. And anybody who thinks that this is a hellhole, they're just idiots.
00:06:49
Speaker 3: All right.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: But when you say that, you can actually back that up. Like, for instance, we know apartment rental is way up. But what about leasing, leasing businesses, commercial space?
00:06:59
Speaker 3: Right now, Manhattan office leasing, offices are mainly concentrated in Manhattan, of course.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: And it has never been harder for companies to find space or to expand than it is now because demand is so great. All the new office buildings fill up immediately. The greatest companies here continue to expand.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: I write about this all the funds.
00:07:28
Speaker 1: Wall Street companies, media, tech, AI, you know, Anthropic, which is one of the most in the news AI-focused companies, recently leased an entire building of 350,000 square feet on, I think, Hudson Street in the Hudson Square area.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: It's an amazing thing.
00:07:53
Speaker 1: And this reality runs contrary to the narratives that some people are still putting out about how, I don't know, New York has seen better days.
00:08:03
Speaker 3: I don't know what they're talking about.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and obviously, just walk around. Restaurants are mobbed. They're packed. You can't get a reservation in a lot of places. There's lines out the door for things.
00:08:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a good and a bad thing.
00:08:17
Speaker 2: Now, am I wrong? Are French restaurants making a little bit of a comeback?
00:08:22
Speaker 3: Totally.
00:08:25
Speaker 1: We've never been without French restaurants, but In the recent year or so, there have been a whole bunch of new openings. And my colleague, Jennifer Gould, wrote about this a few weeks ago. And there are new restaurants coming that have opened recently downtown. Danielle Balloud is opening his giant brasserie, Balloud. across from Lincoln Center in.
00:08:54
Speaker 3: A few weeks.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: And there were all sorts of smaller restaurants as well that are opening. Claudette is a wonderful restaurant down on Lower Fifth Avenue. It closed for a few years and recently reopened. It's a banner time. if you love French cuisine in all its forms. But it's also a matter of time for people who love Korean food and steakhouses. It's a phenomenal thing that we've seen recently. And the only time I've resented is when I have trouble getting a reservation somewhere.
00:09:33
Speaker 3: This happens more often than you might think.
00:09:36
Speaker 2: Hey, before we run out of time, I loved Shelley Fireman, the great restaurateur. Traderia Del Arte, Red Eye Grill, Bond 45, Fiorello. Did you report that that company was filing bankruptcy?
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're in Chapter 11, and this happened a few weeks ago.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: And they actually filed about a month ago, but nobody noticed.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: And, you know, Shelley Fireman, founder of that great company, passed.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: Away almost a year ago.
00:10:05
Speaker 1: And I think that even before Shelley died, it wasn't quite right.
00:10:12
Speaker 3: They had opened a few restaurants. It flopped.
00:10:14
Speaker 1: But they have these great long-lived restaurants like Trattoria Del Arte and Fiorello and Bond 45. Some of these restaurants have been with us for 30 years. This is almost unprecedented in New York City. Nobody has restaurants that are that, as many restaurants that are that venerable.
00:10:36
Speaker 3: And I think that they've had trouble because.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Their main restaurants are all very, very close to or across the street from major entertainment venues. And those have sort of during the pandemic, there was no entertainment. So Bond 45 is on a block with three Broadway theaters. Well, you know, there were no Broadway theaters for nearly two years. So naturally, they suffered a staggering loss of business, and they have yet to recoup that.
00:11:07
Speaker 3: Same with Trattoria dell'Arte across.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: From Carnegie Hall. I was there last night. We hope they recover. That's a great restaurant chain. Hey, we're out of time.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: They're in business. They're all still going strong.
00:11:20
Speaker 2: Steve Cuso. What's the name of the book again?
00:11:23
Speaker 3: Oh, it's called Consuela's Thrill.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: And they're actually pre-marketing it on Amazon, on Simon & Schuster website, Barnes & Noble.
00:11:33
Speaker 3: So order now.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, just go to Amazon. Just type in Steve Cuso.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: As well as thrilled.
00:11:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, type in Steve Cuso. It'll come up on Amazon. Pre-order it. Thanks for being with us. We'll do it again soon.
00:11:45
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, Mark. Take care.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Take care. Hey, don't forget, it's a three-hour show now. I'm here 9 to noon, 9 a.m. till noon every day. And, of course, 6 to 9, you've got Curtis Lewa, Larry Menti, right here on 710WOR.
