Who Needs the Hamptons? Dip and Sip at Manhattan’s Poshest Swimming Pools

Who Needs the Hamptons? Dip and Sip at Manhattan’s Poshest Swimming Pools
Bloomberg, 29-June-2011
By Lili Rosboch and Catherine Smith

This happens all the time, especially when it’s hot: You wake up and decide it’s a perfect day to lounge around a pool sipping something cold.

If you aren’t already at the Hamptons, you’ll need access to deck chairs, a pool and drinks. Here’s our list of options in Manhattan:

Holiday Inn
440 W. 57th St.
212-581-8100
http://www.holidayinn.com/

By far the most straightforward is the midtown Holiday Inn with an outdoor, rooftop pool, plastic lounge chairs and a long line of liquor bottles that shimmer against a wall the color of sea foam. Frozen-drink machines dispense strawberry daiquiris and pina coladas for $8. Burgers cost $5; hotdogs are $3.

Kids are allowed, though the sign says the lifeguard can eject them at will every hour on the hour for an adult swim.

The pool is open from 10 to 6 daily; access costs $70 and includes a towel. But consider the $25 day pass for the over 21 set. It’s available Monday through Friday after 3 p.m. A little research revealed that deck chairs are first-come, first-served and fill up quickly on the weekend. Cash only.

James Hotel
27 Grand St.
212-465-2000
http://www.jameshotels.com/New-York.aspx

The glass elevator at The James is a good indication of the swank scene that awaits on the rooftop above the 17th floor. The hotel’s modern indoor bar and small outdoor pool with deck, both under a vague door policy, are surrounded by views of Midtown, Wall Street and the Hudson River.

Grab an orange towel and an open lounge chair. Stop inside at the Jimmy for a St. George Absinthe Drip ($22). Don’t despair of the cost; the pool is free from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. Swimming is off-limits at all other times unless you’re a hotel guest.

The Peninsula
700 Fifth Ave. @ 55th St.
212-956-2888
http://www.peninsula.com/New_York/en/default.aspx

To get access to the brand-new, wrap-around sun deck opening on July 1 and the glass-enclosed pool at the Peninsula hotel, book a “Spa-cation” Monday through Thursday for $285. It includes 75 minutes of treatments like holistic massage or intensive facial, a bento-box lunch, yoga, sunscreen and more.

While there’s no swim-up bar, there’s a full-time attendant, and cocktails like a $22 frozen margarita are just a room-service bell away.

To get access on the weekend, book two hours of spa services for approximately $400 or ask for a summer fitness membership for $500 monthly with a three month minimum. The luxurious facilities are located on the top three floors of the 22-story hotel with views over Central Park.

Gansevoort Meatpacking
18 Ninth Ave. @ 13th Street
212-206-6700
Gansevoort Park Avenue
420 Park Avenue South
212-317-2900
http://www.hotelgansevoort.com/

The Gansevoort Meatpacking also offers full access to its rooftop pool Monday through Thursday for the cost of a $299 Renewal Day Package. It includes spa services like massage, facial and manicure/pedicure, and a poolside drink from the adjacent Plunge bar. Cocktails include raspberry caipirinhas and the French Kiss, which combines vodka, Chambord and Champagne.

If you’re claustrophobic, this might not be your place. The sundeck is only a narrow strip surrounding the pool, separated from the bar by a hazy glass wall.

Still, the view is great, and when you have sun, swimming and cocktails in the heart of Manhattan there’s not much to complain about.

Le Parker Meridien
119 W. 56th St.
212-245-5000
http://www.parkermeridien.com/index1.php

Soon, maybe even this weekend, Le Parker Meridien on 56th Street will reopen its outdoor deck near the already open indoor pool, with lounge-side cocktail deliveries available.

A day pass to the facility is $100, on Saturdays and Sundays too, so keep checking their website for details on deck- opening day. Proximity to the Burger Joint is a plus.

Soho House
29-35 Ninth Ave.
212-627-9800
http://www.sohohouseny.com/

Of course, you could also book a room in a hotel with a pool like Trump Soho, Thompson LES or The Empire.

Soho House in the Meatpacking district is a members-only club with a small number of hotel rooms offered at $350 and up a night.

The outdoor, rooftop pool has a beach feel. Extra-wide lounge chairs are pushed together on one side to create the largest communal couch we’ve ever seen. The dining area is shaded by umbrellas, and two bars complete the scene. It’s a very relaxed atmosphere where kind servers in striped dresses cater to your needs.

City Pools

Lasker Pool
West 110th St. @ Lenox Avenue
212-534-7639
http://centralpark.org/index.php/attractions-h-w/lasker-pool-%20rink/

There are also 50 free outdoor city pools opening today. We like the Lasker Pool in Central Park which is open from 11 to 7 daily with an hour off from 3 to 4 in the afternoon. Officially, imbibing isn’t allowed in public, though stealth nipping might go unnoticed.

Wall Street Braces for New Layoffs as Profits Wane

Wall Street Braces for New Layoffs as Profits Wane
NYT, 16-Jun-10
By SUSANNE CRAIG

Wall Street plans to get smaller this summer. Faced with weak markets and uncertainty over regulations, many of the biggest firms are preparing for deep cuts in jobs and other costs.

The cutback plans are emerging even as Wall Street firms have mostly recovered from the financial crisis and are reporting substantial profits again. But those profits are not as big as they were before the crisis, and it is expected that in the coming months it will be even more difficult for firms to make money. Worries about debt in Europe and the shape that the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul rules will ultimately take, combined with the usual summer doldrums, are prompting banks to act.

“It’s a tense environment right now,” said Glenn Schorr, an analyst with the investment bank Nomura.

Even Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most profitable firm, is retrenching. Senior executives at Goldman have concluded they need to cut 10 percent, or $1 billion, of noncompensation expenses over the next 12 months, according to a person close to the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. The big pullback will cause Goldman employees, who have already been ordered to cut costs, to re-examine every aspect of their business.

The firm, this person said, had not set final targets for layoffs, but Goldman was “certain” to shrink headcount in the coming months. Decisions on bonuses are still months away, but they are sure to come down as well if business does not pick up.

Bank of America is also examining its expenses and is likely in the next few months to cut some staff members from its securities division, according to one senior executive at that firm who was not authorized to speak on the record. And Credit Suisse is in the process of identifying people to cut in its investment banking unit, according to a person briefed on that bank’s plans.

Morgan Stanley is expected to cut at least 300 low-producing brokers in its wealth management division this year, more than the firm initially expected, and has announced plans to cut $1 billion in noncompensation expenses over the next three years. Unlike many of its rivals, however, the firm so far has no plans to cut staff members from its investment banking and trading division, which has added hundreds of employees over the last two years or so as part of a rebuilding effort after the financial crisis.

Some firms have already wielded the ax. In January, Barclays Capital cut 600 people, or more than 2 percent of its worldwide staff, citing a business slowdown, and recently cut more employees for “performance-related reasons,” according to a person briefed on the cuts but not authorized to speak on the record. A third of the January cuts were in New York.

Regulatory overhaul has weighed on the decisions to cut back, senior bank executives say. Regulation has caused some Wall Street banks to exit some businesses, like proprietary trading. Rules that require banks to hold more capital will probably cause some firms to end certain business lines as they decide they can more effectively deploy the capital elsewhere. On products like derivatives, firms will lose revenue as instruments once traded off exchanges will move into open markets.

While many financial rules are still to be written, some firms have decided that they cannot afford to wait any longer. The last significant industrywide job cuts were in early 2009. In the first quarter of that year Goldman alone cut its work force by almost 9 percent. Since then, most firms have held steady on their head counts or have added to them slightly. That will change this summer.

The scale of the expected cuts is bad news for the New York City economy, which depends heavily on a booming financial industry to pay taxes and fill its restaurants. And they will come as the national economy is still struggling to find its footing since the financial crisis.

Not all is doom and gloom. Wall Street is benefiting from the boom in social media and technology public offerings. In recent weeks big names like Pandora Media and Linkedin have gone public, brought to market by banks. So far this year, companies have raised $29.3 billion in public offerings, up more than 200 percent from a year ago. This year is on track to be the most lucrative since the technology boom in 2000, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The profit picture is also somewhat more stable for diversified companies like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, which have large commercial retail banking operations in addition to those in trading and sales. JPMorgan has no immediate plans to cut head count in trading, according to a person briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak on the record. The bank is, however, trying to reduce noncompensation expenses.

But firms like Bank of America are still paying for mortgage sins of days gone by, which have dimmed their profit pictures. Earlier this year Bank of America put aside another $1 billion to cover claims from outside investors who lost money and want the firm to buy back billions of dollars in bad Countrywide Financial mortgages. The Durbin Amendment, a proposed restriction on debit card fees, is also expected to reduce profits when it comes into effect next month.

For those firms that depend on trading, it is clear how much the engines of Wall Street have slowed. Return on equity, the amount a firm earns on its common stock outstanding and an important measure of financial performance, has decreased significantly in the years since the credit crisis. Industrywide return on equity was 8.2 percent in 2010, down from 17.5 percent in 2005, according to Nomura.

And this year there is another reason that is prompting Wall Street to act more swiftly on cuts. Wall Street typically pays out roughly half of its revenue in compensation, and firms often wait until late summer to cull staff when they have a better sense of revenue for the year. The newest cuts are expected to come earlier this year because of recent changes in the way employees are paid.

Traditionally, Wall Street employees get most of their annual pay in the form of a one-time year-end bonus. But after the credit crisis most firms changed the way they compensated employees in an effort to discourage excessive risk-taking, increasing base salaries while reducing performance-related payments. As a result, banks are paying out more compensation as the year goes on, forcing firms to re-evaluate staffing levels earlier in the year because more of their compensation costs are now fixed.

Firms are also trying to cut noncompensation expenses and are looking for ways to cut fat. Goldman’s goal to cut $1 billion in noncompensation expenses this year is significant, analysts say. There will be immediate and significant savings from the fall off in trading volumes.

Trading firms pay fees to trade, and lower volumes could result in an annual savings of $200 million at Goldman alone, one analyst estimated. Those savings will come naturally, but most will not, and banks will be forced to rein in everything, including travel and professional fees.

Monopoly Lost: Atlantic City's Rise and Fall

Monopoly Lost: Atlantic City's Rise and Fall
AP, 31-May-11
By WAYNE PARRY

Four years ago, some Atlantic City casino customers were shelling out $1,000 for a brownie sprinkled with edible gold dust in a Baccarat crystal they could take home.

Nowadays, some wait until 11 p.m. to eat so they can get a steak dinner for $2.99.

At the beginning of 2007, Atlantic City's 11 casinos were at the top of a wave of prosperity. Starting with the 1978 opening of Resorts, the nation's first casino outside Nevada, Atlantic City for years was the only place to play slots, cards, dice or roulette in the eastern half of the United States. The cash kept pouring in, the busloads of visitors kept coming and the revenue charts went one way: straight up.

And then, they didn't. Now, battered by competition from casinos all around it, Atlantic City is in a fight for its very survival.

The resort is furiously trying to remake itself into a vacation destination that happens to have gambling, but with no guarantee it has a winning hand even as other threats loom, including the possible expansion of casinos to north Jersey racetracks and a growing push for online gambling.

Intoxicated by years of success, Atlantic City missed numerous opportunities to diversify its offerings, widen its customer base and fend off competition that clearly was on its way even 20 years ago.

"The atmosphere was a total irrational exuberance; it truly was," said Robert Griffin, CEO of Trump Entertainment Resorts, who worked at Trump properties here in the 1980s and 1990s. "There was a feeling that there was no end to the good times and that the money would never end."

Then, disaster struck the nation's second-largest gambling market. A perfect storm of competition right on its doorstep in Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware, coupled with the recession, pummeled Atlantic City worse than any other casino market. In four years, a billion and a half dollars vanished, along with thousands of jobs and tourists. Pennsylvania, with its 10 casinos, is poised to knock Atlantic City into third place at some point next year.

How did things go so wrong so fast?

Cars streamed into Atlantic City on May 26, 1978, and people lined the Boardwalk for blocks, waiting to get inside Resorts on the first day it was legal to gamble there.

People bought tickets for buffets they had no intention of eating, just to sneak inside the casino earlier than the rest. Men relieved themselves into plastic coin cups to avoid losing their spot at the tables by going to restrooms. And cash — more than anyone had ever seen and more than management could imagine — flooded into the counting room, to the point that it took nearly an entire day to count it.

"It was euphoria," said Steve Norton, who was Resorts' executive vice president when it opened and now runs a casino consulting firm in Indiana. "I mean, it was an unbelievable time."

One after another in the 1980s, casinos kept coming. Revenues reached a high point of $5.2 billion in 2006.

And then the Pocono Downs harness racing track in Luzerne County, Pa., added slot machines and opened them to the public on Nov. 14, 2006. Suddenly, people in the heart of one of Atlantic City's key feeder markets could drive 10 or 20 minutes to play the slots instead of making a three-hour round trip to Atlantic City. In less than four years, there would be 10 casinos in Pennsylvania, all of which now offer table games, too.

They took in nearly $2.5 billion last year, approaching Atlantic City's $3.6 billion. So far this year, they are running neck-and-neck: $996 million for Pennsylvania, and $1.1 billion for Atlantic City.

"If you didn't anticipate this competition coming, you were asleep at the wheel," said Israel Posner, executive director of the Lloyd Levenson Institute of Gaming at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

David Schwartz, director of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, said Atlantic City can be successful again, "but it's going to require a reinvention."

"Basically, the city needs to stop looking backward and start looking ahead," he said.

A look back reveals many missteps and lost opportunities. The most obvious: a failure to reinvent the resort as a place to go for more than gambling. Atlantic City belatedly jumped on the bandwagon, adding non-gambling amenities over the past eight years like celebrity restaurants, spas, shopping and top-name entertainment. The Borgata even built a stand-alone luxury hotel called the Water Club, and Harrah's indoor pool has become a cash cow, doubling as one of the city's hottest nightspots.

But back then, anything customers couldn't bet on was seen as a waste of money.

"Nobody wanted to build anything other than casinos," Norton said. "The property values shot up so high, it didn't make sense to build anything else."

There's plenty of blame to go around. Casino owners focused only on their own properties instead of the market as a whole, a habit that Atlantic City is only recently shaking off. Competing against each other instead of Las Vegas was the city's playbook for decades.

Now, the casinos are banding together for joint marketing efforts, and will chip in to help sponsor the biggest names in entertainment, rather than letting one casino pay the whole cost of a Britney Spears or Lady Gaga show, or a rodeo. And three casinos are even thinking of jointly funding a new convention or trade show center in Atlantic City to draw badly needed midweek business.

New Jersey also erred by failing to approve legalized sports betting in 1991 when it was given the chance to do so ahead of a nationwide ban, gambling experts say. A state senator sued the federal government in 2009 to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, but the suit was dismissed by a federal judge last month.

When Griffin, the Trump CEO, lays his head on the pillow at night, he worries that New Jersey will one day succumb to political pressure from lawmakers in the more populous northern part of the state to expand casino gambling to the Meadowlands racetrack, 10 minutes from New York City. Analysts expect it would instantly become a $1 billion market. State law now allows casino gambling only in Atlantic City.

"That would devastate us," he said. "This would become a two-casino town; it wouldn't even take five years. That's what keeps me up at night."

Maddie Downey, a bartender at the Showboat, has her own worries. The single mom has already lost one casino job when the Sands closed in 2006, and worries that gas prices will stay near $4 a gallon, keeping people away from Atlantic City.

"I'm just glad to have this job," she said. "I just hope it doesn't get any worse, and I hope the price of gas comes down."

When the Indian-run Foxwoods casino opened in Connecticut in 1992, it was the closest casino to Atlantic City — and a sure sign that more were to come. Mohegan Sun, another tribal casino, opened in Connecticut four years later. The resort responded by allowing its casinos to stay open 24 hours a day; they formerly had to close for a few hours in the wee hours of the morning. It also introduced new games like poker, keno and racing simulcasts.

But the money kept coming in, and the two Connecticut casinos didn't prove to be a major problem for Atlantic City, which sat on its cards. No new casinos opened until the Borgata in 2003, which would usher in a new era of grand dreams — very few of which would ever come true.

The Borgata touched off a casino arms race, with companies from across the country vying to build the next mega-resort here. At the start of 2008, there were plans for as many as four new casinos; MGM Mirage unveiled a $5 billion, three-tower casino project that would have been the largest ever built here.

Pinnacle Entertainment blew up the Sands to make way for its own $2 billion casino resort, modeled on a beach house. Before setting off the explosives that would bring it down, then-CEO Dan Lee spoke of the importance of keeping the market fresh, new and exciting. The challenge, he said, is "to compete in this new world, or be the next implosion."

Yet by the end of 2008, Pinnacle and MGM's projects imploded on their own, and Revel, the first of the new projects to actually put shovels in the ground, was limping along. It would run out of money in 2009 and halt construction on the interior. Morgan Stanley, its major financer, walked away from the project, deciding it was better to take a nearly $1 billion bath on the deal than to stay in Atlantic City.

After scouring the globe for financing, including asking the Chinese government, Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis finally secured new financing in February 2011 that allowed the project to resume, with some state tax incentives.

"Every market got hit, but nobody faced the amount of new competition coming online as much as Atlantic City did," said Larry Mullin, who was president of the Borgata at the time and now runs an Australian casino company. "We were just exposed. Nothing was going to stop the convenience customer from trying a product that was closer to them. I just don't think there was any silver, magic bullet. It was a very tough situation."

Torn between demands from the New Jersey casino and horse racing industries, New Jersey's incoming governor, Republican Chris Christie, sided in 2010 with the casinos, which provided more tax revenue to the state's coffers. He refused to allow slot machines at the racetracks — something the racing industry has long wanted to keep pace with its competitors in other states.

New Jersey staged a quasi-takeover of Atlantic City's casino and tourist zones; Christie called it "a partnership." But the new tourism zone is run by the state and takes charge of many functions Atlantic City's often dysfunctional municipal government had long struggled with, including safety, cleanliness and economic development. (At one point just a few years ago, four of the previous eight mayors of Atlantic City had been arrested on corruption charges.)

The $30 million in annual payments that the casinos had to pony up to the horse racing industry, in return for keeping slots out of the tracks, will now be used to market Atlantic City nationally. The state rewrote many of its famously strict regulations for casinos, removing, among other things, minimum staffing requirements. They even allowed casinos to keep some jackpots that had built up on progressive slot machine games that they decide to cancel.

State-mandated economic redevelopment funds collected from each casino will now be used solely for projects within Atlantic City; before, the money was spread around the state.

The help cannot come too soon. Casinos are selling at fire-sale prices. Within the past year, The Tropicana, Resorts and Trump Marina have all sold for about 10 cents on the dollar from their values of just a few years ago. The Atlantic City Hilton stopped paying its mortgage in 2009 and is looking for a buyer. The casinos have shed nearly 15,000 jobs since 1997, with more layoffs to come.

The extra marketing money is crucial to Atlantic City's future, said Frank Fantini, a Delaware casino consultant and publisher.

"If it can create that same, "I gotta go party!' atmosphere that Las Vegas has, it ought to be able to work," he said.

Griffin, the Trump CEO and Casino Association president, said Atlantic City should bottom out at around $3.5 billion, then slowly start to grow again.

"There's a lot of pain coming, but I strongly believe that in 2012 you're going to see us coming back," he said. "I definitely think better days are ahead for Atlantic City."

Could that be a new marketing slogan for Atlantic City? Most of America seems to know that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Yet how many people can correctly cite Atlantic City's tourism slogan, "Always Turned On"? The resort is thinking of a new slogan.

The effort has been going on for three years.