With even modest hotels charging from $200 to $300 a room all over the world (and sometimes more), the smart traveler is frequently turning to the rental of lower-cost vacation homes or apartments.
We have learned that it is rather easy to find, say, a perfectly acceptable $139-a-night apartment in Manhattan to substitute for a Manhattan [...]

The Plaza Hotel has reopened after a three-year, $400 million renovation, bringing landmark luxury back to Manhattan.
“They say this place is the world’s most famous hotel,” said doorman Freddy Davila, who worked for the hotel for 15 years before it closed in 2005. As he welcomed hundreds of visitors up the red-carpeted steps and through [...]

Leona Helmsley, the self-styled hotel queen, whose prison term for income tax evasion and fraud was greeted with uncommon approval by a public who regarded her as a 1980s symbol of arrogance and greed, died Monday at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 87.
The cause of death was heart failure, said her [...]

Would you like a shiatsu massage with your new condo? How about a bone-density test?
Arizona’s Canyon Ranch, regarded as the most glittering brand in the $10 billion spa industry, has branched into real estate, and on Wednesday will roll out a marketing campaign for the 67-story condo-hotel at Huron and Rush Streets that will bear [...]

Starwood Capital Group today announced that the recently launched “1” Hotel and Residences, the world’s first luxury, eco-friendly global hotel brand, will open New York City’s first five-star green hotel on West 40th Street in Manhattan, across from Bryant Park. The “1” Hotel and Residences will be part of a proposed 31-story mixed-use green tower [...]

Today represents a milestone for the Toronto International Film Festival, with the official groundbreaking for its long dreamed-of year-round home (known for now as Bell Festival Centre) on a parking lot at the corner of King and John Sts.
More than a thousand guests have been invited to a bubbly celebration at the Fairmont Royal York [...]

For the young budget traveler, there are approximately 2500 hostel beds on Manhattan’s Upper West Side*, but now 350 of those beds offer a hip experience to go along with a utilitarian place to sleep. Hank Freid’s Broadway Hotel & Hostel (www.Broadwayhotelnyc.com), located at the corner of Broadway and 101st Street, have undergone renovations and [...]

The mottled surface of 100 11th Ave. will shimmer like a towering alligator handbag or sparkle as if sheathed in sequins. Paris celebrity architect Jean Nouvel has just upped the ante on Manhattan condo design.
The crinkly glass that clads the $150 million, 23-story condo tower for locally based Cape Advisors Inc. blows away the pink-brick [...]

NORFOLK, Va. - Andrew Adams hated one soup kitchen because he believed the workers deprived him of food. He stopped staying at a homeless shelter because he was convinced the people who ran it were plotting to evict him.
So Adams lived on the street, sleeping in out-of-the-way places, trying to avoid the people who, in [...]

Police were hoping that images caught on security cameras would lead them to a brazen bandit who followed a family of three tourists to their downtown Manhattan hotel and robbed them of jewelry and other possessions worth thousands of dollars.
Detective Madelyne Galindo said Sunday that no new information had turned up in the incident that [...]

Blackstone Group LP, the leveraged buyout firm that spent about $160 billion on acquisitions during the past two decades, earns higher returns from investing in real estate than from its takeover funds.
Real estate has been New York-based Blackstone’s best- performing investment since the company started buying property 16 years ago, with net returns averaging 29 [...]

Manhattan’s condo market is showing signs of reversing its cooling trend, and the capital markets are taking heed. Palisades Financial disclosed yesterday that it has acquired a $93 million B note for the first mortgage of a condominium conversion project in Manhattan’s Chelsea/Flatiron district.
“The market’s going wild,” Palisades principal Billy Procida told CPN this afternoon. [...]