The New Kings of York

There’s a story behind every apartment sale, every building development, and each real estate transaction in New York City. And many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly— the blood sport that is New York real estate is defined by billion-dollar feuds. THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World’s Most Famous Skyline, by journalist Adam Piore (The Real Deal), charts the extraordinary transformation of America’s greatest city from a near-bankrupt urban combat zone into the land of Billionaires’ Row and Hudson Yards—a luxury playground for the global 1 percent—and provides an inside look at the bombastic developers behind the biggest real estate deals of this century.The first two decades of the twenty-first century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs anddeep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the largest residential and commercial development inNorth America, the largest condo conversion in the history of the world, the most expensivepenthouse sale in the city, the most lucrative office skyscraper sale in history, the tallest condo everbuilt. Yet 2020 brought in a new era: 95 percent of Manhattan’s office space sat empty amid apandemic, retail stores were boarded up, and restaurants went belly-up.THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK offers a behind-the-scenes picture of what it’s like to operate at the highest levels of the industry, and how some of the skyline-transforming deals were accomplished. And it features the larger-than-life characters behind the deals.The drama also includes stories of property moguls who get scammed by Malaysian embezzlers, come to blows over deals gone bad, and make backroom pacts with Russian oligarchs on their way to putting up towers that kiss the sky. Written and published by the team behind The Real Deal, New York’s preeminent real estate–focused publication, THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK is a book about the history of the city, the dawn of New York real estate’s second gilded age, the opportunists who sought to exploit it, and the adventures they had along the way. It is a look at where we have come from as we consider where to go next.