Week in Pictures for Dec. 6

See the slide show

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include shopping on Black Friday, a Metro-North train derailment and New York City’s next police commissioner.

This weekend on “The New York Times Close Up,” an inside look at the most compelling articles in Sunday’s Times, Sam Roberts will speak with The Times’s Gail Collins, Rachel Swarns and Matt Flegenheimer; State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman; and Ellen Futter, president, American Museum of Natural History. Tune in at 10 p.m. Saturday or 10 a.m. Sunday on NY1 News to watch.

A sampling from the City Room blog is featured daily in the main print news section of The Times. You may also browse highlights from the blog and reader comments, read current New York headlines, like New York Metro | The New York Times on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Hints of Elaine’s in the Writing Room

Photo Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Elaine Kaufman, center, and scenes from her heyday loomed large in the space under construction.

The idea behind the above photo illustration was to conjure the spirit of Elaine’s, the famed Upper East Side bar and restaurant, in a setting where it was now invisible.

The photographer Tony Cenicola and I infused the history of Elaine’s into the Writing Room, which will open in the next few weeks, by projecting archival photographs from The New York Times onto the walls of the construction site.

Above, an image of a young Elaine Kaufman, smoking indoors, baths the walls of the gutted dining room. She is surrounded by star patrons. Below, we used an exterior shot from 2010, taken the day Ms. Kaufman died, and lined the photograph onto the currently boarded-up doorway.

Photo Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times The Writing Room will open soon on the Upper East Side, where Elaine’s once flourished. A 2010 photo of the exterior of Elaine’s, complete with patrons, was projected onto the walls.

Mr. Cenicola’s mastery enabled a collaboration among photographers from the past and present, commemorating the energy and life that existed there and that will hopefully guide, not overshadow, the Writing Room.

Big Ticket | Vintage-Modern Fusion for $43 Million

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times The building at 144 Duane Street was first designed as a department store, then became a warehouse before its current residential-retail iteration.

A vintage TriBeCa loft building designed as a department store in 1862, reinvented as a warehouse for a children’s shoe company and then, in 2001, gut-renovated and transformed into boutique apartments, has sold for $43 million. It was the most expensive sale of the week, and garnered one of the highest prices for a downtown residence, according to city records.

Crowned by a triplex penthouse, the building was first on the market for $45 million in 2011, and last year the asking price escalated to $49.5 million.

A six-story building with an elaborately carved limestone exterior and an elegant street-level storefront whose sole tenant is the German perfume maker Drom, 144 Duane Street was transformed by Studio Rivelli Architects in 2001 for the present seller, a private investor. The renovation created an 11,000-square-foot triplex on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors and two full-floor lofts on the second and third floors.

Daniel Romualdez Architects was retained to reimagine the interiors, which in contrast to the historic exterior are starkly modern and include multiple skylights and a floating staircase with blue glass steps, though ample exposed brick and cast-iron columns give a nod to the past. The building has eight bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, a rustic wood-burning fireplace girded in brick, and a combined 23,100 square feet of residential space.

There is, of course, an elevator among the refurbished mechanicals, and the penthouse also has 2,775 square feet of outdoor space divided between a roof deck and a terrace. The ceiling heights vary from 12 to 17 feet, the windows are oversized, and the 41-by-91-foot basement now contains a private gym and a half-court basketball court. The third-floor loft is a 4,000-square-foot floor-through, and the second floor is currently split into two units. The owner’s triplex had previously been on the rental and sales markets as a separate entity. The asking price was $30 million; the monthly rental fee was $100,000.

Leonard Steinberg, Yoko Sanada and Hervé Senequier of Douglas Elliman Real Estate handled the transaction on behalf of the seller, who used a limited-liability company, 144 Duane Street Corporation. The similarly anonymous buyer, identified in city records as Duane Street, was represented by a business manager/lawyer and did not use a broker. The commercial space, with a dedicated entrance, will remain on the ground floor, but the buyer requested that the residential portion of the building be delivered vacant, suggesting that it might be recombined as a single-family dwelling.

The week’s second-priciest sale, at the River House at 435 East 52nd Street, the 1931 Art-Deco co-op renowned for its panoramic East River views and emphatically selective co-op board, was also a property that had been on the market for several years and traded for less than the asking price.

The 13-room residence, No. 6A, sold for $10 million; it entered the market in 2010 with a list price of $18.89 million, and after several changes in price and listing brokerages, the most recent asking price had been $10.3 million. The elegantly proportioned co-op, with monthly maintenance fees of $10,446, has four bedrooms, four and a half baths, two fireplaces, three maids’ rooms and, in the dining room and library, romantic bay windows that overlook the river. The 26-story River House, with a pair of 15-story wings and a quaint cobblestone driveway, was designed by Bottomley, Wagner, & White.

The sellers, the romance novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford and her husband, Robert, were represented by Serena Boardman and Eva J. Mohr of Sotheby’s International Realty; the buyer was the actress Uma Thurman, who somehow clicked with the stuffy co-op board, which in previous years had discouraged show-business personalities from buying there, a slight to which the actress Diane Keaton, among other rejected applicants, can attest.

After an in-house dispute over the fate of the River House’s private club, the River Club, the board has put the 62,000-square-foot club on the market to be recreated as a private mansion for a qualified owner with deep pockets and patience. John Burger and Kyle Blackmon of Brown Harris Stevens are the listing brokers, and the price is $130 million.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

Pearl Harbor Changes a Girl’s World

U.S. Navy, Collection of the Library of Congress Dec. 7, 1941.

Dear Diary:

The few mentions in the press served to prompt my recollections of the attack on Pearl Harbor 72 years ago. My parents were away and our Aunt Pearl had come to care for my little brother and me. I was not yet 11. That Sunday, Aunt Pearl was in the living room listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio, when an unfamiliar voice broke into the music; I heard the announcer say, “This means war.”

The radio was on a table near a window. I went and stood next to it as we listened to reports of the bombing. I remember looking out the window at the backyard, seeing the garage with green-trimmed doors, the thorny brambles of the rose trellis to one side, bushes and the grass lawn beyond.

“Everything looks different now,” I said.

“That’s because you know,” my aunt said.

Her response must have been the first time anyone told me that what I knew could affect what I saw, and it would be years before I could use any insight my aunt’s remark evoked. But her response struck a chord in me.

Of course, the world soon began looking different regardless of my knowing or not. The next day there was an air raid alarm in New York. My school (P.S. 99, Queens) dismissed us early. No procedures; we were just told to go home quickly. Outside, the policeman who usually waved us across stood in the middle of the street, looking up at the sky and clenching and unclenching his fists.

Someone said German planes were five minutes from the city. There were sirens. Later, my father became an air raid warden and in the spring we dug up the lawn for a Victory Garden.

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New York Today: Christmas Countdown

Todd Heisler/The New York Times Santa takes many forms this time of year.

Good morning, New York. Temperatures will drop today, with rain forecast, and by late Sunday, we may see snow.

Meanwhile, holiday season is in full swing in the city. The likelihood of catching a Christmas carol hovers at around 100 percent, should you leave your Grinchy lair.

Here’s a guide:

- Lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree: 45,000.

- Number of tourists who will take tour buses to Brooklyn to see the over-the-top Christmas displays of Dyker Heights: 6,000.

- Linear feet of icicles in Bergdorf’s Fifth Avenue windows: 1,000.

- Christmas trees harvested in New York State: 1 million.

- Christmas trees sold in the city that were grown in New York: weirdly, very few. Most city trees come from Canada and North Carolina, though upstate growers hope to squeeze in next year.

- Number of ice rinks up and Zambonied: eight, soon to be nine. Prospect Park reopens its rink on Dec. 20th.

- Holiday cards sent to Brooklyn residents by Borough President Marty Markowitz, at his own expense: 7,000. (Save this year’s - he’s leaving office).

- Weight of the New Year’s Eve Ball, in pounds: 11,875.

- Millions estimated in Times Square to see it drop: one.

Here’s what else you need to know for Friday and the weekend.

WEATHER

Messy. Fog, then thick clouds as temperatures fall through the day to 43 by afternoon.

Then a soaking rain â€" as much as an inch, perhaps changing to sleet overnight.

Clearing on Saturday, and cold, with a high of 42 and lows in the 20s.

Stuff falls from the sky again Sunday evening. If it remains snow, it might stick for a while.

COMMUTE

Subways: Check latest status.

Rails: Check L.I.R.R., Metro-North or New Jersey Transit status.

Roads: Check traffic map or radio report on the 1s.

Beware: it is a Gridlock Alert Day.

Alternate-side parking is in effect.

COMING UP TODAY

- Mayor Bloomberg’s weekly spot on the John Gambling radio show. Only four of these left. WOR-AM 710 at 8:05 a.m.

- A state Assembly hearing on a bill to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18, at 250 Broadway downtown. 10 a.m.

- Graduation for 162 Fire Department paramedics and medical technicians, in Brooklyn.

- A candlelight vigil for Nelson Mandela outside the South African Consulate, at 333 East 38th St. 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.

- A preservationist denounces the plan to remove old metal stacks from the New York Public Library along with millions of books, at the Neighborhood Preservation Center in the East Village. 6 p.m. [Free]

- An a cappella carol concert by the Metropolitones, plus free trolley rides to City Island, at Bartow-Pell mansion in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. 5:30 p.m. [$12]

- An Illumination Celebration at Conference House Park at the south tip of Staten Island. 7 p.m. [Free]

- Steve Earle, Bettye LaVette, Joan Osborne and others pay tribute to John Lennon at Symphony Space. 8 p.m. [$65 and up]

- Either you’re having another paranoid hallucination or there really is a Philip K. Dick film festival at IndieScreen in Williamsburg opening tonight and running through the weekend. [$11 and up]

- For more events, see The New York Times Arts & Entertainment guide.

IN THE NEWS

- After two decades elsewhere, William J. Bratton will return as the city’s police commissioner under Mayor-elect de Blasio. [New York Times]

- The famously undemonstrative Mayor Bloomberg choked up during a farewell speech. [New York Times] [Video via NBC New York]

- Scoreboard: Knicks nix Nets, 113-83. Rangers beat Sabres, 3-1. Blues dog Islanders, 5-1.

Joseph Burgess and Andy Newman contributed reporting.

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