narrative features have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Discover Magazine, Mother Jones, Playboy, Scientific American, the Atavist, BusinessWeek and many others.
Piore's new book is The New Kings of New York.
At Lit Hub he tagged five of his favorite books about New York City's "most iconic properties, and the big personalities behind them." One title on the list:
Vicky Ward, The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons (Wiley)Read about another entry on the list.
Ward, a bestselling author and former Vanity Fair contributing editor, is a masterful storyteller. In Liar’s Ball, she recounts the antics surrounding the ownership of midtown Manhattan’s famous GM building, a luxury office tower and hedge-fundhaven across the street from Central Park that long commanded the highest rents in the city and attracted the desire of some of the city’s biggest egos. Its owners included, among others, Donald Trump and the aforementioned Harry Macklowe, who bought it with almost no money down, unlocked tens of millions of dollars in value—and then lost it all when he offered it up as collateral in a ruinous deal to buy a $2 billion portfolio of midtown office portfolio with just $50 million of his own money, at the height of the 2008 real estate bubble.
--Marshal Zeringue
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