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In fact the patios, ranging in price from $40,000 to $150,000 (depending on size, location and time of purchase) have sold faster than the condos.

Of the 157 luxury units at 1450 Washington Street — some of them penthouses with attached outdoor space — two-thirds have sold, said John McCullough, an assistant vice president of Toll Brothers City Living. Of the 15 private terraces, only two remain.

For those gravitating to North Jersey’s waterfront — whether it be families leaving New York City in search of more space, or 20-somethings looking for better job and social prospects — having private access to the outdoors has become an expectation, and cost does not really seem to be an issue. Increasingly, this holds true despite the buildings’ more-or-less suburban location, in easy proximity to public green space of various kinds. Developers have responded by providing not only access, but also full-scale open-air social and entertainment centers, with lap pools, grilling stations, fire pits, playgrounds, jogging paths and dog runs at many of the newer upscale waterfront developments.

“I don’t think they can truly be competitive without having some type of outdoor offering,” said Chris Krasas, the chief financial officer of Let It Grow, a landscape and construction company in River Edge that has built several outdoor spaces in Hoboken, Jersey City and New York City. “The need to bring nature into these mostly concrete structures and for people to have a place to interact with the outdoor environment is very important.”

Traditionally these outdoor amenities have been available to the residents of a building as common space, but Toll Brothers has gone a step further. In addition to the private terraces, its newer buildings have two common areas: a second-floor courtyard garden surrounded by park benches, and a rooftop area with lounge chairs, barbecue grills and a two-sided glassed-in fire pit. Mr. McCullough said the idea was to offer tenants a choice.

“If you can afford a unit with a private outdoor space attached, that’s gold,” he said. “Or you might buy a relatively lower-priced unit, then take that money you saved to buy outdoor space.”

The private terraces range in size from 450 to 750 square feet. Five are on a seventh-floor rooftop, and 10 are on the top of the 12-story building. Each comes with gas, water and electric hookups; two lounge chairs; and an outdoor dining set. The two 550-square-foot patios still for sale are on the roof; each is listed at $80,000. Owners also have the option of reselling their terrace spaces to other residents. Toll Brothers offered a similar product in 2008 to residents of Harborside Lofts; all 11 private rooftop spaces on offer sold, at prices ranging from $50,000 to $200,000.

The kind of outdoor space being offered at 77 Hudson, a 420-unit luxury condominium in Jersey City built by K. Hovnanian Homes, is more traditional: 44,000 square feet of shared amenities, half of which are outside. An 11th-floor roof above the garage has a lap pool, hot tub, lawn, park, barbecue grills and fire pit, as well as a fitness center.

“I’ve heard people say it’s like living on a cruise ship, or South Beach on the Hudson,” said Scott Waldman, the president of Hovnanian’s brokerage division, noting that the building holds zumba and yoga classes, movie nights and other activities that have brought homeowners together. Along with the utilities, the amenities and activities are included in the monthly maintenance fees, which range from $590 to $1,270, Mr. Waldman said. Asking prices for units in the 49-story glass tower are $524,000 to $2.6 million, and so far about three-quarters have sold.

Elsewhere in Jersey City, Crystal Point, a 42-story condominium built by Fisher Development Associates, has a deck on the sixth floor equipped with a pool, a spa, fire pits and barbecue grills. All but two of the 269 units in this building have sold, at prices ranging from $650,000 to $1.495 million, according to George Cahn, a spokesman for the project.

North Jersey’s luxury rental market also has outdoor amenities. At one big project, Xchange at Secaucus Junction, there is even a rolling meadow, available to tenants as well as the public in Secaucus. Outdoor space makes up about 20 of the project’s 60 acres along the Hackensack River — which, when built out, will include 2,035 units. Included in that outdoor space is an amphitheater fronted by a 2.5-acre great lawn, its flat topography regraded by the project’s developers, Atlantic Realty Development in Woodbridge, to give it an undulating slope. Here, the project’s managers have staged concerts, movie nights and a holiday light show that drew an audience of more than 1,300 last November.

“We feel we’re neighbors with everybody in Secaucus,” said Jeremy Halpern, a vice president of Atlantic Realty, one of the developers of Xchange, “and we wouldn’t want to exclude them from this incredible property.”

Toll Brothers, similarly, has given the public in Hoboken access to various outdoor improvements. As part of its development agreement with the city, the company employed Let It Grow in building Maxwell Place Park and Pier, both of which were turned over to the city upon completion, according to Mr. McCullough. The properties include a sandy beach with a kayak launch, a boathouse and a raised peninsula that juts into the Hudson River.

More or less adjacent to these public spaces, Toll Brothers has three major projects in the works: the four-phase condo plan that includes 1450 Washington Street and Harborside Lofts; the Hudson Tea Building, a condo conversion of a former Lipton Tea plant; and Maxwell Place on the Hudson, 554 luxury condos that Mr. McCullough described as the company’s “premier product in New Jersey.”

Callingthe Maxwell Place Park and Pier “fabulous amenities for the city,” Mr. McCullough noted: “They’re not private to the residents of Maxwell Place on the Hudson. But obviously, they have a front row seat.”

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NEW YORK CITY

Manhattan, May 5 A 1927 maisonette designed for an heir to the Ford fortune will be one of six sites on a tour to benefit the Junior League of New York. Tickets are $125, or $100 if purchased by May 3, and include lunch and a cocktail reception. Information: (212) 288-6220 or nyjl.org.

Greenwich Village, May 6 The 14th annual tour to benefit the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation will include seven sites, among them the former studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Tickets are $175, or $150 in advance; for the tour and the reception that follows, they are $350, or $300 in advance. Information: (212) 475-9585 or gvshp.org/benefit.

Brooklyn Heights, May 12 A tour of five homes includes an 1856 Renaissance Revival house and a converted carriage house. Tickets are $40; no children under 13. Information: (718) 858-9193 or thebha.org.

Park Slope, Brooklyn, May 20 An 1882 Neo-Grecian brownstone is one of seven homes on the tour. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance, and include a lecture at the Montauk Club after the tour. No children under 10 (except infants in front packs) and no backpacks. Information: (718) 832-8227 or parkslopeciviccouncil.org.

Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, June 3 The tour includes eight houses. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance; for an additional $10 fee, ticketholders may attend the Prospect Lefferts Gardens tour as well. No backpacks or children in strollers. Information: (718) 625-4073 or boerumhillassociation.org.

Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, June 3 The 42nd annual tour includes nine homes and one garden, among them a 1909 neo-Renaissance limestone town house with intricate plaster moldings. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance; for an additional $10 fee, ticketholders may attend the Boerum Hill tour as well. No children under 12, except infants in front packs. Information: (718) 284-6210 or leffertsmanor.org.

Jackson Heights, Queens, June 9 and 10 A dozen block-long private gardens will be open from noon to 4 p.m. on June 9; there will also be a display of historic photographs and memorabilia, and a free lecture on the history of Jackson Heights at 10:45 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. On June 10, starting at noon, guided walking tours will be offered (tickets must be reserved or purchased in advance). Tickets are $10 for one day or $15 for both. Information: (718) 565-5344 or jhbg.org.

Flatbush, Brooklyn, June 10 Six to eight houses will be open from 1 to 6 p.m. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance. Information: (718) 859-3800 or fdconline.org.

Mount Morris Park, Harlem, June 10 A penthouse overlooking Marcus Garvey Park and an 1890s brownstone are among the tour’s 10 to 12 sites. Tickets are $30, or $25 in advance. Information: (212) 369-4241 or mmpcia.org.

Staten Island, June 24 The tour includes four to six historic houses in the Hamilton Park section of New Brighton, a suburban community designed around 1860 by Charles K. Hamilton. Tickets are $25. Information: (718) 448-2006 or preservestatenisland.org.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Oct. 20 The 34th annual house tour supports scholarships for college-bound students from the Boys and Girls High School and Brooklyn Academy. Tickets are $20, or $15 in advance. Information: brownstonersofbedstuy.org.

WESTCHESTER AND PUTNAM COUNTIES

Larchmont Manor, May 19 Three houses, including an 1880s Queen Anne, will be on a tour sponsored by the Larchmont Historical Society. Tickets are $45, or $35 for members of the historical society; no children under 12. Information: (914) 381-2239 or larchmonthistory.org.

Garrison, Cold Spring, Brewster, Carmel, Mahopac and Putnam Valley, June 9 The Putnam County Secret Garden Tour will include eight private gardens, as well as Stonecrop Gardens, in Cold Spring, and the gardens at the Boscobel House and Gardens, in Garrison. Tickets are $40, or $30 if purchased by June 7. For $125, or $90 in advance, the event will include an additional tour of two houses that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on Petra Island, in Mahopac (no children under 12 will be admitted to the Wright houses). Information: (845) 278-7272, extension 287, or putnamsecretgardentour.com.

DUTCHESS AND COLUMBIA COUNTIES

Poughkeepsie, May 9 and 20 On May 9, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., the Dutchess County Historical Society will sponsor a talk by John Pinna, an adjunct lecturer in history at Marist College, and a reception and tour of a restored 19th-century barn. On May 20, from 4 to 6 p.m., Andrew Lattimore, an artist from Cornwall on Hudson, will lead a similar program at a house filled with historic 19th- and 20th-century portraits. Tickets must be purchased in advance: the May 9 event is $35; the program on May 20 is $60. Information: (845) 471-1630 or dutchesscountyhistoricalsociety.org.

Dutchess County, Oct. 13 The 24th annual Country Seats Tour will feature as many as a dozen historic farms. Information and tickets, to benefit Hudson River Heritage, will be available closer to the event: (845) 876-2474 or hudsonriverheritage.org.

ROCKLAND AND ORANGE COUNTIES

Palisades and Snedens Landing, May 12 Eight houses, including a 1924 Craftsman-style cottage overlooking the Hudson River, will be on a tour to benefit the Blue Rock School scholarship fund. Tickets are $40, or $35 in advance; no one under 18 will be allowed. Information: (845) 627-0234 or bluerockschool.org.

Goshen, June 16 A Japanese-style garden and a lily garden are among the six gardens that will be open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event benefits St. James Episcopal Church. Tickets are $45, or $40 in advance. Information: (845) 294-6225 or stjamesgoshen.org.

Warwick, July 14 The Warwick Historical Society’s 1810 home will be one of six sites on a tour that will benefit Warwick Valley Gardeners. Tickets are $15. Information: warwickvalleygardeners.com.

LONG ISLAND

Southampton and Water Mill, May 12 A 1910 oceanfront house with a traditional shingled roof and bleached wood floors will be one of six houses on a tour to benefit the Southampton Historical Museum. Tickets are $90, or $75 in advance; no children under 12. Information: (631) 283-2494 or southamptonhistoricalmuseum.org.

Centerport and Huntington Bay, May 23 Five homes, including a 1904 Queen Anne Victorian, will be on a tour to benefit the Family Service League of Long Island. Tickets are $60, or $55 in advance; lunch is $30, with reservations before May 16. No children under 12. Information: (631) 427-3700, extension 255, or fsl-li.org.

Sea Cliff, June 9 Eight gardens will be open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., including one on Seacliff Harbor and another with a pond and trellis-covered walkways; a garden tea party will be held from noon to 3:30 p.m. Tickets are $25. Information: (516) 671-1717 or seacliff-ny.gov.

Southampton, June 9 and 10 Landscape Pleasures, an annual event to benefit the Parrish Art Museum, will present four landscape designers who have created gardens on the East End at a symposium from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on June 9; on June 10, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., there will be a tour of several gardens in the area. Tickets for the two-day event are $200, or $150 for members. Information: (631) 283-2118, extension 42, or parrishart.org.

Water Mill, July 22 to Sept. 2 The Hampton Designer Show House, to benefit Southampton Hospital, will be held in a traditional Shingle-style estate. Admission is $30; no children under 6. Information: (631) 745-0004 or hamptondesignershowhouse.com.

NEW JERSEY

Princeton, through May 20 Priory Court, a limestone house with a cloister, will be the site of a show house to benefit the Junior League of Greater Princeton. The house will be open Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Fridays until 7 p.m. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance; no children under 12. Information: (609) 771-0525 or jlgp.org.

Saddle River, through June 10 A Tudor-style home on 10 acres will be the site of the Designer Show House of New Jersey, to benefit the Heart and Vascular Hospital and the Emergency Trauma Department at Hackensack University Medical Center. Tickets are $30; no children under 6. Information: (551) 996-3252 or thedsnj.com.

Morristown, through May 31 Sixty designers will participate in a show house at Glynallyn Castle, to benefit the Inpatient Hospice and Palliative Care Center at Morristown Medical Center. The 40-room Tudor-style house, built in 1917, has 16 chimneys, a dungeon and originally had a moat. Tickets are $30, or $25 in advance (or for those 62 and older); no children under 12. Information: (973) 971-8800 or mansioninmay.org.

Montclair, June 1 and 2 A landscaped property with several garden rooms, including a rose terrace, a boxwood garden and a croquet court, is one of at least seven gardens on the Roses to Rock Gardens tour. Tickets are $35, or $30 in advance. Information: (973) 744-4752 or vanvleck.org.

Westfield and Summit, June 2 Five houses will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in a tour to benefit the Westfield Symphony Orchestra, with music by orchestra members at some of the gardens. Tickets are $35, or $30 in advance; no children under 12. Information: (908) 232-9400 or westfieldsymphony.org.

Hoboken, June 3 The Hoboken Secret Garden Tour, to benefit the Hoboken Historical Museum, includes guided tours of 8 to 10 private gardens, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance; children under 13 are free. Information: (201) 656-2240 or hobokenmuseum.org.

CONNECTICUT

Southport, Greenfield Hill and Westport, May 4 A 3,600-square-foot house on Long Island Sound with stainless steel roofing, cedar siding and wood and glass throughout is one of five homes on a tour to benefit Near & Far Aid, a group that supports more than 100 charities in Fairfield County. Tickets are $75, or $65 in advance. Information: (203) 259-1710 or nearandfaraid.org.

Falls Village and Lakeville, Conn., and Millerton, N.Y., May 19 and 20 This event to benefit Women’s Support Services will include an antiques and plant sale on May 19 and a tour of four gardens, including that of the designer Bunny Williams, on May 20. Tickets for the sale are $35; early-bird entry, at 8 a.m., is $100. Tickets for the tour are $70, or $60 in advance. Information: (860) 364-1080 or tradesecretsct.com.

Greenwich, June 7 The Garden Education Center of Greenwich will sponsor a tour of five gardens. Tickets are $95, or $75 in advance. Information: (203) 869-9242 or gecgreenwich.org.

Stamford, June 10 and 11 The Bartlett Arboretum gardens and five private sites will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $50, or $40 for members; lunch will be available for an additional $20. Information: (203) 322-6971 or bartlettarboretum.org.

MASSACHUSETTS

Boston, May 17 Twelve to 16 gardens will be on the annual Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill tour. Tickets are $40, or $30 in advance. Information: (617) 227-4392 or beaconhillgardenclub.org.

Newton, June 3 Eight houses will be open from noon to 5 p.m., in a tour to benefit Historic Newton. Tickets are $35 ($25 for members), or $30 ($20 for members) if purchased by June 1; half-price tickets are available for new members. Information: (617) 796-1450 or historicnewton.org.

Boston, June 16 Twenty private and community gardens will be on the South End Garden Tour, to benefit the South End/Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance. Information: (617) 437-0999 or southendgardentour.org.

RHODE ISLAND

Providence, June 1 to 3 The Festival of Historic Houses sponsored by the Providence Preservation Society will begin with a candlelight tour on June 1, from 6 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $50. There will be two neighborhood house tours: the College Hill section, on June 2, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the Jewelry District, on June 3, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets are $40 each, or $35 in advance; no children under 10. Admission to the events on all three days is $100. Information: (401) 831-7440 or ppsri.org.

Newport, June 29 to July 1 A dozen gardens will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., as part of the annual Secret Gardens of Newport tour. Tickets for all three days are $20, or $15 in advance. Information: (401) 439-7253 or secretgardentours.org.

PENNSYLVANIA

Furlong, May 6 to June 3 The annual Bucks County Designer House and Gardens, to benefit Doylestown Hospital and the Village Improvement Association of Doylestown, will take place at Spring Valley Farm, an 1850s Dutch Colonial house at 3864 Spring Valley Road; 25 interior designers and 15 landscape designers are taking part. Tickets are $25, or $20 for seniors; no children under 10. Information: (215) 345-2191 or buckscountydesignerhouse.org.

Philadelphia, May 20 Ten houses in the Society Hill area will be on a tour to benefit the Society Hill Civic Association. Tickets are $35, or $30 in advance, and include a discount at several local restaurants. Information: (215) 629-1288 or societyhillcivic.org.

New Hope, June 2 Six private gardens in Bucks County will be open to the public. Tickets are $30. Information: (215) 862-5652 or newhopehs.org.

Mount Gretna, Aug. 4 The annual tour to benefit Gretna Music features 10 to 12 summer cottages and homes built in this lakeside community since the early 1900s, including the Mount Gretna Inn, a three-story Arts and Crafts house. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance. Information: (717) 361-1508 or gretnamusic.org.

DELAWARE

Wilmington, May 5 Sixteen private and public gardens will be featured on the 65th annual tour for Wilmington Garden Day, including the Goodstay Gardens, one of the oldest gardens in the state, created by Ellen Coleman du Pont in symmetrical rooms like a traditional colonial garden. Tickets are $35, or $30 in advance. Information: wilmingtongardenday.org.

MARYLAND AND WASHINGTON, D.C.

Baltimore and Four Counties, through May 20 The Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage began in Baltimore on April 28 and continues in St. Mary’s County on May 5, in Talbot County on May 12, in Howard County on May 19 and in Anne Arundel County on May 20. Among the sites featured will be a 13-foot-wide 1850 row house in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, and Oakdale, an 1838 home in Howard County with 23 rooms. Tickets are $35 for each day, or $30 in advance. Information: (410) 821-6933 or mhgp.org.

Towson, through May 20 Eck House, a 25-room home in Cromwell Valley Park, will be the site of the 36th annual Decorators’ Show House to benefit the educational programs of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Admission is $30. Information: (410) 783-8000 or bsomusic.org.

Washington, D.C., May 5 A two-level garden centered on a multitrunk kousa dogwood and another garden with paths bordered by lavender and planted with white roses, a weeping pear tree and dwarf boxwoods will be on a tour of eight gardens sponsored by the Georgetown Garden Club. Tickets are $35. Information: (202) 965-1950 or georgetowngardentour.com.

Takoma Park, Md., May 6 A dozen homes, from an 1887 Victorian to a modern bungalow, will be open for a tour in the North Takoma neighborhood, from 1 to 5 p.m. Tickets are $20, or $18 in advance. Information: (301) 270-2831 or historictakoma.org.

Hyattsville, Md., May 20 The 33rd annual house tour to benefit the Hyattsville Preservation Association will take place from 1 to 5 p.m. Tickets are $12, or $10 in advance. Information: (301) 699-5440 or preservehyattsville.org.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Wolfeboro, July 11 Five houses and gardens will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., for the 25th annual tour to benefit the Central New Hampshire V.N.A. and Hospice. Tickets are $40. Information: (603) 569-2729.

VERMONT

Westminster, July 14 and 15 Five gardens, including the Hayward Garden, which has two 90-foot mixed borders, a woodland area and an herb garden, will be part of a tour on July 14, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and July 15, from noon to 3 p.m., to benefit Westminster Cares, a service organization for the elderly and disabled. Tickets are $15 for one person and $25 for two. Information: (802) 722-3607 or westminstercares.org.

MAINE

Spruce Head and Rockland, July 15 Seven gardens will be on the 21st annual Gardens in the Watershed tour. Tickets are $28, or $25 in advance; there is no charge for children under 12. Information: (207) 594-5166 or grlt.org.

Camden and Rockport, July 19 The Camden Garden Club’s 65th annual tour features seven gardens, most of which include house tours. Tickets are $30, or $25 in advance. Information: camdengardenclub.org.

Mount Desert Island, July 28 A tour of six gardens is sponsored by the Garden Club of Mount Desert. Tickets are $40, or $35 if purchased before July 10. Information: (727) 515-1335 or gardenclubofmountdesert.com.

THE SOUTH

Atlanta, through May 13 Knollwood, a 1929 house designed by Phillip Trammel Shutze, is the site of the Atlanta Decorators’ Show House and Gardens, benefiting the educational programs of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Admission is $25; no children under 8. Information: (404) 733-5000 or decoratorsshowhouse.org.

Atlanta, May 5 and 6 Nine sites are on this year’s Georgia Perennial Plant Association tour, which will be held on May 5, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on May 6, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $20, and are good for both days; new members and those who renew their membership will receive a free ticket. Information: georgiaperennial.org.

Louisville, Ky., July 7 and 8 The Old Louisville Hidden Treasures Garden Tour will feature 10 private gardens. Tickets are $15, or $12 in advance; there is no charge for children under 12. Information: (502) 635-5244 or oldlouisvillegardentour.com.

THE MIDWEST

Indianapolis, through May 13 The 51st annual St. Margaret’s Hospital Guild Decorators’ Show House and Gardens, to benefit Wishard Health Services, will take place in Tobias House at 5 East 71st Street, a 40-room home built in the 1930s and donated to the Indiana University Foundation in 2010 by Randall L. Tobias, the former chairman and president of Eli Lilly and Company. More than 50 interior and landscape designers will participate. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Tickets are $20 (discount tickets are available for $17, at Marsh stores); children ages 3 to 12 are $5. Information: showhouseindy.com.

Kansas City, Mo., through May 20 The 43rd annual Symphony Designers’ Show House, to benefit the Kansas City Symphony, will be held in a 1909 English Tudor Revival house. Admission is $15. Information: (816) 968-9711 or showhouse.org.

Downers Grove, Ill., July 14 Seven gardens are on a tour to benefit a program for formerly homeless families run by the First United Methodist Church. Tickets are $25, or $20 in advance. Information: (630) 968-7120 or dgfumc.org/gardenwalk.

Chicago, July 21 and 22 The annual Sheffield Garden Walk, a festival of guided architectural tours, live music, food, activities for children and open gates at more than 80 neighborhood gardens, will benefit community organizations and projects, schools and the area beautification program sponsored by the Sheffield Neighborhood Association. The events will take place in the blocks around Sheffield Avenue North, from noon to 10:15 p.m.; gardens are open from noon to 5:30 p.m., and children’s activities are from noon to 5:30 p.m. Admission is $7, or $10 after 3 p.m. Information: (773) 929-9255 or sheffieldgardenwalk.com.

Marshall, Mich., Sept. 8 and 9 The annual Historic Home Tour includes admission to seven historic houses and to the three museums run by Historic Marshall (Honolulu House, Grand Army of the Republic Hall and Capitol Hill School), as well as several other museums, like the Walters Gasoline Museum and the Schragg Postal Museum. Tickets for the two-day event are $20, or $15 if purchased by Sept. 1. Information: (269) 781-8544 or marshallhistoricalsociety.org.

THE WEST

San Francisco, through May 28 A 1902 Classical Revival home with a double curved grand staircase will be the site of this year’s Decorator Showcase, to benefit the San Francisco University High School scholarship program. Tickets are $30. Information: (415) 447-5830 or decoratorshowcase.org.

Los Angeles, May 6 Four houses on a tour sponsored by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects include a three-level architect’s home with Cor-Ten steel walls and a passive energy house with a solar thermal heater, a green roof and a photovoltaic array. Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $85, or $75 in advance; A.I.A. members are $65. Information: (213) 639-0777 or aialosangeles.org.

San Clemente, Calif., June 9 Six private gardens will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for a tour sponsored by the San Clemente Garden Club. Tickets are $30, or $25 in advance. Information: sanclementegardenclub.com.

Denver, June 16 The 12th annual Gardens of Northwest Denver tour will include 20 sites, including urban farms, sculpture gardens and xeriscape gardens designed to reduce the need for irrigation or supplemental watering. The tour will be followed by a silent auction and an after-party. Tickets are $15; there is no charge for children under 12. Information: (303) 433-4983 or conflictcenter.org.

Seattle, June 24 A garden tour of the Wallingford area of the city will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $15; children under 12 are free. Information: (206) 632-3165 or wallingford.org.

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He also helped found the Graffiti Research Lab, an artist group that has undertaken projects like tagging the Brooklyn Bridge with an (erasable) laser and tossing projectile LEDs onto city buildings.

Mr. Roth, 34, is being honored this year by the design community as a winner of a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

John C Jay, global executive creative director and partner at Wieden + Kennedy and the jury chairman for the awards, said Mr. Roth was chosen in the interaction design category, in part, because “he blurs the distinctions between technology, design and art.”

He cited as an example the EyeWriter. The device, which Mr. Roth helped design, allowed a paralyzed graffiti artist named Tempt1 to draw with his eyes. “He’s definitely a very strong problem solver,” Mr. Jay said of Mr. Roth. “That’s at the heart of the design.”

Mr. Roth, who has an M.F.A. from Parsons The New School for Design and lived in New York for several years, spoke about his work on the phone from his home in Paris.

Do you think of yourself as a designer?

I consider myself an artist, but I do see the connection to design. I think my work tends to address dual audiences. It has one life that happens within white cubes in art galleries. But I also have interest in reaching a completely separate online audience. I like when my work appears in galleries and on the front page of YouTube.

Has YouTube been important in getting your work seen, especially the videos you post of street art projects like

L.A.S.E.R. Tag?

It’s not about YouTube; it’s about the Internet. I hadn’t seen a Banksy piece out in the street until 10 years after I was introduced to his work. But seeing one piece on the Web was enough to make me quit my job and go back to graduate school.

I understand when people have specific ideas about how certain parts of art shouldn’t be mediated. That it’s meant to be experienced out in the street. But the influence we can have on society as artists now vastly outweighs those arguments.

Much of your work involves subverting technology and the Internet. Do you know how to write code?

Yes, I know how to write code. But I find it taxing and boring. I’m not fun to be around when I’m writing code.

My relationship with technology is more a fascination with the people writing code. The hacker communities. I’m not talking about phone scandals and e-mail hacking. When I look at graffiti artists, I see hackers. I see a community of people who are making their own tools and subverting systems to tell stories.

How did the Jay-Z “Brooklyn Go Hard” video happen?

I got a call from a former classmate who’s now working at a firm. He remembered this project I did in graduate school at Parsons. He said, “Can you make a Jay-Z video in three days?” Hell, yes. I canceled Thanksgiving that year. My wife was like, “I understand. Do what you have to do. I’ll handle the food.”

Are you interested in doing more traditional products, like designing furniture?

I wouldn’t be against that. I came from architecture and worked in it for three years before I started dabbling on the Web. But not having money influence design decisions was liberating to me. It got disappointing to see great design ideas be shelved because the materials were considered too expensive. I don’t know if I can go back.

The other winners of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards are Richard Saul Wurman (lifetime achievement), Janine Benyus (design mind), Design That Matters (corporate and institutional achievement), Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects (architecture design), Rebeca Méndez (communication design), Thom Browne (fashion design), Clive Wilkinson Architects (interior design), Stoss Landscape Urbanism (landscape architecture), Scott Wilson (product design).

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With buildings accounting for 75 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, city planners say, the hope is that owners will take steps to increase their structures’ energy efficiency, produce their own renewable energy, put storm water to good use and, in some cases, even grow food.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the City Council support the proposed new rules, which the Council is expected to approve in a vote scheduled for Monday. The zoning changes would affect building types as varied as office towers, warehouses and apartment buildings.

The new regulations would encourage better insulation by allowing buildings to add up to eight inches of thickness to exterior walls without its being counted in the building’s maximum footprint. Other changes would relax height limits and facade restrictions to make room for equipment like solar panels, wind turbines, awnings, green roofs, recreational decks and skylights.

Solar installations, in particular, have the potential for significant growth: under the new rules, panels would be allowed on flat roofs anywhere below the parapet regardless of building height. On sloping roofs, the panels could be mounted flat.

Rooftops could also accommodate boilers and other equipment that might operate more efficiently there than in the basement, officials said.

But some changes apply only to certain buildings. Wind turbines could rise up to 55 feet above roofs, but only on buildings taller than 100 feet or those near the waterfront, where winds are consistent enough to generate power reliably. And the greater latitude for rooftop greenhouse installations would apply only to nonresidential buildings, including schools, that promote education or year-round food production.

BrightFarms, a private company that develops greenhouses, said this month that it planned a 100,000-square-foot commercial greenhouse on the roof of a city-owned warehouse building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The operation is expected to yield a million pounds of produce a year.

The changes in the zoning rules were based on recommendations by a task force of design and construction professionals enlisted by the city to propose ways to promote energy efficiency and other environmental improvements for buildings.

Adding green features to buildings can cost thousands of dollars, and officials with the City Planning Department said they were not certain how many property owners would ultimately take advantage of the new rules.

Lowering utility bills is generally the biggest incentive for older buildings to undertake energy upgrades. City planners estimate that New Yorkers spend $15 billion a year powering and heating roughly one million buildings.

“Every building is going to make different decisions,” said Howard Slatkin, the director of sustainability at the City Planning Department. “We’re creating more choices.”

The city offers tax incentives to property owners who install features like solar panels or green roofs. Still, Angela Pinsky, a senior vice president with the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s trade group, said questions remained about how quickly upfront costs could be recovered through electricity savings.

She said, however, that other features like green roofs were appealing to many building owners, and that the zoning changes would eliminate a “very large hurdle.”

Some builders suggested that the main advantage of the new rules would be saved time.

Paul Freitag, the director of development for the Jonathan Rose Companies, a developer of major green projects in the city, said the new rules in many cases would eliminate the need to apply for a variance to add special features. He said it once took him 18 months to get city approval to install exterior solar shades on one building.

The new rules would allow sun-control devices and awnings to project two and a half feet over areas that are zoned as open space. Mr. Freitag said the more flexible approach would help property owners consider improvements “based on what they want and not on whether it’s difficult to have it approved.”

“A lot of people will say, ‘We can do this differently’ once they realize their options,” he said.

Russell Unger, the executive director of the Urban Green Council, the New York chapter of the United States Green Building Council, which confers the seal of approval, known as LEED certification, for environmentally sound buildings, said that improvements in energy efficiency were the best long-term investment for property owners looking at the bottom line.

He estimated that a three-story residential building that added four inches of insulation to its exterior walls could save 10.5 percent on its yearly heating bills, reducing a utility bill of $3,575 by about $373.

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said the changes would help bring more certainty to the building industry in terms of what would be allowed.

“We’re giving people looking to build or rehab a building a permanent green light to make that building greener,” she said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 26, 2012

A previous version of this article misstated the unit of how high wind turbines could rise above roofs under proposed zoning changes as 55 inches. It also erroneously stated that the new rules would allow sun-control devices and awnings to project two to six feet over areas zoned as open space.

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In the next 24 months, virtually every block in a one-mile stretch of 14th is slated to gain a new or renovated building containing residential units and ground-floor retail space. When the dust clears, the strip will have more than 1,200 additional housing units and more than 85,000 square feet of additional retail space.

Few here are surprised. After all, the section of 14th Street from Rhode Island to Florida Avenues, about two miles north of the National Mall and near a major Metro station, has been undergoing redevelopment for years. But in 2008 financing for new projects stopped, and it did not start flowing again until 2010. Now the taps are fully open.

A few small condominium projects are in the mix, including PN Hoffman’s transformation of a Verizon building into 34 upscale units. But given Washington’s very tight rental housing market, developers’ main focus is on apartment buildings, most of them skewing toward the high end.

Perseus Realty and Jefferson Apartment Group are uniting to build 231 luxury apartments with more than 10,000 square feet of retail space. UDR, based in Denver, is working on a project at the northern end of the strip that will contain 255 units, a rooftop pool, and 16,000 square feet of retail space.

But the project that is attracting the most notice is Louis, by the JBG Companies, at 14th and U Streets. It will have 268 luxury apartments, 25,000 square feet of new retail space and a tiered roof deck.

“The area meets some of our key core principles: it’s near the central business district and is a transit corridor,” said Kai Reynolds, a principal of JBG who is overseeing the project.

Mr. Reynolds pointed to a Room & Board furniture store a block away, which opened in 2010 and is flourishing, as an example of the boulevard’s potential. “When you see a national retailer investing $15 million in that area, it shows it has that vibrancy,” he said

The stretch of 14th Street bridges Logan Circle and U Street, two of the city’s more fashionable neighborhoods. Early in the 20th century, the boulevard was lined with car dealerships, but the strip was hit hard by suburban flight, and the riots after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

By 1985, when Yemane Meresie bought Sav-On Liquors, the street was largely known for the prostitutes and drug dealers who frequented it. “It was a jungle,” he said.

Like many other longtime residents and business owners, Mr. Meresie traces the neighborhood’s growth through milestones like the 1987 expansion of Studio Theater at 14th and P Streets. But nothing matched the impact of the arrival of Whole Foods on P Street in 2000, a result of advocacy by residents who said they were convinced the store could thrive in their community.

They were right. “That was a revolutionary change,” Mr. Meresie said. Whole Foods drew businesses like Starbucks and Flow Yoga, and a swath of condo buildings.

At the same time to the north, condos and restaurants were rising around the busy intersection of 14th and U Streets.

But the 10-block stretch between the areas remained partly a throwback: sprinkled among new businesses were pawnshops, used furniture stores and takeout Chinese restaurants, even though the area was gaining a reputation for unusual restaurants like Richard Sandoval’s Masa 14 and locally owned spots like Cork Wine Bar.

Residents say that, given the area’s central location, low-rise buildings that could be expanded or replaced and vacant lots, the building boom is hardly surprising. But the form it will ultimately take is still hazy. Jared Meier, a retail strategist for StreetSense, said the corridor was still in transition from largely food-based tenants to merchandisers and predicted that the increased population would attract “junior box” stores like Petco, DSW or Urban Outfitters.

Greg Leisch, the chief executive of Delta Associates, a real estate consulting company in Alexandria, Va., said, “As an area becomes re-enlivened, there’s a natural cycle that retailers go through; they move from more mom-and-pop to less, and from less chain stores to more.” He cited Georgetown and Bethesda, Md., as having followed that path.

That shift has already begun. In the last year, 14th Street lost a number of small businesses. Ruff & Ready Furnishings and the jazz club HR-57 moved to cheaper neighborhoods, and Sam’s Pawnbrokers is for sale. The Central Union Mission, a 29-year neighborhood resident, will leave within the next year, its building becoming another residential complex, the developer, Jeffrey Schonberger, said. Those who remain know their stay is tenuous. Greg Link, a co-owner of Home Rule, said his 14-year-old housewares shop just had its highest-grossing February. Nonetheless, he predicted the future would bring more competition. “Someday there’ll be a big home store that’ll open here. That’s a big market, and it’s just begging for entry.”

Longtime residents say they worry the changes will bring an influx of short-term renters, question whether the number of restaurants will rise to a level that could threaten the character of the neighborhood, and fear losing parking spaces. But most are excited about the growth.

One, Tim Christensen, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1989 and is president of the Logan Circle Community Association, wondered about the cost.

“I’ve said before that when the last pawnshop and the last storefront deli leaves 14th Street, I will leave,” he said. “It’s that mixture of the gritty and the upscale that gives the neighborhood a unique character. If one day it’s all gone, I think we will feel a sense of loss.”

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For those homeowners whose backyards abutted Ridgeway and whose front lawns were also in the line of fire of Westchester Hills Golf Club across the street, it was even worse: players there were known to overshoot the mark occasionally, breaking the windows of parked cars and then rummaging through residents’ shrubbery to retrieve golf balls.

But now Ridgeway has sold its 128 acres to the nonprofit French American School, which plans to build quarters there for 1,200 students, and many residents find themselves wishing they could turn back the clock, said Mr. Guerriere, president of the Gedney Association, a White Plains neighborhood group representing 450 families.

Instead of school buildings rising in their backyards, neighbors say, they prefer the expansive views and the property tax income the club generated for White Plains’s coffers. In fact, broken windows are a minor irritation by comparison.

Homeowners who live next to golf clubs also at times have concerns about the environmental hazards associated with chemicals used to maintain fairways. In Bedford, Donald J. Trump had planned to build a golf course on the 213-acre Seven Springs Estate, formerly the home of the newspaper magnate Eugene Meyer, a property on a high point reaching into Bedford, North Castle and New Castle.

In the face of intense opposition from residents worried about runoff from the course into the Byram Lake watershed, Mr. Trump is instead seeking approval for a nine-lot subdivision there.

Beyond Pesticides, a Washington nonprofit, credits changes to studies from the 1990s indicating a higher mortality rate among golf course superintendents from certain cancers. Two “Toxic Fairways” studies by the New York attorney general’s office, in 1991 and 1995, helped prompt environmental and health groups, player organizations, and the Golf Course Superintendents Association to adopt what was called “Environmental Principles for Golf Courses in the United States.”

In part, according to Web data posted by Beyond Pesticides, course officials got involved in the effort because they learned that developers were experiencing more resistance to golf courses because of pesticide drift off of the greens and runoff into waterways.

These days, said Michael Hurdzan, president Hurdzan/Fry Environmental Golf Course Design in Columbus, Ohio, “the industry has taken quantum leaps forward.” He says the indiscriminate application of broad-spectrum pesticides and fungicides has given way to more targeted uses of slow-release chemicals.

Course managers are also exploring natural remedies, like applying a mixture of water and molasses to the soil, because increased sugar content encourages healthy microorganisms.

On top of which, Mr. Hurdzan pointed out, much of the public may not be aware that grasses used on courses today have often been genetically engineered to be resistant to infestation.

Audubon International, a nonprofit organization near Albany (and no relation to the National Audubon Society), is working with landowners, municipalities, hotels and homeowner associations in different parts of the country to encourage the use of organic products. It also promotes the creation of pesticide-free areas on courses, where wildlife can thrive.

Of the 2,500 courses that belong to the group, said Joellen Lampman, a program director, 96 percent are using fewer pesticides. (There are about 16,000 courses in the country and 832 in New York, according to Ms. Lampman.) However, she said, “we have not been able to convince golf course managers to abandon all use of chemicals, because of demand by golfers for green, perfectly manicured, weed-free courses.”

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NINE months after the billionaire British heiress Petra Ecclestone set this city buzzing with her purchase of a 123-room estate for $85 million, the real estate community here is hoping the sale will help propel prices high enough to crack the elusive $100 million barrier.

Even in this town of fast fortunes and extravagant mansions, the record purchase price, for Candy Spelling’s Manor in Holmby Hills, by Ms. Ecclestone, the daughter of the Formula One chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, was a showstopper. Ms. Ecclestone was only 22 years old, after all, and already owned a 20,000-square-foot home in the London neighborhood of Chelsea valued at $87 million.

One interesting twist in the script is that the deal to buy the Manor from Ms. Spelling, the widow of the producer Aaron Spelling, would most likely not have been possible — especially in the mere 48 hours it took to finalize — without another prospective buyer’s negotiation on the home with Ms. Spelling nine months earlier.

In late 2010 Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian potash fertilizer billionaire, quietly made a visit to Los Angeles with his eldest daughter, Ekaterina. He made offers on at least two of the most famous mansions in Beverly Hills and Holmby Hills, including the Spelling manor, before deciding not to buy a home on the West Coast, at least for now, according to people familiar with their deliberations who declined to be named for confidentiality reasons.

Instead, Ekaterina, using a trust linked to her father, bought the former Citi chairman Sanford I. Weill’s penthouse at 15 Central Park West for $88 million, a record price in New York. Since then Mr. Rybolovlev’s messy divorce has put that apartment and a home he bought for about $100 million in Palm Beach, Fla., in the crosshairs of his wife’s lawyers.

While to some the $85 million sale here may have been an outlier, to brokers it is a hopeful comp that has helped heat up the high end of the Los Angeles market.

“The market is just on fire the last several months,” said Rick Hilton, a co-owner of Hilton & Hyland, a brokerage in Beverly Hills and an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate. (Mr. Hilton is also the father of the celebutantes Paris and Nicky Hilton.)

Mr. Hilton said the inventory for premium properties was in short supply. For those following Manhattan real estate, it’s a familiar story.

“You have a lot of wealthy people that are nervous about the stock market,” he said.

As in New York and Miami, foreign money is pouring into Los Angeles — from Russians and Chinese, as well as Germans, Britons and Indonesians — who are eager to park their money in real estate, brokers said.

Bidding wars are back, as are New Yorkers. One Brentwood home Hilton & Hyland listed about three weeks ago for $10.25 million drew three potential buyers, all investment bankers from New York, Mr. Hilton said. It went into escrow after 10 days on the market, he said.

Last year Hilton & Hyland handled $1.2 billion in real estate transactions, up from $1 billion in 2010, and they have about $250 million in pending transactions this month, said Jeffrey Hyland, Mr. Hilton’s partner at the firm.

There have been some big transactions recently, including Jennifer Aniston’s $35 million sale of her home in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills to a co-founder of an investment firm in Orange County, a record per-square-foot celebrity sale, brokers said. In fact, three of the top five sales in the city in the past decade have happened in the past 18 months, brokers said.

But none have rivaled the $85 million Ms. Ecclestone paid Ms. Spelling, even if her original asking price had been $150 million. The French-chateau-style mansion, with 56,000 square feet, sits on more than 4.6 acres, and includes a screening room, a bowling alley and a parking lot for 100 vehicles.

Since the purchase she has “Petra-fied” the home, as W magazine put it, painting many of the rooms dark colors, including her 7,000-square-foot master suite, which is now black. With the help of the celebrity designer Gavin Brodin, the house was transformed from “an old ‘Dynasty’-like set to a massive V.I.P. lounge,” W wrote.

The Spelling home often received poor ratings from architecture critics and others who said it dwarfed other estates in Holmby Hills. Still, Ms. Ecclestone actually found it homier than other mansions she toured last year, said Mr. Hilton, her broker on the purchase.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesSHALL WE? Piermont Avenue, the main street, has the kinds of quirky shops restaurants that draw visitors. Its riverfront setting at the foot of the Tallman range helps, too. More Photos »

DRAPED as it is down the Hudson River face of the Tallman Mountains, Piermont evokes a Mediterranean hillside, or maybe Sausalito, Calif. Either way, it presents a sharp contrast to many of its neighbors in Rockland County.

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Three miles south of the Tappan Zee Bridge, with a colorful main street of quaint shops and historic homes tucked along the shoreline, it is insulated from the noise of traffic crossing the span between Rockland to Westchester. But at the same time the George Washington Bridge is about 12 miles south, close enough for residents to commute to Manhattan.

Not surprisingly, the 0.7-square-mile village in Orangetown, with a three-mile-wide section of the river to its east and the steep hillside behind it, has become a refuge for artists, musicians, authors and others seeking a peaceful respite from the clamor of everyday life.

“This is definitely not a place to come and build a McMansion,” said Joan Dye Gussow, professor emerita at Columbia University, environmentalist and author of “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2002), among other books. Ms. Gussow, 83, moved to Piermont with her husband, Alan, a painter, in 1995. The house they bought with the intention of renovating it turned out to be unsalvageable, so they built another on its footprint for about $400,000: a three-bedroom two-bath Italian-style rose-colored stucco residence.

But it wasn’t really for the original house that they moved to Piermont. “I don’t know exactly what it was,” Ms. Gussow said, “but when I walked down to the river with my husband, it was the open space, the nonsuburban aspect of the site that called to me.” Now a widow, she conducts writing classes in her home and tends a large garden that sweeps down to the water. “I get up every morning and pull up the shades and look out at the river,” she said, “and I just love that.”

Piermont has not always been idyllic. As recently as the 1980s, it was so reminiscent of a village laid bare by hard times that Woody Allen chose it for the backdrop of his 1985 movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which takes place during the Great Depression. Formerly a factory town, Piermont was the home of the Continental Can Company in the 1950s and then the site of the Piermont Paper Company. When the mill closed in the 1970s, the village fell into decline. It wasn’t until the 1990s that developers began building condominiums and town houses on the pier, enticing new residents like Fara Abramson, the owner of a gift shop in nearby New City.

After dining out one evening in Piermont with friends, Ms. Abramson, now 43 and the mother of a 9-year-old son, was so smitten that she returned the next morning to buy a three-bedroom three-and-a-half-bath town house with a deck and views of the riverfront, spending $300,000 before even putting her home and business in New City up for sale. “I could never have taken a chance like that in today’s economy,” said Ms. Abramson, who has since opened another gift shop, Presence, in Piermont, “but I’m glad I did back then.”

So magnetic is the village today, according to residents, that tourists and bicyclists often arrive in droves on weekends. The bicyclists often pay little heed to the designated bike lanes, said Robert Samuels, a former journalist and author who has lived here since 1982. “They talk loudly and shout back and forth to one another, often waking me out of a sound sleep on a Sunday morning,” said Mr. Samuels, whose book “Blue Water, White Water” (Up the Creek Publishing, 2011) details his struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a muscle disorder.

But other than the bicyclists and high annual property taxes, most of Piermont’s 2,500 residents consider their village as close to perfect as it gets, said Mr. Samuels, the president of the 500-member civic association.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Ash Street winds down from Route 9W, its various house styles on display: stone homes built in the 1700s, Greek Revivals dating to the 1800s, Victorians, ranches, split-levels and contemporaries. Mr. Samuels and his companion, Karen Brown, a retired social worker, live in a barn-red wheelchair-accessible modular home on Sparkill Creek that he built for $175,000 when he moved to town 30 years ago.

As David Sanders, president and founder of Sanders Properties in Nyack, puts it, residential real estate in Piermont attracts “a very creative, do-your-own-kind-of-thing buyer.”

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Not on Roosevelt Island — at least, not if they can help it. Residents do just 12 percent of their shopping on the island, according to a survey by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation two-and-a-half years ago.

“I make it my business to shop elsewhere,” said Janet Falk, a public-relations consultant and four-year resident who drives to supermarkets in nearby Queens. “I’ve seen my neighbors at Costco, and they hire a local taxi service to take them home with their items.”

The Queens supermarkets “deliver for free if you spend $50, and that’s not very hard,” added Judith Berdy, the president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. She has lived on the island for 34 years.

The 14,000 residents of Roosevelt Island, the skinny land mass in the East River between Queens and the island of Manhattan, reached by a distinctive red tram, have groused for years about the Main Street retail corridor, bedraggled and unappealing. They were heartened last August when two private developers, the Hudson Companies and the Related Companies, took over management of the strip, with its 100,000 square feet of retail space.

Now, several new shopkeepers have been lined up. New arrivals along Main Street will include a food market called Wholesome Direct and a wine and liquor store called Island Spirits. Also arriving will be a Subway sandwich shop and a Europan Bakery Cafe, with its assortment of pastries, snacks and meals.

The new retail rents in Roosevelt Island are around $40 to $50 a square foot, which is exceedingly low for Manhattan, said David Kramer, a principal of the Hudson Companies.

Residents, developers and retailers are expecting a surge in activity on the island in coming years, with the completion of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the island’s southern tip and the planned Cornell technical campus.

In the last dozen years, the Hudson-Related partnership has built the Riverwalk community of six residential buildings, with three more planned. Riverwalk includes several stores, including a Duane Reade with a large grocery section, a Starbucks, a deli and some restaurants. Those stores have been successful, Mr. Kramer said, belying the myth that “Roosevelt Island just plain wasn’t going to have successful retail.”

“Success begets success, and lack of success reinforces more inactivity,” he added. “If anything, retail should be stronger on Roosevelt Island because you have a captive audience. There is a need that is clearly not being met by what is there now.”

The Main Street retail strip was formerly run by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, or R.I.O.C., the state agency that manages the island. “As a government entity, R.I.O.C. was constrained by the laws that require the R.F.P. process in order to rent any space,” said Leslie Torres, the president of the corporation, referring to a request for proposal.

She added: “You have to publicize the bid, people have a certain amount of time to respond, the bids have to be reviewed, it has to go before a board.. It’s a lot of steps. Democracy takes time. It is not the normal course of how business is run — it is how governments run business. Not everyone opening a small mom-and-pop store wants go through that sort of process, I would assume.”

Some prospective merchants would follow up, she added, and some would not. But with so many vacant storefronts, “clearly things were not going as well as we wanted,” she said. “It wasn’t a vibrant Main Street. I was excited to enter into a partnership with Hudson-Related to manage our commercial space because they have the expertise to do it.”

The retail corridor will be spruced up with new signage, street furniture, lighting and what Mr. Kramer calls “way-finding elements,” including digital kiosks with you-are-here maps.

Several nonretailing tenants also have new leases. The Child School, for students with special needs, will take a second-floor space for its arts center. Gallery Rivaa, an art gallery, had not been paying rent, but now has a three-year lease at a below-market rate. The New York Public Library might expand its Roosevelt Island branch, depending on financing.

An additional eight leases are expected to be signed within the next six months, Mr. Kramer said. These might include ethnic restaurants, a bakery, a pet store, a florist and a shoe-repair shop.

What will not be coming, however, are national chains like McDonald’s or Burger King. “The traffic doesn’t warrant it,” said Hal Shapiro, a managing director of Winick Realty Group, which does retail leasing.

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WHAT: A historic 5-bedroom brick house

HOW MUCH: $875,000

SIZE: 7,215 square feet

PER SQUARE FOOT: $121

SETTING: Compton Heights is an enclave within the Tower Grove section of St. Louis. The neighborhood is characterized by mansions built in the late 19th century. Tower Grove Park is a few minutes’ walk, as is a stretch of Grand Avenue known for its ethnic restaurants, coffee shops and eclectic stores. Downtown St. Louis is a five-minute drive from the house.

INSIDE: This three-story brick house was built in 1894. The formal parlor is off the oak-paneled entryway. The parlor ceiling is bordered by a decorative dentil molding, a geometric style typical of the period. Just beyond this room is a two-story reproduction of the parlor from the New York City mansion of the 19th-century publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who had owned The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The room was once part of a display at the St. Louis Art Museum and was installed here in the 1960s.

In the Pulitzer parlor, which functions as the family room, a beveled glass mirror is set over the fireplace, framed by richly carved wood and faced with maroon-and-white marble.

In the rear of the house is the kitchen, part of a 2007 addition. It has a rosy gray ceramic tile floor, unpainted cherry cabinets and French doors that lead to a patio. Also off the kitchen is an open-air porch that has a ceiling fan for outdoor dining. The doorway from the kitchen into the great room is flanked by rose-colored marble columns that were salvaged from a church. The first floor also includes a dining room, a butler’s pantry, a study and a half bathroom.

A stained-glass window illuminates the oak staircase leading to the second floor. In the upstairs master bedroom, the walls are painted deep purple to offset the white marble fireplace. The bathtub in the master bathroom is bordered by black marble, and a modern stained-glass window is set into the wall. This floor also has a hall bath and two additional bedrooms; one is currently being used as a dressing room. The third floor has two bedrooms, a bathroom and a game room.

OUTDOOR SPACE: A brick patio with decorative urns and flower beds is off the kitchen. The oval swimming pool is equipped with a slide, and there is a two-car garage.

TAXES: $6,975

CONTACT: Ted Wight, Dielmann Sotheby’s International Realty, 314-607-5555;

dielmannsothebysrealty.com

WALDOBORO, ME.

WHAT: A 3-bedroom 18th-century house on 9 waterfront acres

HOW MUCH: $889,900

SIZE: 3,111 square feet

PER SQUARE FOOT: $286

SETTING: The property is on a peninsula called Dutch Neck that was settled by Germans in the 1600s. Grocery stores and the popular Moody’s Diner are 10 minutes away in Waldoboro. The house is 25 minutes from the thriving arts scene in Camden, and the area is also known for its lobsters and pleasure sailing. The property, known as Contentment Cove Farm, is flanked by a nature preserve and a park. Bangor is about an hour away, and Portland an hour and a half.

INSIDE: The traditional Cape Cod-style house is clad in cedar shake shingles. Sections of the house date to the late 18th century, but it has undergone numerous renovations. The foyer opens to a den followed by a living room, a dining room and a family room. The living room has a brick fireplace and unpainted wood- paneled walls. It’s also carpeted, though there is a slate floor near sliding glass doors that resemble multipaned windows. The bedroom on this level is currently used as a library, and has built-in bookshelves and a window seat. The kitchen was expanded in the 1990s. The newer section has linoleum flooring and Formica countertops. The older section has a stone sink, antique cabinetry dating to the 1830s, and a wood stove used for heat. Behind the kitchen is a laundry room and a full bathroom.

Upstairs, the master bedroom has carpeted floors, knotty pine paneling and a sloped ceiling. The room receives ample natural light from a skylight and a dormer window, which has distant views of the inlet off Muscongus Bay. The master bedroom shares a hall bath with one of the guest bedrooms, which has a built-in wardrobe and a door leading to an attic. The bathroom has a claw-foot tub, a separate shower stall and pink linoleum flooring.

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THERE are a couple of ways to get into the White House. The first is to win a presidential election. Difficult. Then there’s the easy way: You simply sign up for the White House tour, a free self-guided ramble through the eight rooms available for public inspection.

Actually, it’s not so easy anymore. In a simpler time, tourists just lined up at the White House and walked in. As demand increased, a booth was set up, in 1976, to dispense tickets on a first-come-first-served basis.

After the 9/11 attacks, the system changed radically. Now, anyone who wants to tour the White House must apply through the office of his or her representative in Congress, which forwards the names to the White House for clearance. And because the tour is a hot ticket, applications most be submitted at least 21 days ahead, and up to six months in advance. Successful applicants receive an e-mail with the date and time of their tour.

Once they get the green light, visitors show up at the appointed time on 15th Street between E and F Streets and join the line to enter through the southeast gate.

Anyone who has flown on an airline in recent years will recognize the familiar territory of identity checks and electronic scans, although here you do get to keep your shoes on. At the head of the line, rangers from the National Park Service check photo IDs against a list of names. Farther along, a Secret Service officer repeats the process. In the meantime, a park ranger hands out historical pamphlets to children. Someone, somewhere, judged the audience (eighth graders and younger) acutely.

“Dad, listen to this,” a boy behind me said after studying the document. “Benjamin Harrison was the first president to install electricity, but he was so afraid of it that he had the electricians turn the lights on and off.”

A barrage of presidential trivia followed. Dad looked stoic. He should have encouraged his son to do some missionary work with a cluster of adults behind us who were heatedly debating one of history’s great unanswered questions: did Grant lead the Union or the Confederate army?

Once they have passed through a scanner in a flimsy-looking prefab building, visitors proceed at their own pace. There are no tour guides. Instead, Secret Service officers stand ready to answer historical questions. More on them anon.

The ground floor, where the tour begins, deflates expectations. The hallway is dim. The rooms are small and little-used. A velvet rope bars entry. This is frustrating.

I would have liked to inspect the books in the library, but I couldn’t make out the titles. The China Room, organized by Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, to showcase plates and glassware used by the presidents, also tantalized. There they were, the presidential dishes, but well beyond visual range. Ditto the objects in the enticingly bright, golden-hued Vermeil Room, devoted to gilded silver accumulated over the years.

But in the hallway, visitors can step right up to a full-length portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton, dressed in a black pantsuit and smiling radiantly.

I suspect that foreign visitors, especially if they think of the White House as the American equivalent of the Elysée Palace, come away with the impression that the nerve center of the world’s mightiest nation is an oddly ramshackle, disorganized project with respect to architecture and interior decoration, and an unaccountably humble interpretation of national glory and grandeur. They are right.

Many of the rooms have been used for a variety of purposes over the years. Presidents and first ladies have embarked upon renovations, additions and makeovers.

The Vermeil Room, to take one of many examples, was once a billiard room.

Teddy Roosevelt demolished the conservatories in 1902 and commissioned a thorough renovation of the White House, to drag the place out of the Victorian age and dismantle the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whom Chester A. Arthur had hired for an 1882 renovation.

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?ngel Franco/The New York Times100 11th Avenue

In this week’s section: In New York City real estate, closings can literally take on the trappings of a blood sport.

A full-floor penthouse at 100 11th Avenue that sold for $19,397,662.50 was the biggest sale of the week, according to city records. The penthouse, which has a 4,500-square-foot terrace, was also the last sponsor unit to sell in the building, which was designed by Jean Nouvel.

Holly Parker, a managing director at Prudential Douglas Elliman who oversaw sales at 100 11th Avenue, on the Hudson River, said the actual sale price for the apartment was $19.75 million. She did not know why city records showed a lower number.

A 4,675-square-foot four-bedroom on the 23rd floor, the apartment had an asking price of $22 million, and it sparked a three-way bidding war. Ms. Parker said interested parties included a Nigerian buyer who offered well above $20 million. But after several weeks of uncertainty, in which the Nigerian repeatedly promised but failed to wire money for a deposit, the developer moved on to the second-highest bidder, who bought the apartment through a limited liability company. Ms. Parker declined to name the buyer, but said he was not foreign, as the other two bidders were.

In addition to generating the highly charged bidding war, the apartment recently received screen time on the Bravo program “Million Dollar Listing New York.” Ms. Parker, who appeared briefly on the show, confided that it was a little more fiction than fact.

In the episode, in which a party was held in the apartment for brokers and clients, Ms. Parker said, she already had contracts out on the apartment. “They just pretended for the show,” she said. “It was all make-believe.”

The building first came to market in 2007, but as with many new developments, sales lagged when the financial crisis hit, and several buyers walked away from hefty deposits when they could not close their deals. In fact, the 23rd-floor penthouse went into contract in 2009, but the buyer backed out and lost a $4.5 million deposit.

The listing describes this apartment as “the jewel in the crown that is Jean Nouvel’s iconic masterpiece.” It has 14-foot-high ceilings, two fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and an enclosed loggia in addition to the roof terrace. With so few high-rise buildings in the area, Ms. Parker said, “you get 360-degree views of Manhattan and the water that are really unbelievably spectacular.”

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

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When the CompStat system used by the New York police was applied to Baltimore’s governance, it changed the way the city ran. What else can it do?

Do recent headlines point to a larger conflict on the horizon?

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The calculator keeps a running tally of the most common expenses of owning and renting. It also takes into account something known as lost opportunity costs — for example, the return you could have earned by investing your money instead of spending it on a down payment. The calculator assumes that the profit you would have made in your investments would be taxed as long-term capital gains and adjusts the bottom line accordingly. The calculator tabulates lost opportunity costs for all parts of the buying and renting scenarios.

Purchase costs are the costs you incur when you go to the closing for the home you are purchasing. This includes the down payment and typical closing costs.

Yearly costs are recurring monthly or yearly expenses. These include mortgage payments, condo fees (or other community living fees), renovation costs, maintenance costs, property taxes and homeowner’s insurance. Property taxes, the interest part of the mortgage payment, and in some cases, a portion of the common charges, are tax deductible. The resulting tax savings is accounted for in each item’s totals. The mortgage payment amount increases each year for the term of the loan because the tax credit shrinks each year as the interest portion of the payments becomes smaller.

Lost opportunity costs are tracked for the initial purchase costs and for the yearly costs. The former will give you an idea of how much you could have made if you had invested the down payment instead of buying your home.

Selling costs are the costs you incur when you go to the closing for the home you are selling. This includes the broker’s commission and other fees, as well as the remaining principal balance that you pay to your mortgage bank. “Proceeds from home sale” is the money that you receive from the person who is buying your home. This amount is equal to the value of the home that year and is shown as a negative number since it is not something that you spend money on, but rather, it is money you receive.

If your cumulative buying total is negative, it actually means you have done very well: you made enough of a profit that it not only covered the cost of your home, but also all of your yearly operating expenses.

Initial costs are the rent security deposit and, if applicable, the broker’s fee.

Yearly costs are the monthly rent and the cost of renter’s insurance.

Lost opportunity costs are calculated each year for both your initial costs and your yearly costs.

Leaving your rental is equal to the rent security deposit, typically returned to a renter at the end of a lease.

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WHAT makes a house a home? The lives lived in it, of course. The relationship between people and their homes, sometimes passionate, sometimes indifferent, confounding or fraught, is the subject of “House & Home,” an exhibition that opened Saturday at the National Building Museum here.

In photographs, films, models, timelines and nearly 200 artifacts (including a pink flamingo lawn ornament, a tortilla press, an early Apple home computer and a vibrator from the 1920s), all spread among six galleries, the show gamely asks some of the big questions: How have government policies shaped who lives where over time? Why do houses look the way they do? How does architecture affect individuals? How does it shape neighborhoods? What do we do at home? What is housework? What is play? And, finally, how do our homes express who we are, as well as who we’d like to be?

“Many of us are familiar with the idea that our houses are reflections of our personality,” said Thomas Mellins, an architectural historian and independent curator, who organized the exhibition with Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, and Sarah Leavitt, a curator at the museum.

“In America,” Mr. Mellins continued, “we are very connected to this idea of individuality. Even if we do inherit a place to live, we are interested in personalizing it and having it express our innermost thoughts, desires, aspirations. What is less obvious or less known to most Americans is the way in which their houses reflect major economic changes, government policy, technological advances and consumer culture.”

First, the setting. The National Building Museum lives in a brick palazzo-style monument that was built after the Civil War to do two things: house the United States Pension Bureau and hold events like inaugural balls. It’s been the home of the museum since 1980, a place to tell stories about the built environment.

This being Washington, it is a monument with a capital M. It is mostly all atrium, a thunderously large interior with gargantuan Corinthian columns, a spectacular party space indeed (or an end-of-the-party space: Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered her concession speech here in 2008). The galleries live on the second floor, up wide and worn brick stairs (a gentle angle that was intended to accommodate Civil War soldiers on crutches). Having been walloped over the head with so much architecture, you have to recalibrate your eye to these more diminutive spaces, which at first feel underwhelming.

The show begins pictorially, with two gallery walls blanketed with images harvested from the American Memory Association, historical societies, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the Flickr universe. If the traditional American house is a single-family unit, these photographs show that, in reality, we are perhaps more likely to be living in public housing, penitentiaries, military barracks, gated communities and, yes, mansions, herded there by government policies both beneficial and devastating. There’s Graceland; a relocation center in California; the bungalows of the Rockaways; slave quarters on a Georgia plantation; a branded house by Martha Stewart for KB Homes; a West Virginia mining company’s housing; and a Lustron house.

Nearby, in the center of this first gallery, dollhouses — a stately, chockablock Victorian and a peppy modern dream house designed by an architect for Woman’s Day magazine in 1976 — are outfitted with the decorating totems of the day (an ermine rug in the former, and ethnic masks and low-slung orange sofas in the latter). They make the point that ideas about style and aspiration, and an appetite for shelter magazines, are planted early in life.

The huge collection of American stuff here — cultural artifacts that are by turns curious, kitschy, useful, soulful or disposable — suggests an eBay or flea-market bender. These specimens are organized thematically rather than chronologically, moving from the outside (a Baltimore painted screen door, a push lawn mower) in, and throughout the rooms of the house.

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When the CompStat system used by the New York police was applied to Baltimore’s governance, it changed the way the city ran. What else can it do?

Do recent headlines point to a larger conflict on the horizon?

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Known as Tempo, the 20-story condominium building was originally scheduled for completion in 2009. It hit the market in September 2008 with a million-dollar sales office that included a $500,000 spinning hologram of the structure, which has 98 units. But unfortunate timing aside, other problems stalled construction, and residents did not start moving in until last August.

The building has one-, two- and three-bedroom units, priced from the high $800,000s to almost $3 million. It is 73 percent sold, with an average price per square foot of $1,275, said Bertrand Buchin, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, which is handling sales.

The glass-and-concrete building, designed by Kutnicki Bernstein Architects of Manhattan, consists of a tower sitting on a base that rises to the 13th floor. Apartments in the tower, which have largely unobstructed views in all directions, have been selling for about $1,500 a square foot, with one three-bedroom condo recently selling for $1,900 a square foot, Mr. Buchin said.

The stunning views came as a pleasant surprise, he added. “We didn’t anticipate the views when we were creating the building, because 23rd and Second Avenue is not necessarily what you’d think of as a view area, and this is only a 20-story building. But we got very lucky.”

A number of events conspired to keep the Tempo on ice. The developer, the Menolly Group, one of Ireland’s largest home builders, started sales on the very day that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Menolly later fired its local development associate, Quantum Partners, and accused a Quantum executive of using Tempo contractors for private work; the dispute landed in court. The Menolly Group, which is based outside Dublin, did not respond to requests for comment.

Tempo was also forced to shut down its sales office for nine months in 2010 because of permit issues with the Buildings Department, said Deanna Raida, a Prudential Douglas Elliman broker also handling Tempo sales. Almost all sales have taken place since the sales office reopened in January 2011, she said.

Menolly had more bad luck at the site of what was to have been a companion development to Tempo, called Crescendo, at 950 Second Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets. Tempo and Crescendo were supposed to have opened at the same time, Mr. Buchin said, but on March 15, 2008, a six-ton crane on a nearby tower site collapsed, killing seven people and sparking an investigation into workplace safety practices. Part of the crane landed in the Crescendo property.

“The crane fell on our site,” Mr. Buchin said. “We couldn’t build for 9, 10 months, and then the economy being what it is, we said, ‘Let’s hold on.’ Finally, we sold the lot.”

Despite the global real estate crisis and a growing economic crisis at home in Ireland, developers “kept a cool head” regarding Tempo and decided to forge ahead. “They had to really believe in the building,” he said.

Many of Tempo’s buyers are neighborhood residents looking for new construction, Ms. Raida said, adding that others are from overseas. Almost all are buying to live in their apartments, rather than for investment purposes. “We have only a handful of investor units that have been rented out,” she said.

Apart from the architect, the team at Tempo is largely European. Kitchens and baths have Italian lacquer cabinetry; kitchens have Sub-Zero and Bosch appliances. A 3,300-square-foot rooftop entertainment area has a long communal dining table and a kitchen. Mr. Buchin said that concept had been borrowed from the popular European-style Pain Quotidien restaurants.

Francis D’Haene, the principal of D’Apostrophe Design, which created a home for one of the founders of Le Pain Quotidien, designed the building’s interiors. Mr. D’Haene’s studio is in Manhattan, though he is from Belgium.

“I wanted to do something that had a sophisticated feel,” he said, “simple but warm, not specifically European — except that I am European, so maybe there’s always some European aesthetic in my designs.” He said he thought the lobby, with its sleek lines and bright red cushioned seating area, particularly captured the youthful and international aesthetic he had envisioned.

Not that many foreign developers have tested the Manhattan market, said Dan Fasulo, a managing director of the research company Real Capital Analytics. Another current project in the city is 400 Fifth Avenue, by Bizzi & Partners Development of Milan.

“Recently, we’re seeing more international capital sources in the New York market,” Mr. Fasulo said, “but projects done by developers based abroad are rarer than you’d think.”

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Here are a few definitions that anyone who wants fluency in New York architecture will find useful.

First, the aforementioned grooves:

FLUTING This is an apt term for shallow vertical channels, usually in a column; where else would you leave your flute? There’s a whole mess of fluting out in Morristown, N.J., where scores of column drums of Westchester marble, salvaged from a demolition site a century ago, lie strewn around like a collapsed project of wooden blocks.

Some of the best fluting in New York is not on a column at all, but the first-floor wall of the estimable 740 Park Avenue. The low, almost flat curves evoke the currents and eddies on the sea bottoms where this limestone was formed.

ORIEL OR BAY? We are speaking of those picturesque bumplike things on a facade, almost always with windows. Sometimes they continue all the way to the ground, sometimes they float in midair.

Here’s the trick: does it rest on its bottom? Then that’s B, for bay. Or, does it stick out from a higher floor on the facade with nothing under it? That’s O for oriel, with zero underneath. There are some great oriels on the 1880s houses on 95th off Park, especially 124 to 128.

One of the highest oriels in New York is on the north side of the Carlyle Hotel, jutting out from Apartment 34A: John F. Kennedy’s breakfast nook.

A particularly striking oriel is one added around 1900 to an old brownstone at 52 East 80th, with copper hammered into intricate shapes. I often imagine what it must be like inside, looking out the French windows from a wide leather seat, where I would take my coffee (light and sweet, please) and read The Times in the morning. And I mean the actual paper.

MANSARD Blame the mansard roof on the 17th-century French designer François Mansart, who gave drama and scale to his architecture by adding a floor with a sloping facade of slate shingles. In New York, it caught on in the mid-1860s, and as early as 1868 The Real Estate Record and Guide complained that mansard fad was pernicious: “the thing becomes so overdone that sheer nausea begets a change.”

Few listened — certainly not Carl Pfeiffer, the architect for the neat little group of mansarded pavilions for what is now Lenox Hill Hospital, at Park and 77th, of the same year.

Seven years later The Record and Guide said there had been no letup: “If the owner is penurious or the architect barren, there is one immediate way to make it known. Let them concoct a mansard.” The mansard has become the lifeline for developers and owners who want to add a floor or two — it offers some nice historical camouflage.

VITRUVIAN WAVE A range of identical wave-tops running along a band named, apparently in the 18th century, after the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. “Doing the wave” is a signature move in classical architecture, particularly English design of the late 18th century.

When William Delano brought his customary ingenuity to bear on his 1925 Brook club at 111 East 54th Street, he gave it a special touch: dolphins jumping from crest to crest. Even better is his polychrome band of waves around the Art Deco Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, with flying fish.

RUSTICATION Do you like your pizza rustica? Then surely you like rustication, blocks of stone cut back at the edges to emphasize their mass. The term is mean to suggest “living in the country” — rustic, crude, undressed stonework. But my favorite is blocks that have been softly cut back with a gentle curve, so they look like giant stone pillows. The Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street has rustication like this.

Perhaps the most intense rustication in New York was visited upon the long-demolished house of William A. Clark, at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street. The Architectural Record observed that the building “had as its prototype rather a log-house than any extant construction of masonry.”

VERMICULATION Worms! Or, more precisely, a pattern carved into stone to imitate the twisting, turning tracks that worms make in soil, almost always found on rustication. The 1910 Carrère & Hastings building on Fifth Avenue for Knoedler & Company had perhaps the finest vermiculation in New York. Now the title falls to the 1904 town house at 647 Fifth Avenue; really, it’s entirely new, recreated in a 1996 restoration.

Just why someone thought that the worm- trail pattern was better than $, @, + and other motifs is difficult to answer.

I see I’ve left out parapet, broken pediment and a dozen others — hang on for another day.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

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It was a rusting railroad yard and some sagging warehouses on the decaying west bank of the Hudson River. The LeFraks started building there in 1986.

Now, Richard LeFrak and his sons — his father died in 2003 at 85 — are embarking on the last phase of what has become known as Newport, a 600-acre neighborhood that already has 8 office buildings, 13 apartment towers, 2 hotels, a marina, schools, a retail mall and parks.

To put Newport in perspective, it has six times as much land as Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan does, and dwarfs the 26-acre development planned for the rail yards on the West Side of Manhattan. Over the past quarter-century, the LeFraks and their partners have invested billions of dollars in Newport. It is not easy to imagine a single real estate family ever building anything so ambitious again in the United States.

“Newport is truly extraordinary,” said Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University. “It’s getting harder and harder to do something this big. But this is the right kind of dense, transit-oriented development.”

On Thursday, the LeFraks and Gov. Chris Christie are to formally open a gently sloping 4.5-acre park at the north end of Newport, near Hoboken Terminal. The first of what will be seven more apartment towers surrounding the park is rising quickly. And there are plans for one or two more office buildings on a pier about a mile away, at the south end of Newport.

“I originally thought it would take 20 years, not 35 or 40,” Mr. LeFrak, 66, said. “It’s changed so dramatically since we started. At this point, the project is successful. What you’re really doing now is ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

With Jersey City only one mile from Lower Manhattan, the Newport development, as well as other office towers on the waterfront, have often been viewed by New York officials as a threat to New York’s hold on the financial services industry. Lured by lower real estate costs and tax breaks, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Cigna and other companies moved parts of their operations to Jersey City.

But it has also become apparent that New York retains its allure, at least for high-powered executives. In 2004, traders at Goldman Sachs revolted against plans to move them to the company’s new $1.3 billion tower in Jersey City. Still, New Jersey continues to offer generous tax incentives to companies willing to cross the Hudson.

For many years, Newport was a series of isolated residential and commercial towers looming over a lot of vacant land. The buildings were unremarkable, and the apartments filled with tenants looking for a cheaper alternative to Manhattan, or a way station before heading to the suburbs.

Today, residents and visitors dodge baby carriages along Newport’s pathways, and at the large playground that is part of the newly built park, which includes a playing field and a sandy beach. In recent years, the LeFraks say they have focused on better architecture and filling in gaps between buildings with schools and shops.

“It was a real estate investment, and now it’s a neighborhood,” said Mr. LeFrak’s son, Harrison, who has worked at the family business since 1997.

The LeFraks have had some missteps. After a jury trial last year, they were ordered to pay millions of dollars in compensation to 16 residents of the Shore Club tower. The tenants, who argued that they had been promised “breathtaking” views of the Hudson, sued after the LeFraks erected a 32-story apartment tower in front of their building.

Like many developers, the LeFraks have often criticized elected officials who, in their view, can impede progress with zoning or environmental regulations. Even so, Newport has enjoyed government support in the form of a $40 million federal grant in 1983 for sewers and streets, a 15-year tax abatement for the shopping mall, and tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks from the state to help lure financial companies from Lower Manhattan to Newport’s office buildings.

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Interview conducted and condensed by

VIVIAN MARINO

Q. You wear two hats. How do you divide up your time between Halstead and Brown Harris?

A. You have to prioritize — you have to decide which jobs you can send somebody in your place and which sites need your immediate attention. It’s usually during the initial stages when really important decisions are being made that can affect the economics or the aesthetic of the job. So if we’re doing final floor plans or trying to finalize what that brand will be, I make it to all of those meetings.

Q. Brokers seem to be more involved in the planning stages of developments.

A. In the beginning of the condo development boom, developers sought out the brokerage community to guide them in the predevelopment phase. I guess the best example of that is Louise Sunshine. When the boom really hit full force, developers thought they could do everything on their own. Then when Lehman fell in 2008, a lot of developments that were not properly conceived failed.

So now that we’re in a new boom of development, both rental and condo, developers are calling us in to talk about who the right demographical buyer is for the neighborhood, the right unit mix and size of the units, amenities.

Q. Can you provide some examples of developments where you left your mark?

A. One example is 148 East 24th Street, which we are just completing sales on. We were able to work with the developer to overcome some of what we saw as some minor but important design flaws, like closet doors that open too far into the room. In one unit in particular there was a big outdoor space and a bedroom that was small. They completely redesigned the unit to make it more desirable.

Another example is 540 West 28th Street, Plus Art. When we saw the original floor plans, we felt that they could be enhanced and we also felt that the building needed to have a little more stature. We worked with them and their architectural team to bring in an interior design team that really made their finishes a little bit more upscale. We went with a wide-plank wood floor. And we worked with them to do little things like getting more bike storage in the buildings and we worked with them on their roof deck.

Q. How are sales going at Plus Art?

A. There are 91 units, and we have six or seven units left.

Q. Are there any prevailing trends in amenities or layouts?

A. When you’re talking about the middle of the market, buyers want amenities that they actually are going to use but won’t add a lot of ongoing monthly expenses. They like to see a gym in the building, even one that functions as a second gym if you can’t get to your full-service gym. Community rooms, parking. Outdoor space is very important and so is storage. At 505 West 47th Street we actually doubled the amount of bike storage.

When you get to the very high-end developments, those buyers want top-of-the line service and amenities, so those buildings will have everything.

Q. How many developments are you representing right now?

A. In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we have about 30 active developments on the market on the Halstead side, and on the Brown Harris Stevens side — we really just started getting going — there are 10. Then in our pipeline we’ve got another 25 or so that will come to market from mid- to late-2012 all the way to 2014.

Q. You mentioned a development boom earlier.

A. I do think we’re starting to see a bit of a development boom — not like in the ’90s and 2000, but it’s the “new economy” boom. Developers, and the banks, are seeing that there is an imbalance between supply and demand. In addition, there’s a lot of private equity money that has been sitting on the sidelines. Billions upon billions of dollars.

So over the next three or so years there will be a significant amount of inventory coming to the market. But it’s less than half of what we saw in the prior 15 years: where we were adding 5,000 to 10,000 units a year citywide, I think now you’re looking at 1,000 to 2,000 a year.

Q. Let’s talk about sales prices.

A. It depends on the neighborhood. If you’re looking at Harlem, prices range from $600 to $800 a square foot, on average, for quality development. If you’re talking south of 96th Street, in the middle range of the marketplace $1,100 to $1,400 a square foot is becoming more the norm. In the high end of the market, anything from $2,500 to, I think we’ll see, $10,000.

There’s an incredible appetite for the high end both locally and internationally. New York City is really a safe haven.

Q. What percent of your buyers are foreigners?

A. A couple of years ago it was a little less than 10 percent. Today it’s probably closer to 20 percent.

Q. Sounds like business is good.

A. Business is good. Last year we closed between 500 and 600 units; this year we will probably close about 400 to 500 units, but only because our inventory had dwindled. In 2013 and 2014, the number of closings are predicted to reach 800 to 1,000 units.

Q. Is it a buyer’s or seller’s market?

A. For the most part, we are back into a seller’s marketplace. That switch happened about the middle of last year. Over all, if you look at Manhattan and Brooklyn, the average price is up about 5 percent from last year. For rentals, over the last 12 months, we have seen rents increase 12 to 20 percent. There is such a small supply; and the city, unlike the rest of the nation, has added jobs.

Q. Do you remember your first deal?

A. I do. My first deal ever was a really hard sell, actually. It was a unit on 140 East 28th Street, a two-bedroom apartment in a beautiful Bing & Bing classic prewar building. Back in 1990 the area was filled with drug addicts and prostitutes. They were asking $696,000 and interest rates were high. They ended up buying for the low 600s, and it’s probably worth two and a half times as much today.

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