Anyone who has ever lived in Manhattan and entertained guests who do not live in Manhattan has been there. You’re on Wall Street, showing your family where the Dutch once built their defenses that gave the street its name. Tourists crowd in, snapping photos of one another and begging you to do the same. You haven’t had caffeine yet today and your head is thumping like a drum. You need to grab some fresh air and recoup because you’ve promised to take your family to a nice place on the Upper East Side for dinner, but you’re out of luck because you’ve got no access to the water unless you walk to the Battery, which is clogged with the same types of tourists who’ve driven you to near-madness in the first place.

Now, we bring you news of freedom: the East River Waterfront opened its first leg on Monday -- that's a rendering above -- and it's exactly what those suffering Financial District fatigue needed. The East River Waterfront as presently constituted is fairly modest: a two-block greenspace running between Maiden Lane and Wall Street, featuring 4,000-foot dog run, benches with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Downtown Brooklyn, and steps leading down to the banks of the East River. As impressive as the East River Waterfront is now, though, it's only the first step in opening the neglected East River waterfront -- and that's good news indeed for those living in or hoping to buy Financial District condominiums.

During the boom years in Manhattan real estate, it seemed like new construction condominiums -- and a host of new Manhattan condominium listings -- hit the market every week, each more spectacularly amenitized, dramatically turned out and eye-poppingly expensive than the last. It was a good time, in short, to be a real estate developer -- with plenty of buyers and a housing market that seemed on an endless upward trend, new construction NYC condos essentially sold themselves.

It's a function of the way that statistics dribble out over the course of months that it wasn't so very long ago that we were writing about how, despite a bump in sales, second-quarter prices on NYC condos were flat year-over-year. It was fairly surprising, given that more sales and a limited supply of Manhattan apartments would indicate -- even to those, like your blogger, whose economic expertise is limited to auction-style fantasy baseball drafts -- that prices should rise. Supply and demand and elasticity and all that. But the last few years in Manhattan real estate have challenged just about every previously held belief most market-watchers have, and there the numbers were, tracking right alongside 2009's. The second quarter numbers, that is. With the arrival of the third quarter stats, it looks like things in the NYC condominium market have straightened themselves out. Which means that, belatedly, prices on Manhattan apartment listings did indeed climb in the last quarter, both over the second quarter and over the third quarter of 2009. Good news for fundamental economic rules, not-as-good news for Manhattan condo buyers, right? As usual, it's a little more complicated than that.

We're a NYC condominium blog here at New Construction Manhattan, which means that we spend much of our time and nearly all of our pixels covering -- wait for it -- NYC condominiums. Which is cool by us, certainly, given that NYC condos are kind of our thing, but also means that we've been glossing over what is one of the biggest stories in NYC real estate, as well as in real estate across the country. Namely, that would be the tumbling rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, which -- unless you're Alex Rodriguez, Mark Zuckerberg or someone who keeps several million dollars in cash on hand -- is what just about everyone who buys a NYC condominium will be signing on for after finding the Manhattan apartment of his or her dreams. Nearly every day brings news of a decline in the rates on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, to the point where it's difficult to keep up. When the Wall Street Journal wrote back in August about the historic lows in mortgage rates, it was a big deal; when those historic lows had dropped nearly another tenth of a point two weeks later, though, it was hardly a surprise.