The Upper West Side's Linden 78 has just about everything a new construction condo listing is supposed to have, from a wide-ranging suite of amenities to a prime location -- at, you guessed it, 230 West 78th Street -- to a host of elegant condominiums for sale. What Linden 78 has not enjoyed, though, is luck. Few Manhattan condo listings have been as star-crossed as Linden 78, which saw many residents back out of their contracts during the Manhattan real estate market’s bleakest hours back in 2009, due to construction delays. There was never anything wrong with the building – quite the contrary, in fact, as Linden 78 had appeared poised to become one of the Upper West Side’s most sought-after new construction condominiums. It was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's plenty to do in Midtown Manhattan -- New Yorkers know that, and so do the tourists who throng to the luxury shopping on Fifth Avenue and such tourist mainstays as St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Empire State Building, and everything in between. In short, most Manhattan residents and Manhattan visitors think of Midtown Manhattan in the same way: a nice place to visit, shop, and eat, as well as work or take photos, depending on whether you're arriving from within NYC or without. The proliferation of new construction luxury hotels in midtown Manhattan reflect its status as a tourist hub, but those hotels have a secret. Well, two secrets, if you count the secret hamburger joint inside Le Parker Meridien. But the secret that's more important for those browsing Manhattan condo listings, though, is this -- midtown luxury hotels such as Cassa NYC and The Centria are also home to some stunning new construction condominiums for sale. Hotels with residences for sale are nothing new in Manhattan real estate, but what's most striking about these midtown luxury condos is the way in which they've helped change the face of this neighborhood -- and make a very nice place to visit into an increasingly nice place to live.

It's something of an understatement to write that the Chelsea Hotel is among one of the most famed Bohemian landmarks in Manhattan, given that it has been the epicenter of artistic Chelsea and Boho Manhattan for over a century. The long list of notable musicians, writers, and artists who have frequented the hotel’s 125 rooms -- roughly make up half of what is considered artistic New York, give or take -- have produced a slew of homages, from Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel to countless others with less on-the-nose titles. The Chelsea has been adapted into literature, music, art, and film, but now faces a new and perhaps most difficult adaptation, now that the Chelsea landmark has hit the real estate market. It’s strange, but it's true -- the previous owners have decided to sell the hotel, and haven to so many of the greatest artists ever to call Manhattan home, is now a prized piece of Chelsea property for sale. The on-the-market status of the Chelsea Hotel is noteworthy both because it's not every day that icons hit the market and because of what it means for Chelsea's past, present and future.

It's enough to make a blogger nervous, honestly. It's increasingly obvious that the market for Manhattan luxury condominiums is in a boom phase -- but as the shape, size and volume of the boom in NYC condos continues to become clearer, our job here at the New Construction Manhattan blog becomes more difficult. Wasn't it just a little while ago that we wrote about the big third quarter in the Manhattan condominium market? Yes, . And is this another report crossing our virtual desk, from the august Real Estate Board of New York, indicating that the third quarter spike in NYC apartment sales was even more intense than previously reported? Yes, yes it is. Good news, but... can we get a break over here?

If you browse the Manhattan apartment listings at New Construction Manhattan, you won't find anything under "NoMad." You'll find apartments for sale in Murray Hill and Gramercy Park condos for sale, but nothing on apartments for sale in NoMad. This is not an oversight -- until brokers slapped a name on the area just north of Madison Square Park in what's generally thought of as Murray Hill, NoMad didn't exist. But this is more than the usual Fun With Contractions NYC real estate name game -- the stretch of Murray Hill that we'll now (somewhat grudgingly) call NoMad is indeed on the rise, whatever one chooses to call it. (Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but we ) With a feature in the Wall Street Journal touting the new semi-neighborhood's transition into a full-on neighborhood, though, NoMad has gotten its imprimatur as a Manhattan neighborhood to watch. Which is to say that you'd better get used to that name, like it or not.

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 . 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.

It's not a secret, but we don't make a big deal of it -- new Manhattan condo listings go up onto New Construction Manhattan every couple of days, every week. You'll find them if you're doing a search for apartment listings in a particular Manhattan neighborhood, but you generally won't find them here at the New Construction Manhattan blog. We're about covering Manhattan Condominiums, at least notionally, as opposed to specific Manhattan condominiums. (Although you don't have to go far to find information on NYC condos, obviously) So why are we making an exception for Liberty Luxe and Liberty Green, a pair of new condo listings in Battery Park City? Because this pair of new green condominiums are that exceptional. Liberty Luxe and Liberty Green aren't the first green condo listings to call Battery Park City home. Both in terms of the sprawling lawns and parks that define Battery Park City's aesthetic and the super-green condominiums already in the neighborhood, Battery Park City is one of Manhattan's greenest neighborhoods.

So much of what we do here at the New Construction Manhattan blog feels like fortune-telling -- looking at this trend or that, this swatch of data or another, and guessing at how it will all play out in the months ahead. Of course, that's Manhattan real estate in a nutshell, and true of real estate in general. But when , it was tough not to speculate and imagine a future of soaring prices, disappearing price chops, and other nasty things. Which makes it that much more surprising -- and a little bit humbling -- that S&P/Case Schiller's just-released NYC apartment sales stats for the second quarter revealed that Manhattan condo prices were, yes, totally flat year-over-year. Who knew? (Answer: not us)