Ian Schrager joins forces with chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten for new Edition Hotel

Two of the best-known names in their respective fields — hotelier Ian Schrager and chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten — have teamed up for the Edition Hotel in Miami Beach, they told The Miami Herald Friday.

The partnership had not previously been officially announced, but the two were set to host a cocktail party Friday night at the site of the old Seville Beach hotel, 2901 Collins Ave.

On Friday at the sales pavilion for the Residences at the Miami Beach Edition, the duo chatted nonstop as they examined an elaborate model of the hotel and grounds.

“We just have a good time together,” Vongerichten said. “He’s excited, I’m excited.”

Vongerichten pointed out a lower-level area on the model building that he described as a grab-and-go food court with a deli, bakery, hot kitchen and raw bar. Schrager referred to it as an “updated Wolfie’s,” referring to the deli eight blocks south on Collins Avenue that closed in 2002.

“It’s not just for the people at the hotel, it’s for everybody,” said Schrager, whose launch of the Delano in 1995 helped bring new life to South Beach.

Plans at the Edition also call for a beach eatery and upscale-but-modern restaurant that Vongerichten said would be “chic and glamorous” and focused on local ingredients. He referred to that restaurant as the Matador Room, a nod to the hotel’s previous life.

Vongerichten said Schrager approached him about the project nearly six months ago; they have worked together since he opened the Pump Room restaurant at Schrager’s Public Chicago in late 2011.

Vongerichten is also behind the lauded J&G Grill at the St. Regis Bal Harbour, which opened in January 2012, but the Edition will be his first foray into Miami Beach.

“You always have to wait for the right project,” Vongerichten said.

A partnership between Schrager and Marriott International, the Edition brand includes one hotel in Istanbul. A site in London is set to debut in August, followed by Miami Beach in early 2014, possibly late in the first quarter. Other locations in New York and Bangkok are scheduled to come online in 2015.

Already years in the making, the Miami Beach project has been closely watched since Marriott bought the property in July 2010. Now, construction at the massive site is well underway, with cranes towering over the gutted existing buildings and a new tower. The finished product will include a hotel with about 250 rooms as well as 26 residences, nearly half of which are already sold. The property also features an ice skating rink, a bowling alley and historic outdoor details including a sundial and diving board.

“It’s a little bit like a bamboo shoot that sits there for 100 years, then all of a sudden it shoots up 50 feet in weeks,” Schrager said. “It’s coming to life.”

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Shots fired as Hialeah police attempt to stop a stolen vehicle, perimeter set up in search of suspects

A perimeter has been set up in Hialeah as police search for car thieves after shots were fired in an attempt to stop the vehicle.

According to Hialeah police Sergeant Eddie Rodriguez, shots were fired as police approached a stolen blue mini-van in an attempt to make a stop. The occupants then fled and crashed into an occupied vehicle around the corner at East 6th Avenue. and East 27th Street. before abandoning the van.

A perimeter has been set up from East Seventh Avenue. to East Fourth Avenue and from East 21st Street. to East 27th Street. as police search for the thieves.

Police have recovered a firearm from inside the stolen mini-van.

It is still unclear who fired the shots.

This story will be updated as more details become available.

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2013 Oscars Preview

Security is airtight at the Dolby Theater in the days leading up to Oscar Sunday, but ET has your ticket inside the heavily guarded streets of Hollywood as the Academy preps for the big day!

Our Brooke Anderson even snagged a moment aside with host Seth MacFarlane where the funnyman revealed that nine-time emcee Billy Crystal was kind enough to give the newbie a few pointers. Despite the pep talk, MacFarlane fears Crystal's words won't be enough.

Pics: The 15 Best Oscar Dresses of All Time

"He gave me a lot of really, really useful pointers that will still not save me," the host said with a chuckle.

Not only will ET be front and center for all the red carpet action come Sunday, we are the only entertainment television crew allowed inside the prestigious Vanity Fair after party!

Related: 'Les Mis' Director Addresses Oscar Musical Number

Stay tuned to ETonline for complete Oscar night coverage when the 85th Annual Academy Awards hosted by Seth MacFarlane airs live on Oscar Sunday, February 24, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center.

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Pickup truck horror in Brooklyn: pedestrian crushed on cookie run

 

William C Lopez/New York Post

Scene of the deadly accident in Brooklyn tonight.

A Brooklyn woman was crushed to death by an out-of-control pickup tonight just seconds after she left a Brooklyn Heights cafe with a bag of cookies, cops and witnesses said.

Martha Atwater, 48, had just paid for five horseshoe-shaped cookies and exited Bagel Cafe when the driver of a black Honda Ridgeline jumped the curb and pinned her against the Clinton Street building at about 5:40 p.m., cops said.

“She just came in to buy cookies. She looked happy, she was smiling,” said cafe manager Alauddin Shipun.

“She walked out. I heard a big bang and she was gone. Someone was trying to lift her head up and asking her, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?”

The 53-year-old driver may have lost consciousness because of his diabetes, a police source said.

He remained at the scene and has not been charged.

Atwater was pronounced dead at Long Island College Hospital.Her husband identified her there, a police source said.

Atwater graduated from Princeton University, had been an executive at education company Scholastic, and was on the board of the Brooklyn Heights Association.

“She was very active in the community,” said a neighbor near Atwater’s Remsen Street home.

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National Hotel nears end of long renovation

A panel of frosted glass puts everything in perspective for Delphine Dray as she oversees a years-long, multi-million dollar renovation project at the National Hotel on Miami Beach.

“Chez Claude and Simone,” says the piece of glass stationed between the lobby and restaurant, a reference to Dray’s parents, who bought the hotel in 2007.

“Every time I am exhausted and I pass that glass, I remember why,” said Delphine Dray, who joined her father — a billionaire hotel developer and well-known art collector in France — to restore the hotel after the purchase.

After working with him for years, she is finishing the project alone. Claude Dray, 76, was killed in his Paris home in October of 2011, a shooting that remains under investigation.

In a recent interview and tour of the hotel’s renovations, which are nearly finished, Dray did not discuss her father’s death, which drew extensive media coverage in Europe. But she spoke about the evolution of the father-daughter working relationship, the family’s Art Deco obsession and the inspiration for the hotel’s new old-fashioned touches.

The National is hosting a cocktail party Friday night to give attendees a peek at the progress.

Dray grew up in a home surrounded by Art Deco detail; her parents constantly brought home finds from the flea market. By 2006, they had amassed a fortune in art and furniture, which they sold for $75 million at a Paris auction in 2006.

That sale funded the purchase of the National Hotel at 1677 Collins Ave., which the Drays discovered during a visit to Miami Beach.

After having lunch at the Delano next door, Dray said, “My dad came inside the hotel and fell in love.” The owner was not interested in selling, but Claude Dray persisted, closing the deal in early 2007. Her family also owns the Hôtel de Paris in Saint-Tropez, which reopened Thursday after a complete overhaul overseen by Dray’s mother and older sister.

Delphine Dray said she thought it would be exciting to work on the 1939 hotel with her father, so she moved with her family to South Florida. She quickly discovered challenges, including stringent historic preservation rules and frequent disagreements with her father.

“We did not have at all the same vision,” she said.

For example, she said: “I was preparing mojitos for the Winter Music Conference.” Her father, on the other hand, famously once unplugged a speaker during a party at the hotel because the loud music was disturbing his work.

“We were fighting because that is the way it is supposed to be,” she said. “Now, I understand that he was totally right.”

She described a vision, now her own, of a classic, cozy property that brings guests back to the 1940s.

Joined by her 10-year-old twin girls, Pearl and Swan, and 13-year-old son Chad, Dray pointed out a new telephone meant to look antique mounted on the wall near the elevators on a guest floor. She showed off the entertainment units she designed to resemble furniture that her parents collected. And she highlighted Art Deco flourishes around doorknobs and handles.

“It’s very important for us to have the details,” she said.

With those priorities in mind, she is overseeing the final phase of the renovation, an investment that general manager Jacques Roy said will top $10 million. In addition to the small details, the renovation includes heavier, less obvious work: new drywall in guest rooms, for example, and new windows to replace leaky ones.

Painting of the building’s exterior should be finished in the next two to three weeks, Roy said. Dray compared its earlier unfinished state to resembling “a horror movie — the family Addams.”

And the final couple of guest room floors, as well as the restoration of the original Martini Room, should be done by the end of April.

“At the end, I will be very proud,” Dray said.

The National’s renovation wraps up as nearby properties such as the SLS Hotel South Beach and Gale South Beach & Regent Hotel have been given new life. Jeff Lehman, general manager of The Betsy Hotel and chair of the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority, said the National has always been true to its roots. He managed the hotel for 10 years, including for a few months after Dray bought the property.

“I think historic preservation and the restoration of the hotels as they were built 70, 80 years ago is such a huge piece of our DNA,” he said. “It’s a lot of what sets us apart from any other destination on the planet.”

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Gas leak in Lauderdale-by-the Sea causes evacuation near A1A

More than 25 residents along a section of A1A have been evacuated due to a propane natural gas tank leak in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

A town spokesman said the leak is from an old, abandoned underground tank that began leaking Thursday, sending a smell of gas into the Palm Bay Club development at 5555 N. Ocean Blvd.

“The abandoned tank was supposed to have been emptied, but it wasn’t, now it’s rusted and it’s leaking,” said spokesman Steve d’Oliveira.

It’s unknown how long it will take for the repair to be completed and residents near the tank allowed to return home.

Traffic along that stretch of A1A is being rerouted to Federal Highway.

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2013 Oscar Preps

The Academy Awards are just three days away, and we're behind the scenes with celebrity Chef Wolfgang Puck and other taste makers to see just how the pros are preparing for Hollywood's biggest night, from the delicious food to the Green Room "oasis," décor and more. Roll out the Oscar red carpet!

Pics: 2013 Oscar Presenters

CLICK HERE to see this year's Official Governors Ball Menu.

In addition to Sunday's Oscar preps, lots of people are talking about their Oscar faves on social media. According to Facebook, mentions of "Oscars" are more than three times higher than last year. Could that be because Seth MacFarlane is hosting this year, appealing to a younger demographic? Or perhaps the Best Picture nominees category is more interesting this year, as Facebook says that talk related to those movies is 20 times higher than last year.

In terms of fan base, Les Misérables is tops with 1.2 million "likes," while Django Unchained has 723 thousand likes and Life of Pi places third with 531 thousand likes. When it comes to general chatter, however, Django is getting the most mentions on Facebook even though Les Mis is the most-liked, and Argo and Lincoln are also much talked-about Oscar movies.

Video: Tops & Flops: The Best & Worst of the Oscars

Stay tuned to ET for complete coverage of the 85th Annual Academy Awards, held this Sunday, February 24 in Hollywood, live on ABC.

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Schools Fix Is In

Bob McManus

So now it’s up to state Education Commissioner John King and his band of Albany bureaucrats to chum up an effective New York City teacher-evaluation system?

With all due respect to the commissioner: Not bloody likely.

And Gov. Cuomo, the architect of this latest scheme to coerce the United Federation of Teachers into doing something fundamentally contrary to its best interests, certainly knows it.

Sure, he says his plan will guarantee meaningful evaluations into “perpetuity.”

He says he means for King to develop and impose an evaluation regimen on the city and the UFT if no agreement is reached by June 1.

AP

Surprise: The real power in state education is Speaker Sheldon Silver, not Gov. Cuomo.

Mind you, the need for meaningful evaluations is obvious.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Department of Education has been hamstrung by its inability to fire incompetent, lazy or otherwise unfit teachers ever since he took control of the schools a decade ago.

And the governor himself has been promising a system for eliminating bad teachers since he declared himself to be a “lobbyist” for public-school pupils more than a year ago.

So, taken at face value, the governor has handed King a real challenge. Which is interesting, because he lacks the authority — constitutional or otherwise — to tell King what time to come to work in the morning.

Thus two questions:

* Is Cuomo sincerely attempting to redeem his pledge to look out for the kids?

* Or is this latest initiative just a thinly disguised surrender to the UFT?

It certainly takes a massive leap of faith to assume that anything meaningful will emerge from the legislation Cuomo has proposed.

This, again, is because Commissioner King doesn’t work for Cuomo. He works for the state Board of Regents and, specifically, for Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch.

And Tisch owes her position solely to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — plus to the state Constitution, which severely restricts the direct control governors have over education policy.

The Constitution requires that regents, and the chancellor, be elected by the entire Legislature — sitting as a single body. And since Silver’s Democratic conference outnumbers all other lawmakers combined, he has the whip hand.

Which he exercised with his elevation of Tisch to what is nominally one of the most powerful public-education jobs in America. But while puppet may be too strong a word to describe Tisch’s actual role, she’s not remotely likely to buck him on matters of this magnitude.

So what is Silver’s interest?

Well, let’s just say that the influence the public employee unions enjoy over the speaker and his Assembly Democrats is profound. And that none of those unions are more influential than the UFT and its parent organization, New York State United Teachers.

So it’s not hard to see where all this is heading.

Without reference to King’s good faith, Tisch’s independence or Cuomo’s sincerity, it remains that that the state Education Department itself has been in near-total thrall to Silver and the teachers for years — indeed, decades.

Thus it’s simply not reasonable to expect that the three could force the department to exercise real independence on teacher evaluations, even if they wanted to.

Not in the immediate case, and certainly not over time.

So much for Cuomo’s “perpetuity.”

So much, in fact, for the notion that there is anything fundamentally different in this approach than from what has come before.

The UFT has had an effective veto over meaningful evaluations all along. While it may allow Silver to engineer a fig-leaf accommodation this time around — the union, after all, stands to regain effective control of city schools once Bloomberg leaves office — there’s no reason to believe that significant numbers of bad teachers will wind up losing their jobs.

Ever.

rmcmanus8@gmail.com

Have a comment on this PostOpinion column? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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Caribbean cell phone company asks South Florida relatives to buy minutes for family back home

An Irish billionaire’s telecommunications company, which has revolutionized cell phone usage in some of the world’s poorest countries, is bringing it’s latest marketing pitch to South Florida.

Digicel is tapping into South Florida’s close ties to Haiti and Jamaica in a campaign that asks families stateside to send minutes home.

Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien has staked a claim in the telecommunication industry by building his cell phone company in developing countries in the Caribbean and South America The South Florida Digicel campaign includes bus bench ads, billboards and television spots. The message is simple: “Send minutes home.”

Customers stateside can pay to send airtime minutes to family and friends’ pre-paid cell phones in the Caribbean. The concept is not new, but Digicel is seeking to broaden it’s reach.

It is a nod to South Florida’s ties to the Caribbean and the financial influence of the region’s diaspora. Families in Haiti and Jamaica rely heavily on remittances from abroad.

Haiti received $2.1 billion in remittances in 2011, which represents more than one quarter of the national income, according to the Inter-American Development Bank . In 2011, Jamaica received nearly $2 billion in remittances.

“We understand the value of the diaspora,” said Valerie Estimé, CEO of Digicel’s diaspora division. “They are our lifeline.”

Typically the company relies on ethnic media outlets like radio programs and niche publications for advertising, but there was a gap in reaching second- and third- generation Caribbean Americans, who are more plugged in to mainstream media, said Andreina Gonzalez, head of marketing in Digicel’s diaspora division.

“There was an opportunity to step up and go a little further,” Gonzalez said.

The campaign comes at a time when the company is facing some public relations backlash in Haiti and Jamaica. Customers from both islands have taken to social media to decry shoddy connections and poor customer service.

In Haiti, the problems were so acute that Digicel released an apology letter to its customers in December. When the company tried to integrate Voilà, a competitor Digicel acquired, into its network, the integration caused system failures.

“Quite simply, we did not deliver what we promised and we did not communicate effectively with customers through the problem times,” Damian Blackburn, Digicel’s Haiti CEO wrote in the apology.. “We apologize for letting our customers down and want to thank them for their patience and understanding.”

In South Florida, the marketing pitch is family-centered and draws on the diaspora’s need to stay connected. Digicel representatives say airtime minutes are as valuable as the cash remittances families send to the Caribbean.

The advertising features members of a culturally ambiguous animated family smiling and talking on cell phones.

The ads that appear in Little Haiti, North Miami and North Miami Beach are largely targeting the Haitian community. In South Broward, the focus shifts to the Jamaican population.

A similar campaign has also been launched in New York.

Prices range for $7 to $60 to add minutes to a relative’s Digicel account. Transactions can be made online or at participating stores in South Florida.

“You’re able to make a very big difference with a very small amount of your disposable income,” said Estimé. “We know how important it is to be able to get in touch with a mother, a sister or a brother.”

The company recognizes that some of its older customer base prefer the retail model, while younger and more savvy consumers would rather send pay for minutes directly from their computers or cell phones.

“It was really impressive to see Digicel online,” said Geralda Pierre, a Miami Gardens resident who sends minute to Haiti. “It’s so convenient to add minutes for my dad in Haiti who is sick. It makes it easier for me to get in touch with him.”

For now, Digicel says it will continue to mix the old and new. The Creole-language advertisements on Haitian radio and Island TV, a Creole language cable network, are here to stay.

“We are bringing first world convenience in some cases to third world countries,” Estimé said. “Digicel has in a way improved the lives of our loved ones back home.”

Follow @nadegegreen on Twitter

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Police: Multiple people shot in Miami

Multiple people were shot Wednesday night in Miami near Southwest 24th Street and 26th Avenue, according to Miami police.

The victims were taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Police could not confirm how many people were shot or the extent of the injuries.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.

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