Matthew Bauer is the president of the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District. Photo by Andrew Schwartz.

By Laura Shin

For Matthew Bauer, president of the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District (BID), creating a sense of community is not only an important responsibility, it’s also his favorite part of the job.
“It’s a lot of fun to meet the retailers, to work with them and get to know them,” Bauer said. “We have an exciting group of people that run our stores who are really committed. It’s a pleasure to come up with new ideas with them and build the community.”
It was that same sense of community that helped Madison Avenue have a strong resurgence after it was challenged by the economic downturn in 2008 and 2009, he said.
Bauer said the recession did affect business conditions in the district but that retailers and the BID banded together to come up with new ideas to keep the street strong.
One example is an event that was started last year called Watch Week. The second annual Watch Week, organized by Madison Avenue BID and the Wall Street Journal, will take place April 28-May 4. The week consists of a series of activities for watch collectors and connoisseurs as 18 watch brands showcase their new models.
The district has made a strong comeback, Bauer said. Fourteen new stores opened there in the last six months of 2011; in March, Bauer said he saw three new stores open in less than a week.
“We’re seeing a lot of new retailers coming here,” he said. “Madison Avenue has an important role in the New York City economy. We have a particular niche in the market and we attract visitors from all over the world.”
Madison Avenue BID provides supplemental security and sanitation services to the area. It also has a capital improvement program and marketing and promotional programming for the various establishments on Madison Avenue.
Bauer, 45, joined the BID in 1999. Previously, he worked with the Lower East Side BID. He’s a native New Yorker from Brooklyn and now lives in Queens with his family.
“He’s a community leader and I think his role has been a pacesetter,” said Barry Schneider, a member of Community Board 8 who nominated Bauer for an OTTY. “He’s forward-thinking, hard-working and dedicated to the interest of the Madison Avenue property owners.”
Bauer is also innovative when it comes to charity events, Schneider said, describing Bauer’s role in organizing Miracle on Madison, an event last December that raised funds for the Children’s Aid Society.
Other charity events organized by the BID include a gallery walk last May that raised funds for public schools and the Madison Avenue Pink Ribbon Project last October that raised money for local breast cancer charities.
Looking ahead, Bauer said his goals include creating new events, particularly in a way that maintains Madison Avenue as a place that attracts visitors from abroad as well as welcomes the residents of the Upper East Side. n

The BID received a $350,000 capital grant, arranged by Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, to cover most of the project’s cost. The BID will cover the balance.

The new fence would replace the present chain-link fence that runs up the west side of Columbus Avenue, between West 76th and 77th streets, and extends halfway up each block to enclose three schools: West Prep Academy (which is being phased in as J.H.S. 44 is phased out), the Computer School and the Anderson School. Designed by Richard Dattner and William Stein, principals of Dattner Architects, the fence will also incorporate live plants that will grow up the façade. The architecture firm is best known in the neighborhood for designing the West 72nd Street subway station and plaza.

“I’m very happy that the grant has been awarded. I’ll be most happy when I see it up,” Rosenthal said. “Now the kids in the schoolyard won’t have to look out like they’re in prison.”

The current fence has been in the BID’s sights since the organization was established in 1999.

“This is something we’ve been looking at from the get-go,” said Barbara Adler, the BID’s executive director. “When we first got started, almost immediately, we decided the fence that was there was an eyesore, and we started looking at ways to replace it.”

The BID has also been raising funds to cover the cost of the project, estimated at $500,000, through its annual New Taste of the Upper West Side food festival, which West Side Spirit has joined as a sponsor. The festival raised $50,000 in start-up funds during its first year, 2008. The fundraiser, spanning two days this year—May 21 and 22—will include three separate events. Tickets are now available at www.NewTasteUWS.com.

REchirp.com works with a similar concept: Interested buyers or renters go to the website, browse the listings and make a bid or a “chirp.” If your chirp is accepted by the owner, you get to start negotiations.

REchirp creators Marc Blum and Andrew Green came up with the idea after years of living in New York and moving from apartment to apartment.

Upper East Sider Marc Blum came up with the website REchirp with partner Andrew Green. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

“It was always a tedious process to find an apartment—dealing with brokers, Craigslist, the New York Times. And we thought there should be an easier process of finding real estate in the city,” said Blum, who has a background in both online and traditional advertising.

The childhood buddies were raised on the Upper East Side and currently live at Normandie Court, on East 95th Street, with their families. Figuring that people bid to get the best rates on insurance, hotel and car prices, the duo guessed that people would probably also be willing to bid to buy or rent an apartment. Combining Blum’s background in advertising with Green’s previous work in technology and consulting, they came up with the idea for the real estate website. After working on the start-up for almost two years, REchirp went live a few months ago. The site, now Green and Blum’s primary endeavor, has four full-time employees and is run out of an Eighth Avenue office.

“The biggest differentiator of www.rechirp.com is that when a user searches for a property, they do not search by price,” Blum said. “The idea behind the site is that when a user sees a property they are interested in, they submit a ‘chirp,’ which is a dollar amount they would be willing to pay for that apartment.”

The creators hope that users can submit chirps anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent below the listed price. This would give the broker an incentive to work with the bidder and start negotiations at the chirp amount.

Unlike Bid on the City, the bids at REchirp are non-binding, and people can make as many bids as they want on different apartments. Thirty days after the property is listed, the site holds an auction—the first of which took place this month—in which buyers have to make a winning bid in half an hour. The bidding increments increase from $50,000 to $250,000 and the site gives the winning bidder 48 hours to make a down payment in escrow. Bid on the City also positions itself more as a high-end marketing firm for properties, rather than an auction house, and it is geared toward foreign buyers.

REchirp, meanwhile, hopes to cater exclusively to New Yorkers.

“I think the true distinction between us and them is that our chirps are not binding,” Blum said. “Moreover, we have thousands of listings that a home seeker can submit a chirp on, while there are never more than just a handful at a time with Bid on the City.”

So far, REchirp has almost 4,000 listings, mostly from Manhattan, and Green and Blum hope to add properties from across the city as the business grows. They are already working with nine brokerage firms.

Real estate brokers, meanwhile, are eyeing the new service with some skepticism.

“If people are putting bids without any financial commitment,” said real estate broker Joel Maskovitz, “they are not locked in. If thousands of people bid for fun, I am not going to pay to download false leads,” he said.

Brokers, he argued, already work to negotiate the best prices for owners.

“It would be bad for me to talk to anyone who is bidding low,” he said.

Michelle Araujo, a broker who works with NYC Vertical, pointed out that for the minimal fee of listing one property on Craigslist, she often gets hundreds of queries, many of which turn into customers or good leads. Without an in-depth knowledge of the city real estate market, she added, most bidders would be shooting in the dark on a site like REchirp.

Blum and Green, meanwhile, agree that their users have to have a certain sophistication to use the website. They say the service has been designed by New Yorkers for New Yorkers, and caters to savvier renters. They declined to specify exactly how many deals have been made through the site so far, but said that REchirp has helped a few home-seekers find an apartment of their liking.

“Our goal is not to replace Craigslist, New York Times or anyone,” Blum said. “Anyone who is online will go to a bunch of sites [while apartment hunting]. We are hoping REchirp is one of them.”

The BID, created in January 2000, is contained within the Central Park West Historic District, and covers Columbus Avenue from West 67th to 82nd streets. In addition to promoting local businesses, the BID provides maintenance, sanitation and security services to the area. It is one of 64 BIDs in the city.

“Columbus Avenue has long had all the ingredients of a thriving corridor: It’s an historic district with great cultural institutions, right next to one of the world’s most famous parks. But for too long, it didn’t live up to its potential,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg during a June 23 celebration at Isabella’s, on Columbus Avenue. “Building strong, attractive neighborhoods is one of the pillars of our administration’s five-borough economic opportunity plan—our strategy for leading the city out of the national recession as quickly as possible.”

Earlier this year, the BID hosted the second annual New Taste of the Upper West Side event, attracting more than 1,700 attendees and raising additional funds for beautification initiatives.