••• “Big changes are coming to the World Financial Center. Brookfield Properties hopes to turn the Battery Park City office complex into a restaurant and retail destination by the middle of 2013, executives said at a Community Board 1 meeting Monday night. Brookfield plans to tear down the building’s Grand Staircase to make way for the floods of commuters expected once the World Trade Center site is complete. The removal of the stairs would expand the palm tree-studded Winter Garden by 30 percent. Brookfield also plans to create a two-level market and 714-seat food court in the retail space just south of the Winter Garden, with cafes and test kitchens by the city’s top restaurateurs [and a market along the lines of Grand Central Market, pictured in the rendering]. David Cheikin, vice president of leasing for Brookfield, said he hopes to revive the Financial Center’s sleepy, underutilized retail by serving local residents in addition to office workers.” (DNAinfo the slideshow has more renderings)

•••The Wall Street Journal Q&Aed Frank Gerhy about Beekman Tower and other stuff: “Since it was a residential tower, I wanted to do something that there aren’t many of in New York, which is have apartments with bay windows. If you walk to a normal facade, you can push your nose against the window and you can see in either direction a little bit. If it’s a bay window, you feel like you’re walking into space. But if you have a bay window at the same place in the floor plan in every floor you get a vertical projection that’s lined up all the way to the top, which would have been a harsh move. I wanted to soften that like a fabric.”

••• Sara Zucker, the blogger behind Farpitzs says Century 21 sold her a counterfeit bag: ‘To discover that the bag was not real was, by far, the most embarrassing and nauseating retail experiences of my life.” (Nice life you have!) (via Racked)

••• Some details on The Dutch, the new restaurant from Locanda Verde’s Andrew Carmellini. FYI: This is probably the last mention of the Dutch, given that it’s in Soho. (Grub Street)

••• Marc Forgione has agreed to a series of recap Q&As with OpenTable about his stint on The NExt Iron Chef: “You couldn’t see this on screen, but we were in a semi-circle around the ingredients. I was the farthest away you could have been from the ingredients and for what I had planned, I knew I needed coconut milk, mint, and cilantro. There was definitely a limited amount of those three things, so getting there first was what was going through my mind. And, the sand slide worked! I got there first. I did get sand in all the herbs, but I had to wash it out, too…so I also made it harder for myself. I did play baseball as a kid, but that had nothing to do with the slide. It was a competitive move; a full-on sprint to the ingredients helped.”

••• Brendan Fraser was photographed somewhere in Tribeca (Chambers and West Broadway) besides outside the Greenwich Hotel. (Starpulse)

••• Curbed ogles a $10.6 million penthouse triplex at the Fairchild.

••• “Tribeca and Soho residents, including the likes of actors John Slattery and James Gandolfini, are mounting one last stand against a $500 million sanitation garage slated to rise on Spring Street.
Downtown residents and business owners filed an appeal Monday arguing that the city has no right to dump three districts’ worth of garbage trucks into one garage at Spring and West Streets.” (DNAinfo)

••• “The mystery of what’s hidden behind the curtain covering the facade of 365 Broadway has been revealed, and it’s basically a bunch of bricks. Gone are the arched windows, scroll work and big cornice that once topped this building that sits just outside the Tribeca East Historic District. Over the past year the (formerly) six-story building was netted and stripped, with a couple of clandestine floors added up top. Now that netting is coming down and what’s found is an expanse of flatness broken up by shallowly set casement windows.” (Curbed)

••• Landlords at Independence Plaza North are appealing the recent ruling in favor of tenants. (Tribeca Trib)