••• Battery Park City’s Embassy Suites will close at the end of the year so it can be turned into a Conrad, Hilton’s high-end brand. (DNAinfo)HotelChatter, meanwhile, says “it sounds like” the Sol Lewitt mural will stay. Listen up, Goldman: Touch the movie theater and I’m coming after you.

••• Best Made‘s Peter Buchanan-Smith gets a mega-profile in today’s New York Times.

••• “Sopranos star Michael Imperioli has put his four-story, 4,720-square-foot Tribeca townhouse on the market for $6.995 million. And calling this residence dramatic might be an understatement. The interior of the cast-iron building, which was built in 1872, has classic goth touches mixed with deep bordello reds—and potential buyers who dig the colors might also want to negotiate for some of Imperioli’s striking furnishings. […] The building, on West Broadway between Thomas and Duane streets, is zoned for mixed use. The ground floor and basement are retail space, while floors two through four are the four-bedroom, three-bathroom Imperioli residence, which offers high ceilings and a sunny roof deck.” (New York Post)

••• “In what some Hudson River Park activists are calling ‘huge’ for the Lower West Side park, Governor David Paterson recently appointed hedge-fund billionaire and Tribeca resident Michael Novogratz to the Hudson River Park Trust’s board of directors. Novogratz, 45, is a bona fide ‘master of the universe,’ as one park advocate said in awe. He was ranked No. 962 on the Forbes 2008 list of the world’s billionaires. His net worth is estimated at $1.5 billion. Forbes notes his fortune is ‘self made.’ […] Novogratz was living in Tribeca right before 9/11, and after that lived in the Meatpacking District at 14th St. and Ninth Ave., above Gaslight bar and lounge. A few years ago, he purchased Robert DeNiro’s former Tribeca apartment, while Mickey Rourke moved into Novogratz’s former place in the Meat Market. His brother, Bob Novogratz, his wife, Cortney, and their seven children live nearby and are the stars of Bravo’s hit reality series 9 By Design, in which the couple turn run-down buildings into luxurious abodes.” (The Villager)

••• “Three months after funds for after-school programs at nearly three-dozen schools—including I.S. 89 in Battery Park City—were dumped from the city’s budget, City Council members voted Tuesday night to restore the programs’ funding.” (Tribeca Trib)

••• Karl Taro Greenfeld wrote something on Commentary that I can’t make heads or tails of.