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Latest Addition to the \'Yogurt Capital\': A Bar in SoHo

By THOMAS KAPLAN

Let it be known: New York State is now the Greek yogurt capital of the world - at least as far as the Cuomo administration is concerned.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo dispatched his lieutenant governor, Robert J. Duffy, to pay tribute on Wednesday to the state's booming yogurt industry. The occasion was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Chobani's first retail store, on Prince Street in SoHo, and Mr. Duffy was the ideal emissary: “I am a yogurt person - every morning and every night,” he explained.

As waitresses circulated with platters of yogurt samples, Mr. Duffy praised Chobani for having “put New York State on the map” in the yogurt world. He proceeded to rattle off, from memory, the state's yogurt-related vital signs: 5,300 dairy farms, 611,000 dairy cows, 3.6 million pounds of daily milk deliveries to Chobani's plant in Chenango County.

“That's an awful lot of milk,” Mr. Duffy sa id, adding, “Governor Cuomo is so proud of the fact that New York State has become the yogurt capital.”

Chobani's yogurt bar, which was formerly a Swatch store, opened last week. It offers plain Chobani yogurt starting at $2.75 as well as “yogurt creations” ($3.75) created on-site by “master yogurt makers.” Mr. Duffy was particularly intrigued by the “Blueberry + Power” offering, which includes blueberries, chia seeds, hemp, walnuts and light agave. (He said his usual purchase was a large container of vanilla Chobani yogurt.)

The Cuomo administration has been quite enthusiastic about yogurt. Last year, Mr. Cuomo personally intervened to resolve a dispute between two upstate mayors that was holding up the expansion of a plant for a Greek yogurt company, Fage USA. Mr. Cuomo included Greek yogurt in the Super Bowl bet he made with his counterpart in Massachusetts, and his administration featured Fage in a television commercial that is part of a new a dvertising campaign aimed at attracting new businesses to New York.

Flash Floods Strand Cars in Queens

By ANDY NEWMAN

Torrential rains were flooding highways and stranding cars in Queens on Wednesday afternoon, the Fire Department said.

Three people, one of them a child, were reported to be stuck in a car on the Van Wyck Expressway near Main Street in Briarwood as of about 12:30 p.m., fire officials said. Other trouble spots, fire officials said, included Francis Lewis Boulevard and the Long Island Expressway in Bayside, where several cars were stuck; and the expressway and Utopia Parkway in Fresh Meadows.

On Grand Central Parkway, eastbound lanes near Jewel Avenue in Forest Hills were closed because there were many cars stuck in the water, the scanner-monitoring service Breaking News Network reported; and WCBS-AM (880) reported that the Long Island Expressway was closed in both directions at Francis Lewis Boulevard and that the Van Wyck was closed southbound at Hillside Avenue.

The National Weather Service estimated that more tha n 2 inches of rain had fallen in central Queens, around Kew Gardens and Jamaica, between about 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. A flash flood warning is in effect for Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island until 2 p.m.

The Weather Service encourages drivers who encounter flooded roads to “make the smart choice: turn around, don't drown.”

Plaza Hotel Gets a New Owner

By NEHA THIRANI

The storied Plaza Hotel in New York is the latest buy for Lucknow's Sahara India Pariwar.

The Plaza, whose first guest in 1907 was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, heir to the Vanderbilt industrial empire, has been struggling in recent years after a conversion into condominiums. It took nearly seven years to convert the units, and buyers â€" who spent as much as $50 million on their homes â€" complained about the quality of the renovations.

But on Monday, the hotel owners Elad Properties, a real estate company owned by the Israeli businessman Yitzhak Tshuva, said the Sahara group had agreed to buy a controlling stake in the property for $570 million. Elad has a 60 percent stake in the hotel, and Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holdings owns the rest. Once the deal is completed, Kingdom Holdings' stake will be reduced to 25 percent. The hotel will continue to be managed by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts.

Financial analysts said the hotel should be viewed as more than a “trophy asset.”

“I think it is a well-thought-out business decision,” said Praveen Chakravarty of AnandRathi Financial Services. “Looking at the hospitality market in Europe and the United States and the valuations available, it makes sense for anyone with liquid cash to spare to pick up assets, be patient, do some cross synergies and wait for the market to rejuvenate.”

The Sahara group is cash-rich, he added, and the deal is not expected to harm the company's finances.

This is not the Sahara group's first overseas hotel acquisition. In December  2010, the company purchased the iconic Grosvenor House Hotel in the Mayfair area of London from the Royal Bank of Scotland for $726 million. The company plans to add an Indian restaurant, nightclub, spa and swimming pool to the hotel, which will continue to be managed by Marriott International. The group has also reportedly bid £7 50 million, or $1.18 billion, for a group of Marriot hotels in London being offered by the Royal Bank of Scotland, though it has not confirmed that bid.

“Both the Plaza Hotel in New York and the Grosvenor House Hotel in London are both extremely prestigious properties in very attractive markets,” said Sudeep Jain, executive vice president of Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels. “New York and London are gateway cities of the world and financial capitals, so the group strategy would seem to be acquiring prized assets in prized markets.”

Also in New York, the Sahara group is reportedly about to acquire the Dream Downtown Hotel from the Indian-American hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal. The Sahara group's chairman, Subrata Roy, is reported to have made a formal offer for an 85 percent stake in the hotel, valued at $100 million. The Sahara group is also said to be interested in other high-end iconic hotel properties in New York such as the Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental a nd Waldorf Astoria.

The Sahara group did not make an executive available for comment.

The group is not alone among Indian hotel companies looking to expand their business overseas. Indian hoteliers such as The Oberoi Group and Indian Hotels Company Limited, which operates the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, have had an established international presence for many years, and other Indian companies have rushed into the market recently.

The availability of Indian capital, along with a slowdown in the hotel industry in Europe and the United States, which has caused a drop in property values, has accelerated this, analysts said.

“It has become more prevalent for Indian capital, both hoteliers and investors, to evaluate foreign hotel assets,” Mr. Jain said. “Certain markets could be more attractive than deals available in India at the moment because of the state of the economy and different business cycles.”

In April, Delhi-based Bharat Hote ls, which operates the Lalit brand of hotels, acquired Lambeth College building, a heritage property in London, for an undisclosed amount. The property, which will be reopened in three years, is being developed into a luxury boutique hotel. The group already has a project under development in Koh Samui, Thailand. The Indian Hotels Company acquired the Ritz Carlton in Boston in 2007 and renamed it the Taj Boston. In April this year, the company has also said to have renewed attempts to increase its stake in Orient-Express Hotels, an international hotel chain.

“There seems to be a sudden realisation by Indian entrepreneurs that they can run hotels better than some of their counterparts abroad,” said Mr. Chakravarty. The Nadathur Group, founded by N. S. Raghavan, is buying hotels in Australia and Indonesia, he said, and intends to run them.

“There seems to be something about the hospitality business that so many Indian entrepreneurs feel that they could do a better job at it than their Western counterparts,” he added.

The Sahara India Pariwar, founded in 1978 by the billionaire Subrata Roy, has interests in finance, infrastructure, real estate, media and entertainment, manufacturing and information technology. In 2004, Time magazine famously called the Sahara group India's second largest employer after the railways. The company also owns a 42.5 percent stake in Force India, the Formula One Team, and the Pune Warriors, an Indian premier league cricket team.

“The Sahara group has shown an inclination to be in high-profile, consumer-facing businesses,” Mr. Chakravarty said.

The company also recently announced it would own one of the six franchises of the proposed Hockey India League and is said to be close to purchasing a controlling stake in DigiCable, a cable TV distribution company, to enhance its interests in the Indian television business.

Google Admits Again That It Failed to Delete Private Data

For the second time in less than a week, Google admitted to data privacy authorities that it had retained some of the information despite promising to delete it.

A Subway Platform Pastoral

By TOM DIRIWACHTER

Dear Diary:

On a recent Saturday night, nee, Sunday morning, after a night of waiting tables in Times Square, I descended into the Times Square subway station to find a suspiciously packed platform, and, having just reached the end, heard the dreaded announcement that the 1 train was delayed because of a faulty uptown switch.

Desperate to catch the 1:30 Staten Island Ferry home, I took action and weaved my way back through the crowd, to the N/R line.  Standing on the foreign platform, wiping the sweat from my brow, I checked my watch, again and again, until zero hour had passed, and I knew my fate rested in the hands of a 2:30 boat.

Spirits deflated, consumed with exhaustion, I noticed the dripping tar on the platform surface in front of me: a sunflower!

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

50 Years Ago, Sharply Dressed Protesters Stood Up for a Train Station They Revered

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The architects Peter Samton and Diana Goldstein can tell you exactly where they were a half century ago, at 5 p.m. on Aug. 2, 1962: out on Seventh Avenue, tilting at windmills.

Pennsylvania Station, the McKim, Mead & White masterpiece, was doomed. They knew it. But they weren't going to let it go down undefended. With Norval White, Jordan Gruzen, Elliott Willensky and others, they assembled an impromptu resistance brigade known as Agbany, for Action Group for Better Architecture in New York.

On that 86-degree summer evening 50 years ago, commuters were greeted by the sight of more than 100 buttoned-down and white-gloved protesters marching around the colossal colonnade at the station's entrance.

“Save Penn Station,” their signs said, in nicely formed letters. (Architects. Of course.) “Don't Sell Our City Short.” “Save Our Heritage.” “Action Not Apathy.”

Phili p Johnson was impeccably present, in the company of the peerless Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, who would soon be its president. There was Aline B. Saarinen, the widow of Eero Saarinen, who had been until 1959 an associate art critic at The New York Times. Agbany counted Eleanor Roosevelt, Stewart Alsop, Jane Jacobs and Norman Mailer among its supporters, along with many of the most respected names in architecture and architectural criticism.

Also on the protest line were Ms. Goldstein's friends, ex-husband and a few old boyfriends, whom she had dragooned into picketing duty. “I said to someone, ‘This is like my life passing before my eyes - all these guys walking round and round,'” she recalled in a telephone interview on Tuesday from San Francisco. She was then 30 years old and known as Diana Kirsch.

Mr. Samton, who was 27, recalled being deputized to get Mr. Johnson down to Penn Station that day. “He said, ‘I have a meeting with Mrs. Parkinson; I can't come.' We said, ‘Well, bring her along and you can have your meeting while you parade.'”

“The fact that he came meant that we got publicity,” Mr. Samton said the other day, after spreading out Agbany memorabilia in the comfortably modernist living and working space he created on the parlor floor of an Upper West Side brownstone.

Mr. Samton's Penn Station files bear more than spiritual scars. A number of pages were singed on Sept. 11, 2001, when the offices of his firm, Gruzen Samton, two blocks south of the World Trade Center, were set ablaze by flaming debris. These include a newspaper ad, reproduced below, that heralded the Aug. 2 rally.

More than a year before the protesters assembled, it had been known that the developer Irving Mitchell Felt and the Pennsylvania Railroad had every intention of tearing Penn Station down to street level and replacing it with a new Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue, and a n office tower and hotel tower on Seventh Avenue.

Mr. Samton attributed some of the early inertia among opponents to sheer disbelief. “It was impossible to think that this monumental building was going to be demolished to make way for something that would make more money for the landowners,” he said.

As the threat loomed early in 1962, Ms. Goldstein was invited to attend a luncheon meeting of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter by her boss, Herbert Oppenheimer. Raised in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) and educated in South Africa, Ms. Goldstein had grown up unafraid to speak her mind. She asked at the lunch about the pink granite elephant in the room. She recalled being told that construction unions strongly favored the project and that the chapter considered it a done deal.

As she, Mr. Samton and Mr. Gruzen walked out of the meeting, she said, “Why do we need them? We can just do it ourselves.”

Mr. White, already an impos ing figure in the field, long before he achieved renown with Mr. Willensky as an author of the AIA Guide to New York City, was recruited to head the fledgling Action Group for Better Architecture in New York. The protest won front-page coverage in The Times. A month later, the group met with Mayor Robert F. Wagner.

That turned out to be nothing but a palliative, however. Demolition began on Penn Station a year later and was completed in 1966, by which time the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission - a purely advisory body in 1962 - had been given regulatory muscle.

“I really believe Grand Central Terminal was saved because of what happened at Penn Station,” Mr. Samton said. The experience propelled him into a career of civic service paralleling his architectural practice, including the presidency of the City Club of New York.

Ms. Goldstein, who loves railroads and industrial architecture, spent much of her career designing and planning schools, hous ing developments and building systems. Her last project was a hospice. Now an artist, she said she still regards the demolition as a “moral outrage.”

Then she added, “We knew we wouldn't win, but we did hope to change the climate.”