New York: Projects & Construction

IT'S A FULL HOUSE AT 15 CPW - New York Post
IT'S A FULL HOUSE AT 15 CPW


DANIEL BOULUD

Wins in the deal.

AFTER more than three years of rugged negotiations, 15 Central Park West - the most storied new apartment building in generations - has found takers for virtually all its coveted retail space.

Trendy urban furniture seller West Elm and Chase Bank have signed leases for a total 36,000 square feet on two levels along the Broadway blockfront between West 61st and 62nd streets. They join Best Buy, which opened last year at the north end of the block.

The two deals leave a mere 2,000 of 15 CPW's 87,000 square feet of store space yet to be spoken for at an address where condo sales have been the stuff of legend.

The tower, developed by a William Zeckendorf Jr.-led partnership, rose on the site of the old Mayflower hotel and a lot that had been vacant for years. It quickly became a symbol of resurgent, post-9/11 Manhattan.

The first apartment sold in September 2005, and the rest were taken by June 2007 after $2 billion in sales. Buyers include Sandy Weill, Denzel Washington, Sting and wife Trudie Styler and Bob Costas.

A penthouse purchased by venture capitalist Lindsay Rosenwald for $30 million recently went on the market for a reported $90 million - which, at $16,000 a square foot, would be the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan condo on that basis.

Besides making the limestone tower seem complete, the new retail deals will also have an effect two blocks north.

The new Chase bank branch at 15 CPW will replace one at Broadway and West 64th Street, paving the way for restaurateur Daniel Boulud to take over a space he's wanted for years and allow him to expand his thriving Bar Boulud next door.

Cushman & Wakefield's Gene Spiegel man repped the landlord in the 15 CPW leases.

"After 3½ years, we achieved our strategy and rented our spaces to three retailers best in their class," Spiegelman said.

"Best Buy is tops in consumer electronics, West Elm is Williams-Sonoma's most trend-setting division, and Chase is the leader in financial services."

All parties involved credited Spiegelman with a Herculean feat in pulling together leases complicated by the fact that each depended on the other to make the space requirements work for both tenants as well as for the landlord.

The asking rent on all the retail space at 15 CPW was $400 a square foot on the ground and $125 a square foot on the second floor.

West Elm took 3,000 square feet at sidewalk level and 22,000 square feet upstairs. The retailer was repped by Mark Finkelstein of Retail Strategies.

Chase, which will occupy the south corner on Broadway, landed 8,000 square feet at sidewalk level and 3,000 square feet on the second floor. The bank was repped by Cory Zelnik, a principal of Zelnik & Co.

Boulud, who was in Vancouver, BC, yesterday, said he hadn't received confirmation of the next-door space availability from his landlord, Philip Milstein-owned Ogden Cap Properties.

Boulud actually signed a lease for what's still Chase's space several years ago, but the bank exercised an option to stay.

He said yester day he'll expand Bar Boulud into the bank's rearportion on the 64th Street side, but not the corner, which will probably be leased to a store or another bank.

"We'll be able to expand Bar Boulud with a larger drinking bar and another kitchen. It will give us a little breathing room without affecting the ambience of Bar Boulud."

steve.cuozzo@nypost.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/nyregion/12mlb.html
Developer Cuts Back on Plans for Tower to House Baseball’s Cable Network

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: July 12, 2008

A 21-story office building planned in East Harlem for Major League Baseball is shrinking.

The tower’s developer, Vornado Realty Trust, had planned to begin construction in April on what would be the home for professional baseball’s newly created cable network, which is scheduled to make its debut in January with 50 million subscribers.

But, according to real estate executives and city officials, Vornado’s inability to finance the $435 million project, known as Harlem Park, has delayed construction and is doing what critics who had complained about the tower’s size could not: reduce its height by about a third. That is in part because the developer seems to have had problems signing up other tenants for the building.

Vornado is now considering a revised plan for a 14-story building at 125th Street and Park Avenue and renegotiating its lease with Major League Baseball, the executives and officials said.

The developer did not return calls requesting comment, and officials at Major League Baseball said they were too busy organizing the festivities surrounding the All-Star Game to be held on Tuesday at Yankee Stadium to look at the newly proposed lease.

It is the latest example of the difficulty developers have had in trying to borrow money for projects amid the national debt crisis, even projects that only a few months ago seemed to be on the fast track. After completing the excavation for his Beekman Tower project downtown, the developer Bruce Ratner had to stop work for three months while his company went from bank to bank putting together the construction financing.

Still, the Bloomberg administration and the developer are intent on trying to move the baseball project forward. To that end, Vornado and Major League Baseball intend to use a raft of tax breaks, as well as tax-exempt financing.

“Notwithstanding a very complicated financing environment, the private sector continues to push forward with major economic development projects in Harlem and across the city,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. “We think this project will serve as an important symbol of the rebirth of the commercial market along 125th Street.”

Nevertheless, some critics of the project were amused by the turnabout.

“It’s like chickens coming home to roost,” said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright of Harlem. “What the political forces couldn’t do, economic reality has forced upon them. Nobody wanted towering office buildings on 125th Street. We wanted it to reflect Harlem architecture.”

Vornado’s Major League Baseball project surfaced with a great deal of fanfare in January at the same time that the city was rezoning 125th Street, Harlem’s main shopping boulevard. The 21-story tower would have been the tallest in the neighborhood and the first major office building in Harlem since 1973, when the 19-story Harlem State Office Building opened.

Vornado, one of the city’s largest commercial landlords, replaced another developer who, at a press conference three years earlier, announced with then Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that he was building an even taller hotel on the site, a parking lot.

Vornado hired Swanke Hayden Connell Architects to design a glamorous-looking tower of stacked glass cubes. Instead of government offices, Major League Baseball’s new cable network planned to take about one-fifth — 132,000 square feet — of the space, including studios on the second and third floors and executives’ offices on the top two floors. The network is temporarily situated in New Jersey.

In January, Vornado said that Inner City Broadcasting, which owns the radio station WBLS, was close to signing a lease and moving to 125th Street from Midtown. Later, retail brokers said that Macy’s was interested.

But some residents and elected officials said that the building was too tall for the area and that commercial gentrification was forcing many small businesses that had suffered through the hard times on 125th Street to leave. Under the rezoning, Vornado would have had to build a shorter building.

Vornado and Major League Baseball lobbied for an exception, and in April, the Bloomberg administration was able to get a zoning compromise with the City Council that allowed for the 21-story tower.

The city also provided Vornado with up to $17 million in mortgage-recording and sales tax breaks for the project and an additional $5 million in sales tax exemptions for Major League Baseball’s network, for creating 250 new jobs. Although the site is close to public transportation, the city and Vornado argued that it, unlike other stretches of 125th Street, was hardscrabble and difficult to develop.

Despite asking for subsidies, baseball officials said they expected that the start-up of their cable network would be the most successful in television history.

Vornado planned to invest $127.5 million, about 30 percent of the project’s cost, and borrow the rest, according to project documents submitted to the city.

But the rents for office space have softened in recent months, and lenders have grown increasingly wary of providing financing for real estate projects because of the mortgage crisis. Real estate executives said that banks are now demanding that developers provide equity equal to 35 percent or more of the project cost, up from 20 percent or less two years ago.

And the “imminent lease” with Inner City Broadcasting has not materialized.

As a result, Vornado is now talking about a smaller building, perhaps 350,000 square feet instead of 600,000.

The city’s tax breaks would decline with a smaller building. But Vornado has applied to the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation for a $25 million loan and for tax-exempt financing, which the developer, not the city, is obligated to repay. The project would also qualify for a property tax abatement and income tax credits from both the city and the federal government.

“It’s a project we want to see happen after so many false starts on that site,” said Kenneth J. Knuckles, president of the empowerment zone. “We think an office building will work.”

But critics have always questioned the level of subsidies for the project and the difficulty in determining the full extent of public assistance for Vornado and Major League Baseball. “It seemed like they were getting extra-special treatment,” said Bettina Damiani, director of an advocacy group, Good Jobs New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/ny...ospital&st=cse
Actors Speak Against Plan to Redevelop St. Vincent’s

By GLENN COLLINS
Published: July 16, 2008

Since April, dozens of speakers have stepped before the open microphones of the Landmarks Preservation Commission during hearings to praise the quality of health care at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan. But on Tuesday, two celebrity neighbors did not have kudos in mind.

The actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who live a block from the hospital, took their turn offering comments along with 94 other speakers during a six-hour public hearing. The question before the commissioners was whether the hospital should be able to demolish five buildings in a $1.6 billion proposal to build a medical tower and a high-rise luxury condominium in conjunction with the Rudin Management Company on the land the hospital owns in the Greenwich Village Historic District.

Ms. Sarandon said at the microphone that she went to the hospital only “as a last resort,” adding, “I would not want to bring my children there.” Ms. Sarandon and Mr. Robbins, who are partners, have two teenage sons.

She urged the commissioners “to slow down here and look at what the alternatives are.” In an interview during a break in the hearing, she said that in visits to the emergency room and to patients in the hospital, she had been turned off by “the long lines,” and found the facilities “dirty.”

Meanwhile, outside the hearing, held at the New York University School of Law on Washington Square South, the hospital’s president, Henry J. Amoroso, led a boisterous demonstration of 100 health care workers and hospital employees. That event, held across the street in Washington Square Park, was rare for a landmarks hearing, commission staff members said. Mr. Amoroso led the crowd in a chant of “Let St. Vincent’s build” as many waved black, yellow and white signs saying, “We deserve a world-class hospital.”

Mr. Robbins left the auditorium, observed the rally, then returned and held up one of the signs at the microphone. “Yes, we deserve a world-class hospital,” he said, mocking the sign’s wording. “I live a block from this hospital, and unless it was a life-and-death situation, I wouldn’t go there.” He said that the proposed hospital tower was “an architectural abomination.”

Although a majority of speakers opposed the hospital’s plans, many in the auditorium extolled the care at St. Vincent’s, and the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, said the institution “has a state mandate to serve as the West Side’s primary trauma center.” He added, “Without this service, the health and livelihood of Villagers” would be put at risk.

Bernadette Kingham-Bez, a senior vice president at the hospital, said it would have no comment on Ms. Sarandon’s and Mr. Robbins’s statements. “We are grateful for the support of elected officials and a broad range of community groups,” she said.

The commissioners did not rule on the hospital’s application Tuesday, and more sessions are planned. In the interview, Ms. Sarandon said she would continue to oppose the towers in an effort to preserve her neighborhood. “We value being downtown because of what downtown means,” she said.