Posted Apr 29, 2025, 1:00 AM
|
 |
New Yorker for life
|
|
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 56,636
|
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/business/midtown-development-pfizer-headquarters.html
Apartments for Rent in a Former Office, but You Have to Live in Midtown
The developer behind transforming Pfizer’s former headquarters in Midtown Manhattan into about 1,600 apartments is hoping young people won’t care about the area’s lack of a neighborhood.
By Ellen Rosen
April 28, 2025
Quote:
For many New Yorkers, Midtown Manhattan, with its gleaming skyscrapers and busy transportation hubs, lacks an element of cool and cachet that its more culturally vibrant neighbors have. Hordes of office workers, commuters and tourists typically flood the area, leaving it feeling anything but residential.
What Midtown does have, though, is a glut of underutilized office buildings. Two in particular brought Nathan Berman, chief executive of Metro Loft Management, to the area: the hulking buildings of Pfizer’s former headquarters on East 42nd Street near Grand Central Terminal. Metro Loft, along with David Werner Real Estate, is converting the buildings into about 1,600 rental apartments.
Once completed, the project would be the largest office-to-apartment conversion nationwide, Mr. Berman said. The first tenants are expected to move in at the end of next year.
The developers also recently bought an office building around the corner from the Pfizer site to create roughly 450 residences, 25 percent of which will be affordable housing.
|
Quote:
Mr. Berman has spent over two decades converting office buildings in the financial district, but the Pfizer project is his first in Midtown. He believes that future tenants, whom he calls “active younger professionals,” will forgo more traditional neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Chelsea or the Upper East Side, with their charming cafes and green spaces, for splashy building amenities like a gym, a rooftop pool, lounges, co-working spaces, and a washer and dryer in each apartment.
“No one even needs a grocery store anymore, since everything gets delivered,” Mr. Berman said.
|
Quote:
Buildings that are converted are usually gutted and reimagined. The old Pfizer buildings have floors that are roughly 200 feet deep, and Mr. Berman will have to divide the space to meet light and air regulations, such as the requirement that each apartment has a minimum distance between an operable window and building walls.
Mr. Berman has had experience doing this. Most recently, he did it at 25 Water Street in New York’s financial district, which had a depth almost as large as Pfizer’s old offices. The solution: Create two atriums so that more windows can be added to apartments. The plan is to do the same at the Pfizer buildings.
|
Quote:
As for whether young people will happily move to the bustle of Midtown: If the past is any indication, it’s possible. It happened in both the financial district and Hudson Yards, the mixed-use area on the western edge of Manhattan where Pfizer has relocated. Mr. Berman hopes to replicate the success in Midtown.
He said, “Shaking and transforming buildings in the middle of what is an office area takes an empty office building off the market and brings in residential and that will invigorate an area.”
|
__________________
NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
|
Prev
Linear Mode
