http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...en-in-40-years
Park Avenue Is About to Get Something It Hasn’t Seen in 40 Years
After decades in deep freeze, New York's sacred avenue is about to get a new skyscraper
by David M Levitt
January 30, 2015
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Sometime next week, a metal frame will go up around the blocky brick tower at Manhattan’s 425 Park Ave., designed to protect pedestrians from falling objects. It’s a prelude to the building’s demise.
In about three years, if all goes according to plan, the site will have a new Norman Foster-designed skyscraper more than twice the height of the existing one. The replacement would be the first new office building in almost four decades on what the developer, David Levinson, called New York’s “grand boulevard of commerce.”
The 893-foot (272-meter) tower will rise amid Manhattan’s biggest rush of skyscraper construction since the 1980s, with millions of square feet of offices in such projects as Hudson Yards on the far west side and the World Trade Center downtown. Levinson is building “on spec,” meaning without any tenants signed up. It’s a gamble on the staying power of today’s accelerating demand for space, and a practice that’s had a checkered history in the city, said Lawrence Longua, a retired real estate professor at New York University.
“Obviously, when you begin one of these large New York office buildings, the market is there when you begin it,” said Longua, now an adjunct at Baruch College’s Newman Real Estate Center. “But the market may not be there when you complete it.”
The new Park Avenue skyscraper, between East 55th and 56th streets, will be narrower than the existing 1950s-era building, and have about the same 670,000 square feet (62,000 square meters) of floor space. The developers are touting it as a 21st century answer to the neighboring Seagram Building, which was hailed as an architectural masterwork upon its 1958 completion.
Plans call for the existing 425 Park, a commonplace stack of white-brick boxes, to be replaced by a 47-story glass tower with three distinct sections. Slanted glass will mark the transitions between the base and the middle, and middle and top sections. The bottom floors will extend over the 45-foot-high lobby, creating offices that will seem to float over Park Avenue.
“Our view in terms of mitigating the risk of building a building on spec is to build the best building we can,” said Levinson, chief executive officer of developer L&L Holding Co. “If the market is weak, if you have the best building, you’ll still get a premium.”
Levinson said he’s looking to fill 425 Park Ave. with hedge funds, money-management firms and family offices. He plans to seek more than $200 a square foot for the uppermost floors, or 10 percent to 15 percent more than the highest current asking rents in the Plaza District. Towers in the submarket, Midtown’s priciest and named for its proximity to the Plaza Hotel, are prized for their views of Central Park.
“This is a very rare occurrence,” Levinson said. “You have a mid-century office building being torn down in Midtown. There’s not going to be another new building on Park Avenue in my lifetime.”
The lack of construction is partly tied to an ordinance governing the area since 1961 that requires developers to build a smaller property if they want to completely replace the current one. L&L is getting around that by making it a redevelopment rather than a new building from scratch. It intends to strip the existing tower down to its steel skeleton and use about 25 percent of the frame for the new skyscraper.
The project was scaled back after the City Council in 2013 scrapped an effort led by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg to allow building of taller towers in east Midtown, where the average office property is 70 years old. The former mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to consider new east Midtown zoning recommendations, which probably will emerge in the next several months from the office of Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer, said Rachaele Raynof, spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning.
Levinson said he shaved 90,000 square feet from the design for 425 Park to comply with current rules.
Also dropped was an early design calling for open space in front of the tower to display public art, similar to the Seagram Building, because required city easements weren’t available, according to Foster.
The site is catty-corner from the condominium tower nearing completion at 432 Park Ave., where a penthouse is under contract for $95 million. That building has become a symbol of the rising dominance of the global elite, about the audience Levinson is trying to lure to his project, Bankoff said.
“So you can just zip-line from your condo to your office,” Bankoff joked. “Maybe have a gondola.”
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