A Harlem shuffle
Durst taking over 1800 Park: sources
DOUGLAS Durst’s enthusiasm for Harlem knows no bounds as he closes in on a potentially epochal deal to buy Bruce
Eichner’s huge 1800 Park Ave. site for an undisclosed price.
Asked whether he agreed that the pace of change in Harlem is cyclonic, Durst laughed, “I’d have to say, the pace of change is cyclonic.
“It’s amazing how much is going on. I can’t even keep track of all the projects.”
Durst can’t discuss specifics of 1800 Park at East 125th Street. But if the pur- chase goes through, as our sources say it will in just a few weeks, it can be the game-changer for Harlem east of Fifth Avenue, where some blocks — like the rough south side between Lexington and Park avenues — have yet to sign on to the boom.
Durst bought $100 million in distressed debt on Eichner’s site earlier this year. Eichner poured part of a foundation, but was unable to go ahead with a plan for two 32-story mixed-use buildings, including 682 rental apartments.
If and when Durst takes control of the strategic corner astride the MetroNorth trestle, he said, “we’re studying our options” as to whether to proceed with Eichner’s plan for which Eichner obtained building permits. “We’ll have to spend a lot of time studying it,” Durst said.
He added, “Any project we do in Harlem will have a significant amount of affordable housing.”
The towers Eichner planned would be Harlem’s tallest, but Durst noted that Harlem’s appeal includes its mostly low-rise character. “I don’t think the scale is going to change much, even as restoration of wonderful [smaller] buildings there continues,” he said.
Some of Harlem’s most dramatic change is occurring on 125th Street. Durst credits Jeff Sutton’s big retail project three blocks east, where Whole Foods will open next year, as “providing a real shot in the arm” to the neighborhood.
Big buzz downtown: New York Presbyterian Hospital is trolling several locations for over 400,000 square feet of administrative/office space, sources said. Definitely in the mix is Brookfield’s One Liberty Plaza, where talks have taken place for a commercial condo purchase.
Brookfield’s Web site shows about 430,000 square feet available. No comment from reps.
The ribbon-cutting last week for 10 Hudson Yards, where Coach employees have moved in, finally caught the attention of New Yorkers for whom the vast complex developed by Related Cos. remains a distant mirage on the Far
West Side.
The 52-story 10 Hudson Yards is impossible to miss. Soon it might seem demure compared with 92-story 30 Hudson Yards, which is rising just to the north on 10th Avenue between 31st and 32nd streets.
That tower, the new home for Time Warner and KKR, is to open in 2019 — but will be highly visible well before then as steel rises.
In fact, the entire eastern portion of Related’s rail yard site — which encompasses 11.34 million square feet of mixed-use space on 28 acres — is poised to blossom in the relative blink of an eye. A 7level, 1 million-square-foot shopping and restaurant complex, anchored by Neiman Marcus and slung between the office towers, is to open in the fall of 2018, along with a large public plaza.
Around the same time we’ll see completion of 55 Hudson Yards — a third office tower Related and Mitsui Fudosan are building at 11th Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, where law firms Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy have already signed for a combined 280,000 square feet in the 1.3-million-square-footer.
The site’s first residential building, 15 Hudson Yards, is also to open in 2018, followed by 35 Hudson Yards in 2019. The latter will include a hotel, apartments, offices and a fitness club and spa.
Related expects to start building a deck over the western rail yard between 11th Avenue and the West Side Highway next year. Although architects have yet to be chosen, the western component is to include 6.22 million more square feet of office, residential, retail and school space.
Related Cos. founder and chairman Stephen M. Ross deserves primary credit. “Related deserved recognition for their willingness to take on a massive and complex project — and to attract financing from Canadian funds and foreign banks when American banks were reluctant to lend,” said Mitchell Moss, the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at NYU.
Related’s promise that the completed Hudson Yards will be used by 125,000 people a day raises a question:
Will all those residents, office workers, shoppers, restaurant-goers and plaza-users overwhelm the Highg Line Park, to whichh they’ll have easy access via Hudson Yards’ public plaza?
The High Line already draws about 5 million visitors a year, or an average 13,700 daily. On fairweather days, sections of the 3-mile long elevated promenade are as crowded as Grand Central at rush hour.
“We did a lot of thinking about it,” said Friends of the High Line co-founder and executive director Robert Hammond.
“But I don’t think residents at Hudson Yards will have a huge impact.” As far as commercial users, “They’re going to have a cycle,” Hammond said. “Office workers will come in the morning and leave in the evening. Our busiest time in the park is midday.”
Also working in the park’s favor is the planned opening by 2018 of the Spur — the only uncompleted segment, running east-west above West 30th Street between the Coach tower and 10th Avenue. Hammond hopes it will help absorb any added influx. “It will sort of be the lungs of the High Line, the largest open space in the park,” he said. Eastern Consolidated's prolific retail dealmaker James Famularo, who’s a wizard with restaurants, just nailed down leases for three new eateries on evolving Ninth Avenue. In the largest, a new Spanish/Thai café, will open at 700 Ninth at West 48th Street, in the corner space that was Louisiana-style Delta Grill. Famularo and Eastern’s Jeff Geoghegan repped both sides in the 4,300-square-foot deal. The asking rent was around $200 a square foot, as it was at the other two locations. Just up the avenue, D Squared Café took 2,000 square feet at 714 Ninth Ave. The Eastern team repped the landlord; Capstone’s Ina Donath repped the tenant. A few blocks north, Rice Burger took 420 square feet at 746 Ninth near 50th Street. Eastern’s Max Swerdloff repped the tenant.
Famularo and his team have recently handled 12 new retail leases on Ninth Avenue, which has turned “from a gritty and dangerous strip to a lively restaurant row,” he said. “Rents are still affordable, which is why they are flocking to it.”
He noted another big change: fewer Thai spots than there once were. “It was saturated with them and they were cannibalizing each other,” Famularo said. The mix now includes Southern Hospitality, Casa Agave and even — to some locals’ annoyance — national Chinese fast-casual chain Panda Express.