Saving East Midtown
MAJOR League Baseball’s decision to move its headquarters from Park Avenue to Sixth Avenue, announced last week, should light a fire under city planners. Manhattan’s future depends on making East Midtown once again attractive to Major League companies. But a proposal to do that is stuck at third base.
A rezoning plan that was unveiled in August still has an alarming number of unresolved issues. It raises the possibility that the measure will go down swinging, as an earlier one did in 2013. Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod and Council Member Dan Garodnick, the pol with the largest say in East Midtown, must hold all feet to the fire before it’s again too late.
Rezoning East Midtown would allow larger and taller new buildings than now stand in the district, where structures are on average 75 years old.
The area bounded roughly by Third and Fifth avenues, and East 39th and 57th streets, was once unchallenged as the nation’s premier commercial district. Iconic landmarks like Grand Central Terminal and a wealth of hotels, stores and cultural attractions shared the streets with an unparalleled concentration of Fortune 500 companies.
But the zone atrophied over time. Most of its office buildings are too antiquated for today’s large companies, which demand advanced digital infrastructure, energy-efficient environmental features and more open-plan floor plates than exist in mid-20th Century towers. Current zoning law, much of it written in 1961, makes replacing them with new structures even of the same size all but impossible.
City Hall finally put out a new plan to up-zone the area last year. It could pave the way for about 16 large new buildings over the next 20 years. But it won’t even begin the peril-frought, seven-month public-review process until the end of 2016, if then.
Drawing all “stakeholders” — preservationists, elected officials and landlords — into talks that began in June 2015 was supposed to ensure smooth sailing on the way to approval by the City Council.
But now, real-estate lobbyists want the rezoning to allow even more large new buildings. Churches and synagogues object to rules regarding sale prices for their air rights.
There’s confusion over a crucial requirement for developers in parts of the district to pay for transit upgrades, which they must do to earn size-and-height bonuses. How much would they pay? How will the city and the MTA agree on what should be done?
Without immediate resolution of such issues, it could be years before meaningful rezoning goes forward.
Meanwhile, the list of companies itching to leave grows longer. Those gone or going include Citigroup, Sony, Twitter, Boston Consulting, Hudson’s Bay Co., Wells Fargo, Point72, marketaxess and three major law firms — Reed Smith, Jones Day and Kaye Scholer. They’re headed to the West Side, Downtown or Midtown South.
Now, landlords are trembling over the likelihood that Blackstone, one of the district’s remaining financial anchors, will bolt for the Far West Side when its leases are up in a few years.
In an ominous parallel trend, glamour firms based in other neighborhoods that needed to expand — such as Condé Nast, Time Warner, Time Inc., Coach Inc., IBM Watson and the National Hockey League — have shunned East Midtown. How did it come to this? Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the vision to rezone neglected parts of town, such as the Far West Side and the Brooklyn Waterfront. But he long ignored creeping stagnation in the traditional economic powerhouse, East Midtown.
By the time the city finally woke up to it, a crash proposal to rezone the area ran into a wall of flak that killed it three years ago.
Mayor de Blasio’s planners this year did manage to rezone Vanderbilt Avenue — but that’s a mere five blocks long. The first new office tower the rezoning is making possible, One Vanderbilt, will bring 2 million state-of-the-art square feet to market — but even it won’t open until 2020.
Time is of the essence to get the rest of the job done before East Midtown’s greatness lives on mainly in movies and old postcards.