Wasted away!
Margaritaville loses Brill to CVS
JIMMY Buffett’s Margaritaville is coming to Broadway as a musical, but not to the Brill Building as a giant theme restaurant — at least not yet.
A much-touted prospective deal for Buffett to launch a New York outpost of his “concept” eatery at the landmark building at 1619 Broadway at 49th Street has collapsed, multiple sources said.
The talks were closely watched as a bellwether of “experiential” retail north of Times Square. Broadway is marred by yawning retail vacancies between 49th and 58th streets.
Ironically, the New York Times reported this week that Buffett’s sprawling entertainment company — which owns and operates hotels, casinos, restaurants and stores — will bring his musical, “Escape to Margaritaville,” to Broadway in spring 2018.
It was widely reported last year that a lease was all but signed for a multilevel Margaritaville eating-entertainment complex in the Brill Building, once home to the nation’s songwriting royalty and to Jack Dempsey’s steak house.
However, the deal fell through when pharmacy chain CVS recently inked a deal for the entire second floor. Margaritaville had wanted that floor as well as part of the ground floor and the rooftop.
It was known since last summer that CVS was in talks with Brill’s owners — but for elsewhere in the building.
An insider told us, “What happened is strange. They’re still pitching Buffett on a Margaritaville deal somewhere in the building.” The source added skepti- cally, “But it’s back to square one.”
None of the parties responded to our questions — including Eric Hadar’s Allied Partners, (which owns Brill as part of complicated ownership structure with Bruce Brick
man and also includes several minority partners); Brickman’s leasing agents,
Jordan Plesser and Paul Kotcher; and reps for Margaritaville.
What’s up at 11 Times Square, the 1-millionsquare-foot office and retail tower at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street that we haven’t written about for a while?
Well, for one thing, it no longer calls itself 11 Times Square, but 11 | X.
“We started the name change last fall,” said Jeff
Schotz, EVP of leasing for the tower’s developer and co-owner, SJP Properties.
“It isn’t a very formal thing, but we felt like we’re not really part of Times Square” — which in fact lies one long block east — “but of the new West Side west of Eighth,” Schotz said. The tower’s office space is now 95 percent leased. Two new deals have just been done. Online discount stock brokerage ETrade signed for 31,234 square feet, and will move from 1271 Sixth Ave., and digital consulting tech firm Synechron took 11,831 square feet, moving and expanding from 15 Maiden Lane. Rents are in the $90s per square foot range, Schotz said. Steven J. Pozycki’s SJP famously built the tower on spec, causing some observers to complain about “glutting” the market. But his patience eventually paid off. The building’s diverse tenant mix includes Proskauer, Microsoft and hedge fund Moore Capital.
But while the office floors are full, SJP as well as 11 | X co-owners PGIM (a successor to Prudential’s PREI) and Norges Bank have 50,000 square feet of vacant retail on their hands after the failures of two food tenants, Urbo and Señor Frog’s.
Monomoy Capital Partners, a private investment firm, is expanding in Midtown. A tenant at L&L Holding Company’s Metropolitan Plaza on West 57th Street since 2006, Monomoy is relocating to L&L’s 600 Third Ave., where it’s taking the whole 27th floor (12,505 square feet).
The firm had 9,000 square feet at its old address. The asking rent at 600 Third was $75 per square foot. CBRE’s Silvio
Petriello and Ben Friedland repped the tenant, and L&L’s Andrew Wie
ner and David Young acted in-house.
It’s the latest new deal at 600 Third, the 550,000square-foot tower that L&L bought in 2004. Some 250,000 square feet of new and renewal leases have been signed in the past two years, including for L-3 Communications (100,000 square feet) and law firm Polsinelli (40,590 square feet).