550 Mad ‘low’ profile
Buzzy $1.4B office tower’s base top priority
WHEN550 Madison Ave. eventually reopens as a premier office address, its famed “Chippendale” top will look the same — but it’s likely to be a different ballgame at the 37-story tower’s base.
The trophy’s majority owner, Olayan, and ownerasset manager Chelsfield will soon announce an architect to “work on” the granite edifice’s lower floors, sources said.
Since Olayan and Chelsfield bought the 850,000square-foot, 1984-vintage tower from a Joseph Chet
rit partnership for $1.4 billion in May 2016, “What’s going on at 550 Madison?” is the question most asked of Realty Check.
A US division of Saudi Arabia’s Olayan Group and London-based Chelsfield plan to position the tower as a top-end office property. They dumped Chetrit’s luxury condos plan that would have included a hotel by Europe’s Oetker Group.
The new owners tapped CBRE to market the office project in July 2016. But little has been heard about it since then. The building is eerily vacant except for a few small eateries in the public arcade.
Our sources say Olayan and Chelsfield are moving very deliberately, keeping an eye on such factors as tenant-relocation patterns, the progress of east Midtown rezoning, and the effect on the market of Don
ald Trump’s presidency. “The building’s reinvention will be very comprehensive, and they don’t want to introduce it to the market prematurely. They’re committed to getting it right before they start to market it,” a source told The Post.
It isn’t known how significantly different 550 Madison will look on its lower levels or how any changes might affect its public space. A brightened look for the retail frontage was devised by retail brokerage RKF in January 2016 but is obviously off the table.
Once everything’s decided, leasing efforts will be handled by CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe, Scott Gottlieb, Howard Fiddle, Mike Movshovich and Arkady Smolyansky.
The tower was designed by Philip Johnson and John
Burgee for original owner AT&T. Its controversial look was both ridiculed and hailed. David Langdon wrote in the widely read site ArchDaily that 550 Madison proclaimed, “Postmodernism had officially arrived to the world scene.”
We have no idea whether Kushner Companies’ plan to “reinvent” 666 Fifth Ave. as a 1,400-foot-tall tower of luxury condos, a hotel and top-end retail will ever get built. My colleague Lois
Weiss first reported last week that Kushner’s prospective partner, China’s Anbang, had declined to go ahead with a deal. A Kushner rep told the New York Times Monday that the company still expected to line up $2.5 billion in equity from other sources.
But, entirely separate from issues regarding Kushner’s possible confflicts of interest or the ppropriety of getting a Chinese cash infusion while President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a close adviser to Trump, are more down-to-earth matters.
One reported number is especially baffling: a $4.1 billion construction loan supposedly needed to realize late architect Zaha Hadid’s design. For a very tall but skinny tower that will have floor plates of just 10,000 square feet for most of its height?
SL Green needed only a $1.5 billion construction loan for One Vanderbilt, the highly sophisticated office tower it’s building next to Grand Central Terminal that’s 100 feet taller than a new 666 Fifth would be.
None of the World Trade Center office towers re- quired a construction loan of more than $3 billion on sites much more complex than 666 Fifth.
And, the entire Second Avenue Subway cost $4.5 billion — including three new stations along a new, mileand-a-half-long right of way.