Pfizer on an upward Spiral
Near tower HQ deal
PFIZER
and Tishman Speyer hope to complete a momentous, 800,000-square-foot lease at the developer’s planned Spiral skyscraper by early 2018, sources told The Post. The signing would pave the way for a summer groundbreaking.
We f irst reported last Friday that the pharmaceutical giant had chosen the Bjarke Ingels
designed, 2.8 million-squarefoot tower at 509 W. 34th St. for its new Manhattan headquarters — capping a search that was one of the city’s most closely watched real estate scenarios.
It’s not yet a done deal. Many fine points remain to be worked out. But sources say that if all goes well, Pfizer hopes to move in by the second half of 2022.
The deal would still leave Tishman Speyer with 2 million square feet to rent in the tower, but Pfizer’s anchor-tenant commitment will get the project out of the ground, sources said.
Pfizer also took a good, hard look at other major new projects around town, including Related Cos.’ 50 Hudson Yards (across the street from the Spiral) and SL Green’s One Vanderbilt (next to Grand Central Terminal).
It sent the developers a formal request for proposals in April, we’re told. Pfizer plans to sell its East 42nd Street building, as has been widely reported.
Pfizer’s mega-move also marks a milestone for the Hudson Yards District west of Eighth Avenue, a former backwater that was rezoned by former Mayor Bloomberg to spur large-scale redevelopment.
The Spiral will be the f irst new office skyscraper in the area to be put up by a developer other than Related or Brookfield Property Partners (at Manhattan West) on their respective 26- and 7-acre rail-yard sites.
Tishman Speyer bought the land for The Spiral in 2014 from several other owners for $438 million and later snatched up more air rights for an additional $108 million. It announced a partnership in The Spiral with China’s HNA Property Group last April.
Tishman Speyer owns more than 165 million square feet of commercial space around the world, including 23 million square feet in New York, where its holdings include Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the MetLife Building.
Led since 2008 by President and co-CEO Rob Speyer, the company now has more than 8 million square feet of projects in the development pipeline — perhaps its most ever at the same time.
Among them is a full-scale transformation of nearly six aces of mostly vacant former industrial space in Long Island City’s Queens Plaza district that will consist of two adjacent, mixedused projects.
The Jacx will be the borough’s largest office development since the Citigroup tower opened in 1990. Two 26story towers, connected by a four-story base, will have 1.2 million square feet, of which more than 70 percent is preleased to WeWork and Macy’s/ Bloomingdale’s.
Across the street, work is nearly done on Jackson Park, a trio of high-rise luxury rental apartment towers with a private park. Tishman Speyer has also started on The Wheeler, a 10story, 620,000-square-foot “creative office hub” to rise atop Macy’s department store in downtown Brooklyn. It also plans a new apartment tower on a former Macy’s garage site across the street. The developer is also weighing plans for another tower of up to 1.3 million square feet on a site it owns between the new Hudson Boulevard and the Javits Convention Center between West 36th and 37th streets. Reps for Tishman Speyer declined to comment on the Pfizer situation. A rep for Pfizer said, “We’re still in the process and we expect to announce something either at the end of this year or the beginning of 2018.”