Room boom in NYC
Hotel glitz beats garage grunge
TRADE in your car keys for room keys. In the past nine months, planned development on two neighboring Midtown blocks between Sixth and Seventh avenues has wiped out three big parking garages that had room for nearly 1,000 cars.
What will replace them? At least two new hotels with nearly 800 rooms — and very possibly a third hotel with hundreds of additional rooms — in a Manhattan market already saturated with large new inns.
Manhattan-based Tribeach Holdings has demolished a garage at 145-155 W. 47th St. and a few small other buildings to make way for one planned hotel tower.
Several different sources at the site told us it will be 48 stories tall — not 27 stories as reported last spring based on Buildings Department filings that have yet to be approved.
That could mean that Tribeach is buying up additional air rights.
A call to Tribeach partner William Fegan wasn’t returned.
Meanwhile, as my colleague Lois Weiss first reported, Gary Barnett’s Extell is set to put up the city’s first Hard Rock Hotel, with 35 floors and 445 rooms on a former garage site at 151-159 W. 48th St.
On the same 48th Street block’s south side, meanwhile, Rockefeller Group is demolishing another former garage and a few other vacant buildings west of the Cort Theater in preparation for a mystery project that could extend through to West 47th Street, where it controls another parcel as well.
Although Rockefeller Group’s mum about its plans, another mid-block hhotel seems a more likely strategy than an office building.
Rock reps didn’t get back to us.
The three development sites are all close to the new Edition by Marriott Hotel that’s nearly finished at 701 Seventh Ave., at the West 47th Street corner.
It will add about 450 rooms to the city’s swelling inventory that’s approaching 104,000 rooms — up from 66,000 in 2007.
Developers had better hope that tourists and business travelers don’t sour on the Big Apple any time soon.
A new eatery will soon replace Bistecca Fiorentina at Restaurant Row’s 317 W. 46th St. Tommy Bifulco, owner of West 47th Street’s Scarlatto, signed a 10-year lease for 2,800 square feet.
The landlord was repped by Eastern Consolidated principal James Famularo along with his firm’s Jeff Geoghegan and Ravi Idnani, who brought in the new tenant.
Famularo said the landlord chose Bifulco because of his experience with Scarlatto, and “he knows how to market to the theater crowd through a network of hotel concierges.”