Blackstone: Give me Liberty
FOR the second time in a month, a publicly traded real estate company is selling a big minority stake in a premier Broadway office building — although the addresses are miles apart.
Blackstone Real Estate Core+ fund has a contract to buy 49 percent of One Liberty Plaza from Brookfield Property Partners, downtown industry sources told The Post. It will be the first time Brookfield has brought in a minority partner at the iconic skyscraper.
The purchase is expected to close by year’s end. It’s likely to be the buzz of Tuesday night’s holiday-season party hosted by Fried Frank at Cipriani East 42nd Street, the annual gala that draws the city’s elite developers, landlords and deal-makers.
The prospective sale values the famous black steel tower at slightly over $1.5 billion, the sources said. The move by traditionally cautious Blackstone signifies confidence in the lower Manhattan office market (see story, Page 35). At roughly $660 per square foot, it’s among the largest investment-sale deals ever downtown on a square-foot basis.
The news comes on the heels of the recent sale of a 43 percent interest in 1515 Broadway by SL Green to Allianz SE, which valued the Times Square skyscraper at $1.95 billion including debt, as The Post’s Lois Weiss first reported.
One Liberty Plaza’s 2.3 million square feet on 54 floors make it one of Manhattan’s largest towers — and one of its most unusual. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Mer- rill as the headquarters of US Steel in the early 1970s, its exposed-steel facade is described in the AIA Guide to New York City as “handsome and somber as the Renaissance of Florence.”
Brookfield has owned it since the 1990s. The tower is more than 94 percent leased thanks in part to recent commitments by Aon and the city’s Economic Development Corp.
Brookfield tapped Cushman & Wakefield in October to market One Liberty, the Real Deal reported at the time. The team will be led by Doug Harmon and
Adam Spies, who also handled the 1515 Broadway sale for SL Green.
The impending partial sale of One Liberty nets Brookfield a heap of cash as it continues to develop and lease its office-and-residential complex on the Upper West Side. It also gives the company, led by Chairman Ric Clark, a strong relationship with Blackstone, which boasts $200 billion in gross assets worldwide.
In Manhattan, Blackstone owns major stakes in Stuyvesant Town, the JW Marriott and 230 Park Avenue. The fabled Frank Gehry
designed cafeteria that was once the lunch canteen for
Graydon Carter and Anna Wintour will soon be open again — not for glamorous editors, but for lawyers and financial and tech executives.
The former Condé Nast cafeteria at the Durst Organization’s Four Times Square is reopening after five years in the dark. And building tenants will likely eat better than their predecessors once did.
Durst will relaunch the titanium-wrapped, fourth-floor venue as part of a $35 million, tenants-only fourth floor in the 1.2-million-square-foot tower. It will be run by “new Nordic cuisine” pioneer
Claus Meyer, the Danishborn chef behind restaurant Agern and Great Northern Food Hall in Grand Central Terminal. Meyer will also run a branch of his Brownsville Roasters coffee bar.
Meyer, one of the world’s marquee-name restaurant chefs, also developed inhouse dining programs for 70 corporations in Denmark.
At the same time, “workplace-as-a-service” operator Convene will operate a 20,000-square-foot meeting, event and conference space on the same floor. Durst is an investor in Convene,, which also has tenant facilities at the developer’s 117 W. 46th St. and One World Trade Center, Condé Nast’s new home.
The Gehry cafeteria, which was the architect’s first project in New York, has been “reimagined” as a food hall. It will anchor the 45,600-square-foot floor that’s been redesigned by Studios Architecture.
It will have more seats, 300 compared with the original 260, but signature elements have been preserved, Durst said — including curvedglass “curtains,” undulating titanium walls and banquette seating nooks.
The floor is part of a $100 million capital upgrade of Four Times Square. Although Condé Nast left for the WTC three years ago, Four Times Square is still technically fully leased because the Port Authority is ppaying Durst $3 million a month through 2019 to cover Condé’s lease there.
Since the media company moved out, Durst has filled much of the space with new tenants including ICAP, SS&C Technologies and RSM US. Skadden Arps will remain there until 2020.