Standing Strong
NYT’s Empire State Building obit is just wrong
THE Empire State Building survived King Kong, “Empty State Building” ridicule and decades of neglect by previous owners. Now comes a tendentious New York Times attempt to frame the building as the poster child for a doleful outlook supposedly faced by the entire city.
The Empire State Building’s roughly 2.7 million square feet of offices are much less than at some other Manhattan office addresses both old and new. However, no single structure is so “iconic” or emblematic of the Big Apple, which made it ideal for the Times to pick on it.
The story — headlined “Why the Empire State Building, and New York, Might Never Be the Same” — wasn’t a firing-squad execution. It was, rather, a slow, read-and-bleed agglomeration of misleading data, flagrant omissions, immaterial minor facts and fancy graphics that together might well suggest to a casual reader that, as a sub-headline asserted, “The future of the world’s most famous skyscraper is in doubt.”
No, it isn’t. The article’s text didn’t make such a provocative claim. Nor did it say that Empire State was “emptying of tenants,” as a Page One blurb stated on Saturday. The story accurately said, “A vast majority of tenants who shared their plans are remaining in the building.”
Yet readers in an age of 10second online clicks can be swayed more by the way a story is framed than by what it actually says. The presentation both in print and online, the latter including an “interactive visual feature” that the Times boasted took three months to produce, threw needless destructive shade on the great skyscraper at a time of overall industry-wide unease.
Not that there wasn’t plenty wrong in the text itself.
After reiterating ancient news that Observatory revenue declined due to the loss of tourists, and that a few stores closed for equally obvious reasons, a task force of 10 Times reporters “revealed” precious little about the tower’s major component: its 100 office floors.
To illustrate commercial real estate’s undeniably challenged times, the Times told us that 19 percent of Manhattan office space is “available for rent.” That means that 81 percent of office space isn’t available for rent.
But the paper left out the most salient fact about the Empire State Building, which is, after all, what the story’s about. Namely, that it is currently more than 90 percent leased to rentpaying office tenants. In other words, it isn’t merely in sound shape — it’s handily outperforming the market.
How could the authors leave out such an indispensable fact? Well, “the company that owns the Empire State Building, and its chief executive, Anthony Malkin, declined to answer questions.”
That made it sound like the company in question, Empire State Realty Trust, has lots to hide. In fact, ESRT is a publicly traded company and bound by strict SEC disclosure rules. Most of what the Times was looking for can be found on publicly accessible company documents posted online. To wit, “Empire State Realty Trust Supplemental Operating and Financial Data,” dated June 30, 2021. It cited the tower’s 90-plus-percent officeoccupancy rate on page nine.
Ah, but what about the future? The most the Times came up
with regarding tenants’ future plans was that, of the tenants the paper surveyed (who occupy less than half of Empire State’s office space), most said they would adopt a “hybrid” model for employees to work both in the office and at home.
This wasn’t exactly breaking news — such plans, whether
they’re ever truly implemented or not, have only been announced for just about every company from sea to shining sea.
Perhaps the most gnawing omission was of the Empire State Building’s recent history. One financial analyst’s characterization of “an older skyscraper with a lot of small and medium-size businesses as tenants” wasn’t entirely wrong. But, again, context is everything.
The Empire State Building isn’t the creaky old home to shoe wholesalers like the ones that filled it decades ago. The owners since 2005 spent a halfbillion dollars on widely reported upgrades that brought the once-obsolescent building into the modern age, including a revelatory lobby restoration blessed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Those improvements helped the building lure tenants such as Coty Ltd. and LinkedIn, and drove an increase in occupancy from around 70 percent to today’s 90 percent-plus.
Everyone’s favorite skyline icon won’t go dark any time soon, no matter how much “doubt” the Times would cast on it.