Hedge climbs Tower
New lease on life for lonely W. 46th St. high-rise
IN a breakthrough for Tower 46, hedge fund Fir Tree has signed the first lease for 10 years with SL Green for 31,126 square feet. But, what is Tower 46?
Also known as 55 W. 46th St., it’s the forgotten “other side” of the 34story International Gem Tower on West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
Tower 46, consisting of floors 2234 as well as the second floor, is an entirely separate building within the Extelldeveloped tower, which is notable for curtainwall glass faceted to suggest gleaming jewels.
Gary Barnett’s Extell originally planned to rent the office floors itself, separately from the gem industry condo floors, which have their entrance at 50 W. 47th St.
But residentialoriented Extell last year sold the 319,000squarefoot office portion to SL Green and Prudential Real Estate Investors for $295 million.
With $12 billion in capital under management, Fir Tree can likely afford what sources said was an asking rent of $100 a square foot. CBRE repped SL Green and Centric Real Estate Advisors repped the tenant, which will move from 505 Fifth Ave.
SL Green Executive Vice President Steven Durels said, “We got control of the building at the end of last year, but we didn’t really market it until this year.”
Durels said more leases will soon follow. He credited the activity to ultramodern features such as floortofloor slab heights from 13.6 feet to 16 feet, columnfree layouts, cuttingedge infrastructure — “and dropdead views.”
Kushner Companies’ Dumbo Heights, the mixeduse work campus “in the bull’seye of the Brooklyn tech triangle,” has a new kind of tenant in mind.
CEO Jared Kushner and partners LIVWRK and RFR Realty bought the fivebuilding complex from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society for $375 million two years ago. They later spent $100 million to convert the empty buildings to 1.1 million square feet of classA offices and 80,000 square feet of retail. About half of the office floors are already leased to tenants such at Etsy as well as to shared workspace provider WeWork.
Now, Kushner is setting aside up to 150,000 square feet in two buildings for Smart Space — an arrangement that falls between a conventional lease and WeWork’s brand of 30dayy licensing agreements for spaces as small as 100 square feet.
“The way real estate is run is not always compatible with what small tenants need,” Kushner said. “This is for tenants that have outgrown WeWork, but aren’t ready yet for a much larger, longterm commitment.”
Smart Space will offer prebuilts between 800 and 6,000 square feet at 55 Prospect St. and 77 Sand St., starting with 31 units at 55 Prospect. Leases for 12to 30month terms will run just seven pages, unlike ordinary ones “full of legal language about what happens if things don’t go right,” Kushner chuckled.
The idea is to allow small, growing tenants using incubator spaces to gradually transition into a more traditional format, but without committing to a very long term and having to pay for expensive buildouts. Asher Abeh
sera, CEO of LIVWRK, noted that many such startups are within the Brooklyn tech triangle of which Dumbo Heights is part.
Smart Space tenants will enjoy shared conference rooms and pantries and have access to a roof deck.
Dumbo Heights’ Web site has a feature to help a company figure out how much space it needs and at what price. Punch in, say, that you have 30 to 60 employees and want to be on the fourth floor. The site says you need 1,784 square feet and 21 desks. Rent will be $8,650 a mmonth including furniture, power and
cleaning.
A tiny retail lease at Rockefeller Group’s 1221 Sixth Ave. is the last piece of the puzzle in the estimated $30 million to $40 million redesign of the lobby and entrance areas in the former McGrawHill Building.
Zibetto Espresso Bar is taking 1,500 square feet on the West 48th Street side. It became open when Rockefeller revamped the ground floor, with a West 49th Street entrance opening in November between Oceana and Del Frisco’s.
The 2.5million squarefoot tower’s larger story is the swift absorption of office space left behind by McGrawHill and Société Générale. New leases for law firms and banks, plus an NBC expansion, left only three of 50 floors available. They’ll be waking up early at 70 Pine Street, Rose Associates’ 664apartment conversion project at the landmarked skyscraper. Australianbased java jockey Black Box Coffee has signed a lease for 1,500 square feet, making it the soontoopen tower’s first groundfloor retail tenant.
Black Box will have entrances through the lobby and on Pine Street.
The barista brigade will bring Manhattan’s downtown coffee to “a whole new level,” promised developer Adam Rose, copresident of Rose Associates.