THE Times Square area’s once-raunchiest location is up for lease or sale, possibly spelling an end to what’s left of porn king Richard Basciano‘s Show World Center at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street.
The landowners are seeking development proposals for 303 W. 42nd St. – an L-shaped, 16,700 square-foot site on the west side of the avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets. It includes a 12-story apartment/office building and smaller buildings that are home to stores and the New York Arts Center theaters.
They also house Show World – a shrunken version of the huge porn emporium that once boasted “live girls” before it was reduced to an X-rated video arcade during the Giuliani-era crackdown.
Proposals are due in by tomorrow, although property manager Thomas Simmonds says the deadline “is not set in stone.”
The owners are open to a ground-lease arrangement with a developer, a partnership or an outright sale, which he termed “the least interesting scenario.”
Simmonds said the linked properties are not owned by Basciano, but by a trust. However, real estate executives familiar with the offering all referred to it as Basciano’s.
The land is diagonally across from SJP Properties’ 11 Times Square, the spectacular office tower now under construction next door to the New York Times headquarters.
The Show World site wraps around, but does not include, the northwest corner of Eighth and 42nd – home to a Duane Reade on land owned by a partnership led by Jeff Sutton, and not for sale.
Sources said the 303 W. 42nd St. site – with most of its frontage actually on Eighth Avenue and West 43rd Street – can support about 166,000 square feet of floor area, but theater-district air-rights bonuses could bring the total to 238,000 square feet.
Sources valued an outright sale of the land at between $300-$400 a buildable square foot. But Studley’s Woody Heller cautioned, “Anybody who claims to know what things are worth in this market is getting ahead of himself.”
Basciano, who once owned 17 buildings in the area, launched Show World in the 1970s as a “sex superstore.”
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Renowned Greek seafood restaurant Milos, Estiatorio will soon open its first take-out branch in Metropolitan Tower, the 245,000 square-foot office building owned by L&L Holding Co. and Blackrock Realty Partners.
L&L chief David W. Levinson called the lease merely the “crowning little jewel” of a repositioning of the tower at 142 W. 57th St. that filled nearly all of 130,000 square feet of office space left behind by Ann Taylor last year.
The owners modernized the lobby and created high-end, pre-built office suites aimed at “boutique” financial ten ants – astrategy that drew Icahn Enter prises, Nataxis Alternative Investments, and, most recently, Macquarie Bank.
Levinson said only 20,000 square feet remain, including a 14th floor suite with a terrace asking $95 a square foot.
The Milos shop will be on the West 56th Street side. CB Richard Ellis’s Michael Blum represented the landlord.
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It didn’t take long for Douglas Durst to find a tenant to replace Eli Tahari, which backed out of a deal for the 50th floor of his nearly finished One Bryant Park.
It’s gone to Bank of America, Durst’s partner in the tower, which now claims 36 of its 51 floors.
Tahari was paying $125 a square foot.
And BofA? “More,” Durst said.