Four New York Plaza, the Sandy-ravaged, 1.07 million square-foot tower at Water and Broad streets, has reopened — nine months before Boston Properties chairman and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman predicted it would.
Zuckerman famously said in November that he’d found temporary facilities for the paper “for 9 months to a year” out of fear that its offices, which he said were “wiped out,” would not be usable until then.
The Daily News has been working out of temporary facilities in New Jersey and a few satellite locations. The disorientation might account for recent strange page layouts featuring headlines at the bottom of stories rather than at the top.
Mark Keller, CEO of Edge Fund Advisors, 4 New York Plaza’s owner, told us yesterday, “We are reopening today.”
He spoke to us while he was busy ushering executives of major tenants — Daily News, American Media and JP Morgan Chase — through the building.
Keller credited a CBRE crisis-management team with devising temporary means to restore power and vital services until permanent, storm-proof measures are in place by October.
Edge Fund bought 4 New York Plaza in partnership with an HSBC fund last spring for $270 million. Keller estimated the restoration and improvements will cost $50 million more.
But he noted that the hurricane disaster presented the opportunity to improve the property long-term by replacing some systems dating back to 1969.
The steps are to include moving chillers and other equipment onto steel frames “4 or 5 feet above the garage level, out of harm’s way and above the flood plain,” Keller said.
CBRE, the tower’s leasing and managing agent, has a special project-management group in New York, led by Christopher Van Cleef, and a Texas-based technical-services unit. The teams collaborated on what Keller called a “crash project.”
The fact that 4 New York Plaza has technically reopened doesn’t mean the tenants will rush back in.
Keller — also noting that “getting data lines continues to be an issue downtown” — said American Media would likely be first to reclaim its space, and the others not fully returned until April.
“The tenants are still apprehensive,” he said, and need to have their engineers evaluate the situation.
A Daily News spokesman said the paper “doesn’t know when it will move back in.”
An American Media rep referred us back to the landlord, and a rep for JP Morgan Chase didn’t get back to us.