Contemporary brand Theory is the latest to join the fashion crowd at Brookfield Place, where Brookfield Office Properties is completing a $250 million redesign of the former World Financial Center’s retail, dining and public spaces.
Theory just signed for 2,480 square feet in the street-level courtyard. Other boutiques setting up shop at Brookfield Place include Ermengildo Zegna, Burberry, Hermes, Michael Kors and Salvatore Ferragamo as The Post’s Lois Weiss first reported.
Deals have also been signed for Calypso, womenswear boutique Judith & Charles, and restaurants and cafes including Umami Burger, Parm, and a huge, Eataly-like French marketplace called The District. However, a reported lease with Eileen Fisher is not yet done.
Brookfield national retail leasing director Ed Hogan said that about half of the 250,000 square-foot, three-level complex adjoining the Winter Garden has already been signed for.
In addition, he said, “We’re on track to be fully leased by the end of the first quarter of 2014. We basically have signed leases or leases out on every space except for a few of them,” Hogan said. Stores are expected to open in 2015, around the time Condé Nast moves into 1 World Trade Center.
He wouldn’t discuss rents in the complex except to say that they range “from $200 to $800 a square foot, depending on size and location.” Theory was repped by Millennium Realty Group’s Michael Leifer and Brookfield in-house by Hogan and by McDevitt Co.’s Kira Meers.
Brookfield’s progress comes as mall operator Westfield America presses its campaign to lease 360,000 square feet of store space in the World Trade Center to the east. Westfield last week bought out the Port Authority’s 50 percent stake in the WTC’s retail portion for $800 million, giving it full ownership.
Although we previously reported Westfield has “lined up” tenants for much of its space in the WTC Hub Oculus, the lobbies of 2 and 3 WTC and several underground corridors, no signed leases have yet been announced.
So much newly minted, high-rent retail space downtown has created buzz about a possible glut — or that Brookfield or Westfield might succeed only at the other’s expense.
But Brookfield’s Hogan believes the competition is good for downtown. “The real issue in downtown is to establish critical mass,” he said. He pointed out that Brookfield Place’s and Westfield’s combined 600,000 square feet “amounts to one wing of a typical regional shopping mall. And no mall has the demographics and traffic that downtown has.”
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JPMorgan Asset Management clients paid $498.45 million to buy the controlling interest in 195 Broadway from L&L Holding Co. and Beacon Capital, according to just-filed public records.
The recapitalization leaves L&L with an undisclosed minority stake. So, our story last week was on the money to say the transaction valued the landmark office (and now retail) tower at more than $500 million, and likely twice the $266 million that L&L founder David W. Levinson and his partners paid to buy it from Peter Kalikow in 2005.
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Davis Brody Bond, the chief architectural firm for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, is moving closer to the emotionally charged project. Sources said they’re taking 27,000 square feet at One New York Plaza just east of the World Trade Center, although landlord Brookfield declined to comment.
The firm, which will leave 315 Hudson St., is the latest creative-industries tenant to move to the Wall Street/WTC area. Asking rents at One New York Plaza are around $50 a square foot.
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Paramount Group has shifted leasing duties for 1301 Sixth Ave. outside for the first time. The landlord tapped a Newmark Grubb Knight Frank team of Andrew Sachs, Timothy Gibson, Bill Levitsky and Ben Shapiro to market 340,000 square feet of available space in the 1.75 million square-foot tower between 52nd and 53rd streets.
It’s also a first big assignment for the Newmark quartet since they joined the firm from Cushman & Wakefield in September.
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It isn’t sexy, but it’s big: CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College has renewed for 20 years on 167,072 square feet at Jack Resnick & Sons’ 225 Greenwich St.
The school has five floors in the building, part of BMCC’s urban campus downtown. Asking rents are $50 per square foot. CBRE’s Stephen B. Siegel, David Hollander and Richard Levine repped CUNY. Dennis Brady and Brett S. Greenberg repped Resnick in-house.