Real Estate

Downtown is looking up

The lease HarperCollins just signed at 195 Broadway — which I first reported yesterday on nypost.com — is welcome news for the Wall Street area as it continues to bounce back from the ravages of Hurricane Sandy.

And it says much about the current dynamic between Midtown and downtown. In taking 185,000 square feet at the landmark tower owned by a joint venture of L&L Holding Co. and Beacon Capital Partners, the book giant is the latest to join the media migration south — a burgeoning movement that includes Condé Nast, WOR Radio, the Daily News and American Media among others (see story at right).

HarperCollins is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Post.

The move by HarperCollins from 10 E. 53rd St. also illustrates how a building nearly 100 years old can be more “modern” than one opened in 1972.

HarperCollins has more than 200,000 square feet at its Midtown home, which it will leave in April 2014. But employees are scattered over 20 floors, some with fewer than 10,000 square feet each.

Floor plates at 195 Broadway are 39,700 square feet — and the resulting improved efficiency means the book-publishing giant needed only four-and-a-half floors. The larger floor plates offer a lot of natural light and facilitate the open-seating plans media companies crave.

L&L, founded by David W. Levinson and Robert T. Lapidus, bought the 1 million square-foot landmark from Peter Kalikow in 2006. They launched a major capital improvements program, which has drawn major tenants Thomson Information Services and Omnicom.

Levinson, who is L&L’s chairman and CEO, said yesterday the HarperCollins lease required getting some space back from Thomson. “The [HC] deal went through pretty quickly,” Levinson said — about six weeks.

HarperCollins was repped by a CBRE team led by Ken Rapp and Christopher Mansfield with Mary Ann Tighe. L&L’s David C. Berkey negotiated for the ownership.

Rapp noted that HarperCollins had been in the market for about a year, “looking in Midtown, Midtown South and downtown,” he said.

Terms of the 195 Broadway lease were not divulged, but Midtown rents are, of course, much higher than downtown. Asking rents at 10 E. 53rd might reach $100 a square foot on higher floors once capital improvements planned by owner SL Green are done, sources said.

The asking rent at 195 Broadway was $45 a square foot, according to CoStar and to CBRE research.

Another factor in HarperCollins’ decision to leave was that it would have had to live through a possibly lengthy, disruptive upgrade. SL Green brass couldn’t be reached for comment.

Moving south to the Wall Street/World Trade Center area can be daunting to media types accustomed to Midtown. But, “When their people realized how easy it is to get to 195 Broadway, they got extremely enthusiastic,” Levinson said. The former AT&T headquarters with the “wedding cake” profile is right at the Fulton Street subway station where nine subway lines converge, and where the MTA is building the Fulton Transit Center.

HarperCollins spokesperson Erin Crum said, “We are excited to return to the neighborhood where Harper Brothers founded what is now HarperCollins in 1817, and begin our third century of publishing where it began so many years ago.”