The big General Services Administration lease at 1 World Trade Center won’t be done in time for tomorrow’s fireworks after all.
The nearly 300,000-square-foot deal championed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is being held up in a congressional committee as part of an unrelated battle it’s having with the federal agency.
The Port Authority and the Durst Organization wanted to be done by July 4 with the lease, which will push 1 WTC’s 3 million square feet over the 50 percent-taken threshold.
Schumer started nudging the beleaguered GSA earlier this year to approve the long-aborning deal. After his intervention, it finally signed off on final terms of the 20-year lease with the PA and Durst.
The PA board and a Senate committee also approved it.
But Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is holding it hostage along with other federal leases.
It’s part of a battle he’s having with the GSA over moving the Federal Trade Commission out of a building near the National Mall in DC so that it can be used for a Smithsonian Institution gallery.
Schumer said in a statement yesterday: “The GSA lease needs a final push to get over the finish line. The Senate committee has singed off and we’ve reached out to Congressman Mica to explain the special nature of this lease for New York and the country as a whole.”
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Nordstrom’s coming to Manhattan is great news all around, especially for Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Co.
But the game-changing deal — first reported by The Post’s James Covert and Lois Weiss on nypost.com last week — raises this question: Will the luxury fashion store’s 300,000-square-foot lease pump life into the West 57th Street retail scene, which is a lot less vibrant than landlords and brokers claim?
Nordstrom will open at 225 W. 57th St. near Broadway — but not until 2018.
Meanwhile, the blocks between Fifth and Eighth avenues continue to lose their juice for shoppers. Landlords keep empty sites off the market or hold out for unrealistic rents. Others lease only to temporary stores.
Even so, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Faith Hope Consolo said, “I really think 57th Street retail is moving west. I have offers on the street and so do my competitors.”
She also acknowledged, “It looked bleak for a long time.”
One building west of Fifth with solid retail tenancy is the LeFrak Organization’s 40 W. 57th, home to Nobu 57 restaurant.
Company Chairman Richard LeFrak said, “It’s kind of strange that as you go down the block 100 feet west from Bergdorf Goodman and you’re in no man’s land.
“You’d think that with a lot of retailers getting priced off Fifth Avenue, there’d be some [leasing] activity on West 57th. It’s inexplicable to me there’s such a void.”
The “void” between Fifth and Sixth now includes eight vacant storefronts, two of them in never-rented spaces in Sheldon Solow’s 9 West 57th. (One is used for Solow’s art gallery). The block also has a growing number of shlocky, tourist-oriented stores and, for good measure, a vacant lot.
Between Sixth and Seventh avenues is a mess of scaffolds and noisy construction. The bright side is that the works will eventually yield three major new hotels, including the Park Hyatt at Extell’s 90-story One57.
Maybe they’ll bring new foot traffic and encourage landlords not to keep storefronts dark forever.
One problem is that 57th Street — home to Carnegie Hall, the Four Seasons Hotel and to extraordinary high-end retail concentrations on the two blocks east of Fifth — is so majestic and fabled a crosstown corridor that it encourages dreams that can’t be realized.
As a result, some well-heeled landlords hold out for rents no one will pay — up to Fifth Avenue’s going rate of $1,500 a square foot and higher on the ground — or buy properties mainly as building blocks in the chess game of assemblage-making.
“Generally, no landlords on 57th Street adjusted their rents during the downturn,” Consolo said.
(The pattern isn’t exclusive to West 57th — the entire street-level north blockfront between Lexington and Park avenues, mostly owned by Charles S. Cohen, is also vacant.)
The unending paralysis at some West 57th addresses has made retail brokers thin-skinned. Each time we mention it, they complain that we don’t know anything about the street — but then fail to get any leases done.
They swear change is coming. Those said to be shopping for storefront space on West 57th are surprisingly said to include Mercedes, which might move from Park Avenue, and Uniqlo, despite having a huge new store on Fifth a few blocks away.
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A second Manhattan outpost of 1 Bite Mediterranean is coming to 875 Third Ave. The 3,600-square-foot eatery/store in the tower concourse “will provide an amenity for people working in the building,” said Consolo, who arranged the lease with Prudential Douglas Elliman Retail Group’s Joseph A. Aquino and Dawn R. Ferrer.
The rent was $65 per square foot for the 10-year term.