Move over, Gotham West — an even bigger gourmet food market and restaurant is coming to the Far West Side.
“Farm-to-table” market and casual restaurant Treehaus has signed a lease for a 14,292 square-foot eatery/organic market at MiMA, Related Cos.’ 63-story rental apartment tower at 460 W. 42nd St. between Ninth and 10th avenues.
It’s the second location for Treehaus, which launched its first last year at 830 Third Ave. The MiMA edition will be designed by UnSPACE Architects, which earned an A.R.E. International Design Award for the original.
The new Treehaus, owned by Rachel Cho (not the floral designer), is expected to open in the spring. Although it won’t have celebrity chefs lending their names, it’s more than 40 percent larger than the heavily hyped, 10,000 square-foot Gotham West gourmet market/eatery nearby on 11th Avenue.
Retail asking rents at MiMA are $125 a square foot. The landlord, a partnership of Related and TIAA-CREF, was represented by Cushman & Wakefield’s Gene Spiegelman, Michael O’Neill, Alisa Amsterdam and Jason Greenstone. PD Properties’ Tony Park repped Treehaus.
It will be open 24 hours daily, offering casual menus for sit-down customers and catering and delivery for MiMA residents.
It promises “American cuisine with a French twist” at indoor and outdoor seating, as well as beer and wine tastings from local microbreweries and wineries “accompanied by cheeses and small homemade organic food items inspired by the popular Smorgasburg Flea Food Market in Williamsburg and DUMBO.”
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The curtain is falling on the Times Square Visitors’ Center inside the landmarked former Embassy Theater at 1560 Broadway.
The Times Square Alliance has run the tourist service site since 1998. But Alliance President Tim Tompkins confirms that the landlord, a joint venture of SL Green and Jeff Sutton, is taking back the roughly 8,000 square-foot space this spring.
As we noted last week, SLG and Sutton transformed adjacent 1552 Broadway back to its former glory as a new home for retailer Express. They own both buildings, and SLG exec Brett Herschenfeld had told us the 1560 ground-floor space would soon be on the market.
“We are going to be surrendering the space,” Tompkins said. But he was sanguine about it for a number of reasons.
“We’ve been struggling with the Visitors’ Center a bit,” he said. “We provided visitors’ services, but most people now get their information online.”
A scaffold over the entrance didn’t help. On Monday afternoon, only a few dozen sightseers were checking out old-fashioned pamphlet racks, a preserved “Peep-O-Rama” (without the XXX-rated films) and the 2006 New Year’s Eve ball.
Tompkins was also pleased that because the ornate, French-inspired space is an interior landmark, “It will still be preserved.”
Rather than relocate the center, Tompkins said the Alliance “will experiment with mobile kiosks in the plazas and with roaming ambassadors equipped with iPads” to help tourists. “We’ll probably reach more people than we did before,” he said.
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One block north of the Visitors’ Center, meanwhile, scaffolding and black nets envelop 701 Seventh Ave. We’ve read at least 701 different descriptions of the planned joint venture at the northeast corner of the avenue and West 47th Street to be anchored by a Marriott Edition Hotel. But here are up-to-date data, courtesy of Manhattan Community Board 5.
The board last week voted 34-0 in favor of air rights transfers from two Broadway houses — the Booth at 222 W. 45th St. and the Plymouth at 236 W. 45th — to the project site, a joint venture of the Witkoff Group, Maefield Development, Infinity Urban Century and Vector Group unit New Valley.
The facts from CB5’s letter of endorsement to the City Planning Dept.:
– The air rights sales will add a total of 44,988 square feet of floor area to the new mixed-use building, enlarging it over the site’s permissible 16.8 FAR to a total of 269,892 square feet.
– The building will be “39-story plus mezzanine” and 500 feet tall.
– The hotel will have about 203,532 square feet; lower five floors will have about 66,360 square feet of retail. The frontage will include more than 12,700 square feet of illuminated signs.
Details remain in flux. No plans have been filed with the Dept. of Buildings, although pre-demolition work is in full swing.
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Designer Reed Krakoff, who earlier this year left Coach Inc. to concentrate on his own label, has now broken off from Coach’s bricks and mortar as well. He’s moving his offices from 516 W. 34th St. to 40 W. 25th St., where he’s signed for 27,000 square feet.
Sources said Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Jared Horowitz, who couldn’t be reached, repped Krakoff; landlord Brickman Associates was repped in-house by Paul Kotcher. The asking rent was $59 per square foot.