Microsoft just announced it’s moving its New York headquarters to a new office building at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Construction has started on a new home for Coach Inc. at Hudson Yards. And it’s old news that Conde Nast is moving to the World Trade Center. But which big companies are moving their front offices to Midtown’s fabled east side?
Not one — even though it should be the city’s most desirable neighborhood for corporate headquarters, with its transit links and unparalleled hotels, stores and restaurants.
That’s why East Midtown rezoning is desperately needed. The vast Grand Central district isn’t just “obsolescent”; it’s useless for companies wanting to move or grow and increasingly irrelevant overall. Without prompt attention, it will tragically devolve into a well-located back-office district.
No government decision due this year matters as much as Midtown East rezoning. The stakes are huge: Will Manhattan retain its pre-eminent position among world business capitals? Or will institutionalized decay in its heart reduce it to also-ran status?
The long-overdue proposal from the Department of City Planning would allow construction of larger new buildings than are now permitted in a 78-block swath of the East 40s and 50s. Mayor Bloomberg wants it passed before he leaves office; the City Council must vote by October.
It’s a fourth-quarter, hail-Mary play after years of delay in bringing the area into the 21st century.
The Manhattan market draws its juice from new office towers that draw glamorous tenants seeking a showcase home with advanced electronic, security and environmental features.
Yet once-supreme Midtown East is frozen in aspic. Zoning written in 1961 made major new development there near-impossible. Existing buildings, now 66 years old on average and burdened with antiquated systems and cramped floor plates, are dinosaurs facing functional extinction in the digital age.
In much of the district, they can’t even be replaced with modern structures no larger than the ones there now. That’s because most of the buildings predate the 1961 rules, which shrank the size of permissible reconstruction. Existing structures were grandfathered in — not so, potential new ones.
As a result, leading companies in need of state-of-the-art new facilities are moving anywhere but along or astride the Park Avenue corridor that was once their first choice.
But council members are being furiously lobbied against the rezoning. Preservationists, “congestion”-phobes, advocates for “higher civic aspirations” and just plain obstructionists want to kill or dilute the measure — or at least delay it ’til Bloomberg’s gone.
They howl that larger, taller skyscrapers might, God forbid, cast shadows on or diminish the grandeur of masterpieces like the Chrysler and Seagram buildings and Grand Central Terminal.
Meanwhile, landlords who know how desperate the situation is pull their punches for fear of making the fading precinct sound even less appealing than so much of it has become.
Yes, a number of marquee headquarters tenants such as Citigroup remain. But vacancies are inching up toward 13 percent (as counted by real-estate brokerage CBRE). More ominously, corporate momentum of the kind that sets the pace for the commercial scene is all on the way out, not in.
City Hall warns that without change, tenants who’ve been attracted to East Midtown “in the past would begin to look elsewhere.” In fact, they’ve been going elsewhere for many years.
Time Warner moved to Columbus Circle, Hearst to Eighth Avenue and Bank of America to Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Law firm Proskauer Rose chose 11 Times Square, where Microsoft is headed as well.
Two large law firms chose brand-new 250 W. 55th St. One of them, Kaye Scholer, is leaving 425 Park Ave., its home of 55 years. The building is so antiquated, its owners plan to tear it down for a new one designed by architect Norman Foster. But because the relic is “overbuilt” by 1961 rules, they must keep 25 percent of its steel merely to put up a same-size new structure.
That will complicate and maybe compromise the effort. But it’s that, or wait four years for new zoning to kick in, if it’s approved.
The “sunrise provision” and other complexities with which the city hamstrung the rezoning proposal are needless. But even with flaws, it’s a must to liberate East Midtown from its straitjacket.
Until then, the area’s only hope is ambitious upgrade of older properties, as is happening at 280 Park Ave. But patch-and-fix isn’t the optimal future for a neighborhood that still embodies the magic of Manhattan as no other.
The goal is to reaffirm its premier status. It will only happen by allowing new landmarks — big, tall and worthy of their setting — to rise in the century ahead.