Brookfield Office Properties plans to spend $200 million to turn Manhattan’s largest office-building beast into a beauty — which is good news not only for fortress-like 450 W. 33rd St., but for Brookfield’s Manhattan West, its adjacent 5-development site.
In fact, 450 W. 33rd St., to be reclad in glass by architect Joshua Prince-Ramus of hot firm REX, will be so “integrated” into the site that it will be renamed Five Manhattan West and connected with the rest of it by a park to be built over a Lincoln Tunnel entrance.
Despite its intimidating, severely slanted, precast concrete facade, the 1.8 million square-foot, 1969-vintage, 16-story tower between Tenth and Dyer avenues and 31st to 33rd streets is surprisingly functional, thanks to 100,000 square-foot floor plates, high ceilings and modern electronic systems.
But the neo-Brutalist hulk remains an eyesore despite cosmetic work in 2003. Asked if that work by a previous owner, including armor-like metal plates, made it slightly less ugly, Brookfield CEO Dennis Friedrich laughed, “That’s being generous. Our architects think they made it uglier.”
It wasn’t the aesthetic backdrop Brookfield wanted for the $4.5 billion Manhattan West, which will have a total 7 million square feet of office, residential and retail space, plus public green space immediately east of 450 W. 33rd.
To establish a street-level environment for Manhattan West, Brookfield is building a 120,000 square-foot deck above the Amtrak rail yard between Ninth and Dyer avenues and between West 31st and 33d streets. The new towers will rise from bedrock at the track level and be thrust through holes in the platform.
The epic redesign of 450 W. 33rd might dwarf even the travertine-to-glass recladding of the former Verizon tower at 1095 Sixth Ave. It will replace the concrete with a pleated glasscurtain wall, creating floor-to-ceiling windows.
The project also includes a redesigned lobby, elevator, enhanced systems and new retail storefronts — all to be completed between spring 2014 and summer 2016.
Friedrich said 450 W. 33rd is about 75 percent leased. Asking rents are in the $60s to $70s per square foot range, Friedrich said. The building has an odd history, having been used at first as a warehouse for the EJ Korvette department-store chain. More recent previous tenants included the Sky Rink ice-skating facility and the Daily News.
The largest current tenants are the Associated Press and Coach Inc.
But Coach will leave behind about 330,000 square feet two years from now when it moves to Related’s Hudson Yards between 10th and 12th avenues just west of Brookfield’s site.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Bruce Mosler and Josh Kuriloff are the exclusive leasing agents for 450 W. 33rd and for Manhattan West’s SOM-designed office towers.
Although $200 million sounds like enough for an entire new midsize building, Friedrich says it works out to a modest $120 per square foot.
Publicly traded Brookfield’s cost basis for the tower — taking into account acquisition, accumulated ownership and the renovation — is around $400 a square foot, “half of what its replacement cost would be.”
Now, this should be lively: a “Town Hall” panel discussion on controversial Central Park-area supertowers sponsored by Community Board 5. The Feb. 19 (6 p.m.) session at the Museum of Arts and Design will feature Extell Development chief Gary Barnett (who’s building two of the cloudbusters), New York Landmarks Conservancy president Peg Breen, Municipal Art Society chair Margaret Newman, and skeptical pols Liz Krueger, Richard Gottfried, Linda Rosenthal and Dan Garodnick.
CB 5 landmarks committee chair Layla Law-Gisiko will moderate. Bring your own flak jackets.
It’s free, but you must register here first.