Broadway theater owner, the Nederlander Organization, is moving uptown — well just a few blocks — to a classic Times Square building in the heart of the Bow-Tie.
The company will move from the modernized 1450 Broadway at West 41st Street to the Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway, which takes up the entire block front from West 43rd to West 44th streets.
Here the company has leased the full, 18,700-square-foot 14th floor.
Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Brian Waterman, Lance Korman and Brent Ozarowski represented the tenant in the move.
“As a theater owner, they wanted to be in the epicenter of show business,” Korman said. “They will be on one floor and can see all the lights of Broadway and have Central Park views.”
An Avison Young team of Principal and Tri-State President Arthur J. Mirante, II, Michael Gottlieb, David Cohen and Thomas Hines represented the building ownership which is investing $50 million in upgrades to the historic property.
The building is topped by clocks on all four sides and a 20-foot round globe that lights up at night, and if you listen carefully, you will hear the clock chiming each night at 7:45 pm and 7:55 pm to alert theater-goers that the curtain will soon rise on their Broadway show.
The 33-story building was designed by Rapp & Rapp in 1926 for Paramount Pictures. The Hard Rock Café and Bubba Gump Shrimp are among the retail tenants.
Mirante said the previous upper reaches of the former Paramount Theater and other floors have been turned into contiguous full-floor spaces totaling 250,000 square feet. These include the column-free eighth floor with 20-foot high ceilings and the 50,000-square-foot 10th floor with exposed structural trusses.
Another lobby with more elevators is also being designed for the 43rd St. side to provide more options for office users.
“Ownership is sensitive to the Art Deco architecture,” Mirante added.
Asking rents range from the low-$60s for base floors into the $70s for the smaller tower floors.
Just a stone’s throw away, Jonathan Yormak and David Peretz’s East End Capital, along with GreenOak Capital, is modernizing an older office building. This one at 321 W. 44th St. has an illustrious history as the former home of the Record Plant recording studio.
John Lennon had his own small studio on the top floor, where he was working before returning to his Dakota home the night he was killed.
Yormak has redubbed the building ‘The Plant,’ and lobby visitors are greeted by colorful photographs of exploding paint.
A new 6,000-square-foot green roof deck and conference room has a kitchen, bathrooms and a giant glass overhead entry door that does double duty as a canopy. This was the setting for a recent party with street artist Faile, who jazzed up the entire east side of the building with a giant artwork.
Scott Panzer and Howard Hersch of JLL are handling the leasing, with asking rents of $54 per square foot.
CAST Software recently signed a lease and will move its North American headquarters from 373 Park Ave. South to a 9,145-foot prebuilt on the fifth floor. The company was represented by Michael Kaufman and Michael McCloskey of the Kaufman Organization.
In another deal, Triton Digital signed a 4,759-square-foot lease on the fifth floor. Based in Los Angeles, the company focuses on the digital audio industry and was represented by Robert Kennedy at Colliers.
It’s a lovely time of year to be on the water, and last week we floated around the East River on a New York Water Taxi to check out progress at the South Street Seaport.
Adam Meister of the Howard Hughes Corp. said Pier 17 will be completely demolished within the next four months and work is very much under way. Architect Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP said new steel pilings will hold up its replacement, which will be a 160,000 square-foot glass retail box — being leased by RKF — with a public park on the top and room to park more boats. They are targeting the next iteration toward everyday New Yorkers, not just tourists.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of both enjoying the rest of the Seaport.
At Tuesday’s NYU hospitality conference at the Marriott, Ivanka Trump, who is rolling out the Mar-a-Lago Spa by Ivanka Trump, was interviewed by conference chair, Lowe’s Hotel’s Jonathan Tisch about her family company.
The Trumps and Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner’s family are developing their first project together in New Jersey, and Tisch asked her how that is going to work out.
“Every night we come home and we love what we are doing and we talk about our projects and we push each other and we brainstorm and we meet people within the same industry and leverage each other’s relationships and get to know each other’s colleagues,” she said.
“I’m so glad he’s not in an industry that bores me.”