Real Estate

Pushkin takes a swing at Mantle’s

Russian pelmeni and borscht might soon replace all-American burgers and shakes at the longtime home of sports bar/eatery Mickey Mantle’s.

Landlord Atco, which is trying to evict the bankrupt restaurant founded by the Yankee Hall-of-Famer from its 25-year home at 42 Central Park South, is negotiating with the owners of nearby high-end Russian restaurant Brasserie Pushkin to replace it, sources said.

Whether or not Atco boss Dale Hemmerdinger strikes a deal with Pushkin owner Andrey Dellos, today looms as the bottom of the ninth with two down and nobody on for Mickey Mantle’s.

Owner Chris Villano plans to bring a $71,000 check to Bankruptcy Court to cover one month’s rent — hopefully buying time to find new funding to cover arrears.

As The Post first reported, the eatery hasn’t paid rent in four months due to a recent drop-off in business. Villano attributes the slowdown partly to his claim that Atco violated terms of the lease, which still has eight years left.

A spokeswoman for Atco yesterday said the company had no comment on Mickey Mantle’s or on Brasserie Pushkin. Neither Villano nor a rep for Brasserie Pushkin got back to us.

Hemmerdinger wants Mantle’s gone by the end of May.

Bill Liederman, who was slugging No. 7’s original partner in the place and is now a consultant, said he’s trying to raise $1 million to save it.

Opulent czarist-era fantasy Brasserie Pushkin recently opened at 41 W. 57th St., and earned a two-star review in The Post for its “refined” cuisine. Moscow-based entrepreneur Dellos also plans to open a new lower-priced outpost on West 14th Street, as has been reported.

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Dentsu Holdings USA has leased 33,000 more square feet at the Rudin family’s 32 Sixth Ave., bringing the firm’s stake there to 183,000 square feet. The asking rent was $50 per square foot, according to a source.

The subsidiary of Tokyo-based Dentsu Inc. is a leading holding company for advertising services firms.

Rudin Management CEO Bill Rudin is, not surprisingly, “delighted” by the expansion of “one of the most respected and revered pioneers and innovators in the digital media and technology fields.”

With 1.2 million square feet, 32 Sixth Ave.’s state-of-the-art infrastructure is also home to Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Clear Channel and Verizon.

Rudin’s Robert Steinman represented the landlord in-house, and Jones Lang LaSalle’s Alex Chudnoff and Scott Vinett repped Dentsu Holdings.

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The “iconic” new building L&L Holdings plans to replace its obsolescent 425 Park Ave. with could be a lot more iconic if the city rezones the Grand Central office district before 2015, when work is to begin.

Right now, L&L plans on keeping 25 percent of the tower’s core while it entertains design proposals from “starchitects” including Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano for a mostly new structure.

That’s because retaining one-quarter of the existing structural steel would be the only way L&L could replicate the tower’s roughly 600,000 square feet under existing zoning, which dates to 1961.

Incredibly, the 1961 zoning requires new buildings near Grand Central to be roughly 25 percent smaller than those constructed in the 1950s.

“If they make the modification to City Planning, we would do full demolition and take advantage of it,” L&L Chairman/CEO David W. Levinson said of the $750 million project.

It would allow him to create a truly new building “and would give the architects a freer hand,” he said.

The 32-story building, opened in 1957, is built to a floor-area ratio of 20. If L&L were to tear the whole structure down and start from the ground up, its replacement could be built only to an FAR of 15 under 1961 rules.

But although L&L needs to start planning soon, it still has some time, since it can’t start work until 2015 when leases expire.

The first public warning about zoning limitations near Grand Central was sounded last winter by CBRE regional CEO Mary Ann Tighe, who’s also chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York.

In a speech at Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate, Tighe noted that although many office towers in Midtown’s most desirable commercial area are out of date, landlords were unlikely to replace them because “most are overbuilt under current zoning.”

She said of the Grand Central-area structures:

“Sure, you can keep the existing FAR if 25 percent of the structural steel is saved, but then you’d end up with a compromised design, with slab heights and column spacing sacrificed so as not to lose valuable square footage.”

L&L might not have to compromise as much as some other owners, thanks to certain technical characteristics of the existing 425 Park Ave. But it isn’t hard to guess that Levinson & Co. would prefer not to compromise at all.

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JUST to annoy retail brokers department:

While they love to claim that 57th Street is doing just dandy, it only gets worse — nearly river-to-river.

Take the long block between Fifth and Sixth avenues. It has seven highly visible vacancies, many of them at prime addresses. A long- empty lot and several “art” and souvenir stores of the kind that once spoiled Fifth Avenue add to the blighted look, despite the presence of such retail landmarks as Bergdorf Goodman and fancy restaurants.

Brokers blame a fall-off in foot traffic west of Fifth.

The real reason is landlords who keep spaces empty indefinitely as they seek rents that can’t be obtained or bide their time for redevelopment that might never come.

Of course, with each new storefront they keep dark — like those in several of Sheldon Solow’s properties — shoppers have less reason to go to the block at all, thereby diminishing their value.