NYC Commercial Real Estate

[lofter1]

Re: 17 E. 47th / Mercantile Library Building

DOB shows two recent Filings for standpipe work / fire alarm installation work ( 5.05.08 & 5.15.08 ).

Department of Finance shows two NEW filings for 17 E. 47th:

Zoning Lot Description - May 2, 2008

Insurance Certificate - May 2, 2008

DOF shows no recent filings for either of the buildings which are neighbors to 17 E. 47.

[The Benniest]

There is news on the New York Post today about the General Motors Building being bought.

Article on Wired New York here.

[kliq6]

Deutsche Bank is reportedly searching for 450,000 square feet of office space in Manhattan, but no one knows exactly why. A source told the New York Observer the bank has already looked into both 11 Times Square and 345 Park Avenue. Last spring, Deutsche Bank sold its headquarters at 60 Wall Street to the Paramount Group for $1.2 billion and signed a lease renewal for 15 years.

[antinimby]

Manhattan falls in global ranking of most expensive office space


Updated On 05/28/08 at 05:57PM

Manhattan dropped in CB Richard Ellis Groups's worldwide rankings of the most expensive office spaces from the No. 12 spot to No. 13. Dubai moved up in the list, bumping Manhattan down. Manhattan is still by far North America's most expensive office space market at $103.43 per square foot.

The next closest were Calgary at No. 42 with $66.27 per square foot and Toronto at No. 47 at $62.44. London's West End held its place at the top with $299.54 per square feet, and Moscow climbed to the second slot. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam jumped from No. 45 to No. 23. Miami recorded the biggest percentage gain in price at 29 percent. TRD

© 2008 The Real Deal

[brianac]

Priced Out of Brooklyn, Nonprofit Takes Manhattan

By CANDACE TAYLOR, Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 29, 2008

When the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions began looking for a new home because its lease at 120 Wall St. was expiring, Brooklyn seemed like the top option for a nonprofit aiming to cut costs.

Ben Parker
The Public Affairs Officer for the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, Rafael O. Morales, in his office at 116 John Street in downtown Manhattan.


There was one problem — the group couldn't afford the rent.
"Everyone thinks you get these dirt-cheap prices in the outer boroughs, but Brooklyn was more expensive," the president of the federation, Clifford Rosenthal, said. It eventually signed a lease for the 33rd floor of 116 John St. in Lower Manhattan.

For one of the first times in recent memory, brokers are saying office space is more affordable in Lower Manhattan than in Brooklyn.

While average rents in Lower Manhattan are still costlier — $50.41 a square foot versus $31.86 in Brooklyn, according to Cushman & Wakefield — the numbers can be misleading, brokers said, as they are asking rents, not the actual rents at which leases close. In addition, landlords in Lower Manhattan, spooked by the softening market and rising vacancy rates, are offering free build-outs and other generous concessions. At the same time, the popularity of downtown Brooklyn and DUMBO has left little affordable inventory for nonprofits and other cost-conscious companies.

"There's this perception that the boroughs are cheaper than Manhattan, and I don't know that that's true," a senior director at Cushman & Wakefield, Carri Lyon, said. She said she is working with a social services agency that looked "extensively" in Brooklyn before entering into negotiations for space in Lower Manhattan. "We found that the better deal for them was downtown," she said, adding that she couldn't name the tenant until the deal closed.

Landlords in Lower Manhattan are more anxious than in the past to give concessions, due in part to the 7.2% vacancy rate, an increase of one percentage point from the fourth quarter of 2007, according to Cushman & Wakefield. "It's a higher vacancy rate than it was down here, and landlords are quick to respond," Ms. Lyon said.

Another incentive for locating in Lower Manhattan is the city's Commercial Revitalization Program, which confers real estate tax abatements that can save tenants who are downtown $2.50 a square foot on their rent. "It's a nice extra goody from downtown," Ms. Lyon said. Many of the tax incentives available for companies moving to boroughs other than Manhattan, such as the city's Relocation And Employment Assistance program, don't help nonprofits because they already have tax-exempt status.

While tenants are finding concessions in Lower Manhattan, across the bridge in Brooklyn there is a severe shortage of affordable office space.
"It's never been this tight," the chief executive at Brooklyn-based Corporate Real Estate Services, Christopher Havens, said. "The market's gotten very strong and Brooklyn's gotten very strong. This area's never received this kind of attention."

According to Newmark Knight Frank, downtown Brooklyn had only 1.27 million square feet of vacant office space available for rent at the end of the first quarter of 2008, compared with 5.36 million square feet in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Havens estimated that in downtown Brooklyn and DUMBO, there are perhaps 40 buildings to choose from, and roughly half of those are Class A, where the rent is out of reach of many small companies looking for good value.

Lower Manhattan, on the other hand, has "quite a diversity of office space," the principal of real estate consulting firm Denham Wolf, Jon Denham, said. "There are more opportunities in Lower Manhattan," he said, including "smaller, older buildings" that are often available for less than new office space in Brooklyn.

Not every nonprofit has found that it is more lucrative to be in Lower Manhattan than Brooklyn. In fact, when the Ms. Foundation for Women announced in February it would leave its headquarters in Lower Manhattan for 12 MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, observers expected that a flood of nonprofits would begin fleeing high rents in Manhattan for Brooklyn.

That hasn't yet come to pass, according to the vice president of the nonprofit practice group at CB Richard Ellis, Suzanne Sunshine.

"There isn't much product in Brooklyn. I'm back in downtown" Manhattan, she said. "There are more options in downtown than there were a year ago."

http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/pri...nhattan/78868/

© 2008 The New York Sun,

[brianac]

Mercantile Library Moves, and Gets a Nudge Into the 21st Century

By LILY KOPPEL
Published: June 3, 2008

Above an ornate iron staircase, marble busts of past presidents and members watch over the reading room of the Mercantile Library, with its molded fireplace and grand piano. It is an elegant space befitting one of the three private libraries remaining in New York City.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Noreen Tomassi, executive director of the Mercantile Library, among the portraits and paintings that will move to a new location.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times
A bust of Benjamin Franklin, a noted librarian, will also move.

Founded in 1820 by merchants and their clerks before “the advent of public libraries,” as the library’s Web site says, the Mercantile last month shut the doors of its eight-story white marble neoclassical building at 17 East 47th Street, which has been its home since 1932.

The library had sought to renovate its headquarters, but the cost is beyond its means, and so the Mercantile is selling the building and looking for new home. Noreen Tomassi, the library’s executive director, declined to divulge the price or the name of the buyer, but said the new owner intends the preserve the building.

In the meantime, plans for the library’s reinvention are under way, including a new name — the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction — to emphasize its focus on fiction. Since becoming the library’s executive director in 2004, Ms. Tomassi has been steering the Mercantile toward becoming more of a literary arts center that can play a part in keeping the narrative book form alive. Besides better serving its some 800 dues-paying members, she wants the library to be more of a destination for established authors and emerging writers.

The decision to sell the building has caused concern among some members, particularly because a new home has yet to be found. “To shut the building down without another one bought and waiting is simply foolish,” Michele Slung, an editor and a member, said in an e-mail message.

In a post on the library’s Web site, Ms. Tomassi said, “I understand that this all sounds a bit scary, but it’s also very exciting. When this transition is complete, we’ll christen the new building as the home of the only literary organization in the United States solely devoted to the art of fiction.”

During the library’s transition period, its reading groups will continue to meet at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen on West 44th Street, which houses one of the city’s other private libraries. In a gesture of solidarity, the city’s third private library, the New York Society Library on East 79th Street, will allow Mercantile members to borrow its books.

According to library lore, Edgar Allan Poe composed several short works at the Mercantile.

A popular lecture program once featured William Makepeace Thackeray, Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain. And Jonathan Franzen is among the contemporary writers who have worked in the library’s studio, which has 20 desks.

Ms. Tomassi, 56, has also attracted a new audience with programs that feature younger fiction writers. A younger crowd is also why the library is looking for a new home in SoHo, TriBeCa or near the New Museum, the contemporary art museum in the Bowery.

The estimates for refurbishing the current location started at $6 million and were too high, according to Ms. Tomassi, who said the sale of the building would increase the library’s $1.5 million endowment.

The Mercantile Library, in many ways, never fully made the transition from an age of mercantilism to the information age. In the 19th century, it operated as a significant cultural institution with 13,000 members. It was the fourth-largest library in the country, with three locations in Manhattan and 10 regional branches. Books were delivered by horse cart after being requested by mail in envelopes posted with a Mercantile Library stamp, much like an early version of Netflix.

Even until the day it closed, the library relied on a card catalogu to find books that were then retrieved and hand-delivered by librarians from the dusty stacks holding a collection of 75,000 fiction titles from the last 100 years. An additional 10,000 titles from the 19th century are kept in climate-controlled storage in New Jersey.

Founded before the introduction of the Dewey Decimal System, the library arranged its collection alphabetically — by title for fiction and by author for nonfiction. This was overhauled when the library opened some of its stacks to allow members to browse for their own books.

“It’s like no other place,” said Sonia Kozlova, the managing director of Urban Stages, an Off Broadway theater company that rented space in the library’s building. “You felt you were in a very special world.”

Ms. Tomassi said that the building’s new owner would allow the removal of some of the library’s original fixtures, including Art Deco-style lights and the grillwork from the creaky wood-paneled elevator. Ms. Tomassi hopes to incorporate the old decorations into a new circulation desk that will for the first time be equipped with a computer. “Little things to carry on history,” she said.

Many of the library’s nonfiction holdings have been sold off and donated, like books on maritime history and botany, as well as 19th-century, self-help-themed titles that merchants hoped would instill moral character in their clerks and keep them “away from the rum shop and billiard room,” as William Wood, the library’s founder, once put it.

Joining the library by paying annual dues of $100, many members use it as a place to perch in Midtown. At a dinner in March, the library told about 50 members of the sale of the building. Others were notified in letters or by e-mail, Ms. Tomassi said.

Touring the old building as she spoke about plans for the future, Ms. Tomassi was closely watched by the portraits of bearded men in gold frames who once held her job.

“Times have changed,” she said. “The vibrant centers of the city have changed. The challenge the board faced was trying to run a capital campaign to raise money to refurbish the building in an area which does not have the kind of residential community and vibrant night life that we believe is in important to the institution to grow, where young writers are living who we can help.”

Stan Burnett, 72, a retired American diplomat who lived for years with his wife in Rome, has been a member of the library for 10 years.

“There used to be places in the city serious about literature — the cafeteria next to the old Jewish Forward and the White Horse Tavern, where Brendan Behan and others met — but modernity has sort of done them in,” Mr. Burnett said. “Here at the Merc, you still find it, the best of the barroom and the Left Bank. It would be really too bad if the physical move did anything to stop that, but it’s in good hands.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/ny...1&ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[kliq6]

RSM McGladrey, a division of H&R Block, has signed up for a big renewal and expansion at SL Green's 1185 Sixth Avenue. The accounting firm took another floor with 27,508 square feet, giving it 164,700 square feet. The asking rent on the new space was $95 per square foot.

[brianac]

The City Visible

A Cathedral to Cash, Up for Rent

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

By JAKE MOONEY
Published: June 8, 2008

EVEN with the teller windows quiet and construction dust gathering in the corners, stepping through a low-ceilinged lobby and into the soaring main banking hall of the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank building at 1 Hanson Place in Brooklyn can feel like entering a secular house of worship.

Ruby Washington/The New York Times


Ruby Washington/The New York Times

That is no accident. Robert Helmer, the building’s chief architect, hoped it would be seen as “a cathedral dedicated to the furtherance of thrift and prosperity of the community it serves,” according to a report prepared for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which declared the space a landmark in 1996. Scattered between the marble floor and the ceiling 55 feet up are numerous depictions of tradesmen at work: a machinist and a plumber on the gates between rooms, and a lawyer and a jeweler on the elevator doors, among many others.

Since 2005, though, few people have passed through the space other than construction workers, who have been converting the upper floors to condos, and real estate agents marketing the space. An HSBC bank branch on the site shut down then, and the building’s new owners have been searching for a retail client to open the space to the public — albeit in a somewhat different form — since a deal for a Borders bookstore to move in fell through last year.

The space has a lot to offer, its broker said: 15,000 square feet on the main level, 3,000 more on a mezzanine and 15,000 in the basement, where a vault with three five-foot-thick steel doors is being removed. But the hall will not come cheap: The asking rent is about $2 million a year.

As much as square footage, the brokers are marketing location and style, both of them on display in a glowing mosaic at the north end of the room.

It depicts the building bathed in golden sunlight at the heart of Brooklyn, the entire city spread out at its feet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/ny...ml?ref=thecity

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[brianac]

AIG Takes 800,000 Feet at 180 Maiden Lane in Year's Biggest Lease Deal

by Dana Rubinstein | June 9, 2008

Google Images.

AIG has just assumed the remainder of Goldman Sachs' lease at 180 Maiden Lane. At 800,000 square feet, it's the largest lease transaction so far this year.

"We will consolidate several AIG offices in Manhattan to 180 Maiden Lane," said a source familiar with the deal. "70 Pine will remain our corporate headquarters."

The move will be executed in phases, beginning this September, with AIG fully occupying the 30 floors by 2011.

http://www.observer.com/2008/aig-tak...80-maiden-lane

© 2008 Observer Media Group,

[kliq6]

London Tops New York In New Commerce Ranking
By PETER KIEFER, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 10, 2008

London appears to be cementing its reputation as the world's most influential financial capital, ahead of even New York City.

For the second year running, New York City ranked second to London in the MasterCard Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, a study that evaluates the world's leading cities and their roles in connecting markets and driving global commerce.

In all but one of the evaluating criteria, London scored higher than New York, including such categories as livability, economic stability, and ease of doing business.

A vice president of the Partnership for New York City, Diana Torres, said she was not particularly concerned by the report's findings.

"I think that any competition is healthy and today a study puts London in pole position, while another released on Friday would put New York as no. 1," she said.

The report also showed that the fastest year-to-year growth of cities climbing the index is in Asia and Eastern Europe. Shanghai had the largest jump in overall rank, moving eight spots, to 24 from 32, in the period between 2007 and 2008. Singapore climbed to no. 4 from no. 6 in the same period.

Only two American cities ranked in the top 10 — New York and Chicago — with Los Angeles dropping to 17 from 10 between the 2007 and the 2008 rankings.

"Competition is global and New York needs to be looking all over the world not just to address its competitive challenges but to also bolster its competitive strengths," Ms. Torres said.

The Partnership for New York City said it would be issuing its own report in December.

[kliq6]

Manhattan Class A vacancy rate rose to 6.9 percent in May, up from 6.4 percent in April and 5.3 percent at the beginning of the year, according to data from the brokerage Colliers ABR. After JP Morgan and Bank of America added large blocks of office space, Midtown's vacancy rate increased to 7.1 percent. Downtown, the vacancy rate increased to 6.3 percent from 5.9 percent in April, as Goldman Sachs put its offices on the market in preparation of its move to a new tower in Battery Park City. Midtown South saw improvements, and their vacancy rate fell to 9.9 percent, the first time it's been below 10 percent since January. TRD

[brianac]

Square Feet

Squeezing Big-Box Retailing Into Small City Spaces

Brennan Beer Gorman Architects
A rendering of Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market by Brennan Beer Gorman Achitects.

By TERRY PRISTIN
Published: June 11, 2008

When David Blumenfeld, a developer in Syosset, N.Y., bought a long-dormant wire factory in the East Harlem section of Manhattan in 1994 with the intention of turning it into a vertical shopping center for big-box stores, the notion that quintessentially suburban retailers could adjust to an urban setting had yet to be fully tested.

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times
John R. Clifford, left, and Navid Maqami of GreenbergFarrow designed East River Plaza.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
East River Plaza is expected to open in October 2009.

So to design his project, East River Plaza, Mr. Blumenfeld chose GreenbergFarrow, an Atlanta firm that has designed 1,800 stores for Home Depot since 1979.

“They had a very good sense of what the tenants needed to make this thing work,” Mr. Blumenfeld said recently.

After many delays, East River Plaza, which stretches from 116th Street and 119th Street along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, is expected to open in October 2009, Mr. Blumenfeld said. It will have 485,000 square feet of retail space on five floors and parking for 1,248 cars — all on only six acres. A suburban project of this size would encompass at least 40 acres, Mr. Blumenfeld said.

These days, urban big-box retailing is no longer a novelty, and East River Plaza will not be the only shopping center of its kind to squeeze into a densely populated New York neighborhood.

It will not even be the only one to bear GreenbergFarrow’s stamp. The firm also worked on two more recently planned projects that are under construction: the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market, at 149th Street in the South Bronx, with one million square feet, and Rego Park Mall II, a 600,000-square-foot addition to a mall on Queens Boulevard and 63rd Road in Queens. Both centers are expected to be completed next year.

GreenbergFarrow’s other projects in the city include River Plaza, a shopping center with 235,000 square feet that opened in 2004 on 225th Street, near the Harlem River, as well as the Ikea store that is scheduled to open in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn next week.

Developers of urban office towers often aspire to make a statement with a strikingly original design by a celebrity architect, but those who hope to lure big-box retailers have more mundane priorities.

GreenbergFarrow specializes in the logistical challenges that retailers do not usually encounter in the suburbs, where stores do not need to be stacked on top of one another. Much of the firm’s focus is on how to get people and merchandise in and out of the stores.

People might visit a shopping district like SoHo or Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village as an enjoyable way to pass a few hours, but they shop in big-box stores purely for practical reasons and are annoyed if they are forced to linger, said John R. Clifford, a principal of GreenbergFarrow. “One experience is recreational and the other is all about convenience,” he said in an interview at the company’s Manhattan office.

Ease of access is a test for big-box centers, Mr. Clifford said. “We always try to make the user experience intuitive,” he said. “Would my grandmother be able to figure this out?”

From the outset, Mr. Blumenfeld, the principal of the Blumenfeld Development Group, hoped to attract retailers like Home Depot and Costco, whose suburban customers are used to parking in a big lot and wheeling carts and pallets along flat surfaces.

Since a parking lot was out of the question at East River Plaza, GreenbergFarrow tried to make parking in the garage as similar as possible to a suburban experience. The parking surfaces themselves are flat and accessible directly from the stores by bridges, and shoppers enter and exit by means of circular ramps located at two corners of the parking structure.

The garage’s design also addresses the concerns of retailers that carts loaded with heavy material like lumber would pose a danger on sloping ramps, said Navid Maqami, a principal of GreenbergFarrow. But this design added tremendously to the cost. “This is the most inefficient way to build a parking structure,” Mr. Blumenfeld said.

Typically, 180 to 220 square feet are allocated for each car, he said. Because of space taken up by the circular ramps, the East River Plaza garage allocates 550 square feet per space instead, raising the cost of a parking space from $12,000 to $50,000, he said.

The $440 million cost of the project is nearly triple what was estimated when the city approved it in 1999. The facade, which will be wrapped in a steel mesh American flag, was designed by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Kevin Roche. Blumenfeld is developing East River Plaza with Forest City Ratner, which was also the partner of The New York Times Company in its headquarters building on Eighth Avenue.

Home Depot has been part of the East River Plaza project for about a decade. Two years ago, the retailer signed a 30-year lease for 110,000 square feet of space. But like many national retailers, Home Depot is trimming its expansion plans as a result of the weak economy, and the company is talking to two warehouse clubs — Costco and BJ’s — about subletting its space, Mr. Blumenfeld said. A Home Depot spokeswoman said the company is “re-evaluating” the site.

As it happens, Costco had counted on becoming one of the anchor stores at East River Plaza, but instead the developers cut a deal with Target in 2006, leading Jeffrey H. Brotman, Costco’s chairman, to complain publicly about being shunted aside.

Mr. Brotman said the talks with Home Depot are in the early stages. “We are simply exploring if it will work physically,” he said in an e-mail message. “If so, then we would need to see if we can reach financial terms.”

If Home Depot does sublet its space, customers can shop at another Home Depot store at the nearby Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market. GreenbergFarrow designed the master plan for the Gateway Center, which is similar in concept to East River Plaza, except that it has two retail buildings instead of one. Asked about the look-alike design, Mr. Blumenfeld said, “We’ll call it flattery for now.”

Glenn Goldstein, president of Related Retail, the developer of the Gateway Center, said the design was inspired by the Dadeland Mall in Miami, not East River Plaza. He said he was unconcerned about the proximity of the two shopping centers. “We feel the market is certainly deep enough for both projects to be successful,” Mr. Goldstein said.

GreenbergFarrow’s first completed New York project was Queens Place in the Elmhurst section of Queens, where a Stern’s department store was converted into a home for Target, Best Buy and other large-format retailers, Mr. Maqami said. “Everybody talks in terms of big boxes,” he said. “But these are the department stores of today.”

Now that big-box developers have shown they are willing to modify their formats, city dwellers across the country should expect to find more such stores in their midst, said Michael D. Beyard, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, an industry research group.

With the housing slowdown, fewer shopping centers are likely to be built outside urban areas. “Retailers have a herd instinct,” he said.

“The changing economy, including the price of gasoline, would favor the continuing development of these projects in the city.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/re...l?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[brianac]

Square Feet

A Big New York City Movie Studio Is Getting Bigger

JANSON DESIGN GROUP
An architect’s rendering of the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, after its expansion.

By JANE L. LEVERE
Published: June 11, 2008

Kaufman Astoria Studios, one of New York City’s three largest movie studios, is moving ahead with a major expansion plan, nine years after it was announced.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
George S. Kaufman, left, the developer, and Hal G. Rosenbluth, president of the studio.

The studio, in the Astoria section of Queens, will break ground this fall on a $20 million building, with an 18,000-square-foot soundstage and 22,000 square feet of support space, on a plot of land diagonally across 36th Street from its current building, which is between 34th and 35th Avenues.

Eventually, the studio intends to shut off 36th Street and erect a gate to create a studio lot — a compound with indoor and outdoor sets — and to construct a tower that would combine a hotel and office space directly behind the new soundstage.

Astoria Studios is not the only New York movie studio that is expanding: Two years ago, Silvercup Studios, in Long Island City, Queens, announced that it would build a $1 billion complex on the East River waterfront, south of the Queensboro Bridge. It is to have eight new soundstages, production and support space, two towers with 1,000 apartments, an office tower and stores.

Construction has been delayed, however, by problems involving the removal of generators, owned by the New York Power Authority, on the site. Stuart Match Suna, Silvercup Studios’ president, said he hoped this matter would be resolved in time for work to begin next year.

The newest of the big three studios, the four-year-old Steiner Studios, is renovating a 289,000-square-foot building adjacent to its current soundstages in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for use as production and office space. It also announced last November that it had joined forces with the Navy Yard to transform a 20-acre segment of the yard into a media and entertainment center that would also contain a studio lot.

All the development is intended to take advantage of tax incentives offered by the city and state governments.

To lure film production away from other states and Canada, the New York State Legislature four years ago approved a 10 percent tax credit on certain production costs, primarily for blue-collar technicians and crew members, and a 5 percent credit from New York City. These tax breaks — which are applied toward state and city income taxes — were sweetened in April, when the Legislature tripled the state tax incentive to 30 percent.
George S. Kaufman, a developer of New York City office and showroom space, has leased Astoria Studios, which dates to the 1920s silent-picture era, from the city government since 1982. A 10-minute subway ride from Manhattan, the studio’s original 300,000-square-foot building holds six soundstages, a recording studio and 50,000 square feet of office space.

The neighborhood around the original studio building has many related buildings, including a 63,000-square-foot loft building, at 35th Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets, that Mr. Kaufman converted to offices five years ago. Directly across 35th Avenue is a multiplex theater.

Other buildings in the neighborhood also have links to the creative arts. The Museum of the Moving Image, across 36th Street from the original studio building, is undergoing a $65 million renovation and expansion.

In addition, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a high school established in 2001, will move next January into a new building on 35th Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets, on land also previously leased by Astoria Studios.

Astoria Studios announced plans to build a new soundstage and support space in 1999, but Hal G. Rosenbluth, its president, said it had delayed going forward because “as 9/11 happened, some of our financing came into question.” He added: “Production tax credits later came into play, and the city was able to resurrect some of the financing that was set earlier.”

Mr. Kaufman said Astoria Studios would embark on the public review process required to “demap” 36th Street, in order to create a studio lot, once construction begins on the new soundstage in the fall. He estimated the lot would cost about $2 million.

Later, he would like to construct the new hotel and office building behind the new soundstage. The tower is expected to be as big as 150,000 square feet and 18 stories high; this is now in the planning stage.
Government officials and film industry observers generally laud Astoria Studios’ expansion plans. In the last month, the studio announced that it would be used for two new television series: ABC’s “Life on Mars,” about a time-traveling detective, and HBO’s “Last of the Ninth,” a police drama. A remake of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” originally made in 1974, is currently being produced there.

“There is a growing competitive awareness that the space you are offering for TV and film production needs to be upgraded in quantity and upgraded in quality,” said Rosemary Scanlon, associate professor of economics at the Real Estate Institute of New York University and former chief economist of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Ms. Scanlon estimates that television and film production is responsible for $6.6 billion of the total $21.2 billion generated by the arts in New York’s economy.

She said Astoria Studios’ plans for mixed-use development could “help offset the risk of putting investment in soundstages.” She said: “Once you build the facility, then it’s a marketing process. Studio space is like inventory; you have to market it every time it becomes vacant.”

Pat Swinney Kaufman, executive director of the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, said the film industry “can absolutely absorb” the expansions by the three movie studios. (Ms. Kaufman is not related to George S. Kaufman.)

Michael N. Gianaris, a Democratic state assemblyman from Queens, predicted the new development would be “an integral part of the continued success of Long Island City and Astoria. It’s an area of the city growing by leaps and bounds; many of us believe it will be the next big business district for the city.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/bu...l?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[kliq6]

Hunts Point Food Distribution, the largest wholesale market in the world, might be leaving its Bronx home. Consultants say the market will outgrow its 1967 space in five years, and the city has declined their $150 million request to build a new facility in the southeast Bronx. Hunts Point shareholders are looking for another location near a highway or rail system for easy distribution, but that could mean higher prices for consumers if grocers have to travel outside the city for crates of fruits and vegetables.

[Derek2k3]

1140 Avenue of Americas is getting a new skin. The renovation is by Iu & Bibliowicz Architects LLP, same firm that did the new Alvin Ailey building.



http://1140aofa.com

This is the second time the building has been reclad since it was built in 1926.
http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=...orkcity-ny-usa



Also, there's a residential tower on 2nd in the 20's that removed its entire brick facade.