WACHOVIA Bank, expanding its consumer presence in the city, is taking its message to the “Crossroads of the World.”
Wachovia just signed a short-term lease for a jumbo sign high on the north face of Times Square Tower, aka 7 Times Square – Boston Properties’ gleaming new green-glass tower, which is nearing completion on 42nd Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenues.
Boston was repped by Sherwood Outdoor, which is also the agent for sign spaces on 1 and 2 Times Square.
The sign will be mounted from floors 34 to 37 of the 47-story skyscraper as early as August. Sherwood chairman Jeffrey Katz it will be about 50 feet wide and 40 feet high – an eye-popper even for Times Square.
Looking south from the “bow tie,” it will stand above and behind the Discover Card signs at the top of 1 Times Square and be seen by a worldwide TV audience of billions on New Year’s Eve.
But Wachovia’s lease only extends until the building opens next winter, when Sherwood will have the job of finding a permanent sign tenant.
“Wachovia will get to see what kind of response the temporary sign gets,” a Times Square source said. “Then they can decide whether to commit to the more expensive option of a long-term lease and creating an electrical spectacular.”
Terms of the 7 Times Square deal were not disclosed. Supersigns on 2 Times Square, five blocks north, have been reported to run $2.5 million a year for long-term leases. Fleet, HSBC and Chase all have prominent supersigns nearby.
The sleek, trapezoidal 7 Times Square, which cleaves Broadway and Seventh Avenue like a latter-day Flatiron Building, was built for Arthur Andersen. The firm’s collapse left Boston with 1.1 million square feet of office space to fill, a task for Insignia/ESG team heavy-hitter John Powers.
Law firm O’Melveny & Myers has already signed on for 200,000 square feet on floors 27 to 34. The sign will overlap some windows on O’Melveny’s highest floor – “which they knew when they took it,” Powers said.
A prime site just north of Times Square appears poised for big-time redevelopment.
Sherwood Equities, parent of Sherwood Outdoors, is weighing options for 1600 Broadway, the 10-story building at 48th Street it has owned for 15 years.
The 1910 structure was once a Studebaker auto factory; in recent times it has housed sound studios and film post-production facilities. Sherwood chairman Katz says he cleared out the last upper-floor tenant about nine months ago, and today the only users are ground-floor fast-food outlets and discount stores – all on month-to-month leases.
The property’s disheveled look belies its value. It stands on a prime site flanked by hotels, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Bros., and can be built significantly larger without zoning changes.
Katz says he’s considering several options: “We had a plan to gut it and build a new Class-A office building, but the market’s not in good shape now.”
One scheme under consideration is a 25-story hotel – “a cousin to the Renaissance, which we built.” There is also another possibility that Katz wasn’t ready to discuss.
The Bronx is home to this newspaper’s new color printing plant. And there’s new life in the borough’s tiny but growing Bronx office market.
The new Hutchinson Metro Center, a low-slung, 460,000-square-foot project off the Hutchinson River in the Pelham Bay section, is more than 45 percent pre-leased prior to its completion early next year. In the latest commitment, Mercy College has taken 130,000 square feet.
Cushman & Wakefield honcha Tara Stacom, who’s also part of the leasing team for Macklowe Properties’ 340 Madison Ave., reps the owners, Simone Development Cos., headed by Joseph Simone.
Stacom said, “There is no better building in any borough, due to its ease of highway access, mass transit and large floor plates.” Asking rents are $30 a foot.
Simone said, “We’re creating an environment that doesn’t exist in the Bronx, including on-site parking, 24/7 security, cafeteria and health club, banking and even dry cleaning.”
Simone bought the former Bronx Development Center, a mental health facility, from the state last year. He stripped down the old buildings on the 18-acre site and rebuilt them on spec.
Bronx-born Simone’s company owns 1 million square feet of Bronx commercial space – about half of the borough’s entire class-A inventory. The Hutchinson center is its first new class-A office project in 10 years.
He said, “Our intent is to bring the bio-tech industry” into the project, but the first phase, “for now, is to bring in Class-A office tenants to put us on the map.” Down the line, Simone envisions a hotel and conference center on the grounds or on 80 acres of adjacent state-owned land.