Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has chosen Tishman Speyer’s dramatic new office skyscraper The Spiral for its new headquarters, The Post has learned.
Although it wasn’t clear whether a lease has yet been signed, Pfizer has definitively made up its mind on the planned Hudson Yards-area cloudbuster, where it will take about 800,000 square feet, sources familiar with the situation said late Thursday.
The 65-story, 2.85-million rentable square-foot Spiral is designed by Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels. To rise west of 10th Avenue at 509 W. 34th St., the $3.2 billion, 1005-foot-tall tower takes its name from stepped, tree-filled terraces on all four sides that curl upwards around its façade like a necklace.
Pfizer’s decision marks an another giant leap forward for the Hudson Yards District, an official west of Ninth Avenue city zoning designation that includes both the 26-acre Hudson Yards complex owned by Related Cos. and several different partners and Brookfield Property Partner’s 7-acre Manhattan West.
The district also includes two development sites whose owners need an anchor tenant to break ground — The Spiral and Joseph Moinian’s 3 Hudson Boulevard at 11th Avenue and 34th Street.
Once completed, the lease with Pfizer will allow Tishman Speyer to get The Spiral out of the ground, sources said. Pfizer had also considered the Related and Brookfield sites among other options.
Earlier this year, Pfizer hired Cushman & Wakefield to market its current East 42nd Street headquarters. Pfizer held off on committing to The Spiral until East Midtown Zoning was passed two weeks ago, sources said. That decision allows a much larger building to go up at the 42nd Street location and thus makes Pfizer’s old property much more valuable.
Pfizer’s move will mark the latest major corporate relocation out of East Midtown. Others that have moved to — or soon will move to — the Hudson Yards District include Coach Inc., Time Warner, BlackRock, Skadden Arps, the National Hockey League, Accenture, Steve Cohen’s Point 72 and the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
The Pfizer deal will also join the battle for tenants between The Spiral and Related’s 50 Hudson Yards just south of it across the street. Related’s tower, roughly as big as Tishman Speyer’s, signed BlackRock as its anchor tenant earlier this year for 847,000 square feet.
Tishman Speyer, led by CEO Rob Speyer, paid $438 million for the Spiral site in 2014. It later bought additional air rights from the Imperatore family and from the city and state for a total of $108 million.
In April, Tishman Speyer announced a partnership with China’s HNA Property Group for both The Spiral and the Macy’s department store development site in downtown Brooklyn.
Reps for Tishman Speyer and for Pfizer could not immediately be reached.