Downtown adds one more hotel

Lois Weiss

BETWEEN THE BRICKS

Another downtown office building is close to becoming a hotel.

Multiple sources say a sale of the Class B building at 170 Broadway, owned by AMG Realty, is in the works to local hotelier Tribeca Associates.

The price wasn’t revealed but even at $300 a foot, the transfer of the 165,000-square-foot building at the southeast corner of Maiden Lane would put around $50 million in the owner’s pocket.

We understand that Tribeca Associates is working on this sans broker. Tribeca is also close to completing its deal to buy the former Donnell Library site at 20 W. 53rd St., which will be rebuilt as a library, luxury hotel and residences. Tribeca and the owner did not return calls for comment.

Downtown is seeing a 20 percent surge in hotel rooms as firms prep for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opening this fall.

“This confirms that lower Manhattan is not only a prime business travel location, but also a tourism mecca,” said Liz Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York.

A 95-room hotel at 24 John St. and the McSam Hotel Group’s Hampton Inn at 32 Pearl St. should both open later this year. A 21-story hotel at 53 Ann St. and an 85- to 95-room hotel at 87 Chambers are also back in development. The American Stock Exchange building at 86 Trinity Place is also being targeted for a 174-room hotel above a retail base.

The former Embassy Suites next to and now owned by Goldman Sachs, is also being turned into a 4.5 star Conrad’s with three Danny Meyer restaurants. Additionally, Larry Silverstein is seeking financing for his Four Seasons Hotel and condo tower at 99 Church St.

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Century 21 is expanding into another 109,000 square feet, including space for retail on floors 4 through 6 as well as offices, in addition to renovating its current 120,000-square-foot store at 22 Cortlandt St. opposite the newWorld Trade Center.

To make the deal, Barrett Stern of Grubb & Ellis, who represents the building owners, had to work with tenants for years to relocate them.

ContextWeb was moved to another floor, while the lease with the New York State Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance was not renewed. Over the weekend, those state workers moved into 90,000 square feet at SL Green Realty’s nearby 100 Church St.

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In other good news for downtown, a deal for the 1 million-square-foot majority interest in the white, nearly windowless Verizon Building at 375 Pearl St. was completed to Seattle developer Sabey Data Centers for $120 million.

Sources tell us Youngwoo Associates is in the deal with a 2 percent equity stake. Additionally, Verizon continues to own at least three floors in the building, which is filled with high-tech switches and wiring that Sabey wants for its clients.

Sabey will rename the building Intergate Manhattan and reposition it as a tech-centric commercial tower.

Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan of CB Richard Ellis marketed the building for M&T Bank, which took the keys back from Taconic Partners when it couldn’t find an anchor tenant willing to pay enough to drop a glass curtain wall on the tower.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Jeffrey Heller and Sean Brady represented Sabey, while Ron Solarz of Eastern Consolidated represented Youngwoo.

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An 83,637-square-foot, lowrise Upper East Side apartment building with an additional 77,023 square feet of buildable air rights has just come on the market for the first time in 50 years.

We got our hands on the offering memorandum sent around by the Jones Lang LaSalle Capital Markets Team, which sources say expects to get about $65 million. JLL declined comment.

The e-mail memo from Richard Baxter, Ron Cohen, Scott Latham and Jon Caplan of JLL says the six-story rental building at 1143 Second Ave. has 93 units broken up into 41 one- bedrooms and 52 studios. About 50 percent of the units are fair market.

It also has with 13 retail stores with “national and regional brands” in 8,067 square feet along the entire 200-foot long blockfront between 60th and 61st streets in Bloomingdale’s country.

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A new bar and restaurant is coming to the Lower East Side.

The owners of the popular haunt, The Delancey at the corner of Clinton Street, just leased another 9,000 square feet five blocks east at 95 Delancey by Ludlow Street.

The new corner triplex space will include a rooftop bar just like the one at The Delancey, which has regular barbecues and other events.

Julia Volpe of Stone Land Capital represented the tenants, while colleague Ben Landy handled negotiations on behalf of the building owner. The asking rent for the retail space was $140 per foot, with the lease setting a record price for the south side of the street.

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On the bright side, Midtown taking rents are ramping up. According to Cushman & Wakefield, over the first five months of the year, 23 transactions in 13 buildings had taking rents starting above $100 per foot. The net effective weighted average rent for these deals penciled out to $118.58 per foot.

Lois@BetweenTheBricks.com