250 West 55th Street

Lois Weiss reported today in the New York Post that Boston Properties' plans for LEED Gold 250 West 55th Street might soon be moving forward once again. According to Weiss, a source told her that "it's supposed to be a deep dark secret" that law firm Proskauer Rose is back negotiating for 500,000 square feet of space at the 38-story, SOM-designed tower. After the law firm backed out of a deal last month, Boston Properties suspended the project (pending completion of foundations) until the economy picked up again. The story got a great deal of play in the green commercial office market news both locally and nationally. Here at gbNYC, we noted the suspension in the context of Real Estate Weekly 's report that Proskauer had moved on and was negotiating with SJP Properties for space in LEED Gold hopeful 11 Times Square. We've been following 11 Times Square's pursuit of an anchor tenant for well over a year now and it's interesting that two LEED projects are fighting for the same firm for their survival, though perhaps not surprising given the lousy economy.

Back in November, we noted an article in Real Estate Weekly reporting that Proskauer Rose might pull out of its tentative agreement to take nearly 500,000 square feet of space at Boston Properties' LEED Gold hopeful 250 West 55th Street (which is currently in the midst of excavation and foundation work). The snag for Proskauer was a loss of financial incentives from Morgan Stanley to vacate its current space at 1585 Broadway early so that the (at the time) investment bank could take over all of the space in that tower.

Earlier this week, REW reported that Proskauer is now in negotiations with SJP Properties for that same 500,000-square-foot block of space at the star-crossed, LEED Gold hopeful 11 Times Square, which remains without a single tenant even after both its steel skeleton and concrete core topped out late last year. REW suggests that a deal would (finally) likely be at a discount from the $100 per square foot asking rent that SJP had refused to lower throughout 2008. (Note that the deal which law firm Gibson Dunn signed last year with Boston Properties at 250 West 55th Street was rumored to be in the low $100s per square foot.)

The New York Observer reported on Wednesday that 20 Times Square, the planned 42-story LEED (for Core and Shell) Gold tower that Vornado and Ruben will co-develop above the north wing of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue, is close to securing an anchor tenant. Law firm Paul Weiss is in preliminary negotiations with Vornado for 500,000 square feet of space across the building's middle floors- over a third of the building's 1.3 million square feet- at what's rumored to be $95 per square foot. The project should be ready for a 2012 or 2013 occupancy; Paul Weiss' lease at 1285 Avenue of the Americas expires in 2011.

Episode 6 of the gbNYC Audiocast takes a deeper look at Boston Properties’ 250 West 55th Street project, which was recently dubbed the “Lever House Redux” by the company’s Regional Manager Robert Selsam. As you’ll recall, both the seminal Lever House at 390 Park Avenue and the new tower were designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill as glass boxes rising out of a wider podium base.