All Posts Tagged With: "green commercial office space"

According to Real Estate Weekly (via the Wall Street Journal), Boston Properties’ deal with law firm Proskauer Rose for 500,000 square feet of its LEED Gold hopeful 250 West 55th Street project may be on the rocks. (Just as a side note, I can see the site from my office and excavation and foundation work is moving forward as we speak at full steam). The speculative, SOM-designed green commercial office project had no trouble lining up tenants for close to 80 percent of its 1 million square feet, even while SJP Properties’ similarly speculative and LEED Gold 11 Times Square just a few blocks south was (and continues to be) on the hunt for its first tenant of any size. Should Proskauer pull out of the deal, it would be the credit crunch’s biggest blow to a green building in New York City to date.

Back in April, AOL opened up its new headquarters at 770 Broadway, which dates from 1903 and was designed by Daniel Burnham. The 15-story tower spans the entire block between East 8th and 9th Streets and is currently in pursuit of a LEED for Existing Buildings (”LEED-EB”) rating. In an effort to demonstrate that there is still good green real estate news here in New York City, AOL has announced that it will take the tower’s entire sixth floor (76,000 square feet) from owner Vornado, bumping its total at 770 Broadway to around 228,000 square feet across three floors. Architects Mancini Duffy designed AOL’s interiors, which are currently seeking an unspecified level of LEED for Commercial Interiors (”LEED-CI”) certification, though it’s unclear whether the firm will also design the company’s sixth floor addition.

Designed by architects Cook + Fox (The Lucida and Bank of America Tower), a planned 17-story, 350,000-square-foot office building could become Brooklyn’s first LEED Gold-certified commercial office tower. The tower, part of the larger City Point development in downtown Brooklyn, is a joint venture between Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners, P/A Associates, Washington Square Partners and Rose Associates, is a smaller version of a much larger tower that had been proposed for the same site. CIty Point will also include 525,000 square feet of retail space, as well as a 900,000-square-foot residential component that will also include affordable units. Earlier this week, the development team named Cushman & Wakefield as the office tower’s exclusive leasing agent.

Currently under development by Tishman Speyer, the $316 million Gotham Center will be a 662,000-square-foot, 21-story Class A office building at the corner of Queens Plaza and 28th Street in Long Island City. Mayor Bloomberg and other officials announced the project’s groundbreaking last Friday, noting that it will join a number of other green projects in the neighborhood, including the LEED Gold-certified, KPF-designed Court Square Two. The tower was designed by architects Moed De Armas & Shannon and is pursuing a LEED Certified rating under the Core and Shell system. The tower is rising out of the former site of the Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage; the project team also includes construction manager Bovis Lend Lease and architect of record Gensler.

We’ve written about 1095 Sixth Avenue previously; the tower, owned by the Blackstone Group, sits across 42nd Street from LEED Platinum hopeful Bank of America Tower and is undergoing a two-year, $408.9 million renovation. Designed by Moed de Armas & Shannon Architects and Gensler, the entire shell of what was once the Verizon Building is being replaced, effectively creating an entirely new structure; the tower’s marble exterior is being replaced with an energy-efficient glass curtain wall. Unlike the Bank of America project, and despite its green features, 1095 Sixth Avenue is not seeking a LEED rating. Tishman Construction is the construction manager on the project. While it’s hard to draw any real conclusions from the deal, it’s notable that Dabroes Management, a hedge fund, just signed a five-year lease for 12,200 square feet on 1095 Sixth Avenue’s 24th floor. Asking rents for the prebuilt space were $135 per square foot.

The CoStar Group’s list of the top 50 Manhattan office leases that were finalized in 2007 appears in this week’s issue of Crain’s New York Business (though it isn’t available online). By our count, 9 of these 50 leases were inked for space in green office buildings. Importantly, 3 out of the top 10 leases (ranking 6 through 8, consecutively) were green. We’ve written about a number of these buildings before, and present each lease after the jump along with links to pertinent posts at gbNYC. We also set forth the tower’s certification status (if any), tenant, landlord, and total square footage of the deal.