#Office building inside with workers full
#Office building inside with workers windows

But many companies don’t have the financial clout to rent Succession-caliber offices, and they’re driving the market for smaller, well-located, well-priced spaces, according to Kirill Azovtsev, executive managing director at Savills. On Park Avenue, the tenants are preponderantly firms with “capital holdings” in their name. Temasek, the Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund, recently signed a lease for a larger space at the Seagram building, which is 95 percent leased 280 Park Avenue, where a giant Kaws sculpture in the lobby greets employees of blue-chip firms, is also doing well.

#Office building inside with workers windows

So naturally suited is Grand Central to office life that the city targeted it for the Midtown East rezoning, which aimed to return it to its former business-district glory, replacing the older buildings with sleek new corporate skyscrapers.Īs many of the buildings around Grand Central are older, prestige tenants tend to go to Park Avenue, where the modern skyscrapers with soaring ceilings, marble lobbies and floor-to-ceiling windows are. But Grand Central, once the city’s preeminent office district, has so many advantages: an abundance of less-expensive office space, two commuter rails that feed directly into it (key for employees and clients who took advantage of remote work to move out of the city), and a pleasant neighborhood with a long-established network of restaurants, coffee shops, barbers, shoe-repair guys, and other businesses. Other transit hubs are also doing comparatively well - brokers and landlords mentioned Fulton Street in the Financial District, Union Square, and some of the buildings around Penn Station. Serendipity’s Grand Central office space.

Grand Central has leased more commodity space than any other submarket in New York, nearly 3 million square feet since 2022. Even the older, so-called commodity buildings in the neighborhood, which are most of them, are seeing solid demand. “Better” buildings in the tier of One Vanderbilt and 22 Vanderbilt have availability rates of 11.7 percent in the neighborhood - the paucity of superlative office towers accounts for the greater demand - compared to the 18.6 percent overall vacancy in Grand Central and 19.7 percent rate in Manhattan. (“Everywhere has a lot of vacancies right now,” says one broker with a sigh.) Since the start of 2022, Grand Central has leased the most space -225,000 square feet per month- of any submarket in Manhattan, according to commercial-real-estate firm CBRE. At least, compared to the rest of Manhattan.

In fact, most of the office buildings around Grand Central are doing well. It seems like the type of older office building that Jeff Blau, the CEO of Related, was talking about when he recently told commercial property owners to sell off or, as he put it, “take what you can and run.” But One Grand Central is doing just fine - 98 percent leased, according to brokers. Like many of the other buildings around Grand Central, it was nice enough in its day, and it’s not in bad shape now - it underwent an $85 million renovation in 2008 - but its amenities include a dated-looking conference center and Blue Bottle coffee.

A neo-gothic tower completed in 1930, it has brass Deco detailing, a law library and a bronze statue of Lincoln in the lobby. 42nd Street, is more like the epitome of the 20th.

#Office building inside with workers full

The building, which opened in the fall of 2020, offers a full floor of lavish amenities - including shower rooms for business travelers coming in straight from the airport, expansive terraces, and a Daniel Boulud restaurant - is fully leased up, and bills itself as an “epitome of the 21st century workplace.” One Grand Central, a one-minute walk away on E. When office brokers talk about the “flight to quality” - the trend of brand-new trophy towers leasing up while older ones languish - One Vanderbilt is the kind of building they mean.