Monday, March 17, 2014

A record deal at 51 Astor Place (AND STOP CALLING THIS AREA MIDTOWN SOUTH!)



Let's head over to The Real Deal for this story:

Claren Road Asset Management, a credit-focused money manager that is a subsidiary of private equity giant the Carlyle Group, will take the top floor of Edward Minskoff’s 51 Astor Place, The Real Deal has learned. The 25,401-square-foot space was asking a rent of $118 per square foot, a record for Midtown South. Sources familiar with the transaction said that it was likely the priciest per-square-foot deal struck in the neighborhood.

With this lease, 51 Astor Place/DeathStar/the IBM Watson building is now 85 percent, uh, leased.

Now can we look at a map please. Oh, here is an official one from the city of New York.



OK, you see where Midtown South is on the map? And you see this neighborhood?



Anyway, everyone knows that this area is known as WeAs (West of Astor) or LeLa (left of Lafayette Street, depending on which way you are facing).

Previously on EV Grieve:
Report: Maps show that Midtown South does NOT include the East Village/Astor Place

18 comments:

Big Brother said...

A record for Midtown South because... there's no such place!

Spike said...

Is there any chance Midtown will annex that bit of Murray Hill poking into its eastern border? It's ripe for the taking!

nygrump said...

Carlyle Group - true death junkies, the elite of vampires. At one point they owned the corner of 1st Ave. I know they have their guns on redeveloping that Ave now that they're finishing up 2nd.

Anonymous said...

Will this part of the east village vote to join mid-town south freely or will troops be sent to persuade it?

DrGecko said...

If you look carefully at the second map, you'll see a subtle black line connecting Midtown South and the East Village. This is to indicate that they are the same thing. I believe the correct term is "exclave."

Anonymous said...

as a former (reformed) commercial broker, I can tell you that *any office space* between Midtown and the FiDi is generally referred to as midtown south. Not so for retail or specialty uses. Been that way for years.

andersonenvy said...

I prefer to call this area NoCo (North of Cooper Union)

Anonymous said...

Zoning Violation in Historic District South

Anonymous said...

You guys realize that "East Village" is a real estate coinage, too, right? This is the LES.

Anonymous said...

There will be a referendum, just like in Crimea. And just like on that ballot, there will be no refuse option. You may choose from:

1. Astor Place is part of midtown.
2. Astor Place is not part of downtown.

- East Villager

Anonymous said...

Enough about the finance schmucks, what about the retail? We need a crack investigative team to figure out what is going in there....

The Philosophical Zombie said...

Where is Hell's Kitchen? And what the hell is Clinton?

Anonymous said...

Phil. Zombie, Clinton was the name of the area before it became Hell's Kitchen. It was revived in the 90s, but never caught on. What worse is... get ready... Midtown West!

Giovanni said...

That map sucks, not enough detail since some neighborhoods overlap like the Bowery, NoHo and the EV, or are mixed like Chinatown and Little Italy. And Phil's right, I don't know one person who says they live or work in Clinton, but I know plenty who say they live or work in Hells Kitchen.

It seems the city wants us to forget the old Hells Kitchen and its sordid history and make newer residents feel like they live next door to Bill and Hillary Clinton or something. Ironically even Chelsea Clinton didn't live in Clinton, she lived in Chelsea before moving to Madison Square Park. I guess the name was for Dewitt Clinton Park but who even goes there?

The problem is that the job of naming neighborhoods fell into the hands of the extremely mindless and endlessly greedy real estate industry after the phone company dropped the old exchange system. In the good old days everyone knew what neighborhood you were in, at least according to the phone company, based on the phone exchange.

The letters corresponding to the first two digits in every phone number corresponded to the area you were in, CH for Chelsea, GR for Gramercy, most of the LES was OR for Orchard, MU was Murray Hill. For instance, two of the fake phone numbers used for the Ricardo residence in I Love Lucy were MU 5-9975, and CIrcle-7-2099. Circle meant you lived in Midtown even though their fake address was on the Upper East Side.

The system worked because everyone agreed on what neighborhood names were and it made it easier to remember all those phone numbers.

Now that everyone has a cell phone any hope of reviving this once great system is shot to hell. Not Hell as in Hells Kitchen, the actual extremely warm place where most politicians and real estate developers will some day be calling home.

Gojira said...

Anon.7:27, that neighborhood was called Hell's Kitchen as far back as the 1880s; that name predates Clinton, another real estate broker whitewash, by about a century.

The Philosophical Zombie said...

All I see there is "Chelsea" and "Clinton." URRG

randall said...

@Giovanni

I know a lot of people who call Hell's Kitchen "Clinton" and every single one of them is from out of town.

But this whole conversation is stupid. I call all of New York City SoWeCo and WeNaCo for South of Westchester County and West of Nassau County.

Jill said...

For a second I thought the building was being spotlighted by a drone and war was imminent.