http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/re...l?ref=business
Offices Put High Above the High Line
Morris Admji, left, and Charles Blaichman at 14th Street project.
A rendering of the tower.
By STACEY STOWE
April 16, 2008
In the trendy meatpacking district, an office tower used to be as rare a sighting as a fanny pack. But the area, a 20-square block playground of boutiques, bistros and luxury apartments in Manhattan, is starting to attract new corporate tenants.
Indeed, in a neighborhood where the clip-clop of stilettos has replaced the scrape of a meat hook on a cable, one new building, at 450 West 14th Street, is being built on a distinctive site imbued with slaughterhouse and sleekly modern characteristics.
Designed by the architect Morris Adjmi, a 10-story glass tower is under construction on top of a former meatpacking plant, a three-story buff brick building where cattle carcasses were delivered by rail and processed for consumption. The 22,000-square-foot plant sits atop the High Line, the former elevated train track that is being redeveloped as an urban park. The High Line runs 103 feet through the building, which will have a staircase and elevator for access to the track. “Morris combined the historic significance of the building and also captured the essence of history in the meatpacking district,” said Charles Blaichman, the principal developer of the project.
The meatpacking district, which sits between 15th and Horatio Streets on the West Side, originated in 1884, when the city set aside a two-acre parcel for food stalls. It was named the Gansevoort Market, for Gen. Peter Gansevoort, who was a Revolutionary War hero and grandfather of Herman Melville, according to the Meatpacking District Initiative, a nonprofit business development organization.
Mr. Blaichman’s office building is expected to have full-floor tenants. It is set amid a landscape that includes some 50 nightclubs and restaurants. He said he hoped that certain kinds of companies would appreciate being part of that mix. These might be financial firms or advertising agencies, he said, or “whoever wants to work in an interesting neighborhood.”
While it has a particularly striking design, the West 14th Street project is not the only office building under construction in the meatpacking district. The event planner Robert Isabell is erecting an 80,000-square-foot building behind the restaurant Pastis that will span the full width of the block between West 13th Street and Little West 12th Street. The prospective annual rent in that building is $100 to $175 a square foot, depending on the floor, said the leasing agent, Matthew R. Bergey, a broker with CB Richard Ellis. There will be ground floor retail space and offices above.
Offices are beginning to sprout in the area because “people want to work where they live,” Mr. Bergey said. He said that the trend began when Paul Tudor Jones of the Tudor Investment Corporation leased 10,000 square feet of office space above the Apple store at 401 West 14th Street.
“There’s a lot of high-net-worth individuals running around, and they want high-end space to work in,” said Mr. Bergey, who specializes in leases of office space in Chelsea, the meatpacking district and the West Village.
When finished about 14 months from now, Mr. Blaichman’s building will have 100,000 square feet of office space to lease for $100 to $125 a square foot annually as well as 8,000 square feet of retail space at $400 a square foot, Mr. Adjmi said. The project is expected to cost about $55 million.
Two retail stores will occupy the ground floor of 450 West 14th Street. Interest has been expressed by high-end fashion retailers, Mr. Blaichman said. The tenants will be half a block away from the Diane Von Furstenberg store at 874 Washington Street. Ms. Furstenberg’s son, Alex, is a partner with Mr. Blaichman in the 450 West 14th Street project. Mal Serure, is the third partner.
Other retailers in the neighborhood include the clothing boutiques Trina Turk on Gansevoort Street and Maison Martin Margiela on Greenwich Street.
Restaurants like Pastis and Spice Market and hotels like the Gansevoort and Soho House have drawn tourists to the area.
Two blocks away from Mr. Blaichman’s project is the Caledonia, the first high-end residential tower to be built on the High Line. Its developers are the Related Companies and Taconic Investment Partners.
As for the office space in his new building, Mr. Blaichman said, the fifth and sixth floor have been spoken for by a fashion retailer, whom Mr. Blaichman declined to identify because the deal had not been completed. The sweeping views from the upper floors will include the Hudson River, the Marine Aviation Terminal Pier and the Standard, an André Balazs hotel.
The building will address environmental concerns, being constructed with some sustainable materials in an energy-efficient manner, said Mr. Adjmi, whose works includes the new Prudential Center area in downtown Newark. Mr. Blaichman, 54, was a developer of the Urban Glass House, a condominium on Spring Street in Lower Manhattan that was the last commission of the architect Philip Johnson, who died in 2005 at age 98, with interiors designed by Annabelle Selldorf.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Blaichman, whose father, Frank, develops hotels and residential projects in New Jersey, worked primarily on town house and loft restorations, including the rehabilitation of a space once owned by Bob Dylan for the Italian painter Francesco Clemente.
In building 450 West 14th Street, Mr. Blaichman, who has developed property in the meatpacking district for a decade, sought to retain the original character of the location.
“There’s an attractive vibrancy here of art, fashion, food and design,” he said. “It’s a commercial jewel.”
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http://www.ma.com/projects/450-west-14-street/
