Equitable Building 787 Seventh Ave Original Art Exhibits 787
Equitable Seeks Park Ave. Rents On Seventh Ave.
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February 9, 1986
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INSURANCE companies have a reputation for being bourgeois in business. Nonetheless, the Equitable Life Balls Guild of the United States has poured $200 million into what some might regard as a risky venture, a 54-story office tower at 787 7th Avenue between 51st and 52d Streets - merely north of tawdry Times Square. It is, past far, the most ambitious commercial building e'er attempted in the Midtown Due west area.
Equitable has no doubts, however, and is confidently marketing the 1.5 1000000-square-human foot edifice as an extension of Rockefeller Middle, to which it is linked past an hush-hush concourse, and expects to get Park Avenue rents of $forty to $fifty a foursquare foot for the infinite.
With a huge budget for fine art and public civilities and a design by a prominent architect, Edward Larrabee Barnes, the building certainly has no peers along 7th Artery. Asking rents for beginning-class space in other modern buildings in this western section of midtown range from $27 to $33 a foursquare foot, according to Michael Cohen, vice president of Williams Real Estate Company Inc., a Manhattan brokerage.
Equitable took over the top third of the tower as its corporate headquarters concluding fall, but it has not even so found tenants for the remaining million square anxiety of vacant space.
Now, equally the building nears completion, Equitable is about to start firing its large promotional guns. On Tuesday, it will unveil the complex's new public spaces, including a new co-operative of the Whitney Museum of American Art and $7.five million worth of artwork in its museum-like lobbies, atrium, through-street galleria, plazas and restaurants.
''I would say that in every fashion, the relationship is symbiotic - the company gets a lot from the art plan and the art program gets a lot from the compa-ny,'' said Mr. Barnes, who designed the tower with rose granite columns and cream-gray limestone spandrels. ''This is, in a sense, going to feel similar a civic center,'' added the builder, who has designed many museums, including the new Dallas Art Museum and the new Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, as well as such Manhattan landmarks as the 5-year-one-time I.B.Thou. Building at 57th Street and Madison Avenue.
Equitable'southward new tower shares the aforementioned block with its former 42-story, aluminum-and-glass headquarters at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, known equally the eastward tower, which was designed past Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The ii towers, which are connected at the eight-story base of operations, vestibule and concourse levels, have been named Equitable Centre. PaineWebber, however, leased sufficient infinite in the Artery of Americas edifice -about a tertiary of the 1.7 million square feet there - to take its proper name put over the door. THE decisions by John B. Carter, Equitable's main executive officer, to go on the company's headquarters in New York and to invest millions in art and architecture on the 7th Artery site have already had a tremendous touch on on the revival of this office of town, existent-estate analysts say.
''It's a tremendously positive thing for the city,'' said John R. White, managing director of Landauer Associates, real-estate consultants. ''It took a company like Equitable, with massive capital capabilities, to lead the way. They have made a statement and they can feel secure that others volition follow.''
''From a marketing point of view, they take put an institutional banner on Seventh Avenue,'' said Raymond T. O'Keefe,executive vice president of Cushman & Wakefield, a Manhattan brokerage. ''It does for Seventh Avenue what Rockefeller Center did for 6th Artery and what the major banks did for Park Avenue.''
''In the past,'' he went on, ''no major tenant would have considered Seventh Avenue - I would take been picked up and thrown out of their offices bodily. Now, every major tenant in the market is because it - they may non go at that place, but they are considering it.''
Equitable, the third largest life insurance company in the country, owns $7.viii billion in real estate, including substantial interests in three hotels clustered around its new belfry. They are the Sheraton Centre, the Sheraton City Squire and the former Taft Hotel, which is at present being transformed into what is described as a ''four star'' hotel on the lower floors and a separately developed condominium apartment residence above.
The elegant new function tower on Seventh Avenue presently will have company and competition every bit the pace of function development in Midtown West picks upwardly. Millions of square feet of office space are scheduled to be congenital in Times Square, at the old Madison Square Garden site on Eighth Avenue at 50th Street, at the Coliseum site in Columbus Circle and in scattered locations in between.
But for at present, the new Equitable tower represents a bold, lonely move into this area -especially since office leasing has been flat for over a year. Though no major leases take been signed, the visitor expects to denote the renting of 120,000 foursquare feet sometime this month. Meanwhile, in the eastward belfry, Crossbar Barton Durstine & Osborn Inc., a major advertising agency, recently took 350,000 foursquare feet. Company officials, who adopt to market the two-tower complex every bit 1 entity, say about 60 percent of its iii.2-million square feet of infinite is leased.
Midtown Manhattan has a vacancy rate of about vii percent, which means that about sixteen 1000000 foursquare feet of space is available -much of it in competitively priced landmarks similar the Pan Am Building and new function towers like 599 Lexington Avenue, according to Dennis M. Karr, a partner in Jones Lang Wootton, a brokerage and consultant. ''At that place are not that many tenants looking for big space in that price range,'' he said.
''They take priced the tower very aggressively - I think they volition get realistic and make some deals,'' said John L. Dowling, a broker with Cushman & Wakefield.
Principals in the projection, however, say that though information technology may take 12 to xviii months to charter the infinite, there will be no rent reductions. ''Equitable is in the best position to sit down and wait - they're non going to give that building abroad,'' said Jerry I. Speyer, mananging partner of Tishman-Speyer Properties, which developed the complex for Equitable; the insurance company owns half of Tishman-Speyer. THE pioneering challenge, in some means, explains the company's $7.5 million art investment. By filling much of the center'south street level with fine art, the company hopes the new edifice volition gain instant cultural recognition, divert attention away from the men on 7th Artery handing out leaflets for ''adult entertainment'' and encourage tenants to sign leases.
Equitable is paying all installation and operating expenses of the Whitney branch museum, which will occupy two lobby galleries on the Seventh Avenue blockfront. The galleries, exhibiting works from the museum'due south permanent collection, are scheduled to open Tuesday. Two other subsidized shops, operated past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, will sell newspaper and jewelry reproductions from New York museums.
Other art installations, in what the company calls ''ane of the largest corporate art circuitous ever developed,'' include the $iii.4 million ''America Today'' murals past Thomas Hart Benton displayed in the antechamber; large-calibration wall commissions past such well-known contemporaries as Roy Lichtenstein and Sol LeWitt and massive sculptures past Barry Flanagan and Scott Burton. Executive dining and conference rooms, which are open up to the public by special arrangement, have been hung with works by over a dozen other high-profile artists, among them Marsden Hartley, James Buttersworth, Milton Avery, George Bellows and Alex Katz.
Equitable has likewise filled two street-level eating place spaces with art. In the Palio - an Italian restaurant to be operated by Tony May -Sandro Chia has painted a 54- by 124-human foot mural depicting the Palio, the ancient almanac horseraces in Siena, Italian republic. For Le Bernardin, a French seafood restuarant, which is operated by Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze, Equitable curators went to France to purchase ''good quality'' 19th-century paintings of line-fishing scenes. A third restaurant, scheduled to serve American cuisine, has not been planned yet.
In the past, developers avoided leasing prime street-level space to restaurants because restaurateurs could non afford the loftier rents paid by high-volume commercial tenants and banks. But at present that there is a surplus of office space, owners are using high-priced restaurants equally civilities to lure blue-chip tenants. Prominent restaurants likewise add together luster and name recognition to an office building.
''If yous say, 'Meet me at the Rainbow Room or the Iv Seasons,' y'all don't have to say anything else,'' said Joseph Baum, the eatery consultant. He maintains that the increased prestige ultimately means college rents for office space.
The eastward tower has non been neglected in this new show of art. Equitable commissioned Scott Burton to create ''art piece of furniture'' - eighteen green granite tables, plus stools and settees on the edifice'due south forepart and side plazas. In additon, Equitable provided the lobby infinite for PaineWebber to display its own corporate art treasures and mount traveling shows from museums. Currently on exhibit is ''The By Remembered: The Art of Toys,'' on loan from the Museum of the City of New York.
Equitable's investment in art far exceeds the minimium needed to rent office space and is - as company officials similar to remind visitors - in the tradition set by neighboring Rockefeller Center. It is no accident, and then, that ''Day,'' a 1938 bronze sculpture by Paul Manship, whose ''Prometheus'' dominates the Rockefeller Center skating rink, decorates the new Equitable lobby and is sometimes used as a symbol of Equitable Center. ''It was purchased with that in listen - it links us to Rockefeller Center in a way,'' said Pari Stave Choate, Equitable's new curator.
''It would be foolish as hell if I said the artwork wouldn't make information technology more attractive to tenants, but it wasn't washed for that purpose alone - we wanted to extend the midtown concept of Rockefeller Center,'' said Benjamin D. Holloway, who conceived the project and is chairman of the Equitable Real Estate Grouping Inc., an Equitable subsidiary that controls $22 billion in real-manor assets for Equitable and other companies effectually the state.
''There is a tendency amid some writers to say that what we accept done, what Rockefeller Center has done, was based on crass profit motives,'' he said, ''simply I think it's a silly argument. We tried to create an surroundings that is pleasing - and nosotros are the major tenant hither, so nosotros are trying to please ourselves.''
''They could take done something glitzy and gotten high rents, right?'' said Mr. Burton, the sculptor. ''But they didn't. They're doing what information technology takes to do it right, they're giving the metropolis new landmarks - this is enlightened patronage,'' he said. In additon to his work on the east tower plazas, Mr. Burton created a 40-foot, semicircular marble banquette with onyx lamps, a circular marble pool and a stand up of tropical plants in the spectacular 80- past 80- by 80-foot atrium of the new edifice - what Mr. Barnes, the architect, calls ''a museum space embedded in an office edifice.'' Rising behind Mr. Burton's ''Atrium Furnishment'' is Roy Lichtenstein's 68- by 32-foot ''Mural with Blue Brushstoke,'' a spectacular canvas that splashes color into the restrained building.
Mr. Holloway said that some office developers spend as much as 1 percent of a building's construction cost on artwork, and that he had originally budgeted 2 percentage, or almost $3.5 million. Simply two years ago, the art budget went out the window. Mayor Koch, seeking to keep the Benton murals from being sold to an out-of-town heir-apparent, asked Equitable to purchase the panels, which had hung in the New School for Social Research for fifty years. Equitable agreed and spent $3.4 meg on the murals and all the same more than on restoring them; every bit a issue the building'due south fine art upkeep went over four pct.
This effigy, still, does not include Equitable's initial or annual expenses in underwriting all operating and staffing costs of the Whitney Museum co-operative, which uses 6,000 square feet of climate-controlled space for its galleries and 3,000 square feet for offices and storage. One gallery will have semipermanent exhibitions and the other volition have at to the lowest degree five special exhibitions a year; admission will be gratis and the museum staff expects 100,000 people a yr to visit.
In improver to these artistic civilities, the new tower will have an underground health club and puddle and an auditorium-concert hall as well every bit a variety of shops on the concourse level that leads to Rockefeller Center and the subway. Tenants' computers should likewise exist happy with the ''intelligent building,'' which the visitor says is simply the 2nd in Manhattan to exist equipped with a fiber-optic spine that connects all floors with the building'southward primal figurer.
Companies oftentimes spend lavishly on their their headquarters buildings, but Equitable's new belfry price no more than most other first-class function buildings - or near $110 a square foot for the construction lone. ''For all the fact that the bottom of the building is very special and looks like a museum, the whole detailing is very unproblematic - goose egg lavish - until you get to the very top where the biconvex window is,'' said Mr. Barnes, the architect.
The ''Radio Metropolis'' shape of the tower, he added, was dictated by zoning setback regulations, and he credited the large size of the atrium, which stands in front end of the tower, to a commercial tenant who delayed construction past refusing to leave i of the former buildings on the site. While Equitable negotiated with the holdout, information technology had to brainstorm construction of the tower, Mr. Barnes said.
Mr. Holloway would not reveal all costs, proverb that ''I'm a footling coy because you lot always know in that location is a city assessor looking over your shoulder.'' But land costs could not have been a large cistron since Equitable assembled the block in 1958, only before it built the e tower. SIX years agone, while preliminary plans were existence prepared for the new edifice, the visitor was not sure whether it would constuct a new headquarters or build an investment property to sell or lease, Mr. Holloway said. ''Some headquarters buildings have iv years to build,'' he said, ''this was a ii-year building and we finished it under budget and on time - if you phone call being on time not having the sidewalks finished. We built it with tight toll restrictions so that it could rent in the marketplace and make a return that was satisfactory. It was designed and so that it would suit anybody if Equitable decided to move adjacent week.''
Equitable, which has pioneered new locations in the urban center three times in the final 126 years, does not look to motion for at least 25 years.
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