GAZE up at the Equitable Tower on Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street, and you’ll see a granite and limestone face that looks impervious to the elements or to change.
That’s exactly what the Equitable Life Assurance Society wanted when it opened its new headquarters in 1984: a symbol of power and permanence.
But Equitable, which still owns the tower, moved its own offices to Sixth Avenue years ago. And behind that smooth, 50-story facade, much is in play.
In Midtown’s drum-tight office market, the tower will soon have 500,000 square feet of vacant, prime office space – a good chunk of Equitable’s total 1.5 million, which includes Le Bernardin and other restaurants, a gallery, atrium and an entrance to the Rockefeller Center shopping concourse.
The catch is that the office space isn’t available till 2002, when accounting giant Ernst & Young bails out for its new headquarters at 5 Times Square.
Insignia/ESG, just hired as the Equitable Tower’s exclusive managing and leasing agent, isn’t waiting until then.
An Insignia team led by senior managing director Howard Fiddle and executive managing director Bob Alexander plan to begin marketing the prime block on floors 11 to 26 “within the next six months,” Fiddle says.
“When a tenant needs a block of that size, they’re looking well in advance,” he explained. Ernst & Young, for example, made its deal for Times Square three years before that building would be finished.
Fiddle predicted the E&Y space would go for “upwards” of $70 a square foot.
He would not comment on anything else in the tower, where more is going on than Insignia wants to discuss.
One source said that 200,000 square feet on lower floors – occupied by London-based investment banker Schroders – will be up for grabs this year.
And restaurant-industry sources said a much-touted plan to open an extravagant eatery in Equitable’s former 50th-floor private ballroom is in jeoprady.
The sources said restaurateur David Emil, president and an owner of the company that runs Windows on the World, was considering selling his lease to a financial firm that made an offer too good to turn down.
Emil confirmed that his company had signed a 15-year lease for the Equitable space. He had “no comment” otherwise.
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Speaking of restaurants:
Is celebrated architect Frank O. Gehry really creating one on West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues?
For months, reports have claimed that Gehry is designing a 20,000-square-foot eatery in the West Chelsea Arts Centers – adjacent to the former warehouse-factories at 508 and 526 W. 26th St., now a 500,000-square-foot art gallery complex.
It turns out Gehry is working on a restaurant – but not exactly as the designer. Keith Mendenhall, an aide to Gehry at the architect’s Los Angeles office, explained:
“Frank is basically overseeing a group of designers, supervising them less about the design than the process.”
One of those designers is Gehry’s son, Alehandro, who works for the Prince Street firm the Arnell Group.
Also deeply involved is David Mandl, a partner in Meltzer/Mandl Architects, the firm that has overseen the piece-by-piece redesign of the West Chelsea complex at a cost he estimates at around $20 a square-foot.
Mandl, with a chuckle, described the collaborative process: “Frank draws three circles and a line, and says, ‘Like this, you know?'”
Gehry, creator of the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is probably the world’s best-known architect. Last week, the Guggenheim unveiled a proposal for a new Gehry-designed museum on East River piers in Lower Manhattan.
But the only Gehry project actually built here is the interminably buzzed-over Conde Nast cafeteria at 4 Times Square – open only to Si Newhouse’s working stiffs.
The Chelsea restaurant will occupy the ground floor at the arts center’s east end, where it abuts a derelict rail trestle.
Perpetually-smiling Gloria Naftali, who owns the buildings with her husband, said the space under the trestle – with the actual underside of the railroad bridge as its ceiling – will house a club.
West Chelsea, more than 90 percent leased to galleries that moved in from SoHo and uptown, is an anchor of the thriving Chelsea arts scene.
Naftali won’t discuss rents. But Faith Hope Consolo, vice chairman of Garrick-Aug, said Chelsea gallery space runs $50 to $75 a square-foot.
Who’s footing the bill for the restaurant? No one would comment. But sources said the prospective operators are prominent lawyer Richard Golub and Martin Thesing, a partner in the Supper Club.