Steve Witkoff and Howard Lorber, joined by partners from Winthrop Realty Trust and Maefield Development, celebrated the groundbreaking of 20 Times Square on Monday morning at the construction site at 701 Seventh Ave. with politicians that included Mayor Bill de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.
Hotelier Ian Schrager watched from above as others struggled down the 100-foot-plus-long construction stairs to bedrock, where footings are going in for the 39-story, 452-room five-star Marriott Edition.
Its base will have 76,000 square feet of retail and an 18,000-square-foot LED sign.
The entire project is being developed with union labor, Witkoff said.
The mayor noted Times Square had come a long way since 1985, when “it was skeevy,” but now, “Here we are, literally, in [sic] crossroads of the world — center of the universe, and here something great is going to happen.”
Among the other celebrants were Peter Ward, who heads the Hotel Trades Council, Tim Tompkins from the Times Square Alliance and Howard Michaels of the Carlton Group, who brought the parties together for the deal that included financing from Barry Sternlicht, whose son, James, just began working for Witkoff.
At the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat conference, developer Larry Silverstein told me that he is not selling his 1,100-foot-tall tower development site at 514 Eleventh Ave. due to issues with affordable housing, as others had reported.
The 1.8 million-square-foot building is slated for 375,000 square feet of affordable housing.
“The paper was 100 percent wrong,” Silverstein exclaimed. “We’ve got about $10 billion worth of construction underway and it’s too much. So I said if you get a good price for it, sell it. And if you can’t, put it on the shelf and wait until we finish what else we are doing.” When I asked him “What’s a good price?” he grinned and walked away.
For its first store on the East Coast, designer Edgardo Osorio’s Aquazzura is leasing 2,153 square feet at the base of the townhouse redevelopment at 935 Madison Ave. at the northeast corner of East 73rd Street.
The elegant shop will have 1,144 square feet on the ground and 1,009 square feet on the lower level. The asking rent was $1,000 per square foot.
Aquazzura was represented by Marc Simon from Isaacs and Co. while the developer Daniel E. Straus had an RKF team led by Ariel Schuster as well as a team from Isaacs and Co. led by Joel Isaacs.
Osorio has his studio and flagship store in Florence, Italy, where he designs sexy, modern and comfortable shoes.
Moynat, the high-end leather goods brand, has also signed on for a storefront.
Four of the project’s 10 residential units with the address of 33 E. 74th St. are already in contract, including a $45 million townhouse.
