With no tower planned for the top of the James A. Farley Post Office Building, the whereabouts of the 730,000 square feet of office space has been a head-scratcher.
But the Beaux Arts building is roughly the size of four soccer fields and has multiple levels, windows and skylights putting it all under one sprawling roof.
Vornado Realty Trust has taken the lead on marketing the office space with an asking rent that will top triple digits per square foot by the project finish date of 2020, sources said.
The announcement last week that Vornado and Related Companies have closed on the deal to redevelop both Farley and the Moynihan Train Hall comes after many years of thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’.
In 1992, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York proposed the building become the new Amtrak station. By 1999, President Bill Clinton stood with Moynihan, Gov. George Pataki and others to proclaim it was on its way to reality. The senator died four years later, with his dream left undone.
Vornado and Related won a 2005 RFP for the project that was then recast, rebid and won again last year with Skanska as their construction partner.
Now, the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design calls for Vornado and Related to have roughly 730,000 square feet of “unique creative office space on the highest level of the building” along with 120,000 square feet of retail throughout the new station complex, Vornado CEO Steve Roth told analysts on a call earlier this year.
The 1912 McKim Mead & White-designed structure is 751 feet long by 384 feet wide. The full mega-block building is bounded by Eighth and Ninth avenues and West 31st and 33rd streets and sits directly opposite the current Penn Station catacombs and Madison Square Garden, where once those architects’ grand Penn Station project stood.
The 51-page Vornado marketing PDF provided by a source boasts of an outdoor terrace the size of Bryant Park and explains the building’s length is the equivalent of a 67-story building, but companies can have access through multiple entrances along the streets.
A gaggle of 1,500 to 1,700 people can work on a floor — think of the size of a theater audience — “with perimeter circulation that provides light and air for all,” it continues, and references unnamed CEOs touting the enabling interactions.
The ground, second, third, fourth and fifth floors have ceiling heights from 14 to 18 feet with columns spaced 32 to 40 feet apart. Floors range in size from 150,000 square feet to the large fourth floor of 260,000 square feet.
The fifth floor is encircled by the “giant” terraces described as their own 50,000 square feet of “High Line.”
The ground floor will have private lobbies for the tenants and retailers.
No comment from Vornado to me, but I’m sure they’ll be glad to share more info with brokers and prospective tenants.