News
NYC'S BIOTECH HULLABALOO
July 25, 2012
 |
| It was a big day just north of Canal yesterday, where we snapped Partnership for New York City CEO Kathy Wylde, New York Genome Center founding exec director Nancy Kelley, and Edward J. Minskoff Equities CEO Edward Minskoff in action just before the NYGC's ceremonial lease signing for a 170k SF HQ at Minskoff's 101 Ave of the Americas and colocation space in Sabey Corp's 1M SF Intergate.Manhattan data center at 375 Pearl St. |
 |
| JLL's Paul Glickman tells us the 425k SF building went up in the early '90s, and when the 32BJ property services workers union vacated, the owner decided to reposition it. It's got 30k SF floorplates on the lower levels that set back to 15k SF higher up, where lease-up continues. |
 |
| JLL's Jon Fanuzzi (here with Paul, Mitch Konsker, and Matthew Astrachan— JLL NY prez Peter Riguardi also worked on the deal) tells us NYGC signed for 20 years and the building had the right infrastructure for heavy computing (10 petabytes of files within 10 years, if that means anything to you), plus the capacity for a separate entrance and a back-up generator. The $47M buildout (with $5M in low-cost financing from the NYC Economic Development Corp,Mayor Mike says) will deliver mid-2013, when 100 employees will move in. Within five years, it'll house 500 biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and others. (That's the most IQ in one building since the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions.) |
 |
| Sabey CEO Dave Sabey, Edward, and Nancy signing the leases. Edward says NYC is evolving from the financial center of the world to a tech and biosciences hub, and startups like this (NYGC launched in February 2012 in Rock Center offices) will beget more jobs for the young and well-educated who want to live and work in NYC. The folks here will do DNA sequencing, genome mapping, bioinformatics, and a whole bunch of other words we pretended to understand. We didn't hear the words "Higgs boson," but basically, the work here will eventually make people a lot healthier. |
 |
| Here's the man who moves mountains (trust us, the Himalayas used to be in Staten Island). Fried Frank real estate chair Jon Mechanic, assisted the NYGC in the complicated lease, which he tells us included zoning changes and separate AC and power. Oh, and he also repped Condé Nast in the 1M SF lease that got One World Trade Center (in the background) out of the ground. Newmark Grubb Knight Frank's Bill Harvey and Dan Segal were NYGC's brokers at 101AOA, and Bill, Michael Morris, and Bryan Loewen repped NYGC in the data center lease. Michael and colleagues David Falk(tri-state prez), Danny Levine, Josh Gosin, and Todd Bateman repped Sabey. |
 |
| We also snapped Mayor Mike with Sloan-Kettering Institute director and big-time cancer researcher Tom Kelly. NYGC will partner with all those medical and university names that the mayor name-drops. |
 |
| Suzanne Epsaro, who has worked at Amelia's Restaurant & Coffee Shop around the corner at 110 Varick for 36 years, was all aflutter about the activity as she walked past. It wasn't our celebri-mayor in the flesh that did it but rather the idea of diner customers returning to the neighborhood. She tells us there was a big drop-off in business when the union left 101 Ave of the Americas. |
