Vornado Realty Trust might be spiking a football when it comes to 220 Central Park South.
In a likely cause for celebration, the developer appears to have unloaded two of its final units at its blockbuster Billionaires Row condo with the sale of a three-bedroom and a studio in a $34 million haul.
And the purchaser seems to have close ties to the New England Patriots. The shell company used by the buyer lists its contact as the Kraft Group, the owner of the Super Bowl-frequenting football squad, and an address of 1 Patriot Place in Foxborough, Mass., a mixed-use entertainment and retail project developed by Kraft next to Patriots home field Gillette Stadium.
Likewise the shell company’s official name, Protista 220, includes an anagram of the word “Patriots.”
The units, Nos. 43B and 20F, went into contract on March 1 and closed on April 12, according to the deeds for the apartments, which appeared in the city register on Wednesday.
Because Vornado chose to market 220 Central Park South privately, not much is known about the look of the two apartments save for what’s spelled out in the condo’s offering plan, a legal document that the state requires in advance of condo projects.
The three-bedroom, which went for $33 million, has three-and-a-half baths and about 3,000 square feet, the plan says, while the studio, which was presumably created to be a staff or guest unit, has a bath and 500 square feet. It traded for $1 million, according to the register.
A conglomerate with holdings in wood, healthcare and technology companies, the Kraft Group was founded in the late 1960s by Boston area native Bob Kraft, who still serves as the company’s chairman and CEO, though his sons Jonathan, Daniel and Josh also hold executive positions at the company or in related ventures.
An attempt to reach Kraft’s media office by phone by press time was unsuccessful, and a phone message left for company spokesman Michael Jurovaty was not returned. Peter Batten, the New York lawyer who handled the paperwork on behalf of Protista, also did not return a call. And Vornado spokesman Bud Perrone had no comment.
With the two sales, Vornado has likely hit its goal, or is very near to it, of completing a staggering $3.5 billion sell-out of the 117 units at 220 Central Park South. In summer 2022 the 79-story development had 10 units left, according to a Crain’s analysis, and in the two years since has sold most of those apartments, based on the register.
Though the Steven Roth-helmed Vornado may have struggled to realize its long-term vision for a new office district surrounding Penn Station, 220 Central Park South has been a regular bright spot for the firm since sales there began in 2015. Among the huge-ticket deals completed in the complex was hedge funder Kenneth Griffin’s purchase of a triplex apartment, a $238 million transaction believed to be the country’s priciest-ever residential sale.
At the same time, several apartments at the park-facing building have resold for even more than Vornado’s original lofty prices, no small feat at a time when similar units in rival towers have posted declines in value over the years.
The retail vacancy rate across the city hit just over 11% this quarter — a slight drop from what it was last year, according to the most recent data from the city's Department of Small Business Services.
The department presented the data during a City Council hearing on Wednesday.
Out of the 144,359 storefronts across the five boroughs, the latest tally of those that are empty was 16,384 — or 11.3% — according to Calvin Brown, deputy commissioner at SBS for the neighborhood development division, citing data from an independent vendor. The most recent comparison is from the third quarter of 2023, when the vacancy rate hit 11.6%, the agency said. Brown could not provide the average length of a storefront's vacancy.
Manhattan is following the same citywide trend, despite being notoriously slow to recover from the pandemic and home to the largest swaths of vacant commercial corridors. Today in the borough, the vacancy rate is 15%, a small decline from 15.7% during the third quarter of 2023, according to Tian Weinberg, the chief of staff at SBS.
Picking up some of the slack are brick-and-mortar shops that are immune to being replaced by online retailers, according to Weinberg.
"Vacancies are being filled by a variety of industries, including e-commerce-resistant businesses such as juice bars, sports stores and coffee shops," she said. "Grocery stores are up 11%, and our nightlife is up an impressive 17%."
Still, the highest vacancy rates are consistently in Manhattan, with Community District 1 — encompassing the neighborhoods of Battery Park City, the Financial District, South Street Seaport and Tribeca — hitting 22%, according to Bronx Councilman Oswald Feliz, chairman of the Council's Committee of Small Business.
The numbers stand in stark contrast to what they were before the pandemic, though the vacancy rates started rising before Covid-19 hit the city. In 2007, only 4% of storefronts were vacant citywide, rising to 6% in 2017 and nearly 8% in 2019, said Feliz. He cited data from the Department of Finance.
New York City delivery workers will soon seek respite at a new “deliverista hub” in City Hall Park. The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on Tuesday voted to approve designs for a new hub that will give workers a place to rest during bad weather, charge their phones and e-bikes, and learn about e-bike and battery [...]
The post Landmarks approves rest hub for NYC delivery workers next to City Hall Park first appeared on 6sqft.
Leases
Argentine steakhouse opening in Tribeca
Address: 200 Chambers St., Manhattan
Landlord: Jack Resnick & Sons
Tenant: Baires Grill
Lease size: 8,450 square feet
Lease length: 20 years
Asset type: Retail
Brokers: Brett Greenberg and Fran Delgorio represented the landlord in-house.
Danish children's clothing firm extends in Garment District
Address: 209 W. 38th St., Manhattan
Landlord: GFP Real Estate
Tenant: MOLO
Lease size: 1,869 square feet
Asset type: Office
Brokers: GFP Real Estate's Matthew Mandell represented the tenant and the landlord.
Financings
Israeli bank provides cash for historic Sears redevelopment
Address: 2358 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn
Owner: Clipper Equity
Lender: Bank Hapoalim
Loan amount:$68.9 million
Asset type: Mixed-use
Read more about this deal here.
Chetrit Group refinances on Sunrose Tower
Address: 620 W. 153rd St., Manhattan
Owner: Eli Chetrit
Lender: Bank of Montreal
Loan amount: $152.3 million
Asset type: Apartments
A new penthouse perched above a 120-year-old Upper West Side residential building checks all the boxes. As one of three modern penthouses added to the historic Astor condominium, this residence offers pre-war-inspired details with modern conveniences, expansive living space, and over 1,700 square feet of private outdoor space. The exclusive five-bedroom duplex recently hit the [...]
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SL Green and Vornado Realty Trust scored a big win Wednesday morning when they unveiled the long-awaited refinancing of 280 Park Ave.’s mortgage.
The new $1.075 billion loan matures in 2026, with a potential two-year extension, the co-owners said, and carries the same floating 7% interest rate as the mortgage that matures in September. 280 Park is a 1.3 million square-foot, 43-story tower at the corner of East 48th Street.
In addition to refinancing the mortgage, SL Green and Vornado lowered the building’s debt burden by paying off a $125 million mezzanine loan for just $62.5 million. The gain from extinguishing the debt should give a boost to both landlords when they report quarterly financial results. SL Green is to report tonight.
Lenders for the new mortgage weren’t disclosed. The banks that wrote the current loan were Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and Citigroup.
280 Park houses several financial tenants, including money manager Franklin Templeton and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Several large tenants have moved out in the past year, including asset managers Cohen & Steers, Blue Mountain Capital, and Viking Global Investors, and cash flow fell 10%, KBRA said in a report last year. The decline raised questions on whether lenders would demand stricter terms for the new mortgage.
But last December restructuring specialist PJT Partners helped relieve the pressure by agreeing to double its footprint in the building to 270,000 square feet.
Evercore ISI analyst Steve Sakwa described the refinancing as “a favorable resolution.”
Shares in SL Green and Vornado each rose by about 2% in midday trading.
It’s anticipated that as artificial intelligence technologies mature, they will unlock over $17.7 trillion in economic value each year by boosting performance and productivity across the global workforce. With 40,000 AI professionals in our workforce—second only to Silicon Valley—New York is positioned to capture an outsized share of those gains.
But there’s a catch: while New York is ahead of the curve when it comes to regulating AI, we still aren’t doing enough to make sure that the benefits of AI tools and technologies are felt by everyone in the workforce.
The problem is that AI is often seen chiefly as a way of augmenting the performance of office-bound knowledge workers — not of supporting the 80% of employees who don’t do their jobs sitting at a desk. Take Walmart, for instance: despite the company having provided 740,000 smartphones to associates in a bid to digitize in-store operations, the company’s recently unveiled generative AI toolkit was designed specifically to help non-store employees.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with using AI to support office workers. It’s been shown that generative AI tools, for instance, can improve the performance of such workers by as much as 40%. But we shouldn’t only be using AI tools to support desk-based employees — because if we do, we’ll miss out on some of the most compelling potential productivity and performance gains these technologies are capable of delivering.
Mobile workers are knowledge workers
The lack of attention to the frontline applications of AI shouldn’t come as a surprise: the world’s deskless workers — all 2.7 billion of them — have long been neglected by tech innovators. The vast majority of tech venture funding goes to companies that support white-collar workers. Meanwhile, just 10% of deskless workers believe they have access to the tools and technologies they need to do their jobs effectively, and less than half say they’re given meaningful opportunities to learn new skills at work.
Our tendency to treat deskless employees as second-class citizens is anchored in an outdated view of frontline teams as focused on transactional tasks and manual labor, rather than real knowledge work. The reality, though, is that in today’s connected workplace, frontline teams drive incredible value for their organizations by serving as expert sources of market intelligence, custodians of brand identity and customer relationships, and powerful drivers of business process innovation.
Given this, smart leaders increasingly view their frontline teams not as mere labor, but as mobile knowledge workers. Empowering these vital employees — and finding ways to use AI to augment their activities — is a vital step as businesses of all kinds look to beat burnout, boost retention, and empower frontline teams to drive productivity and performance across the value chain, improve the customer experience, and increase revenue.
The power of frontline AI
So what can AI, specifically, deliver for today’s frontline teams? The answers are as varied as the roles and responsibilities that frontline workers take on. There’s one key insight to remember, though: while frontline employees are every bit as smart, creative, engaged, and driven as their deskbound counterparts, they’re seldom given the tools and resources to truly unlock their full potential.
This isn’t just a question of underfunding or neglect — it’s also because, by their nature, frontline teams work in fast-changing and challenging mobile environments, and lack access to many of the tools used by deskbound knowledge workers. Unlike office workers, frontline teams need to be able to access the support and resources they need while on the floor, using whatever devices they have to hand, without disrupting high-stakes workflows.
That’s where AI can play an enormously beneficial role. Where an office worker can take the time to scroll through a website or click through a PDF to find the information they need, for instance, a frontline worker could use GenAI — perhaps via a hands-free voice-operated interface — to rapidly surface the exact information they need in a particular moment.
In other cases, AI tools can proactively recommend the tools and resources that a frontline employee needs — from bite-sized educational resources tailored to their role and learning style, to context-specific summaries explaining how to comply with a new mandate from head office, to auto-generated updates and targeted tips about new promotions or products. They can also provide AI-assisted task management, with scenario-specific tips on what steps to take or best practices to follow — and by tracking real-world employee actions, AI tools can also identify which approaches work well, and what steps employees should take to be more productive and successful.
It’s even possible to use AI to automatically moderate chatrooms and peer-to-peer communications, creating a safer and more inclusive way for frontline teams to stay in touch — or to proactively connect employees with real-time support for HR or work-related issues, as well as the wellness and mental health resources they need based on the specific stresses and pressures they’re facing.
By customizing, targeting, and streamlining the flow of information to individual teams, and helping to proactively surface emerging and established best practices across the entire workforce, AI tools can drive powerful benefits for deskless teams — more fully establish frontline employees as engaged, equal, and empowered members of the workforce. In this way, AI can become a workplace equalizer, giving all workers access to a wealth of knowledge, resources, and support they need to thrive.
Brace for impact
The irony is that while many investors, developers, and IT leaders think of AI as primarily a desktop resource, the tech industry is currently pushing toward a mobile-first vision for AI. Tech companies are developing more powerful and energy-efficient AI chips that enable inference tasks to be run on handheld devices. New augmented reality technologies — from the Rabbit puck to the Frame glasses to Humane pin to the Vision Pro goggles — are also driving AI out into the real world, with potentially transformative consequences for frontline teams.
Given the slower pace of innovation and tech adoption in the frontline space, it might take time for some of these impacts to be felt across the frontline workforce. But that creates an important opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves with both employees and consumers. Companies that start working now to build an AI-ready frontline workforce, using today’s best technologies, will be better placed to benefit as these technologies evolve into even more powerful and ubiquitous frontline solutions in years to come.
The bottom line: if New York wants to remain a leader in the new AI economy, then we need to ensure that organizations of all kinds — from retailers to construction companies, and from logistics firms to healthcare organizations —move quickly to position themselves for a world in which AI is a vital part of every employee’s daily workflows. The transformation of frontline work is coming. The only question is whether New Yorkers will move to take advantage of that trend — or get left behind as the AI revolution rewrites the rulebook for frontline teams.
Fabrice Haiat is co-founder and CEO of Midtown-based startup YOOBIC.
It’s anticipated that as artificial intelligence technologies mature, they will unlock over $17.7 trillion in economic value each year by boosting performance and productivity across the global workforce. With 40,000 AI professionals in our workforce—second only to Silicon Valley—New York is positioned to capture an outsized share of those gains.
But there’s a catch: while New York is ahead of the curve when it comes to regulating AI, we still aren’t doing enough to make sure that the benefits of AI tools and technologies are felt by everyone in the workforce.
The problem is that AI is often seen chiefly as a way of augmenting the performance of office-bound knowledge workers — not of supporting the 80% of employees who don’t do their jobs sitting at a desk. Take Walmart, for instance: despite the company having provided 740,000 smartphones to associates in a bid to digitize in-store operations, the company’s recently unveiled generative AI toolkit was designed specifically to help non-store employees.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with using AI to support office workers. It’s been shown that generative AI tools, for instance, can improve the performance of such workers by as much as 40%. But we shouldn’t only be using AI tools to support desk-based employees — because if we do, we’ll miss out on some of the most compelling potential productivity and performance gains these technologies are capable of delivering.
Mobile workers are knowledge workers
The lack of attention to the frontline applications of AI shouldn’t come as a surprise: the world’s deskless workers — all 2.7 billion of them — have long been neglected by tech innovators. The vast majority of tech venture funding goes to companies that support white-collar workers. Meanwhile, just 10% of deskless workers believe they have access to the tools and technologies they need to do their jobs effectively, and less than half say they’re given meaningful opportunities to learn new skills at work.
Our tendency to treat deskless employees as second-class citizens is anchored in an outdated view of frontline teams as focused on transactional tasks and manual labor, rather than real knowledge work. The reality, though, is that in today’s connected workplace, frontline teams drive incredible value for their organizations by serving as expert sources of market intelligence, custodians of brand identity and customer relationships, and powerful drivers of business process innovation.
Given this, smart leaders increasingly view their frontline teams not as mere labor, but as mobile knowledge workers. Empowering these vital employees — and finding ways to use AI to augment their activities — is a vital step as businesses of all kinds look to beat burnout, boost retention, and empower frontline teams to drive productivity and performance across the value chain, improve the customer experience, and increase revenue.
The power of frontline AI
So what can AI, specifically, deliver for today’s frontline teams? The answers are as varied as the roles and responsibilities that frontline workers take on. There’s one key insight to remember, though: while frontline employees are every bit as smart, creative, engaged, and driven as their deskbound counterparts, they’re seldom given the tools and resources to truly unlock their full potential.
This isn’t just a question of underfunding or neglect — it’s also because, by their nature, frontline teams work in fast-changing and challenging mobile environments, and lack access to many of the tools used by deskbound knowledge workers. Unlike office workers, frontline teams need to be able to access the support and resources they need while on the floor, using whatever devices they have to hand, without disrupting high-stakes workflows.
That’s where AI can play an enormously beneficial role. Where an office worker can take the time to scroll through a website or click through a PDF to find the information they need, for instance, a frontline worker could use GenAI — perhaps via a hands-free voice-operated interface — to rapidly surface the exact information they need in a particular moment.
In other cases, AI tools can proactively recommend the tools and resources that a frontline employee needs — from bite-sized educational resources tailored to their role and learning style, to context-specific summaries explaining how to comply with a new mandate from head office, to auto-generated updates and targeted tips about new promotions or products. They can also provide AI-assisted task management, with scenario-specific tips on what steps to take or best practices to follow — and by tracking real-world employee actions, AI tools can also identify which approaches work well, and what steps employees should take to be more productive and successful.
It’s even possible to use AI to automatically moderate chatrooms and peer-to-peer communications, creating a safer and more inclusive way for frontline teams to stay in touch — or to proactively connect employees with real-time support for HR or work-related issues, as well as the wellness and mental health resources they need based on the specific stresses and pressures they’re facing.
By customizing, targeting, and streamlining the flow of information to individual teams, and helping to proactively surface emerging and established best practices across the entire workforce, AI tools can drive powerful benefits for deskless teams — more fully establish frontline employees as engaged, equal, and empowered members of the workforce. In this way, AI can become a workplace equalizer, giving all workers access to a wealth of knowledge, resources, and support they need to thrive.
Brace for impact
The irony is that while many investors, developers, and IT leaders think of AI as primarily a desktop resource, the tech industry is currently pushing toward a mobile-first vision for AI. Tech companies are developing more powerful and energy-efficient AI chips that enable inference tasks to be run on handheld devices. New augmented reality technologies — from the Rabbit puck to the Frame glasses to Humane pin to the Vision Pro goggles — are also driving AI out into the real world, with potentially transformative consequences for frontline teams.
Given the slower pace of innovation and tech adoption in the frontline space, it might take time for some of these impacts to be felt across the frontline workforce. But that creates an important opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves with both employees and consumers. Companies that start working now to build an AI-ready frontline workforce, using today’s best technologies, will be better placed to benefit as these technologies evolve into even more powerful and ubiquitous frontline solutions in years to come.
The bottom line: if New York wants to remain a leader in the new AI economy, then we need to ensure that organizations of all kinds — from retailers to construction companies, and from logistics firms to healthcare organizations —move quickly to position themselves for a world in which AI is a vital part of every employee’s daily workflows. The transformation of frontline work is coming. The only question is whether New Yorkers will move to take advantage of that trend — or get left behind as the AI revolution rewrites the rulebook for frontline teams.
Fabrice Haiat is co-founder and CEO of Midtown-based startup YOOBIC.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will send mitigation money to New Jersey as part of a final congestion pricing plan that has been submitted to the federal government, authority chair and CEO Janno Lieber said Wednesday.
“Lo and behold, the presentation we made to the feds does call for some allocation of mitigation dollars to New Jersey,” Lieber said at a Crain’s New York Power Breakfast. The unspecified commitment was part of a final analysis that the MTA submitted “in recent days and weeks” to show that the authority’s tolling structure is consistent with the Federal Highway Administration’s initial approval last year, Lieber said.
The commitment could be meaningful as the MTA tries to kill New Jersey’s lawsuit against congestion pricing, seen as the most serious of the various legal challenges that could delay the program past its planned mid-June start date. The MTA has long said New Jersey might be eligible for some money to mitigate adverse traffic effects but had not committed to it.
Lieber said Wednesday that as of this week, tolling infrastructure has been fully installed and connected to a 5G network. Most drivers will pay $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.
“We’re looking forward to a June start date once the New Jersey litigation is put to bed, which I think it will be,” Lieber said. He declined to give details about the mitigation money, joking that “you’ll have to ask New Jersey’s most passionate representative, the soon-to-be corporation counsel of the City of New York” — Randy Mastro, New Jersey’s lawyer in the congestion pricing case whom Mayor Eric Adams is reportedly eyeing for a top administration job.
Lieber began the event on an upbeat note, saying the MTA has made the most of the financial bailout it received in last year’s state budget. He touted increased service on 11 subway lines and on the Long Island Rail Road, new tracks being laid along the F line and a relationship with the NYPD that he called the strongest in the MTA’s history.
But he took a different tone when it came to fare evasion, which “threatens to upend everything” as it grows to a $700 million-a-year problem for the MTA, Lieber said. Lieber took time to criticize former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. — “a nice man, but misguided on an important issue” — for Vance’s 2018 decision to stop prosecuting turnstile-jumping on the subways.
Lieber said he remains committed to modernizing turnstiles in ways that could make it harder to beat fares and said he is “crazy passionate” about the idea of modifying subway exit doors to pause before opening, in order to deter would-be evaders.
Lieber acknowledged a recent spate of crime on the subway system as “demoralizing for riders,” and noted that most were committed by people with histories of prior offenses. Of the 38 people accused of attacking transit workers last year, only 11 were indicted, Lieber said, criticizing the lack of prosecutions in the other cases.
Other highlights of Lieber’s appearance on Wednesday included:
- He acknowledged that talk of rebuilding Penn Station has quieted in recent months, saying that the project was competing with other multibillion-dollar projects as the MTA gets closer to a new capital program. The MTA’s focus on Penn Station relates more to “modern amenities,” he said, such as wider concourses and better egress from the platforms, as seen in its new Long Island Rail Road concourse.
- Lieber dismissed the notion that the MTA might struggle to accommodate an influx of new riders once congestion pricing takes effect. “It’s bupkis,” Lieber said of the projected influx of about 30,000 riders, noting the number is smaller than a typical daily fluctuation due to weather.
- He was bullish about the proposed Interborough Express light-rail line between Brooklyn and Queens, whose environmental review and design are advancing thanks to new funding from Gov. Kathy Hochul. “It’s on its front foot,” Lieber said, although he declined to estimate what year it might be completed.
- The MTA is “on schedule” with the property acquisitions it needs to extend the Second Avenue subway to 125th Street, Lieber said. But he reiterated that the MTA will be unable to sign contracts for excavation and tunnel-boring work until the congestion pricing lawsuits are resolved.
- Lieber seemed excited by the potential $8 billion extension of the Second Avenue subway westward along 125th Street, which Hochul floated in her January State of the State address. Although far from confirmed, Lieber said the project would get “high marks” for its potential to connect to Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus and several West Side subway lines.
- Lieber called on city government to improve the city’s ability to absorb water during extreme rainfall. That storm surge threat is “the number-one issue for the subway system,” he said.
- As the MTA contends with widespread vacancies in subway retail spaces, Lieber said the authority is “pretty far along” on procurement efforts for new tenants at the Times Square and Rockefeller Center stations — and said that “major museums” will soon announce art installations at some retail spaces that are otherwise unviable.