New Look in Manhattan

Manhattan's famed land-rich Astor family, which gave the city some of its best-known hotels, e.g., the old Waldorf-Astoria and St. Regis, last week promised Manhattan the biggest and glossiest project in the family's 150 years in New York real estate. Vincent Astor, 64, fifth-generation chief of the U.S. clan founded by John Jacob Astor, announced that he would build a block-square, 46-story office building at Park Avenue and 53rd Street, thus add to Manhattan's office space another million square feet, the air-conditioned, carpeted equivalent of 17 football fields.

Scheduled for 1960 completion, the $75 million Astor Plaza will have a rooftop helicopter landing field, a sub-basement garage, a sunken garden, subterranean passages to funnel its 10,000 workers to nearby subways. Architects Robert Carson and Earl Lundin plan to set the metal and glass-faced tower back from the thoroughfare, flank it with one- and two-storied shops and restaurants to give emphasis to the slab construction.

Fast March. The Astor announcement highlighted the march of U.S. industrial headquarters on Manhattan Island toward the upper East Side, particularly Park Avenue. Once the barracks of New York's upper crust, Park Avenue is becoming the prestige address of U.S. business. From its new Park Avenue perch, the Astor Plaza will look southward on the bronze-skinned, 38-story House of Seagram, now a building on the next block, westward at blue-green Lever House, just across Park Avenue. Within a radius of two blocks on Park Avenue, four other office buildings are going up, while buildings have been completed for Aramco, Universal Pictures and Colgate-Palmolive.

All over Manhattan Island the office-building boom (TIME, Dec. 21, 1953) is going as strong as ever. In the last nine years 61 structures with 14,182,000 rentable sq. ft. of office space have gone up; 14 more are scheduled for 1956-57 completion ; another 15 have filed plans. Thus, by the end of next year, the postwar boom will have added more than 26 million sq. ft. of office space to the existing 100 million, an increase greater than the combined total office space in any other city of the world, save Chicago.

Fast Renting. And demand still keeps outracing supply. One of the newest structures, 711 Third Avenue, was built 20 stories high; the owners now wish they had 35. Rentals have climbed from an average $4.75 to $5.25 per sq. ft. in the past five years, and the vacancy rate runs at a minuscule 1.4%. Such speedy renting and high occupancy has made possible a novel technique for financing construction. The builder either options or purchases a parcel of land, has an architect draw up building plans, and on that basis signs up prospective tenants. Commitments in hand, he then goes to a bank or insurance company, which advances the financing and enables him to build.

Biggest example of the new financing technique is the 45-story, 1,600,000-sq.-ft. Socony Mobil Building across from Grand Central Terminal. On the basis of plans drawn by Architects Wallace Kirkman Harrison and Max Abramovitz, Real-Estate Men Peter Ruffin and John Galbreath got Socony Mobil to sign a letter of intent for a 25-year lease on nearly half the proposed building. They took the plans and tentative leases to the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which put up $37.5 million in principal financing for the building. Next month the Socony Mobil Building, world's largest air-conditioned commercial structure and largest metalclad building, will be opened.

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