Crain's New York Business

On a recent morning, a pedestrian waited outside the subway entrance at East 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue to ask for directions to 10 Grand Central. “Sorry, can’t help you,” said a gentleman named Mark, who works nearby in financial services. “I bet it’s near the train station.” Indeed, 10 Grand Central is one block east of Grand Central Terminal. But even though the 36-story tower has stood there since 1931, its location isn’t better known perhaps because its address for decades was 708 Third Ave. The change came in 2018 after owner Marx Realty renovated the 450,000-square-foot building and moved the entrance around the corner to East 44th Street. This new name produced a shift in fortunes on par with what happened to Stefani Germanotta when she became Lady Gaga. Freed from its association with Third Avenue, a corridor riddled with depressingly vacant post-war office buildings, 10 Grand Central’s average rent has jumped to $92 a square foot from $44 last year. Total revenue has doubled to $40 million a year. “If we were 708 Third Ave., we wouldn’t be renting at these prices,” said Marx Realty CEO Craig Deitelzweig. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gCX-dyx6

"Anora" won big at the Oscars last night, the latest in a long line of NYC-based films to clean up at the awards show. Check out this June piece for Crain's New York Business from my colleague C. J. Hughes and I about the recent boom in studio space the city has been seeing, which has given a major boost to its film industry, especially when combined with its iconic skyline and generous tax credit for movies. https://lnkd.in/eGYGKjSe

For many buildings, a change in address can mean a change in fortune.

The full-block Midtown site is being marketed for a potential teardown.

Some buses are arriving at stops too early due to congestion pricing, leading transit officials to redesign routes.

The race is on for New York City’s largest hospital systems to develop the finest artificial intelligence applications that will add to their fame, money and clinical breakthroughs. Mount Sinai, Northwell Health, NYU Langone and New York-Presbyterian are raising venture funding, partnering with tech companies and launching startups as they forge a path to future treatment advances and potential profits. The nascent ideas using AI are breathtaking: eye scans that can predict cardiac disease or diabetes, tools that can restore movement in patients with paralysis, readers that detected heart disease from an electrocardiogram exam, enabling earlier intervention. But in fact the faster growth of AI in hospital care is more mundane. Hospitals’ leadership say the back office is where efficiencies are being achieved as we speak, to help harried staff focus more on patients and less on filling out forms. Clinical research is still in early stages, and caution is required. AI is nascent and the technology could magnify small mistakes exponentially. “You have to be very careful with AI. If you put bad information into these AI models, you'll get bad information on the other side. And we don't want that to happen, said Dr. Michael Ast, chief medical innovation officer for the Hospital for Special Surgery, which uses AI to advance robotic orthopedic surgery. “So most of what we are doing right now is building models in a safe space, in a research space, so we know it's trustworthy when it goes out.” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gUpt-ia7

New York's lieutenant governor left open the possibility that he might challenge Hochul for her own office.

On a cold Tuesday in early February, Fifth Avenue was bustling as usual. Tourists ducked in and out of the storefronts that line the world-famous shopping corridor, including Bergdorf Goodman, Gucci and Dior, and the fourth floor of the Louis Vuitton store was no different. A line curved around the bend as shoppers waited to pick out, or just admire, the goods behind the glass — not the Courrier Lozine 110 monogrammed canvas trunk, which retails on another floor for $46,500, but a petite box of chocolates, with each piece bearing the logo of the French fashion house. Those seeking a taste of the brand's heritage, and those who can't — or don't want to — splurge on the real thing, can instead bite into a chocolate shortbread version of the trunk for just $85. Louis Vuitton in November debuted its first branded cafe in the U.S. at 6 E. 57th St. and right next to it, Le Chocolat Maxime Frédéric. The retailer best known for its luxury leather goods operates just a handful of cafes around the world, including in Paris, Tokyo and Bangkok. It's not a new phenomenon, but more fashion retailers across the city are offering their customers branded food and beverage options in addition to the latest designs. Other examples include in-store cafes and markets by Muji and Arc'teryx, and, of course, Tiffany. The growing trend is a way to entice customers, both new ones and loyalists, to stop in as well as a way to reinvigorate the brick-and-mortar experience, said Shawn Grain Carter, associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It's also a play for hyper-online younger shoppers returning to retail locations seeking offline experiences. "On every single level, they want you to buy their clothes, buy their glassware and enjoy their dessert," said Carter. "'Socialize with us, shop with us, dine with us.' It's like a seduction, and it's a smart way and a strategic way to do it." Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g4baD5Qp

The city’s efforts to transform Governors Island into a $700 million environmental research center are taking shape. The design includes a structure made of climate-friendly mass timber, linked by a curvy canopy of solar panels, that’s intended as a model for large-scale sustainable development. New designs reviewed by Crain’s provide a sneak peek at the project, known as The New York Climate Exchange, led by Stony Brook University to transform one of the island’s last swaths of developable land into a 400,000-square-foot incubator for the city’s green economy. A key part of the project’s ethos is to help mainstream climate-conscious innovation in large-scale construction projects. Chief among those efforts is encouraging a wider embrace of mass timber, an engineered lumber that is used to create wood buildings sourced from younger, softer woods as opposed to increasingly scarce old-growth forests. The prefabricated timber can save on material costs and requires fewer workers to install than steel or concrete. “One goal of this project is to make mass timber a little bit less intimidating for New York builders,” said Andrew Winters, the director of capital projects, planning and development for The New York City Climate Exchange. “We want to pave the way for, whether it's developers or other institutions, to make the decision to use timber, because it will have already been done.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/grV_MVD4

Not long after the pandemic upended the world of work, Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steven Roth predicted people would soon return to the office. It took longer than he’d hoped, but this week Roth proclaimed the threat that remote work posed to his business, which owns 20 million square feet of Manhattan commercial space, is over. “Work from home was a scare, but as we predicted it would not last and is not lasting,” he said. “Most have left their kitchen tables and are back at the office.”