Manhattan’s Newest Skyscraper

The 47-story 425 Park Avenue has officially opened in Manhattan. And, while it debuts in an office market rocked by record-high availability and wobbly rents, the tower is already 85 percent leased. Also, local planning authorities have provisionally approved a Trump Organization plan to build a 2,209-unit condo project at the Blue Monster golf course in Doral, Fla.

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— Tom Acitelli, Co-Deputy Editor

Manhattan’s 425 Park Avenue Officially Opens at 85 Percent Leased

Sacred, hallowed, heroic, iconic. These were among the adjectives used to describe Park Avenue by those behind the construction of its newest skyscraper at an Oct. 26 event marking its opening. David Levinson and Robert Lapidus, the partners behind L&L Holding Company, talked about the travails of building 425 Park Avenue, a spot they saw as “sacred.” It was worth the effort of not only acquiring the land lease for, they said, but also the 10-year quest of getting the existing tenants out of the old 425 Park in order to build the new one. The last three adjectives — hallowed, heroic and iconic — came from Norman Foster, the British architect on the project who made regular pilgrimages to Park Avenue when he was a student at Yale in the early 1960s. “There’s only one Park Avenue. … [It] is the very essence of the New York grid. The facades line up generally so it creates this pedestrian-scale, almost heroic thoroughfare. And then, with the setbacks, the towers rise out of it,” Foster said during a panel discussion at the event. “It’s kind of a hallowed place and really unique. So how do you respond to that and create a building with its own powerful identity?”

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Trump's Condo Development Approved by Doral Officials, Pending Further Review

Former President Donald Trump’s organization’s proposal to build a 2,209-unit condo complex at the Blue Monster golf course in Doral, Fla., was approved on first reading Wednesday night at a meeting of the local planning agency. But The Trump Organization will still need to return with more details at a later time for full approval by the city to build on a mostly vacant 56-acre site. The new development would be adjacent to a 470-room hotel resort with 107,432 square feet of retail space, 185,415 square feet of amenities. The applicants are seeking a zoning change from “county mixed use” to “downtown mixed use” in order to build a larger structure, which will be limited in height by the Federal Highway Administration due to flight patterns to and from Miami-Dade Airport.

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