http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/re...1&ref=business
Square Feet
With Financing Still Rare, New York Developments Start to ReboundBy JOTHAM SEDERSTROM
Published: September 6, 2011
When the development firm Hines began exploring plans for a state-of-the-art, ground-up office tower overlooking Bryant Park in April 2009, the notion seemed far-fetched at best, given the economic mood.
Construction is expected to begin next year for a 28-story tower at 1045 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The tower will serve as something of a gateway to neighboring Bryant Park.
Demolition at 1045 Avenue of the Americas began in 2009, and the project has avoided pitfalls.
After all, Lehman Brothers had collapsed seven months earlier and Bernard L. Madoff had just pleaded guilty to federal felony charges in his vast financial Ponzi scheme. By the end of 2009, construction had frozen at development sites all across Manhattan. But in the nearly 30 months since those discussions, Hines’s plan to build a 28-story, glass-and-...stainless steel tower at 1045 Avenue of the Americas has withstood many of the obstacles that have thwarted other real estate developers.
“In no point in the last 30 years across all the cycle changes have we ever not been active,” said Tommy Craig, a senior vice president and head of Hines’s regional office in New York. “Resilience is one of the defining virtues of our firm.”
With a search for equity partners and a marketing campaign set to begin this week, the 450,000-square-foot building is one of two Manhattan projects now in the works for Hines.
The other, a 72-story mixed-use building at 53 West 53rd Street, is set to rise adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art once an equity source is chosen. The project, designed by Jean Nouvel, was scaled down recently from its original height of 82 stories.....