Landmarks Approves Restoration and Enhancement of Porte-Cochere Entrances at Manhattan House

New York (Jan. 8, 2008 )  The Landmark Preservation Commission recently approved plans to restore and enhance the two 66th Street porte-cochere entrances at Manhattan House, the Upper East Side landmark architectural icon and residential development.

The porte-cochere improvement plan was designed and developed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Sasaki Associates.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the restoration and enhancement of driveways, sidewalks, columns and landscaping at Manhattan House. The driveways and sidewalks will be repaved with the introduction of granite curbs flanking both sides of the new driveway. At the two main drop-off points, granite pavers will be installed and repairs will be made to the existing terrazzo flooring. New landscaping and lighting features will be introduced on both sides of the porte-cochere columns. The Manhattan House porte-cochere improvement project is scheduled to break ground in early 2009, and completion is projected for fall 2009.

“It is important to us to bring back the elegance of the original grand porte-cochere entrances designed by Gordon Bunshaft when Manhattan House was built in 1952,” said Brian Fallon, a partner of O’Connor Capital Partners, the sponsor of Manhattan House. “This is another milestone in the redevelopment, and we have assembled a highly qualified team to complete the Landmark-approved restoration in the spring and summer of 2009.”

Located at 200 East 66th Street, the legendary Manhattan House has been restored and enhanced to combine the building’s classic grandeur with quintessential elements of 21st-century luxury living. Manhattan House offers spacious, light-infused, one- to five-bedroom-plus family sized residences, and residents will enjoy unprecedented services and amenities, including the exclusive residents-only Manhattan Club, an in-residence hotel concierge, Exhale Spa and state-of-the-art fitness facility, Roto Studio-designed children’s playroom, and Manhattan’s second largest private residential park with landscaping by Sasaki Associates, the world-renowned firm that recently designed the 2008 Beijing Olympic Green.

For more information, please visit www.manhattanhouse.com.

O’Connor Capital Partners
O’Connor Capital Partners, founded in 1983, is a privately held real estate investment and development firm. The firm is headquartered in New York with regional offices in Mexico City and Los Angeles. O’Connor Capital Partners is focused on principal investing through private equity funds and concentrates its efforts on direct investments in high-quality assets in major North American metropolitan markets. Notable New York Metro projects include The Westchester in White Plains, Menlo Park Mall in New Jersey and Parkchester in the Bronx. O’Connor has participated in the development of high-end residential projects in most of the major cities in the U.S. and Mexico. Since inception, the firm has acquired or developed more than $15 billion of property on behalf of various investment funds, institutional clients, and its own account, encompassing all major property types. For more information, please visit www.oconnorcp.com.

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Take the Manhattan House video tour

Featuring captivating exterior views, as well as highlights of the 2008 Kip’s Bay Interior Designer Showcase, the Manhattan House video tour gives house hunters a glimpse at the Manhattan House lifestyle: the luxe finishes, and the opulent scale of space allowing residents to choose a modern, or more classic aesthetic.

The video speaks for itself, now available for view on You Tube. Experience 200 East 66th Street:

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Manhattan House featured by Condo-Living-West.com

 

The Manhattan House Upper East Side Residences

Situated in the heart of the Upper East Side real estate district, New York’s most prestigious neighbourhood, is an icon of modernism architecture: the new Manhattan House condominium residences for sale. Offering a grand one to five bedroom presale New York City apartment residences and penthouse suites in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and featuring one of the largest private parks, the new Manhattan House homes has long been one of the most sought after addresses for sophisticated New Yorkers according to their online marketing website. Designated an architectural landmark by the City of New York back in 2007, the pre-sale Manhattan House luxury residences recently undergone a major renovation to ensure its features, amenities and systems meet the needs of today’s knowledgeable home buyer. The New York City apartments at the pre-construction Manhattan House residences is one of the most influential pieces of architecture from the city’s mid-century period. Insipired by Le Corbusier, the father of Modernist architecture, the Manhattan House New York City apartment homes was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the internationally renowned architectural firm responsible for the Time Warner Center, the St. Regis Hotel and Residences, and Lever House. The firms’ master architect, Gordon Bunshaft, was lead designer of the New York Manhattan House apartment condominiums as well as a resident. His Manhattan House in the Upper East Side of Manhattan real estate was honoured with landmark status in 2007 and was recently designated as the host site of the 2008 Kips Bay Decorator Show House, the premier interior design exposition in North America.

The Upper East Side Residences at the Manhattan House NYC

The living rooms at the Manhattan House condominium residences for sale include high style, contemporary with a mix of traditional. The choice is truly yours. The pre-sale New York Upper East Side Manhattan House residences were designed with classic understated simplicity, making each one the perfect canvas for your to express your individual style. The Upper East Side Manhattan House building provides unique floor plans to ensure that nearly every New York City apartment residences here is a corner unit or a floor through, filled with natural light from two exposures. Perfectly situated on a quiet, tree lined two way boulevard at 200 East 66 Street New York in Manhattan’s Upper East Side real estate district, overlooking a beautiful private park, each residence here has an unobstructed view. The pre-construction Manhattan House New York apartments was built with exacting craftsmanship, and the renovation preserves these details while updating the building with every modern convenience. Every presale New York City residence features plaster moldings, oak floors, solid doors and custom hardware. Many Upper East Side homes at the Manhattan House residences also have wood burning fireplaces and private balconies. Each presale suite is conveniently pre-wired for fiber optics, allowing for state of the art phone, cable, and high speed internet. With only two to seven residences on each floor of the Upper East Side Manhattan House New York City real estate development, privacy and exclusivity are built in.

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From the New York Times: The Kelly Connection

IS the story of Grace Kelly, the future princess, at the Manhattan House, a quintessential Manhattan real estate story?

That is the question that Dr. Jim Sperber, an internist in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., who is also a Grace Kelly fan and the son of a Prudential Douglas Elliman broker, raised in an e-mail message about her stay in the early 1950s at Manhattan House, the first and perhaps grandest white-brick apartment complex on the Upper East Side.

Now that Manhattan House — with 584 apartments, many with balconies, spread across five 20-story towers — is in the midst of a condominium conversion, the sponsors are celebrating Grace Kelly’s years there and have signed an agreement with the Princess Grace Foundation, to permit the use of her image in promotional materials.

But after learning of this development, Dr. Sperber, who has many interests, including providing medical care to an 8-foot 4-inch farmer in Ukraine, went through his collection of Grace Kelly books — assembled from garage sales — and pointed out that Miss Kelly’s father, John B. Kelly Sr., a three-time American gold medalist rower, helped build the Manhattan House.

Mr. Kelly, a wealthy Philadelphia contractor from an Irish family, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of Philadelphia in the 1930s, founded Kelly for Brickwork, which was a subcontractor on the project. Many Manhattan House residents believe that his company manufactured the distinctive white bricks used on the building, but Toby E. Boshak, the executive director of the Princess Grace Foundation, said that his firm was hired as a construction contractor to do the brick work and put up the distinctive white walls of the project.

As for the notion that he used his pull, as any father might, to get his daughter into a coveted apartment in the building, the evidence is far from certain. On the one hand, biographies detail a difficult relationship that Grace Kelly had with her father, and she yearned for financial independence from her family. On the other hand, family background was carefully reviewed at the Manhattan House and other prominent buildings in Manhattan.

Patricia Lynch, a former television news investigative producer for NBC Nightly News, who has lived in Manhattan House since 1975, said that when she applied for admission 25 years after Grace Kelly moved in, the building had a long waiting list and connections were needed to get to the top of the list. She said that she wore white gloves for an interview in which the building manager queried her about her parents and her family background, even though she had written two books and was financially independent at the time.

One biography, “Grace,” by Robert Lacey (Putnam Adult, 1994), said that Miss Kelly, who was in her early 20s, was “installed” there by her father in an apartment that her mother decorated. Another book, “The Bridesmaids,” by Judith Balaban Quine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), who was a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Rainier in Monaco, said that the Kellys had given their daughter “permission” to leave the Barbizon Hotel and move into Manhattan House, but wanted her to find a roommate. The book also suggested that the apartment was decorated to the taste of Miss Kelly’s mother, Margaret.

In an interview, her first Manhattan House roommate and another bridesmaid, Sally Parrish Richardson, said that she moved in after Miss Kelly and did not know how she got the apartment.

The Manhattan House sponsors have commissioned four designers to create model apartments “with the spirit of Princess Grace,” bringing their “unique vision of grand, high-style living at Manhattan House.”

But by some accounts, despite her increasingly glamorous life, Grace Kelly’s furnishings at Manhattan House were, alas, quite plain. “The living room was without charm, character or gender,” Ms. Quine wrote. “It wasn’t ugly; it was utterly bland. Furniture, fabrics and colors alike were all resolutely practical. Everything seemed brown.”

By JOSH BARBANEL, Published: October 28, 2007, available here.

In a related article, check out House Beautiful Magazine’s feature on interior designer Jamie Drake’s Kelly Green decorating scheme from the 2008 Kips Bay Designer Showcase, hosted by Manhattan House.

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Urban Legacy: An Upper East Side Landmark

Manhattan House received landmark status in 2007 for its Bunshaft designed, Le Courbusier-inspired architecture, but has been regarded as an Upper East Side monument to modernism for years.

In 1998, the New York Times wrote the following on Manhattan House, in a retrospective on this famous building:

“WHEN completed in 1951, the 582-apartment Manhattan House at 200 East 66th Street was a dreamy white Gibraltar amid a soot-dark sea of dingy tenements. The New York Life Insurance Company, which built the project, protected its pristine island by buying up the surrounding blocks as a low-rise frame for what is often acclaimed as a masterpiece in modern housing.”

Check out the full article, available here.

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O’Connor Capital Partners Completes $86 Million Sale of 102,842-Square-Foot Upper East Side Retail Condominium at Manhattan House

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–O’Connor Capital Partners has completed the sale of the Upper East Side retail condominium at Manhattan House to Madison Capital for $86 million. The deal marks a major milestone for the $1.1 billion condominium conversion of Manhattan House, a modernist and architectural icon with grand residences that was designated a historic landmark in 2007 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

…

“The Manhattan House retail condominium is a strategic investment with considerable future growth potential,” said Brian Fallon, partner at O’Connor Capital Partners. “Its proximity to the luxury retail core of New York City and position at the base of the top luxury residential conversion development in the city make this the prime location for retail traffic.”

O’Connor Capital Partners successfully attracted new top-tier tenants, including Lululemon Athletica, a yoga-inspired athletic apparel company with over 80 locations in Canada, the United States and Australia; Staples Express, the United States’ largest office supply store and business resource center; ALDO, an international leather goods retailer; and Icon Parking Systems. Existing tenants include Club Monaco, a subsidiary of Polo Ralph Lauren Corp., and Madame Paulette.

Read the Full Story at Biz.Yahoo.com.

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From NYPost ‘Real’ Deal Section:

…In the latest breakthrough for the $1.1 billion Manhattan House condo conversion, O’Connor Capital Partners has sold the entire commercial portion of the landmark Upper East Side apartment building for $86 million.

The commercial unit – which includes 102,842 square feet of retail, office and garage space – was purchased by Madison Capital.

O’Connor Capital partner Brian Fallon said, “it was always part or our overall capital and development plan” to sell the commercial space in the luxury building between Second and Third avenues and 65th and 66th streets. The state attorney general’s office approved Manhattan House‘s offering plan in August.

Bill O’Connor, a company principal and the son of founder Jeremiah O’Connor, noted that they have rented much of the store space to new tenants, including Lululemon Athletica and Aldo shoes.

Prudential Douglas Elliman Vice-Chairman Dolly Lenz, who’s marketing the 472 apartments, said, “The fact that the commercial space sold for such a high price shows that the whole building is a seller.”

Read more ‘Real’ Deal Coverage from NYPost here.

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RE BusinessOnline Reports: Manhattan House Retail Condo Space

O’CONNOR CAPITAL SELLS RETAIL CONDO FOR $86 MILLION
NEW YORK CITY — New York City-based O’Connor Capital Partners has disposed of the retail condominium at Manhattan House, a five-building, 22-story building located at 200 E. 66th St. that is currently undergoing a residential conversion, in an $86 million transaction. The condo offers 102,842 square feet of space that includes seven street-level stores located on Second and Third avenues between 65th and 66th street; four professional office spaces on 65th and 66th streets; and a parking garage located on 65th Street. Current retail tenants include Club Monaco, Madame Paulette, Lululemon Athletica, Staples Express, ALDO and Icon Parking Systems. O’Connor was represented by Eastdil Secured in the transaction; the property was acquired by locally based Madison Capital.

See the original article from 10/10/08, at http://www.rebusinessonline.com/news_archive/2008/October/10-10-08.shtml

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Commercial Property News Reports: Manhattan House Retail Space

Madison Capital Takes NYC Retail Condo for $86M

O’Conner Capital Partners has announced the closing of the sale of the retail condominium portion of the Manhattan House to Madison Partners for $86 million. Eastdil Secured represented O’Conner in the deal. Manhattan House, at 200 East 66th St., is in New York City’s Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and originally built in 1952, the property is currently undergoing a $1.1 billion condominium conversion. O’Conner Capital Partners has announced the closing of the sale of the retail condominium portion of the Manhattan House to Madison Partners for $86 million. Eastdil Secured represented O’Conner in the deal.

Manhattan House, at 200 East 66th St., is in New York City’s Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and originally built in 1952, the property is currently undergoing a $1.1 billion condominium conversion.

Brian Fallon, a partner at O’Conner told CPN, “In anticipation of the condominium conversion offering plan being approved by the Attorney General in late summer 2008, O’Connor conducted a competition for sale of the commercial space at Manhattan House with Eastdil as our agent. We had a tremendous response and a great deal of competition for the opportunity.”

Manhattan House has 22 stories and five buildings. The property includes retail condominiums, as well as office and parking. It also includes seven street level stores on Second and Third Avenues, four professional offices on 65th and 66th Streets and a parking garage.

Fallon noted that, “the retail was repositioned on Second and Third Avenues with new leases to Lululemon Athletica, Staples Express and Madame Paulette.” The closing “without a missed step,” he added, was testimony to the quality of the property and location.

The residences have one to five bedrooms. Amenities include an in-house concierge, exclusive use of the Manhattan Club, Exhale Spa, a Roto-studio designed children’s playroom, and the second largest private park in the city with landscaping designed by Sasaki Associates.

O’Conner Capital Partners, headquartered in New York City , is a twenty-five year old privately held real estate and development and investment firm. Madison Capital is a private real estate organization that manages a $1.25 billion portfolio of retail and residential assets in New York City .

Judy Feldman, Contributing Correspondent for Commercial Property News: URL, http://www.commercialpropertynews.com/cpn/regions/new_york_city_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872393

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Globe St. Coverage of $86M Retail Condo Sale

$86M Retail Condo Buy Furthers $1.1B Conversion, By Natalie Dolce

NEW YORK CITY-O’Connor Capital Partners has completed the sale of the Upper East Side retail condominium at Manhattan House to Madison Capital for $86 million. The deal marks a major milestone for the $1.1 billion condominium conversion of Manhattan House here. Brian Fallon, partner at O’Connor Capital Partners, tells GlobeSt.com that the business plan for the Manhattan House conversion always anticipated the sale of the commercial premises prior to year end 2008. “Given the capital markets, this is a significant milestone for both O’Connor Capital Partners and Madison Capital.”

Fallon tells GlobeSt.com that the commercial premises were offered to the market during the summer. He further notes that it was a very “spirited competition” with “many interested parties.

As GlobeSt.com previously reported, the Real Estate Finance Bureau of the State of New York Office of the Attorney General recently declared locally based O’Connor Capital Partners’ Manhattan House’s offering plan effective. The Attorney General had accepted for filing an amendment to the offering which authorizes formation of the condominium here at 200 E. 66th St.

Fallon tells GlobeSt.com that the conversion is “going extremely well with Phase I sales having just been completed and Phase II units just being offered to the marketplace consistent with our plan.” He notes that the retail condo here is a “strategic investment with considerable future growth potential. Its proximity to the luxury retail core of New York City and position at the base of the top luxury residential conversion development in the city make this the prime location for retail traffic.”

…

“Madison Capital is extremely pleased to have been able to acquire a significant and exceptional retail asset in the heart of the Upper East Side,” says Richard Wagman, managing partner at Madison Capital, in a prepared statement. “The high caliber of tenancy, together with the prime location and high quality of this asset, were what attracted Madison to this premier core plus opportunity. We continue to actively pursue new acquisitions as our historically disciplined approach to underwriting allows us to acquire assets despite market volatility.”

For the full GlobeSt.com coverage, visit this site. Archive subscriber membership is required to view the full article.

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