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Manhattan buildings sit at corner of prestige and high rent after address changes
February 25, 2025
Marx Realty CEO Craig Deitelzweig said rent has doubled at 10 Grand Central since the landlord changed the address from 708 Third Ave.
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.
The building at 10 Grand Central is just the latest in Manhattan to change its fortunes at least in part by changing its address.
Ever since 1250 Broadway was renamed NoMad Tower in 2017, for example, rents have risen by 25%, said Craig Panzirer, director of leasing at owner Global Holdings Management. The name change helped draw attention to the $45 million spent by the landlord to upgrade the 1960s-era glass tower at the corner of West 32nd Street.
“We’re getting rents you don’t normally see in this part of town,” Panzirer said.
Opting for vanity
Changing a building’s address typically requires approval from the borough president. It costs $11,000 to secure an OK from the Manhattan borough president’s office for an address that deviates from “normal numbering conventions.”
“A vanity address should make the building easier to find or at least no less difficult to find,” reads a memo from the office’s topographical bureau. “The request for a vanity address should be based on more than the desire to lend prestige to an otherwise ordinary building.”
Of course, prestige – and higher rents – is exactly what most building owners are looking for. In Midtown, many have chosen to bask in the refracted glory of Bryant Park. Bank of America kicked off the trend in 2010, when its new tower rose at the northwest corner of West 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue and took the address 1 Bryant Park. Across the street, 1100 Sixth Ave. rechristened itself 2 Bryant Park, 1095 Sixth Ave. became 3 Bryant Park, 1071 Sixth Ave. turned into 4 Bryant Park and 1065 Sixth Ave. became 5 Bryant Park, according to mortgage records filed with the city.
A few blocks to the east, three years ago 335 Madison Ave. renamed itself 22 Vanderbilt Ave., a nod to the shiny supertall tower that rose across the street at 1 Vanderbilt Ave.
Sometimes changes have different intentions, such as when the Durst Organization changed 4 Times Square about five years ago into the more traditional-sounding 151 W. 42nd St.
“They wanted to distance themselves from the craziness in Times Square,” said one broker.
In a statement, Durst Organization explained the move by noting the primary physical entrance to the office building is on 42nd Street facing Bryant Park rather than in Times Square. Meanwhile, Durst kept the 4 Times Square branding for the building’s retail spaces.
Over on West 34th Street, the towers at 1 and 2 Penn Plaza are now Penn 1 and Penn 2 after Vornado Realty Trust spent more than $1 billion modernizing these 1960s-era buildings. Penn 1, which was completed first, is commanding 30% more rent than before the 2019 rebrand, or about $100 per square foot.
Vornado wouldn’t comment on the address change. Dan Shannon, an architect who worked on the project, said “plaza” had an old-fashioned connotation that doesn’t fit with the Penn area’s refreshed towers and public spaces.
“A new name conveys new ambition,” said Shannon, managing director at MdeAS.
Or, as Piper Sandler real estate analyst Alexander Goldfarb put it, “When you spend hundreds of millions redeveloping a building, you want a new name.”
But you can’t always get what you want. The owner of 45 E. 53rd St. wanted to change to a Park Avenue address, but city officials said no. Although buildings located on the corner of an avenue and a side street can “pull” an avenue address to a side-street entrance, according to the Manhattan borough president’s office, 45 E. 53rd doesn’t face Park Avenue. The city’s aim is to prevent cases like that of 1325 Sixth Ave., a tower developed in 1989 that’s actually on West 53rd Street and closer to Seventh Avenue than Sixth.
New name mojo
Sometimes the need for change is obvious, such as when 666 Fifth Ave. changed its address four years ago to 660 Fifth. The New York Post described the old address as “diabolical,” and Brookfield wanted a fresh start after acquiring the tower from the Kushner family. Around the same time, 666 Third Ave. changed to 6 Grand Central. Owner Tishman-Speyer declined to comment.
The first building to see the potential of Grand Central as a business address was 140 E. 45th St., developed in the 1980s by Harry Macklowe, who was referring to it as 2 Grand Central Tower in a 1997 mortgage document filed with the city. In 2009, 60 E. 42nd St. became 1 Grand Central Place, a move that its owner, the Malkin family, said “confirms the building’s reputation as the premier prewar trophy property within the Grand Central district.” The 1.2 million-square-foot tower is 92% leased, up from 79% a decade ago.
The mojo carried over to 10 Grand Central, whose leased rate has climbed to 93% since shedding its Third Avenue address, a high figure for a building its age. Some tenants seem to like the Art Deco touches of the building designed by architect Ely Jacques Kahn; Ayn Rand worked in his office for six months while writing The Fountainhead. Other tenants appreciate 10 Grand Central’s remodeled lobby scented with Baccarat perfume, ample outdoor terrace spaces upstairs and open floor plans with hidden columns.
“We chiseled beams from the ceiling to get an extra half-inch of space,” Deitelzweig said. “Little things like that add up.”