March 29, 2024

Square Feet: A Wounded Wall Street Is Expected to Stay Put

Dozens of office buildings that were flooded by the storm still lack power and are off-limits to tenants, and many streets are a chaotic mess of generators, work crews and pumps.

Still trying to gauge the extent of the damage, many landlords have been vague about when their buildings will reopen. And some tenants, who have been uprooted to tiny conference rooms in New Jersey or industrial spaces in Brooklyn, are weighing whether to come back to the neighborhood at all.

But despite the uncertainty and destruction, many analysts don’t expect the bulk of tenants to pack up and leave for good, nor do they think that future tenants will rule out the neighborhood over fears they might get flooded.

“I don’t think it will become an overriding factor in the location decision,” said John Wheeler, the head downtown broker for Jones Lang LaSalle, echoing other top brokers. “I guess time will tell if I’m being too sanguine about this.”Brokers add that the neighborhood remains a compelling place to locate a business. Even with some train lines hampered by storm damage, it is still amply served by mass transit, with more than a dozen subway lines and ferry service. The new apartments and condos built in recent years, along with new boutiques and restaurants, also mean that many people can now live a few blocks from their office.

Besides, rents are notably competitive with other business districts in Manhattan, at about $40 a square foot in the financial district, compared with $65 in midtown, according to Cassidy Turley, the brokerage, though the downtown figure is expected to climb when the two new World Trade Center buildings come online.

Complicating the prognosis about the neighborhood’s long-term health is the fact that getting an exact handle on the extent of damage has been tricky. Many major landlords have been reluctant to respond to even basic questions about the status of their buildings. And many brokers have refused to discuss individual properties.

And while the city’s Buildings Department declared early last week that nine downtown buildings were completely off-limits, and another 445 were partially habitable, it did not differentiate between commercial and residential structures.

Jones Lang LaSalle has been one of the few brokerages to tackle the issue. It concluded that a hefty 20 percent of all the major office buildings below Canal Street are closed, or 37 out of 183, according to data compiled as of Monday. And those shuttered buildings, most of which are east of Broadway, represent 29.2 million square feet of space, the data shows.

Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests the damage has been severe. Late last week, the Water Street corridor, which runs along the East River, appeared alarmingly hard-hit.

Men in white hazmat outfits pushed garbage bins on streets, which rumbled with the sounds of generators. Several traffic lights were still dark. Clumps of yellow hoses snaked up escalators and through lobbies. And security guards, protecting against looters, were more numerous than people wearing suits.

Among the buildings confirmed closed were: 99 Wall Street, 199 Water Street, One Wall Street Plaza and 180 Maiden Lane. Others that appear to be closed include 55 Water Street, 85 Broad Street, 7 Hanover Square and 10 Hanover Square, among others. Four New York Plaza, where The Daily News is based, could be closed for a year, though One New York Plaza, whose basement shopping center took on 30 feet of water, should reopen in two weeks, according to a spokeswoman for the building’s landlord, Brookfield Office Properties.

Going forward, some tenants are concerned that floods will become a regular occurrence; after all, just 15 months ago, the city was soaked by Tropical Storm Irene. These tenants say their fears were confirmed by comments that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made after Hurricane Sandy about how destructive weather events are likely to recur.

“He was like, ‘If you don’t believe in global warming, wake up and see what’s happening here,’ and he was right,” said Andrea Katz, a development director for WBAI, the public radio station, which has a 10,000-square-foot space at 120 Wall Street. The lower floors of the Art Deco building, which is at South Street and owned by Silverstein Properties, were flooded by Hurricane Sandy.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/realestate/commercial/a-wounded-wall-street-is-expected-to-stay-put.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Media Equation: TV Justice Thrives on Fear

Well, there’s always Nancy Grace.

Every night on HLN, CNN’s supposedly softer side, Ms. Grace sprays lightning bolts in all directions — at her guests, the law, and most often, the accused. Since her show began in 2005, the presumption of innocence has found a willful enemy in the former prosecutor turned broadcast judge-and-jury.

Shows like “Nancy Grace” and “America’s Most Wanted” — along with “Cops,” and all the prison reality shows and Court TV re-enacts — may serve as a window on crime, but the fundamental appeal is more primal. Crime shows are the adult version of the scary stories we were told as children, the ones about the unseen Gollum who sweeps out of nowhere and devours the lives of unsuspecting people.

I have no issue with true crime, as long as it is true. Ms. Grace, a former prosecutor in Atlanta who was reprimanded for stepping over a line more than once, obliterates lines every night on “Nancy Grace.” Working with a contingent of experts who have all the independence of a crew of trained seals, Ms. Grace races toward judgment, heedlessly ignoring nuance and evidence on her way to finding guilt.

Ms. Grace knows what she knows with a great deal of certainty, but she was wrong about the now debunked rape charges against the Duke lacrosse team, she was wrong about who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. She taped a corrosive interview in 2006 with Melinda Duckett, whose 2-year-old son had gone missing, and Ms. Duckett killed herself the next day. Ms. Grace broadcast the interview anyway.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington and a frequent television talking head on legal matters, says she practices a hybrid of journalism and law that manages to be neither.

“I think she has managed to demean both professions with her hype, rabid persona, and sensational analysis,” Professor Turley said. “Some part of the public takes her seriously, and her show erodes the respect for basic rights.”

She has her fans. Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, is upset about the apparent passing of “America’s Most Wanted” and sees Ms. Grace as one of the last people standing up for victims.

“What Nancy Grace does so well is tell the story from the perspective of the victims,” he said. “Her show is a way for the broad dissemination of information about the victims of crime.”

Like Mr. Walsh and Dominick Dunne, Ms. Grace came by her victimhood honestly when her fiancé, Keith Griffin, was killed when she was just 19. In her book “Objection,” Ms. Grace suggested that a stranger with a criminal record shot Mr. Griffin outside a convenience store, was arrested and denied any involvement. By her recollection, she had to sit through three days of agonizing deliberation and then the prosecutor asked her if the defendant should be given the death penalty. She said no, she had no stomach for it.

The New York Observer fact-checked her written account and discovered that Mr. Griffin was killed by a former co-worker with no criminal record who confessed to the crime immediately. At trial, he was convicted within hours and the prosecution did in fact ask for the death penalty, but was denied. Ms. Grace explained the variance by telling The Observer, “I have tried not to think about it.”

So what if she got a few details wrong? The love of her life died when she was at a young age. And she’s been dealing payback ever since.

It can be a successful line of work. (Indeed, Beth Holloway, mother of Natalee, the young girl whose disappearance six years ago became a cable-television and “Nancy Grace” mainstay, now has a Lifetime show called “Vanished with Beth Holloway.”) But there are some signs that crime doesn’t pay as it once did.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e7156870369b7e8c0353985b5bc97f01