Fresh off his joint $136 million purchase with SL Green of 1552 Broadway, the Times Square commercial property that houses TGI Friday’s, Jeff Sutton has become one of the most prominent retail landlords in the city, The New York Observer said. According to the profile, in which Sutton declined to participate (as he did for a recent story by The Real Deal on his Manhattan activity), the Gravesend, Brooklyn-native started his march to the top in the early 1990s with a risky strategy: he would get the lease first, and then buy the space with the lease money. He used the strategy first with Payless Shoes and then CVS, before landing his big break in 2002, signing American Girl at 609 Fifth Avenue.
… [more]

From left: 1551 Broadway then and now

Since the day it opened back in 1959, the now vanished Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, at 1551 Broadway at 46th Street, announced a profound change in the once and future crossroads of the world.
Until that time, the intersection had been a fairly elegant and surely vibrant part of the city, where you could take the family. But the arrival of Howard Johnson’s restaurant over 50 years ago confirmed, though it did not cause, the change that would soon lead to the swift and inexorable degeneration of Times Square into a den of prostitution and drug addiction, where respectable people feared to tread. It was fitting then that this Howard Johnson was almost the last vestige of that old Times Square to evaporate, nearly half a century after its opening, thus signaling the definitive victory of resurgent family values. … [more]