Clothing maker signs rare Garment District lease

The Arsenal Company has signed an honest-to-goodness clothier to its Garment District building, rare at a time when most spaces in the area are being snapped up by tenants from other industries that are priced out of Chelsea and the Flatiron District.

In a six-year-plus deal, Long Island-based clothier Knoles & Carter will take 5,400 square feet at 463 Seventh Avenue, Arsenal’s 410,000-square-foot, 22-story building between West 35th and West 36th streets. The asking rent for the eighth-floor space was $38 per square foot.

The company will use the space for offices and showrooms, Crain’s reported.

David Levy, principal at Adams & Co., brokered the deal on behalf of both the landlord and the tenant, Crain’s said. Most other buildings in the Garment District have been overrun by tenants from other industries, Levy said, as the area that he termed the “transit triangle” – between Grand Central Station, Pennsylvania Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal – offers lower rents for loft-size buildings similar to those in Chelsea and Flatiron.

“There were two schools of thought a year ago,” Levy told Crain’s. “Would tenants go Downtown to the Financial District or would they come up to the transit triangle. I think the combination of Sandy and less convenient transportation in Lower Manhattan has led them here.”

Crain’s did not include a comment from Arsenal nor from Knoles & Carter. [Crain’s]  –Hiten Samtani