McDonald’s parted with a three-story retail building it had owned in Midtown Manhattan for decades.
The fast-food giant sold the nearly 5,800-square-foot building at 429 Seventh Avenue for $35 million, property records filed with the city on Friday show. McDonald’s didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The buyer was Buvet Fee Owner LLC, whose authorized representative is Michele Gagnon, according to records.
The deal works out to just over $6,000 per square foot. The building sits between Penn Station and Macy’s flagship location in Herald Square. It did not appear on a list, dated May 2019, of properties McDonald’s has been trying to lease or sell.
It appears McDonald’s has owned the site since at least the early 1970s, though it was not clear for how much the restaurant chain acquired the property.
In the first half of 2019, the sales consideration of retail property deals in New York City increased 30 percent, to $2.56 billion, year over year, according to research from the Real Estate Board of New York. But the total number of retail transactions dropped 19 percent during the same time.
In 2004 McDonald’s sold a location in West Harlem to Columbia University for $2.7 million. The school plans to build a 34-story tower there, replacing the restaurant, which had been adored by locals and students. However, Columbia has said that McDonald’s will return as a retail tenant.