Tony Malkin in San Francisco last month before heading to New Zealand and Hong Kong on business
From the April issue: How do you transform a 2.9 million-square-foot building leased out to hundreds of puny renters with names like “Round the Clock Socks and Hosiery” and “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral” into a state-of-the-art office building with a roster of high-quality, big-money international tenants?
That was the question facing Tony Malkin when he and his father, Peter Malkin, finally removed Helmsley-Spear as managing and leasing agent of the 75-year-old Empire State Building in 2006.
It was a challenge for the ages — compounded by years of infighting between the tower’s previous owners and tabloid headlines pushed by Donald Trump alleging rodent problems and elevator malfunctions. As if that wasn’t enough, the building’s infrastructure, as Malkin put it, was designed before the advent of “copy machines, faxes and computers.”
The Empire State Building may have been the world’s most famous office building, but in the New York real estate industry, it was becoming famous for the wrong reasons.
Lately, however, that’s begun to change. [more]