The Department of Buildings has given L&L Holdings the green light for a planned 42-story tower at 425 Park Avenue.
The 905-foot tower on Park Avenue, between 55th and 56th streets, will go up after L&L tears down of the current 31-story, 650,000-square-foot office tower that currently takes up the full block. Demolition is slated to kick off at the end of the year. L&L CEO David Levinson told the Wall Street Journal that he expects construction to be completed by 2017.
Under former Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed Midtown Rezoning, Levinson would have been able to raze the current building and construct a new tower roughly 15 percent larger. Because that plan stalled out, L&L must leave the steel skeleton of the bottom 25 percent of the building in place.
L&L, formerly a minority stakeholder in 425 Park, picked up the remaining 90 percent interest in the property from Lehman Brothers in July 2013. [WSJ, 1st item] — Julie Strickland