Hahn Kook Center on Park Avenue Plans Upgrade with M-CORE

An aging office building on Billionaires’ Row will be redeveloped to the tune of $200 million — perhaps with some help from the city.

The Korea International Trade Association’s Hahn Kook Center at 460 Park Avenue, on the northwest corner of East 57th Street, sits next to the Four Seasons Hotel and has been known by its ground-floor tenant, Citibank.

The owner wants to upgrade to meet the needs of companies willing to pay sky-high pricing for first-class, amenitized space.

“It’s an important site and has been languishing,” said Dan Shannon of MdeAS Architects, who is not involved in the project.

Advised by JLL on repositioning the property, the owner, a subsidiary of the trade association, has been quietly letting leases run out and not adding to the tenant mix. In September, city records showed the owner paid one tenant $1.7 million to vacate. The tenant, WTG & Co., which moved to 500 Park Avenue, declined comment, as did JLL.

Now the owner of the 283,000 square-foot building, which also has 30,000 square feet of underground space, is seeking financial assistance as part of the city’s new M-CORE program to renovate, expand, furnish and equip the property.

Hahn Kook has applied to the city’s Industrial Development Agency for breaks on city and state mortgage recording taxes as well as sales and use taxes. It is also requesting to make payments in lieu of property taxes, or PILOTs, which would be less than what it would otherwise pay. A hearing on the project is scheduled for Jan. 23.

Two projects, at 850 Third Avenue and 175 Water Street, were previously approved for M-CORE, which incentivizes office owners to transform their properties into Class A buildings. They nabbed a combined $100 million in tax breaks.

In its pitch for the tax breaks, Hahn Kook said tenants including the Korean Consulate General and Korean International Trade Association are expected to retain 635 jobs and add 144 jobs at wages of $110 per hour.

The 292-foot-tall building sits on 13,557 square feet of land with no height limit. If the structure were set back and restacked, for instance, smaller tower floors could end up with Central Park views.

The building has a colorful backstory.

Marion Davies, early movie star and savvy businesswoman (Getty)

Its developer was the Davies Company, backed by Marion Cecilia Douras. Born in Brooklyn in 1897 and later known by her stage name, Marion Davies, she appeared in several Broadway productions including the Ziegfeld Follies, where she met William Randolph Hearst.

Davies starred in his 1918 film “Cecilia of the Pink Roses” and was acclaimed as a gifted comedienne. She and Hearst became inseparable and moved to California where they founded Cosmopolitan Productions which had ties to MGM and other studios. She eventually starred in 46 films, of which 16 were “talkies.”

Davies and Hearst lived and threw lavish Hollywood parties in what became known as “Hearst Castle” in San Simeon and in Santa Monica where they had another mansion on the beach. She listened to Hearst’s financial advisers and made shrewd investments including in real estate, even keeping Hearst afloat in the 1930s with a million-dollar check.

Her building on Park Avenue was designed by Emery Roth & Sons and completed in 1955. According to Architecture Magazine, it was “clad in unique stamped aluminum that was prefabricated at the factory, [and] installed quickly and easily at the site.”

In August 1952, Citibank’s predecessor, National City Bank of New York, leased its ground floor space prior to the completion of the building. The adjacent retail space was leased to a Liz Claiborne entity but has long been occupied by Audemars Piguet.

The unbuilt office building was entirely ground leased in April 1953 by Davies to Melvin Katz’s 460 Park Corporation with a first expiration in 2005.

After Davies’ death in 1961, the Davies company sold the land in 1968 to Long Island-based Thomas Parkinson Jr.’s Nock Company.

Nock conveyed a 15 percent stake to a Chilean company with the requirement that if its assets were seized by that government, his company could reclaim the stake. Nock then sold the land to another of his entities, Breecom.

In 1972, after an upheaval in Chile, Breecom reclaimed that interest.

Two years later, South Koreans bought the 99-year leasehold on the 22-story building from Katz for nearly $15 million, brought in its own consulate and leased to other tenants while also creating a Korean International Trade Center.

The building was redubbed the Hahn Kook Center, and that entity purchased the land below from Breecom in June 1995 for another $15 million. The ownership took out a $25.2 million mortgage from the Commercial Bank of Korea and paid it off in 2005.