Brooklyn Buzz: From Spike Lee to Etsy, C&W’s Glenn Markman Has BK Down
By Daniel Geiger October 30, 2012 7:00 am
reprintsThrough a connection with the real estate executive Michael Fascitelli, now the chief executive officer of Vornado Realty Trust but then a partner at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Markman began to handle some sublease space that Goldman was trying to dispose of at the office building 1 Pierrepont Plaza. He eventually subleased two floors to the U.S. Attorney in a roughly 70,000-square-foot deal. Soon after, he subleased another floor in the skyscraper from the Royal Bank of Canada to the same tenant.
“I couldn’t have worked on transactions of that ilk with those kinds of tenants in Manhattan so early in my career,” Mr. Markman said. “By doing those deals in Brooklyn, I accelerated my career incredibly and tapped opportunities I never would have otherwise had.”
Mr. Markman found other openings for advancement, and not just in Brooklyn. Fresh off his success in that borough, he was riding one day in a cab through Midtown when he noticed Disney and Warner Bros. both had retail stores. He had just read an article about the tremendous profits the NBA was netting from its merchandise. Why didn’t it have a store too, he wondered.
“I wound up contacting them and pitching the idea,” Mr. Markman said.
His vision culminated in a 35,000-square-foot lease for an NBA store at 666 Fifth Avenue, with a starting rent of nearly $3 million annually—then one of the most lucrative deals ever done in the city for a retail space.
Aside from his brokerage work, Mr. Markman now owns two Brooklyn restaurants with his brother. It was while riding on the No. 4 train to one of them, Della Rocco’s Brick Oven Pizza, that he noticed how big Brooklyn had become.
“I realized [all these older women] were heading to the Barbara Streisand concert at Barclays (BCS),” Mr. Markman said. “These people would never take the 4—they would never ever take the train to Brooklyn. And yet here they were all heading to Barclays, and it really dawned on me: This thing is big.”
