292 Mad Scores Nation’s Biggest Minority-Owned Law Firm
By Laura Kusisto February 16, 2011 8:15 pm
reprints
In just the last couple of months, we’ve watched the ins and the outs, the ups and the downs at the Empire State Building. The activity continues unabated.
Milwaukee-based Gonzalez, Saggio and Harlan, the nation’s largest minority-owned law firm, has moved their New York offices from the icon to a 6,035-square-foot space at 292 Madison Avenue. The lawyers took the entire 19th floor for a little over five years.
The firm was leasing a short-term space in the Empire State Building, but “it was too small,” said Frederick Kane Mare, of The Vortex Group. They “opted for the Madison Avenue space because of its proximity to Grand Central,” he said. The tenant was repped by Vortex’s Rick Marek and Oliver Petrovic.
While the views might not be quite the same as they were in Gonzalez’s former home, the 1920s gem at the corner of 41st and Madison does feature a high concentration of Fortune 500 companies and a paneled lobby fit for some Brits in smoking jackets.
In August, Royal Bank of Canada sold a mortgage note for the building taken out by Haim Revah and Jacob Abikzer’s Metropolitan Realty Partners, which controls the building through a ground lease, to an entity controlled by JEMB for about $30 million, the New York Post reported.
“A number of law firms that we’re doing work for are expanding in New York,” Mr. Mare said. “It has got a better reputation than it ever did. Everybody wants to be here.”
Asking rents in the building were not available, but average asking rents for Class A buildings in the Grand Central submarket are in the low $60s.
lkusisto@observer.com
