Splitsville! Divorce Doyenne Takes 8K for New Firm
By Laura Kusisto February 16, 2011 5:32 pm
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Amongst the city’s power elite, Harriet Cohen is the maestro of the highly public marital split. It’s fitting then that one of the city’s top divorce attorneys has left the firm in which she was a founding partner and, in dramatic fashion, taken an uber-prime spot in Seven Times Square.
Ms. Cohen has leased 8,300 square feet on the 38th floor of the billboard-plastered, 48-story building over the 42nd Street subway entrance. Her brand-new firm, known as Cohen Rabin Stine Schumann, consists of 13 matrimonial lawyers who came over from Cohen Hennessey Bienstock & Rabin, founded in 1994.
The Observer caught up with Ms. Cohen as she was bee-lining from a cab into her “beautiful new office,” as she told us. A few minutes later, from her spot overlooking Times Square, Central Park and the Hudson, she continued: “Being in this spectacular new space will give our clients a sense and a feeling of being able to get back to the top of the world because we meet clients when they’re in distress.” Those clients include Andrew Cuomo, Laurence Fishburne, and Alison Stern (the former Mrs. Howard Stern), not to mention Patricia Duff, former wife of billionaire Ronald Perelman.
Ms. Cohen said the reason for starting over yet again was to be in the new triangle of legal activity forming at Seven, Four, and, most recently, 11 Times Square. The city’s formidable new divorce force moved in literally overnight in January and will sublease from one of the building’s several big-name legal tenants, Day Pitney, which has shed at least one other small chunk of its space in recent months.
The asking rent for the four-year deal was $60 a foot in the building, where deals just a few years ago were signed on high floors for $150 a foot, according to Arthur Draznin, of Newmark Knight Frank, who repped the tenant. Jennifer Ogden of CB Richard Ellis represented the sublessor.
“It was fully built and furnished,” Mr. Draznin said, “with spectacular views, multiple conference rooms and a large storage and filing area, which was important to the firm.”
lkusisto@observer.com
