Winick Realty’s Far West Side Shepherd

reprints


Steven Baker built a life, and staked his career, on the Far West Side of Manhattan at a time when the High Line still languished as an abandoned freight track and nearly every block west of Ninth Avenue included a warehouse, garage or parking lot.

While other brokers followed dollar signs in Midtown and across Madison Avenue, Mr. Baker, then a young broker living in a Ninth Avenue bachelor pad, saw potential in the dusty warehouses and loading docks he walked past in the summer of 2000.

“I knew I wanted to control the neighborhood,” recalled the 40-year-old Mr. Baker, now a managing partner at Winick Realty, who has played a leading role in transforming the area.

for web power broker Winick Realty’s Far West Side Shepherd
From Far West Side to... Scarsdale?

From his earliest deals with Payless Shoe Source and John Jay College, which created classrooms on 10th Avenue where a boarded-up retail space once shriveled, Mr. Baker has helped change the Far West Side from a ghost town of dreary industrial buildings into a pedestrian-heavy attraction for city trendsetters and tourists alike.

Earlier this year, in fact, he inked yet another deal in the area that has triggered a wave of new business, all geared toward the Far West Side’s revitalized landscape.

At the TF Cornerstone-owned 505 West 37th Street, where Mr. Baker serves as the leasing agent, Ark Restaurants, the national group behind the Bryant Park Grill and Sequoia, inked a long-term, 10,350-square-foot lease for an upscale eatery on the building’s ground floor. Add to that the fact that Ark convinced former Chanterelle chef David Waltuck to create the menu and lured Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne into designing the restaurant and the message snapped into focus: lease now.

“It helped spur other deals in the buildings,” said Mr. Baker, referring not only to 505 West 37th Street but to other properties that TF Cornerstone owns in the area. “It helped people realize it won’t just be a destination—it will be a hip destination.”

Within days of the news, calls from prospective tenants jammed the line. A catering hall targeting young sophisticates inked 10,000 square feet around the corner. After that, a wine store committed to 2,200 square feet at 455 West 37th Street, another TF Cornerstone property Mr. Baker oversees. Of the 28,000 feet he was tasked with leasing at those TF Cornerstone properties, less than 6,000 remains, he said.

And while the repercussions of the mortgage crises and ensuing economic collapse still linger in most real estate markets, the Far West Side has benefited from news of an extended 7 train to 11th Avenue by 2013, development of the Hudson Yards by the Related Companies, earlier rezoning efforts and, farther north, Riverside South.

“When times are tough, landlords need our services more than ever,” said Mr. Baker. “It’s like that Honda commercial—“They sell themselves.”

As the Far West Side has evolved, so too has Mr. Baker’s career. While he now counts the Brodsky Organization and TF Cornerstone as two powerful clients, his earliest contacts, such as a Ninth Avenue landlord for whom he has inked seven deals since their relationship began in 2000, remain nearly as vital to him as the big shots.