Insight Venture Partners Inks Deal at Grace Building
By Al Barbarino January 9, 2014 2:21 pm
reprintsInsight Venture Partners has signed a 31,285-square-foot lease for a relocation to a space on the 36th-floor at the W.R. Grace Building on Bryant Park at 1114 Avenue of the Americas.
The private equity and venture capital firm struck a 15-year deal at rents starting in the low-$90s per square foot with landlord Brookfield (BN) Office Properties and is relocating from the 26-story Buchmann Tower at 680 Fifth Avenue, The Real Deal reported.
The 1.5-million-square-foot building, completed in 1974, was designed principally by Gordon Bunshaft and commissioned by the W.R. Grace Company. Its main entrance along 42nd Street, between 5th and 6th, overlooks Bryant Park and the New York Public Library.
The recognizable concave vertical slope of its north and south-facing facades, on 42nd and 43rd Street, resemble the Solow Building, another of Bunshaft buildings. It is said that he used the initial, rejected façade design for the Solow building in his design for the Grace Building.
In 2005, the City University of New York opened a “Welcome Center” on the ground floor of the Grace Building as an information center for prospective students.
In October, consulting firm Bain & Company took a nearly 100,000-square-foot space spread over three consecutive upper floors at the tower.
Brookfield Office Properties is Lower Manhattan’s largest landlord and is in the midst of a $250 million overhaul of the office and retail complex at Brookfield Place, where an impressively long list of high-end retailers have signed contracts to occupy its retail wing.
Jones Lang LaSalle’s Barbara Winter represented the tenant in the deal, while Brookfield was represented in-house by Sarah Pontius and Duncan McCuaig, according to the TRD report.
