Anthony Malkin

On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover pushed a button turning the lights on at the Empire State Building, the tallest, most cutting-edge and most anticipated building ever made.

Ninety years later, the Empire State Building is still more cutting-edge than the rest of its younger Midtown peers.

For years, Anthony Malkin had been turning the Empire State Building — the jewel of ESRT’s 10.1 million-square-foot portfolio — into “the most efficient building of its size of any age in the United States that’s occupied,” as Malkin put it on a Commercial Observer panel back in 2015. And positioning this New York icon as energy-efficient and health-focused was probably the best possible preparation for a worldwide airborne contagion.

“We thought it was about the air; as it turns out, it is about the air,” Malkin told CO. MERV 13 filters and AtmosAir (which provide an ionization blast) proved effective in protecting against the virus.

“That cocktail trifecta of high-density filters, ventilation, bipolar ionization — that’s the way.”

For four painful months, the building’s hallowed observation deck was closed, but this great totem of the city still offered something symbolically critical to first responders, with nightly light shows and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Eventually, the deck opened (at one-fifth pre-pandemic capacity) and — with tourism heavily curtailed — is currently seeing something it hasn’t seen enough of: New Yorkers visiting their landmarks.

But, more than just shielding the building from harm, ESRT was making deals. Centric Brands leased 212,154 square feet in a space previously leased to Global Brands Group. And, only a month into the lockdown, ESRT secured a massive, brand-new, 20,000-square-foot lease to build out the second-largest Starbucks in the world, save for Chicago’s Roastery.

It wasn’t just the Empire State Building, though. Malkin’s REIT did 923,379 square feet in leases in 2020 (although a big chunk of that came pre-pandemic) and, as of the end of the first quarter of 2021, they were 88.7 percent leased and their rent collections stood at 94 percent.

At One Grand Central Place, Belkin Burden Goldman signed a 30,598-square-foot lease; Berkley Insurance Company took 63,173 square feet at their Stamford, Conn., property Metro Center; and Burlington Stores doubled its footprint at 1400 Broadway.—M.G.