David Levinson and Robert Lapidus

It was the tours. Those are what told David Levinson that 2024 might be a good vintage for his and Robert Lapidus’s L&L Holding. 

“Most companies, the last thing they want to be doing is looking for office space,” Levinson said. “So, if you see a lot of people out looking for office space, you know the economy’s turning and the market’s going to turn. And quality buildings are the tip of the spear on that.” 

L&L’s stock in trade is quality buildings. The privately held, Manhattan-based company rode the flight-to-quality trend to fill up its 425 Park Avenue, the first new full-block office building along the boulevard in nearly half a century. That came in March 2025, when the State Bank of India took the remaining three floors for 20 years. 

“In one sense, it was kind of bittersweet,” Levinson said. “We’re now 100 percent leased, so it’s very sweet. On the other hand, with the market so strong, it’s a little bitter that we didn’t have any more space to rent.”

Indeed, rents at 425 Park Avenue have exceeded $200 per square foot.

Since the start of 2024, L&L also closed major leasing deals with a pair of law firms at 600 Third Avenue, bringing it to 91 percent leased, and at 114 Fifth Avenue, where L&L and co-owner Columbia Property Trust secured an expansion by Capital One to nearly 117,000 square feet. And L&L inked an arrangement with Brooks Brothers for a flagship store at 195 Broadway. 

In Miami, the company scored one of the more notable U.S. leases south of Manhattan: In January 2025, after months of searching, Amazon signed a 50,333-square-foot lease in the office tower at Wynwood Plaza, the mixed-use project that L&L and its partners are developing. 

Another project under development is L&L and Columbia Property’s revamp to office and retail of Terminal Warehouse, a 1.3 million-square-foot former train hub in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Again, the tours tell Levinson good things are on the horizon. 

“We have a lot of people going through the building now,” he said in late March. “We have about 100,000 square feet of deals in the tunnel section of it that we’re in the final stages of that we’ll make announcements about in the spring.”