Rudin Starts Demolition at 415 Madison Ave, Making Way for Taller Tower
By: Benyamin Davidsons
Rudin Management has started demolition of its office building at 415 Madison Ave., making way for a taller tower.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the developer will clear away the 24-story building, and has filed plans to construct a new 40-story skyscraper. The new tower will boast 342,000 square feet of office and retail space, as well as a 35,000-square-foot public concourse. The tower is also slated to include an entrance to an underground concourse with a path to the Long Island Rail Road terminals at Grand Central Station once the LIRR starts operations there.
In the fall, Rudin had obtained special permits to construct the 605-foot-tall project through the city’s universal land-use-review procedure, in line with the 2017 Midtown East rezoning. The company also purchased air rights for the project from St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, which is nearby.
Rudin declined to disclose the cost of the project. Generally, office space in New York City costs roughly $600 per square foot to construct, as per Statista, which would mean that this project would likely run a bill of about $200 million or more.
The building currently standing at 415 Madison Ave. offers about 270,000-square-feet of space, and was constructed by Rudin in 1955. It was the developer’s first commercial building. The construction is slated to take four years, making the estimated open date sometime in 2026. The developer is betting that the market for office space will have rebounded by then.
In June, office occupancy in NYC was reportedly at about 40 percent, for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. This year, the availability rate of Manhattan office space grew to a record 18.6 percent, as per data from Avison Young. Meanwhile, in the first half of this year, the amount of office space available directly from landlords dropped to 73.6 million square feet and sublease space increased 4.5 percent, up to 23.4 million square feet. Compared with last year, leasing activity was up 25 percent.
Rudin Management is one of the largest privately owned real estate companies in NYC. The firm, which now boasts roughly 700 employees, was founded in 1925 by Samuel Rudin and his siblings. It is now led by the third and fourth generation co-chairs Eric Rudin and William Rudin. The company oversees the daily operations of 33 NYC properties in New York City.
The portfolio includes 17 residential buildings boasting approximately 4.7 million square feet, as well as 16 commercial office buildings with roughly 10.5 million square feet of space. As per the company’s website, its other recent projects include: 130 West 12th Street, a residential condo project renovating a 13-story prewar building in the Greenwich Village Historic District; Dock 72, a 16-floor new construction office building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard; and The Greenwich Lane, a residential condo project featuring 5 buildings and 5 townhouses made in partnership with Global Holdings.
