250 West 55th Street – An Incredible New Office Building Rises in Midtown West – Similar to Lever House and 510 Madison Avenue

It’s no secret that the east side of Midtown is losing its dominance as the place to be for Manhattan based companies.  Once considered the crème de la crème of New York City office space, many emerging creative and technology firms are opting for lofty buildings in Chelsea, SoHo, Tribeca, Flatiron and Gramercy.  Although the vast majority of these companies are selecting cool buildings in trendy neighborhoods, many tenants still need to be in Midtown.  Some of these Midtown based companies are gravitating towards the City’s west side for newer, more efficient, state-of-the-art, and LEED certified spaces (click here for a custom list of these available spaces).  Boston Properties’ 250 West 55^th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, is the most recent tower to attract these types of users-  namely the two powerhouse law firms, Kaye Scholer and Morrison Foerster.

From the outside, 250 West 55^th Street has a strong resemblance to Lever House (390 Park Avenue).  Both buildings were designed by the highly acclaimed architecture firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill.  Similarly, 250 West 55th Street and Lever House have exceptionally large bases (in comparison to the tower floors) and comparable styling and architecture cues.  Upon walking the raw floors, I realized that the finishes are extraordinarily like  510 Madison Avenue as well.  The tremendous amount of perimeter glass, minimal column spacing and slab heights are overwhelmingly akin to one another.   However, 250 West 55th Street is much larger, with  over 1,000,000 rentable square feet of office space.

All floors feature oversized windows, 10’ finished ceilings, column free floorplates and minimal core penetrations.  Asking rents are between the mid-$80’s and $90’s per square foot and the landlord will build-to-suit an incoming tenant’s needs.  Floorplates in the building range from 50,000 to 25,000 rsf and Boston Properties will be pre-building a couple of floors with smaller units.

Below are some photos and renderings of the finished product: