Retailers in the area are now paying upward of $1,700 a square foot annually, according to a quarterly report from the Real Estate Board of New York that came out this morning. That's still well behind coveted Fifth Avenue, where average asking rents were $2,367 a square foot, but not too shabby for a neighborhood that was exactly that not too long ago.

But Times Square may soon be giving Fifth Avenue a run for its money. "That's certainly my observation as well," Michael Slattery, a senior vice president at REBNY, told The Observer.  

Oakley was recently rumored to pay a record-setting $1,400 a square foot for its flashy store at 1515 Broadway. Leaks about blockbuster deals might be prompting retailers to ask a little bit more, Mr. Slattery said, but it's harder to get a handle on whether retailers are paying anything like that price and what types of concessions might be thrown in. 

Yet Times Square may still be a deal as the economy and the tourism industry continue to improve. "It's a good time to jump," Mr. Slattery said. "For a long time, what my people were saying about Times Square is [that leases] should have come out of the advertising budget and not out of the real estate budget," Mr. Slattery said. "Now I'm hearing brokers say retailers expect to make money at these locations." 

But Fifth Avenue will not give up without a fight. The strip has been one of the few in the city to see stable rents during the downturn, this despite a few major vacancies. "That's not what people would have expected," Slattery said. "Everyone was so damn depressed a year ago they couldn't see any sunlight."

lkusisto@observer.com

Oakley will pay what could be a record-setting retail rent for Times Square, $1,400 a square foot, for its new location at 1515 Broadway.

With prices on both sunglasses and square feet rapidly rising, Times Square may finally rival its classier retail neighbors, in fact. "It's catching up to Fifth Avenue, which gets $2,000 a foot for the best spaces," said Jeffrey Roseman of Newmark Knight Frank, who represented landlord SL Green.

Oakley, which joins a flagship Aeropostale store in the former MTV building, is likely to draw a much younger clientele, albeit with just as much disposable income.

"SL Green Realty Corp. has been building a strong mix of upscale retail tenants aimed at a young demographic at 1515 Broadway," said Rick Matthews, a building spokesperson. "Oakley is a perfect fit and should do very well there."

The New York Post first had news of the deal. The paper reports that Oakley will take 1,815 square feet that juts out next to the building's entrance at 44th Street and Broadway, plus a storage basement.

Kenneth Hochhauser and Marc Leber, along with Mr. Rosen and also of Newmark Knight Frank, represented the landlord. Beth Rosen and David Rosenberg of Robert K. Futterman & Associates "scoured the neighborhood" for Oakley, says the Post.

lkusisto@observer.com

Mr. Piccinich: You talk about the economic downturn, when we went into the single-digit range, and where we've climbed now—I see it as the same experience we had eight years ago, when we went from $28 [a share] to $150. The whole REIT sector, SL Green in particular, is trading very well. We've climbed up to upwards of $50, and I think that momentum is going to keep on going.

What updates can you share with me about 1515 Broadway, the former home of MTV's Total Request Live in Times Square?

We completed a $40 million redevelopment there. If you get a chance, in our lobby there, we installed the Schott glass that wraps around the entire lobby. I personally think it looks like a glacier. We brought in Lens limestone from France; we brought in some Italian marble. That whole lobby was transformed to make sure we touched upon all the important things. Look, there's a lot of activity there with the Viacom folks going in or out, and them being our anchor tenant. We have acoustical ceilings so there's no echo, because you have 30-foot ceilings. It's spectacular.

You have kids. Do they pepper you with questions about

Total Request Live?

They absolutely do. That and Nokia Theater. Having a 21-year-old and a 16-year-old—who just turned 16 this past Friday—and a 10-year-old, absolutely. And even with TRL suspending their operation there, you always see stars going in and out of that building, so 1515 is a topic of conversation.

You completed renovations last February at 1551 Broadway, home to the retailer American Eagle. What has the response been like since the store opened in November?

I'm really excited about American Eagle, which we finished when everywhere else in the city, you saw cranes stopped-and we were building during the downturn. If you get a chance, you might want to go by, because the 250-foot LED signage tower that's there? They came up with a pretty novel idea, American Eagle: If you make a purchase, they send you downstairs, they take a picture, and they give you 15 seconds live up on the screen. It's phenomenal. It's a great idea. That sign is a sight to see, so whenever I walk by, it makes me really proud. You have to see it.

You recently finished an M.T.A. office consolidation. Tell me about it.

With our tenants, one of the things we boast about is our ability to be able to move people in and around the city. They were located in Manhattan and they were relocating from another building, so we were able to take 333 34th Street. This is where they were going to consolidate the majority of their back office space. That building is just sparkling from a distance. We have a white-box retail space that we have some pretty active interest in. And the lobby ended up itself, it opens up, it's floor-to-ceiling glass. This is what we do-we look to do things in terms of curb appeal, because if you can't get someone to take a second look ... I always tell my folks, you don't get a second chance on first impressions.

First impressions do seem to be at the top of SL Green's list of priorities. You guys have been pretty vocal about those chandeliers in the lobby of 100 Church.

We are getting rid of those chandeliers! Actually, those chandeliers may be coming down as we speak. We did what we do best; we walked into that lobby. Some interesting stuff the prior owner did there! You really have to go inside and try to figure out what can stay and what can't, and every building and every lobby has a budget, so you can't just go in and decide to cut out slab. You have to take into account what the building's meaning is in that particular area. It's sitting alongside the trade center complex, so you have to understand how to integrate that into a community where the church across the street sold their air rights to put up a residential needle building. So we're well under way. We feel we have a solution for 100 Church that will, again, reach out to the people that are passing by.

Speaking of the prior owners of 100 Church—the Sapir Organization—they and now Macklowe Properties have filed lawsuits against SL Green recently. What's the story?

I wouldn't say it's litigious. I always say that in those situations, I think there's going to be more situations as people go back to their lenders and refinance, and folks can arrive at a conclusion whether they can or cannot make it. You're going to have situations like that. It's part of the reconciliation process. You buy something, you own it, you build a fence around it-just like anything else in life.

You were general manager of the World Trade Center for the Port Authority. Have you been watching what's happening down at ground zero with a personal interest?

I spent the majority of my career downtown. That's where I started. I spent 10 years at the Port Authority, the last five managing the trade center. I have very fond memories; I'm watching with interest. You might have seen near my conference table, the pictures there are a gentle reminder of my experience there. Back in the '93 blast, all the people who perished were friends, so aside from the delivery person, there were people that worked down the hall from me. I was stationed 90 feet away from a van that blew up in '93, so I was able to miraculously get out of the trade center and was part of the whole restoration.

I think I was there for another couple years with the Port Authority, and then I moved on to JPMorgan, where I returned back to the trade center in a different capacity. So when 9/11 came around, those are most of the faces that are pictured. When 9/11 came around, I was called to an impromptu meeting on the West Coast, so I flew out the day before. But the people who are pictured there, it's a subtle reminder to keep things in perspective.

SL Green submitted a failed bid to operate the Queens Aqueduct racetrack alongside Hard Rock. What was the allure, in your mind, to owning a racino?

The Aqueduct is very near and dear to my heart. It took us between two or three years, and that exercise was exciting. I think in one way, shape or form, I think we've all gambled, whether it was rolling dice, blackjack or steal the old man's pack. This particular case, where our CEO decided to pursue this franchise, it was about getting to know and understand what we can do with the Aqueduct. We thought—and we still believe—that we had the best ideas for that area. We wanted to make that a destination, and we wanted to partner with someone who's the best in the industry, and that's Hard Rock. But it took time. It took time to understand.

jsederstrom@observer.com

The same year that Times Square became Times Square, the Astor Hotel opened for business. It was 1904, and The New York Times had just arrived in the neighborhood, erecting its headquarters on West 43rd Street. Like the paper of record of that day, The New York Herald, The Times wanted to paste its name on a piece of Manhattan. If not the respectable midtown square that bore its rival's flag, then The Times would settle for the next best thing: a patch of cramped factories and whorehouses rubbing up against the steadily encroaching theater district. That year also marked the long-awaited completion of the subway's first line, and with it, the masses came reeling through the Times Square turnstiles. By 1910, the square had undergone its first unlikely metamorphosis, transforming itself into an incandescent spectacle of acrobats and escape acts, vaudeville and ragtime—an electric Milky Way of gleaming signs.

With its ornate rooftop gardens and banquet halls, its unabashed gilded fervor, the Astor Hotel on Broadway became a point of congregation for the city's society crowd—mayors, industrial tycoons, socialites, ex-royalty. But the hotel was known best for its bar, a place where Times Square's true royalty, its showbiz luminaries, gathered to gossip and flirt, where Cole Porter could sip absinthe, kiss Monty Woolley and sing, "Have you heard that Mimsie Starr just got pinched in the Astor Bar?"

It was almost a century later that Times Square emerged from an even unlikelier transformation, but in many ways, the block between 44th and 45th streets stayed true to the spirit of Mr. Porter's swell party.

By 1999, at 3:30 on weekday afternoons, close to a million viewers nationwide would tune their televisions to MTV. Mostly aged 12 to 17, they were the very demographic Viacom executives were congratulating themselves for sinking Sumner Redstone's wizened teeth into. But it was the teenagers right outside Viacom's corporate offices that would turn out to have the far more lasting impact.

The throngs assembled beneath MTV's glass studio for the taping of Total Request Live endowed the show with the fervid pitch of religious hysteria. Mostly teenage girls, some of them held handmade signs, and all of them screamed. They'd made the pilgrimage to Times Square on the believer's gamble that they'd catch a glimpse of Britney Spears or 98 Degrees, or maybe even be among the chosen few ushered up to the second-floor studio. It took a few decades, a few revolutions in the saga of Times Square's reincarnation, but at the building that sprung from the ruins of the Astor Hotel, the cult of celebrity was alive and well.

At least, it was until recently. Total Request Live, the countdown music video show, made its final run in 2008, though it had ceased being live sometime before. Then, at the end of 2009, MTV shuttered the famous studio altogether. (Tween mall staple Aeropostale will take the retail space below it, though the studio remains empty.) While Viacom, which rents about 95 percent of 1515 Broadway, renewed its lease for roughly 1.27 million square feet of office space in 2008, the era of screaming teenagers on the street was over.

What happened, of course, was bigger than MTV, bigger than Viacom, bigger even then Times Square. But 1515 Broadway had a front seat to the glimmering spectacle.

When the Astor was razed in 1967 to make way for 1515 Broadway, a cry went up for the passing of a long-gone era's opulent relic. It didn't help that the tower that supplanted it was a glass-and-steel monolith so tall you had to be down the street to see its sole defining feature: concrete fins sprouting from the roof with all the manic zeal of a tinfoil cap.

The Astor may have helped launch Times Square's first glitz-bedazzled reincarnation, but the leviathan that replaced it presaged the next. The first tower to take advantage of the city's Times Square redevelopment subsidies, 1515 Broadway commenced the spasm of high-rise construction that enveloped the area in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, the district was filled with historic, derelict theaters, and it consistently placed both first and second in city felony rates (the area runs the fault line of two police precincts). In the name of redevelopment, city officials allowed unusually large office buildings to be built atop leveled theaters, with the one provision that a new theater be incorporated into the space.

In 1967, the developer Sam Minskoff & Sons acquired the Astor for $10.6 million. To design its successor, Minskoff commissioned Ely Jaques Kahn, a man whose architectural legacy is perhaps upstaged by his fictional one. In 1937, a budding, blocked novelist known as Ayn Rand spent six months in Mr. Kahn's office, volunteering as a file clerk while she worked out the elusive gaps in what would become The Fountainhead. Guy Francon, the social-climbing, mediocre architect, was inspired by her boss. By 1972, the 2 million-square-foot 1515 Broadway, with its conciliatory Minskoff Theater, stood in the Astor's place—a 54-story ode to moneymaking that would have done Rand proud.

As Times Square became the subject of a several-decades-long public debate, a site for the city to hash out its ideas about urbanism and development, 1515 Broadway embodied the district's fevered oscillations between entertainment and enterprise. In the 1980s, Alvin Ailey made its home in the building, but a change in ownership (Tishman Speyer purchased the building for $190 million-18 times what Minskoff paid for the Astor) pushed the dance company out to make way for more lucrative office space. The building also housed the below-ground Loews Astor Plaza, the largest single-screen movie theater in the country. In 2004, when the building was again bought and sold, this time to SL Green, the age of the multiplex had rendered the theater unprofitable.

Where once Times Square vaudeville acts had given way to the silver screen, in a curious inversion of history, it was a live concert hall, the Nokia, that replaced the Astor Plaza.

And then there is Viacom. Sumner Redstone began his memoir, A Passion to Win, with the pronouncement: "Viacom is me." The octogenarian mogul, whose age and ego are surpassed only by his litany of media acquisitions, likes to claim he'll never die. Which may explain his recent erratic plunges into the spotlight: The man who owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, CBS, Simon & Schuster, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Comedy Central, Blockbuster and TV Land has carried on a highly public feud with his daughter over the future dominion of his empire, and—should there remain any doubt about who's running the show—he made a few very public firings, namely the longtime head of MTV and one Tom Cruise. When you own the media, publicity is, after all, somewhat easy to mistake for immortality. Or just as likely, Mr. Redstone's companies each harbor a bit of his leathered soul, through which, Voldemort-style, he really will live forever.

Viacom moved to 1515 Broadway in 1993, just as the media magnate was waging his unlikely battle to buy Paramount Pictures. Mr. Redstone won, of course (he always wins-winning is his passion), solving the minor complication of cash flow by purchasing Blockbuster. As the amoeboid conglomeration expanded, so did its square feet, rising up 1515 Broadway's glassy facade with every successive purchase.

With the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress dismantled the regulatory framework set up in the 1930s, declaring a new world order in which, as Bill Clinton called it at the time, the "information superhighway" made the old rules obsolete, stifling competition and dragging like dead weights on the soul of free enterprise. The new rules set the scene for a seismic shift in the media landscape and sparked a bout of mega-consolidations. Time Warner subsumed Turner Broadcasting and CNN. Disney merged with ABC. Then in 1999, the F.C.C. decreed that companies could own more than one station in the same local market. That was the year that TRL reached its frenzied peak, and Mr. Redstone did the only logical thing: He merged his entertainment panoply with a major news network. In the biggest broadcast merger in history, Viacom acquired CBS.

In 1980, there were 50 principle media firms; by 2000, there were six. Evidence of the new media order was everywhere in Times Square. By that time, after several civic campaigns, a development-preservationist debate-histrionic even by New York standards-and numerous rounds of building incentives, Times Square had emerged from its brazen transformation. The porn shops and sideshows were shuttered, the corner delis pushed out, the seedy theaters rolled into a few shiny multiplexes. The towers got taller to accommodate the ranks of Disney, News Corp., Reuters, Bertelsmann, Condé Nast and Clear Channel, and the street got compressed further and further below.

The street itself became a kind of corporate big top where the ecstasies engineered in the buildings above cartwheeled and spun. The Times Square of the social fringe, of pimps and hustlers, of Diane Arbus' transvestites and dwarves, became a place of mainstream cultural convergence. In the new Times Square, safer, cleaner and less weird, electric words charged through you; ads spilled into news tickers; and the actors in sitcom promotions fixed you intently in their sights. Corporate executives could look down from their tinted towers and observe their board presentations in action, giddily refracted in the kaleidoscope of consumer desire.

But something else was happening, too. The crowds outside 1515 Broadway, crowds that had once been known to stop traffic, that bespoke a generational standstill for a handful of formula-sprung pop stars, suddenly and abruptly departed. People stopped waiting for Carson Daly or one of his equally awkward stand-ins to count down to their video; now they watched online. But instead of just watching, they were making things as well. Consumers were becoming producers, and the consuming and producing were becoming difficult to distinguish, remixing and mutating and deconstructing. Things were happening in the margins. It was weird and messy and shocking and banal and voyeuristic and tacky. It was often derivative, occasionally brilliant, and all of it human. It was a little like Times Square.

New York is a vertical city that leaves little room for the people on the street below. Only occasionally—say, when clamoring teenagers stop traffic for a glimpse of Beyoncé in the tower above—do the two spheres collide. But the new street is a virtual one, and the Sumner Redstones and Rupert Murdochs are already staking out their real estate. It's always been the invisible few that shape mass culture. Celebrities may be royalty, now as in the days of the Astor bar, but it's the figurehead sort, distracting us with its pomp and jewels while the driving forces mostly stay out of glass boxes. (Which is what makes it such an odd and fantastic spectacle when the invisible few come out to fire the figureheads.) Just as the Astors left their influence and family feuds imprinted across the city (the Waldorf and the Astoria, for instance, were originally two hotels, split between family factions), Mr. Redstone's feuds and whims are stamped across our mediascape.

Of course, no one really knows to what extent the endless weird conversation of the Internet can be commodified. If Times Square has taught us anything, it's that you can't buy weird; you can only supplant it.

Maybe that's why we're so nostalgic for Times Square, even Times Squares we've never known, why we argue and wring our hands over each metamorphosis: With its bizarre mutations and unending reinventions, Times Square has always been our way of talking about ourselves.

Even New York, a city that tears itself down and reconstructs itself at near lightning speeds, is made out of concrete and brick and glass. It's comprised of buildings that are hard and unyielding and leave little room for improvisation. A building can't contradict itself. A building can't be a conversation. Which leaves us with Times Square and its blaze of screaming signs. Never quite the square anyone wanted, always the runner-up and always truer just one incarnation ago, it will always, we can be certain, transform into something else. And when it does, we will wonder what it says about our city and what we've become.

egeminder@observer.com

The retailer has nearly completed a lease for one of the neighborhood's most prominent locations: the about 17,000-square-foot storefront at 1515 Broadway, according to sources close to the negotiations. Real estate database CoStar indicates this includes some of the same space formerly occupied by the MTV Studio. The storefront sits at the bottom of the 54-story cloudbuster between 44th and 45th streets, smack-dab in the middle of Times Square. 

When fully completed -- it's said to be just millimeters away from done -- this lease will be just the latest coup for landlord SL Green, which earlier this month announced the successful $475 million refinancing of the scraper. That came just over a year after SL Green convinced anchor tenant Viacom to keep its global headquarters in the building.

Aeropostale couldn’t be reached for comment. But the store, which saw robust sales over the holiday season and recently increased its earnings estimate, is taking a big bet on the Times Square market. Gossip on the retail street puts the annual rent at around $10 million. That number couldn’t be confirmed. But it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility given Times Square's tremendous foot traffic and tourist allure. Other retailers have also been jumping into the Times Square mix, including Disney, which recently signed a 25,000-square-foot-lease at 1540 Broadway.

Neither Newmark Knight Frank's Jeffrey Roseman, who represented SL Green, nor SL Green would comment for this story.

drubinstein@observer.com

Editor's Note: The former version of this article incorrectly described the new Aeropostale store as including the old MTV Store space, rather than part of the MTV studio space. 

The 1515 Broadway dealings have been among the most closely watched of the latter part of 2008, with the city's largest office landlord and its tenant locked in reportedly contentious negotiations for years. No word on what Viacom will be paying to stay in Times Square, but SL Green, according to Mr. Cuozzo, recently signed new leases at 1515 Broadway for $85 a foot.

"We’re have ongoing negotiations with Viacom for what seems like five years now," Mr. Hughes said, while giving a presentation at the Merrill Lynch Global Real Estate Conference. "There is a renewal option that comes up that they have that they need to exercise in December of this year. I think if you talked to them they would tell you they like the building very much…"

"They’ll likely exercise their renewal and then there’ll be a spirited discussion over what fair market value reps," Mr. Hughes continued. "The very good news is that we have signed a couple of recent deals in that building for $85 a square foot." Right now, Viacom pays around $50 a square foot.

SL Green recently launched a $160 million renovation of the 54-story cloudbuster on Times Square that will replace its limestone facade, extend its glass-curtain wall, make it silver LEED-qualified, and include a new lobby.

Mr. Hughes said that, even if Viacom doesn't renew, it will make the building more attractive to new tenants: "We’ve come up with a redevelopment plan that kind of suits either result. If they stay, it’s fine. If they go, it’s fine."