Walgreens has reached a deal to lease the space for about $2 million in annual rent according to sources with knowledge of the transaction. The drug store giant will either operate its own store in the location or use the space for a Duane Reade, the New York City based pharmacy that the company purchased last year for $1.1 billion.

The space, which is about 22,000 square feet in size, formerly was home to a Borders bookstore but sat vacant after the company declared banruptcy at the start of the year and in July subsequently opted to liquidate its national portfolio of about 400 stores, including nine locations in the city according to reports.

The real estate investment company Madison Capital acquired 100 Broadway in 2010 after buying debt on the property and foreclosing on the roughly 375,000 square foot building’s prior owner, the Japanese real estate firm Hiro Realty. Madison Capital used the technique to move in on another Hiro asset as well according to written reports, 655 Fifth Avenue.

The firm installed a team from the real estate services firm CBRE to handle leasing the building’s office space. It selected a group from the rival firm Cushman & Wakefield to lease the retail space.

Though the deal with Walgreens will fill a prominent vacancy at 100 Broadway, in some retail circles, the deal may come as a bit of a letdown. Some leasing experts and neighborhood advocates had hoped the space would attract a tenant that would add to the neighborhood’s rise as a shopping district with destination retail. Though drug stores fill a large niche in the city for food and snacks on the go, prescription drugs and as a convenient stop for other odds and ends, most retail experts concede that the use is generally an un-sexy addition to the streetscape.

Jeff Winick, chief executive of the retail brokerage Winick Realty, handles leasing for Duane Reade. Mr. Winick could not be reached for comment. Executives as Madison Capital also could not be reached.

While other brokers followed dollar signs in Midtown and across Madison Avenue, Mr. Baker, then a young broker living in a Ninth Avenue bachelor pad, saw potential in the dusty warehouses and loading docks he walked past in the summer of 2000.

“I knew I wanted to control the neighborhood,” recalled the 40-year-old Mr. Baker, now a managing partner at Winick Realty, who has played a leading role in transforming the area.

From Far West Side to... Scarsdale?

From his earliest deals with Payless Shoe Source and John Jay College, which created classrooms on 10th Avenue where a boarded-up retail space once shriveled, Mr. Baker has helped change the Far West Side from a ghost town of dreary industrial buildings into a pedestrian-heavy attraction for city trendsetters and tourists alike.

Earlier this year, in fact, he inked yet another deal in the area that has triggered a wave of new business, all geared toward the Far West Side’s revitalized landscape.

At the TF Cornerstone-owned 505 West 37th Street, where Mr. Baker serves as the leasing agent, Ark Restaurants, the national group behind the Bryant Park Grill and Sequoia, inked a long-term, 10,350-square-foot lease for an upscale eatery on the building’s ground floor. Add to that the fact that Ark convinced former Chanterelle chef David Waltuck to create the menu and lured Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne into designing the restaurant and the message snapped into focus: lease now.

“It helped spur other deals in the buildings,” said Mr. Baker, referring not only to 505 West 37th Street but to other properties that TF Cornerstone owns in the area. “It helped people realize it won’t just be a destination—it will be a hip destination.”

Within days of the news, calls from prospective tenants jammed the line. A catering hall targeting young sophisticates inked 10,000 square feet around the corner. After that, a wine store committed to 2,200 square feet at 455 West 37th Street, another TF Cornerstone property Mr. Baker oversees. Of the 28,000 feet he was tasked with leasing at those TF Cornerstone properties, less than 6,000 remains, he said.

And while the repercussions of the mortgage crises and ensuing economic collapse still linger in most real estate markets, the Far West Side has benefited from news of an extended 7 train to 11th Avenue by 2013, development of the Hudson Yards by the Related Companies, earlier rezoning efforts and, farther north, Riverside South.

“When times are tough, landlords need our services more than ever,” said Mr. Baker. “It’s like that Honda commercial—“They sell themselves.”

As the Far West Side has evolved, so too has Mr. Baker’s career. While he now counts the Brodsky Organization and TF Cornerstone as two powerful clients, his earliest contacts, such as a Ninth Avenue landlord for whom he has inked seven deals since their relationship began in 2000, remain nearly as vital to him as the big shots.

It was Mr. Baker’s familiarity with so many clients, in part, that persuaded Winick Realty founder and chief executive Jeffrey Winick to name the broker as one of the firm’s two partners two years ago. Indeed, following Mr. Winick’s decision in 2009 to dedicate more time to brokerage activities—and less to managerial duties—at the firm, Mr. Baker added partner to his co-president title. Despite growing pains, he’s learning.

“I want to grow as a manager,” said Mr. Baker, whose entire career has been spent with Winick, which has divulged that future plans for the company include launching an investment-sales division. “I want to make this company more entrepreneurial.”

“They are two completely opposite skill sets,” he added, referring to the distinction between brokers and real estate managers. “It’s very difficult to be a player-coach.”

In his brief tenure as a manager, Mr. Baker has spearheaded a drive to hire younger brokers, many of them recent college graduates, whom he believes are among the most passionate of the city’s pool of potential new real estate professionals.

As Mr. Baker sees it, the industry’s most talented brokers exhibit three strengths, with fundamental knowledge of the business and personality lagging behind what he defined as the most crucial of skills for young brokers trying to break in.

“Mental IQ is in there, but I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m the smartest person in the room,” said Mr. Baker. “The most important thing is the burning desire.”

Weathering the economic downturn is one of a real estate manager’s most difficult tasks, and when it became clear that business would be affected by the collapse, Mr. Baker extolled the young brokers on his team to stop worrying. “We said, ‘Guys, wake up! This is the best time to be a broker,’” said Mr. Baker, who defended his stance by talking up existing capital and rock-bottom interest rates.

Still, there is at least one thing Mr. Baker is not entirely confident about. Despite his early years as a resident of the Far West Side, the broker left the city recently, opting instead for a suburban existence with his young family.
But while soaring rent and cramped housing most certainly can take the broker out of Manhattan, taking Manhattan out of the broker, he said, is a totally different story.

“I reluctantly live in Scarsdale,” acknowledged Mr. Baker, who last week said he was considering a return to the city. “We are Upper West Siders, through and through.”
gvoien@observer.com

West Coast classic.

Raw fish is a dish we generally prefer with a side of irony. Thus, in our second-favorite reason this week to mock BroBillies, the nabe is getting that snooziest of cuisines, an Asian fusion restaurant.

Indeed, the press release contains more signs of the Apocalypse than we can count. To wit: "Fushimi offers a family-friendly, yet stylish setting that will appeal to upscale, late-night crowds as well as families and hipsters alike," notable, among other things, as the first indication the real estate PR world has discovered the hipster.

The company has leased 7,200 square feet at 475 Driggs Avenue, on the corner of North 10^th Street, a new mixed-use development designed by our pal Montreal architect Karl Fischer. The restaurant, meanwhile, has been around for nearly a decade in such culinary hot spots as Staten Island and Bay Ridge.

Winick Realty’s Diana D. Boutross represented both the tenant and the landlord, Driggs Development, in this long-term lease transaction.

Bird watching in Bryant Park. (Bryant Park Blog)

Notwithstanding the seemingly thousands of pigeons that have occupied Bryant Park, Manhattan is getting its first wild bird sanctuary.

The Wild Bird Fund will be an 800-square-foot roost for all manner of feathered friend at 565 Columbus Avenue, between 87th and 88th streets. 

“This will be a great location for them," Winick Realty’s Brian Tregerman in a statement. "Not only is the store close to Central Park, but it’s also on what’s becoming a very pet-oriented block, with the Center of Avian and Exotic Medicine and a pet store nearby.”

(We feel compelled to point out, however, that the world's most famous urban park is but a block or so away. Should the birds bust their cage, as it were, that could make for some serious avian watching for generations to come.)

Mr. Tregerman, along with Joseph Isa, represented both sides in the 10-year lease transaction.

lkusisto@observer.com

Scattered indiscriminately across five Upper West Side buildings, each one of them housing national retailers like Whole Foods, T.J. Maxx and Sephora, the blueprints ran black with vacant storefronts ranging in size from just 2,403 square feet to nearly 9,000.

The plans were for Columbus Square, the Chetrit Group-owned shopping and residential complex that opened two years ago between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues in the West 90's. Ms. Shabtai's theater of war, however, was in Las Vegas, where she and her colleagues at Winick Realty were due to compete against thousands of retail brokers to market as much as 42,000 square feet to merchants at the ICSC event, which opened over the weekend.

"We'll be talking to everyone," Ms. Shabtai said beforehand. The Winick executive vice president said she had already taken her pitch to existing small businesses on the Upper West Side as well. "We're really looking for a shoe store, we're looking for amenities for children, and we're looking for other retailers like those. But we're putting out just a huge net."

Ms. Shabtai and members of her team, comprised of director Monica Kass and associate director Kelly Gedinsky, began marketing the retail portion of Columbus Square back in 2007, shortly before that year's ICSC event. The group was tapped to market more than 350,000 square feet, and, as such, it sent early word to about 350 retailers. Subsequently, it met with as many as 20 companies while in Las Vegas, talking them up during the day and wining and dining them at night. The strategy paid off, said Ms. Gedinsky, with many of those retailers signing leases shortly after the event.

"There was such an enormous amount of interest," she said, adding that, four years later, the trio continues to touch base with retailers who showed initial interest in Columbus Square, but for varying reasons have yet to sign deals.

But if marketing the square has proved to be a gigantic endeavor--so big, in fact, that the assignment earned the group the Most Significant Deal of the Year award from REBNY--it's merely one in a list. From leasing duties at 855 Sixth Avenue and 450 West 14th Street in the meatpacking district to a big transaction in 2009 for the Empire Room bar at the Empire State Building, the team has masterminded some of the city's bigger recent retail leases.

Among those, Ms. Shabtai said, was the assignment to locate a retailer to occupy space at the landmark Puck Building. Until now, the three-tiered space had been used as a catering hall, but the team saw great potential for what the space could become. In the end, the owner, Kushner Companies, chose to lease the space to REI, an outdoor gear and sporting goods store that, until now, had no stores in New York. The deal was inked in August. (Jared Kushner, a principal at Kushner Companies, is publisher of The Commercial Observer.)

Meanwhile, the trio has been juggling an assignment to lease retail space at 555 Sixth Avenue, the Stonehenge-owned property the group converted into a rental apartment building last year after St. Vincent's Hospital closed. As such, when the building's residents begin moving in, retail leasing will be underway, said Ms. Gedinsky. As for potential retailers, she said, tenants and their customers will benefit from 15-foot ceilings and more than 300 feet of wraparound glass facades.

"We're really looking for people who might take the entire space," said Ms. Gedinsky of the 18,000-square-foot two-tiered retail space at 15th Street. "There are plans to build escalators so they would even have their very own designated escalators and elevators."

"This is going to change the entire neighborhood," Ms. Shabtai added hopefully.

IN DESCRIBING HER role at Winick, where she has worked for six years, Ms. Shabtai insisted that she has regularly collaborated with many of its brokers, and not only Ms. Gedinsky and Ms. Kass. "We're Jeff's Angels," she said jokingly, referring to the firm's chief executive, Jeffrey Winick. "We're here for him."

As for her team, the broker alternately plays the role of boss and ice-breaker to her less seasoned staff. Despite gruelingly long hours and high stress, however, the threesome laugh easily and can finish each other's sentences and decipher what they described as their own admittedly cryptic shorthand. "We're together 20 hours a day," said Ms. Shabtai, a mother of three. "Whether it's texting or e-mailing or having dinner, and landlords also call us at, like, 5 a.m. But what makes us unique is that we're so dedicated to the people we work for, and we have so much fun working together."

The three brokers, each a New York State native, came to Winick from different backgrounds. Ms. Shabtai launched her own real estate career 25 years ago following a stint as a jeweler. For Ms. Kass, who joined Winick in 2006 after working at Garrick-Aug Associates, the road to commercial real estate followed stints working in photography, alongside art dealers, for makeup artists and within the hospitality industry, among other disciplines. Ms. Gedinsky, meanwhile, joined in 2007, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin.

With such disparate backgrounds, Ms. Shabtai insisted, they each bring a unique perspective and an assortment of skill sets to the negotiating table.

"I try to see the best in everyone, and then Monica will just be, like, 'O.K., uh no,'" said Ms. Shabtai of potential clients, some of whom, she admitted, have been less than ideal. "She's the voice of reason. And Kelly is the voice of ...

"Morality," said Ms. Kass to a gust of laughter. "She's the moral compass."

"And I'm just, like, out there-the dreamer," continued Ms. Shabtai.

jsederstrom@observer.com

"Basically, anybody can walk into the door and get a quick treatment," Winick Realty's Tatiana Jung-Voevodina told The Observer. "You can even do the blood tests and get results within five to 10 minutes."

But finding a space that could accommodate that wasn't easy. "It took a long time between both parties negotiating," the broker added. "I was in Europe, so it was a lot of conference calls."

The landlord agreed to do a build-out of the space, and the asking rent for the 15-year lease with a five-year option was around $200. Now that it's "up and running, it looks fantastic," said Ms. Jung-Voevodina. She said the location was also ideal, with its combination of residential and office neighbors, and its proximity to the U.N.

"There are no major hospitals or medical centers in the area, so this is something the community really needed," said Douglas Kaiden, one of the doctors at MedRite, in a statement.

Ms. Jung-Voevodina and Lori Shabtai represented the owner Samuel Fisch and the landlord.

lkusisto@observer.com

The artwork, "Jupiter Mission," by the artist team Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader, was unintentionally germane at Thursday evening's party, which Winick Realty hosted with the hope of grasping tenants for 75 Wall's retail space. "In recent years, the Financial District has reinvented itself as a corridor of deluxe residential buildings and high-end retailers," say the brochures that rested on a glass table at the event. The Winick brokers know what they want. The question Thursday evening was whether they would be able to get it.

"We're really pushing for a high-end luxury retailer to come down here," Winick broker and party co-host Annie Shinn said. "But they're slow to pull the trigger."

She rattled off the names of high-end retailers that have already set up camp in the FiDi, names that also appear along the bottom of the brochure's fold-out spread: Hermes, Canali, Tiffany & Co., Thomas Pink, Tumi and BMW. Ms. Shinn, like other real estate brokers who work in the neighborhood, said the area has been evolving into "more of a 24-hour community."

Stephanie Snyder, a broker with Crown Retail, seemed to share Ms. Shinn's optimism. "Despite what happened, Wall Street will always be Wall Street," she said. "It's an iconic location. You don't have a movie named after it for nothing."

But she doubted the area's high-end potential. Another broker, who was chatting with Ms. Snyder, and who withheld his name, thought that only a middle-priced retailer would fit into the neighborhood. He said the area cannot accommodate sellers of luxury goods: Although wealthy people work in the FiDi, they do not shop there. If the neighborhood is "24-hour," he said, that's due to the activities of lower-income residents. Ms. Snyder agreed. The Gap, Banana Republic, Coach or Men's Wearhouse, she said, might be safer options.

"I think Hermes is selling ties and that's about it," she said.

Broker Debra Pinto, with Wohlfarth & Associates, was surprised to see luxury retailers already in the neighborhood. "I didn't think there would be good retail down here," she said. "I was thinking more middle-of-the-road."

As a three-piece band played Herbie Hancock funk, waiters maneuvered trays of ours d'oeuvres: duck prosciutto with apricot, breaded mozzarella with basil, Italian dried sausage, baked cheese puffs, cupcakes and mini carrots. An air conditioner's hum competed with the band, recalling the World Cup's vuvuzela horn. To the ear of Kipton Cronkite, the entrepreneur whose gallery KiptonART is the current tenant of 75 Wall's ground floor, the AC sounded like a "freight train."

Mr. Cronkite's organization hung "Jupiter Mission" and the rest of the art that spans the room's walls. He said he's excited to be operating a gallery in the Financial District.

"We really wanted to re-energize the Financial District by bringing art to the community," he said. "There's a negative perception of the financial community. We want to get people to come down here."

He and Winick both. Broker Elizabeth Rueckerl-Betteil, with New York Commercial Real Estate Services, thought a fancy restaurant would be the best tenant for the space. Serving lunch rather than retail goods, she said, was the best way to take advantage of the wealthy daytime population.

"The neighborhood warrants it," she said. "You could put a Subway in here, but it wouldn't do it justice."

Winick broker Darrell Rubens, who co-hosted the party with Ms. Shinn, said he has high-end retailers interested in the space, but he wouldn't say who. As Mr. Rubens chatted with The Observer, Newmark Knight Frank broker Gregg Gropper joined the conversation. Mr. Rubens playfully ridiculed his friend for not having shaved for the event.

"I'm not even wearing a suit," Mr. Gropper said, tugging a pastel polo shirt.

He told Mr. Rubens he had hoped to grab a Bud Light at the party.

"That's not happening," Mr. Rubens said. "You could get a glass of champagne."

walden@observer.com

Writes The Real Deal's Adam Pincus:

The brokers, who are not charged in the case, acted on a few deals with Duane Reade as both landlord and broker. In addition, the trial has painted a picture of a retail leasing environment in which landlords in a few instances paid brokers in cash to avoid taxes, including one instance of a suitcase filled with cash, though such cash dealings didn't occur in connection with the Duane Reade deals.

Defense attorney Reid Weingarten, representing one of the two Duane Reade executives accused of orchestrating sham real estate deals with affiliates of Winick Realty Group, said that while the deals were not bogus arrangements, they were pieces in a cloudy and interconnected world where payments flew back and forth between limited liability companies.

While there is nothing illegal about a property owner acting as broker on his own property, the situation could allow the individual to alter a commission payment based on other financial circumstances. How such commission and other payments are made are central to the allegations against the Duane Reade executives.

More here.

drubinstein@observer.com

Back when Times Square was still a no man's land of strip clubs and rough-around-the-edges video game arcades, Benjamin Fox was there, dreaming a dream in which Mickey Mouse and girlfriend Minnie walked arm-in-arm along family-friendly, neon-lit streets. No pimps, no hookers, no problems.

A decade earlier, he was in the Flatiron district before the Flatiron district had a name, and these days he's all over the far West Side, Williamsburg and one other locale that cartographers have yet to discover. That last one, he's keeping to himself.

"We're there way before it ever even shows up in The New York Times or The New York Observer or New York magazine," said Mr. Fox, a retail titan who these days sits as president of Winick Realty. "We're down there early, and we're street urchins to an extent. We're always on the street, always looking, always exploring. A lot of us are looking for new markets."

As an old journalism yarn goes, a New York Times editor once boasted, "We have a man at every rat hole," to which a New York Herald-Tribune editor countered, "Well, we have a rat at every manhole." Mr. Fox is more man than rat, to be sure, but one thing is certain: At the age of 60, the Riverdale, Bronx-residing retail broker sniffs out emerging neighborhoods as well as, if not better than, any broker currently working in the city, not to mention the youthful trailblazers he looks to for direction.

Be it the meatpacking district, where he inked one of the first deals as the area was shedding its dry skin as a bastion for butchers, or on Mulberry Street, where he was the leasing agent for John Gotti's former social club—which he turned into a boutique—Mr. Fox has rested his reputation on an uncanny ability to spin gold from silk. "Talk about changing the guard," he laughed during an interview last week, when asked about the social club lease.

Indeed, Mr. Fox has represented retailers as varied as Hard Rock Cafe, Starbucks, Dean & DeLuca, Ann Taylor and Equinox, ushering each of them into neighborhoods once thought undesirable but now considered chic. But among all his real estate moments, the 180,000-foot deal he secured for the AMC Movie Theaters chain on West 42nd Street ranks among his proudest, Mr. Fox said.

That deal, along with a separate deal to bring in the Madame Tussauds wax museum, helped convince the Walt Disney company to take up residence in Times Square, which city and state officials had been pushing for in a bid to clean up the neighborhood's reputation as a den of ill repute.

"At the time, Disney had just announced a deal to take over the New Amsterdam Theater," recalled Mr. Fox of the push to clean up Times Square in the mid-1990s. "The city and the state were giving them very cheap money, very low interest, and that was going to be the anchor. But then the next day, the New York Post had a cartoon of Mickey Mouse on the arm of a hooker walking into the New Amsterdam. Michael Eisner then said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think I want company,' and that's when we brought AMC Movie Theaters to the area." (He also brought the now defunct H&M Records to the area in a subsequent transaction.)

But don't label Mr. Fox an agent of gentrification, a term that he believes conjures up negative images of poor families being pushed from their long-held neighborhoods. Instead, he sees neighborhoods such as Harlem and Williamsburg as being remade, a process essential to the city's own revitalization efforts.

"People use the term 'gentrification,' and gentrification has always had a negative connotation," said Mr. Fox, whose son, Zach, 25, also works at Winick, and has done some retail deals on the Lower East Side, among other areas. "I don't use that word. I use the word 'regeneration.' I think neighborhoods remake themselves."

MR. FOX ORIGINALLY WANTED to be an architect, but he instead started his career in real estate in 1973 at Garrick-Aug, the legendary starting point for many of the city's top retail brokers. Like many of his peers, he found retail transactions more interesting than the comparatively bland office leases he and many of his colleagues were then brokering across New York City.

"When I started with Charlie Aug, I started as an office broker, when he was still an office-leasing firm, and I failed miserably," Mr. Fox said. "I just didn't get it. To me, every office looked the same and had fluorescent lighting, a recessed ceiling and elevators.

"In the streets, I used to tell people that I window-shopped for a living, and that I got a nosebleed above the second floor. I had to retract the second part of the statement when multilevel retailing started to come into fashion."

Mr. Fox left Garrick-Aug and later co-founded New Spectrum Realty in 1987, turning it into one of the city's leading retail brokerage houses until Newmark acquired it, in May 2000. In the company's first few years, Mr. Fox and his colleagues took an aggressive shot at the Flatiron district, eventually brokering deals in the area for Pier 1 Imports, Hallmark, the Gap and Citibank, among other businesses.

As for the next dream locale in his cross hairs, Mr. Fox believes the yet-to-be-named neighborhood may, indeed, grow to become the city's next big thing. As for a hint of what to expect, Mr. Fox says only that it's in Manhattan.

"I'm not going to tell you where it is," he said, his lips totally sealed. "I got a chunk of turf that I've been working on and, like I said, I enjoy walking in a neighborhood where I look behind my shoulder and don't see any other brokers, as opposed to nine brokers. So, for as long as I can keep it that way, I'll be happy. But I recognize that isn't going to last for very long."

jsederstrom@observer.com