It's a nice Saturday afternoon, and I'm literally in Midtown right now, wandering around after walking down 5th Avenue (it's shut down to cars today for "Summer Streets"). Perfect chance to walk over and take a look at this. I love city oddities like this.
EDIT: got a great view of it. Fascinating that this dilapidated structure has just been hiding in plain sight all these years.
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What do you call a building that can only be seen once in a hundred years?
99% Invisible.
Mamdani should expropriate the building and do something charitable with it.
They have an odd definition of "middle".
I used to work one block from there. For years I got off at that station and walked past the building but had no idea it was hiding something like that. Amazing!
a farm. in manhattan
sigh
There are still farms in Manhattan and other parts of NYC. From the few I know off-hand:
- The Farm at the Javits Center (Hudson Yards) is a working rooftop farm, greenhouse, and has an orchard.
- On Randall’s Island there is a farm with raised beds, greenhouses, rice paddies, and also an orchard.
- Battery Urban Farm (Lower Manhattan) - not sure of this counts but its an operating educational farm that grows produce.
There are others.
Why do you think "sheep meadow" in Central Park is called that?
Do you think Manhattan has always been skyscrapers?
I don’t understand. Do you think the Dutch came to Manhattan in the 1620s and found it fully built out with streets and skyscrapers?
"The Bronx" was "The Bronks", a farm owned by a Dutch family and a popular picnic destination before it was subdivided and built over.
“Hidden by billboards for over 100 years, the tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view”
Initial word of headline necessary for comprehension
Fixed (from “by billboards for over 100 years …” or something, previously)
The London version of this is Spiegelhalters, in the middle of the ornate facade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickhams_(department_store)
That wiki photo is hilarious!
Amsterdam's Victoria Hotel near Central Station also has a holdout embedded in its edifice.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpiteHouse/comments/of5cqh/in_the_c...
Wow, I walk there all the time and I’ve never noticed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Corner
In September 2021, Macy's accused the billboard's owner Kaufman Realty of negotiating to lease the space to an online retailer before Macy's most recent lease expired that August. Macy's claimed that the lessee was almost certainly Amazon and filed for an injunction preventing Kaufman from leasing the space to a competitor. Macy's claimed that a 1963 agreement prohibited such a lease "forever" and that an Amazon billboard would be highly visible during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
So was the injunction successful?
You nerd-snipped me into digging through court records.
The case was 655669/2021 in the New York County Supreme Court (the Supreme Court is the name for the first-tier courts in NY state).
Docket: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/DocumentList?docketI...
The parties were in settlement talks and postponed the hearing on an injunction and then settled and dismissed.
Is it more profitable to lease the space for banners as opposed to lease the apartments to tenants?
Yes, think about the less overhead from dealing with people and building issues. Take a look at the Times Square too.
Probably since you don't have to deal with tenant issues for one.
People underestimate the value of predictability.
Land value tax solves this
Not really. looks like they pay nearly $2mil a year every year right now already. You can look up Block 810 Lot 40 here: https://a836-pts-access.nyc.gov/care/search/commonsearch.asp...
Land value tax is an evil concept. Having to pay for land you already own is insane. Also, people already pay property tax, why should there be an additional tax.
A land value tax would be instead of a property tax. It encourages owners to either develop or sell to someone else willing to develop. Although in this case, I don't think it would actually encourage anything as it's clearly being used. The bottom of the building is being used as a store and the rest of the structure is holding up billboards. Most of the building itself is probably worth very little (it does look uninhabitable) so property taxes are lower than what they'd be if the plot was actually occupied with apartments or offices. The actual value comes from what's nearby which is the giant Macy's that wants a big billboard. Land value taxes are meant to prevent people from having relatively empty plots, like a big estate or a vacant plot, but there's already something here. Maybe it's not being used to its full potential but that would involve figuring out what it would take to actually develop and the future income against what the LVT would be. A dilapidated building serving as a billboard structure (plus the Sunglass Hut lease) is easy money, why upset that?
Not per se. In fact, land tax is extremely important to encourage things moving and economy growing.
It's the implementation that can be evil.
The funniest thing about internet land value tax discourse is all of the people who don’t realize that land is already taxed in cities like this.
As the other commenter discovered, the tax rate is very significant for this property.
But the core proposition doesn’t make sense, either. A land value tax wouldn’t force a property to be used for a less profitable use case. A LVT forces the property to be used for the most profitable use case because the tax would prevent people from using it for less profitable activities because that’s the only way to pay the high LVT.
If at least 1% of people selling the property there don't cite land tax as the main reason for sale, then it's too low.
Well the desirable property of a land value tax is that it is used entirely in lieu of the current “land plus improvements” tax.
Naturally people dislike this because using land for less than economically optimal uses is usually desired by the landowner and taxing improvements means that someone with a more economically optimal use makes them less of a competitor for the land than the present owner.
Most of the pro-LVT people I encounter have a belief that pure LVT will benefit them and harm corporations. The idea has become entangled in the pro-individual, anti-corporate mentality as a tool for us to wield against corporations. The most common LVT argument I hear is something about forcing developers to convert parking lots into housing units.
The example above shows that pure LVT would have the inverse effect: If the land becomes valuable for something other than housing, the taxes rise to the point that the only logical conclusion is to use it for commercial activities.
It’s at this point that the conversation turns to carving out land value tax exceptions for the 80 year old grandma in her forever home, which turns into more exceptions for normal homeowners, which slowly gets us closer and closer to our current system where we’re not ruthlessly taxing properties based on the value of the land alone.
How delightful! I had no idea other people had this view of LVT enthusiasts. I certainly think that if commercial uses outweigh housing they should take priority under these circumstances. There are externalities to be internalized but the general idea is that anyway.
I’m for LVT precisely for the express purpose of not carving out exceptions for any landowner. 80 year old ladies included.
Basically I see it as a way to get closer to the ideal of making land speculation no longer a thing. Regular homeowners included.
If you buy a home for $100k, in theory after you adjust for inflation it should sell for less due to depreciation of the structures on the property. The fact we assume a home is an investment is the root of the evil.
Of course this does not mean LVT is the only way to make this happen. It just seems the fairest to me. I still want people and corporations to be incentivized to develop and improve land - just not rewarded for sitting on it forever. The standard objection of 80 year olds in forever homes sitting on prime real estate better used for young professionals with families who still need to commute to work is exactly the sort of folks who should not be rewarded for such behavior.
That building looks horrible, do people live there?
No, they just shop there.
Not on the really rough looking floors. It has been used as a huge billboard for a very long time.
I was thinking the same question. It certainly looks unoccupied -I can’t imagine people living in the other side but then again it _could_ be very well maintained and decorated on the inside despite the eyesore looks on the outside. Moreover since the lower floors are commercial it must mean that at least the upper floors are keeping out the elements.
Ground floor is a shop, pepper floors are basically empty.
^pepper^upper
Though I have replaced pepper control arms on a vintage Mustang once. Rust does that.
I know. I was expecting something easier on the eye. Maybe a century of being behind billboards has wrecked it. The 1906/1907 photographs look much better.
Neglect and dust. With the billboards up nobody not even the rain has been washing the facade.
You know your facade sucks when it looks better with a giant billboard covering it.
Based on the pictures I can’t imagine anyone legally living there.
I don’t know for sure, but I imagine usable windows are required for living spaces.
The ground floor is a Sunglass Hut from the looks of things. Then the first floor looks like it might be offices, or a fancy apartment. The other floors could be storage space for the tenants and the landlord.
My first instinct was perhaps they raised the ceiling in the first floor to occupy some of the second. But thinking on it more, high ceilings without windows to go with them usually don't make the space feel that much bigger. You can spend up to a couple feet on crown molding but beyond that you're well into diminishing returns.
Mandamus will tax it
Every bedroom of a rental is required to have a window in New York.
But in this part of town, the advertising rights alone probably vastly exceed any possible revenue from renting the building for residential use. It’s kind of like the tiny building in Times Square that has the ball on top. I don’t think people even realize there’s a building behind all of the billboards, but it was original New York Times building.
That’s what I meant, but worded poorly: that for anyone to legally be living there it wouldn’t currently meet the standards.
Renting any part of that building out is likely not worth the hassle compared to the ad revenue, as you noted.
> but it was original New York Times building.
It was the second New York Times building! The original was on Park Row.
There are several such buildings in NYC in prime real estate areas that are kept empty in order to prioritize billboard revenue.
Source? My understanding is this is no longer true
TFA as exhibit 1?
He said there are several others like this which I think is false, TFA wouldn’t be relevant.
There are several that are either nearly or partly (several floors) empty
One Times Square is no longer fully empty (besides ground floor retail) you’re right that it is now just almost entirely empty as they’ve added an observation deck and a small visitors center/museum about the building as of January this year.
Some other buildings in Times Square keep several floors empty to use for signage instead, a minimum of which is actually mandated by the city.
A lot of the buildings along Canal Street in New Orleans, with souvenir and liquor stores on the ground floor, are empty upstairs as well.
I can think of buildings in other cities in seemingly premium real estate, including the Chicago Loop, that are notably underutilized.
Old, cramped upstairs spaces in crowded, touristy commercial districts just aren’t that useful. A small business would rather just get an office in WeWork.
Converting to housing is going to be expensive and probably also not worth it. Tourist lodging might work, but the licensing can also be an issue and tourists can be weird — no matter how much you tell people a place like that is noisy and on one of the busiest corners in the world, you’ll get reviews complaining about the noise and chaos.