Most of what the Times was looking for can be found on publicly accessible company documents posted online. In fact, ESRT is a publicly traded company and bound by strict SEC disclosure rules. How could the authors leave out such an indispensable fact? Well, “the company that owns the Empire State Building, and its chief executive, Anthony Malkin, declined to answer questions.”That made it sound like the company in question, Empire State Realty Trust, has lots to hide. Namely, that it is currently more than 90 percent leased to rent-paying office tenants. In other words, it isn’t merely in sound shape - it’s handily outperforming the market. To illustrate commercial real estate’s undeniably challenged times, the Times told us that 19 percent of Manhattan office space is “available for rent.” That means that 81 percent of office space isn’t available for rent.īut the paper left out the most salient fact about the Empire State Building, which is, after all, what the story’s about. Google’s $2.1 billion NYC building purchase is proof that offices aren’t dead The Empire State Building has been an NYC staple since the 1930s. After reiterating ancient news that Observatory revenue declined due to the loss of tourists, and that a few stores closed for equally obvious reasons, a task force of 10 Times reporters “revealed” precious little about the tower’s major component: its 100 office floors. Not that there wasn’t plenty wrong in the text itself. The presentation both in print and online, the latter including an “interactive visual feature” that the Times boasted took three months to produce, threw needless destructive shade on the great skyscraper at a time of overall industry-wide unease. Yet readers in an age of 10-second online clicks can be swayed more by the way a story is framed than by what it actually says. The story accurately said, “A vast majority of tenants who shared their plans are remaining in the building.” Nor did it say that Empire State was “emptying of tenants,” as a Page One blurb stated on Saturday. The article’s text didn’t make such a provocative claim. It was, rather, a slow, read-and-bleed agglomeration of misleading data, flagrant omissions, immaterial minor facts and fancy graphics that together might well suggest to a casual reader that, as a sub-headline asserted, “The future of the world’s most famous skyscraper is in doubt.” The story - headlined “Why the Empire State Building, and New York, Might Never Be the Same” - wasn’t a firing-squad execution.
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However, no single structure is so “iconic” or emblematic of the Big Apple, which made it ideal for the Times to pick on it. Now comes a tendentious New York Times attempt to frame the building as the poster child for a doleful outlook supposedly faced by the entire city.The Empire State Building’s roughly 2.7 million square feet of offices are much less than at some other Manhattan office addresses both old and new. The Empire State Building survived King Kong, “Empty State Building” ridicule and decades of neglect by previous owners.
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Manhattan skyscraper snags its own builder as a tenant Le Coucou - NYC's best new restaurant in decades - is finally back Wellington Hotel appears poised to close – and will oust two restaurants Politicians rally to fix 'abandoned’ UES filth magnet
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HR and legal nervous-nellies are spoiling holiday fun for workers - and restaurant owners