The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [7]
One avenue east, on Madison, a rash of new boutiques are opening, many at rents of $50 per square foot. Complice sells special jeans for $65; Ungaro’s, silk blouses for $250; Pumpkins and Monkeys, a child’s dress for $235. The waitresses in Confetti wear Bill Blass vests.
Manhattan is thriving. Six of the nation’s largest banks, employing 120,000 people, are headquartered here, as are nine of the ten biggest ad agencies, all but two of the Big Eight accounting firms, 42 of the 50 leading investment banking establishments, 90 of the Fortune 500 companies, one-third of the nation’s 48 largest law firms. According to the real-estate brokers Cross & Brown, Manhattan’s real-estate market in 1977 was the highest it had been in five years; nearly 3 million square feet of vacant office space was rented in one year, and prices of $25 per square foot were common. The first new office tower in five years is planned at 487 Park, an avenue that is already a crowded steel-and-glass warehouse for the nation’s foremost corporations. Four new office towers will rise on Madison Avenue between 50th and 57th streets. The Chrysler Building is being refurbished, as are other once-abandoned relics. The one-square-block $147 million Citicorp Center was christened in the fall of 1977; rising 59 stories between East 53rd and 54th streets, and stretching from Third Avenue to Lexington, the complex is bursting with ten restaurants and assorted shops, including one that sells imported bonbons.
Housing is also at a premium. In 1977, Manhattan real-estate values soared 30 percent. According to W, a publication devoured by people who frequent Régine’s, the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Paris is $729; in London, $720; in Zurich, $500. In chic areas of Manhattan, the same apartment rents for $1,170. The co-op market is at its zenith. On Park Avenue north of Régine’s, where white-gloved doormen patrol under shaded canopies, limousines stand at attention and nannies push baby strollers across a wide boulevard lush with tulips and begonias, the average three-bedroom apartment sells for $200,000. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, tried—and failed—to purchase an eighteen-room apartment at 640 Park for $600,000, with yearly maintenance charges of $25,000.
Manhattan’s real-estate boom is matched by its tourism, now New York’s second leading industry. More visitors (16.5 million) and conventions (834) were drawn to the city in 1976 than at any time since the 1964–65 World’s Fair. They came to spend $1.5 billion and buy 10 million tickets to Broadway’s 36 theaters and 500 sister theaters off Broadway, to visit the 400 art galleries, 90 night clubs, 50 institutions for the performing arts, 28,000 restaurants, 30 department stores and 61 museums. Most of these attractions are in Manhattan, where the 100,000 first-class tourist hotel rooms are located. To cope with this surge of tourists, new hotels are in the works. Harry Helmsley plans a fifty-seven-story, 600-room luxury palace—to be called the Palace—on Madison Avenue and is considering another on East 42nd Street. William Zeckendorf, Jr., recently redecorated the Delmonico and McAlpin hotels. The old Commodore Hotel is scheduling a comeback as a Hyatt Hotel, and the New York Hilton is contemplating the addition of 1,200 rooms. Manhattan restauranteurs, whose volume in 1977 was one-third greater than it was in 1976 (a very good year), worry not about customers but about President Carter’s proposal to eliminate