The owners of 452 Fifth Avenue, aka 10 Bryant Park between East 39th and 40th streets, landed another big catch at their tower where Amazon recently signed for 330,000 square feet — and it all started with a game of pickleball.
In one of Manhattan’s largest retail-space deals this year, burgeoning “athletic urban country club” Life Time signed for 52,000 square feet on four levels, including in the soon to be vacated, 17,000 square-foot Staples store.
It will open in early 2027 behind a prominent Fifth Avenue entrance. The Life Time deal all but completes the leasing picture at the address, which consists of three formerly separate structures that include the 10-story Knox Building.
Life Time has 180 clubs in the US and Canada. Chief property development officer Parham Javaheri said 10 Bryant Park checked all the boxes for what he wanted in Midtown.
“We want to serve both our residential and commercial cores,” he said. “Although the location is obviously more commercial, there’s a lot of residential growth nearby as well.”
Life Time, founded by chairman and CEO Bahram Akradi, has seven other Manhattan locations, two in Brooklyn, and another coming at the supertall Brooklyn Tower condo project.
Javaheri said, “We want to grow methodically. Meaning, we want destinations that let us stay true to what Life Time is, and they require a lot of space.” In fact, several others in the city are even larger than at 10 Bryant Park with 80,000 square feet each.
The 10 Bryant Park edition will boast a luxurious, co-ed “wet” suite with steam rooms, saunas, hot tubs and cold plunges; a workout floor with best-in-class cardio and resistance-training equipment; a recovery space with massage chairs and body-compression technology; and a half-dozen boutique-style studios for group fitness formats.
Eli Elefant, CEO of 10 Bryant Park landlord Property & Building Corp., said, “We had the privilege of repositioning the building in a post-Covid world. It gave us the ability to reimagine what a commercial building can look like in a challenging environment.”
Elefant said, “When we lost our big bank tenant, HSBC, we got all their antiquated space back. Our thought was to lean heavily into the tech sphere and market the former bank space to big users and we were ultimately successful.” With the Amazon deal, the 30-story tower’s office floors are 100% leased.
What he called a “blank slate” after HSBC decided to move to The Spiral in Hudson Yards also suggested the need to deliver what Amazon and many other 21st Century tenants want: a spectacular “wellness” amenity. “We didn’t just want to build a gym,” Elefant chuckled.
Introduced by brokers, he and Javaheri first met on Oct. 17, 2023. “We talked about a lifestyle-physical concept,” Elefant said. “I said, ‘Why don’t we meet for a workout?’”
Javaheri recalled, “We played pickleball at 1 Penn and at Sky on West 42nd Street. Eli told us what his vision was for a strong amenity. We formed a good friendship.”
The competition “was a great way for him to humiliate me,” Elefant laughed. “But I’m a firm believed in personal synergies” in a changed real estate market that needs to be “less sharp-elbows than collaborative, although I’m not sure everyone got the message.”
Atlantic Retail’s Joe Mastromonaco represented Life Time and JLL’s Patrick Smith acted for the ownership.
Property & Building’s parent company owns 14 million square feet of buildings in Israel, but 10 Bryant Park is the only one in New York it wholly owns although it has discreet investments at others.
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