Law firm Goodwin Procter signs Park Ave lease

Law firm Goodwin Procter’s planned move from the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue to BXP’s 200 Fifth Ave. in Flatiron says a lot about today’s commercial market.

The relocation in late 2026 represents only modest short-term growth — from 216,000 square feet at its old digs to 250,000 square feet — but the deal includes  expansion options in the building. The firm’s move is a stroke of faith in once-sleepy Midtown South, where SL Green’s One Madison is now home to IBM and Franklin Templeton’s New York headquarters.  

Welcome to the mighty, ever-evolving Manhattan office market in 2025. Although saddled with too many obsolete old buildings and a hesitant lending environment, it’s in a vastly better place than doomsayers dreamed of five, or even two, years ago.

A Newmark survey this month found that Manhattan’s office recovery has “defied the national narrative” — that is, it clobbered  other large US cities both in terms of volume and percentage.

Data from CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Newmark, Savills, Colliers and Avison Young differ by a half-percentage point here or there, but all found the first quarter of 2024 recorded the most leasing volume since the fourth quarter of 2019 — plus-or-minus 12 million square feet.

The availability rate fell to around 17%, the lowest in five years. It was under 15% in prime Midtown and under 10% on Park Avenue.

The first quarter’s five largest leases were all above 300,000 square feet. And — wait for it! — physical office attendance, still regarded by some as the holy grail even though most large  landlords now say work-from-home is  “in the rear-view mirror,” continued to its rise. The Partnership for New York City found March office attendance at 76% of pre-pandemic levels, compared with 72% last year.

But five years since the pandemic’s horror fully took hold, it’s worth a look back at how prisoners-of-the-moment media organs viewed the future of the Manhattan office market — and of New York City itself.

The New York Times, which never found a perceived threat to free enterprise it didn’t enjoy, had this to say on May 12, 2020:

The pandemic crisis felt “fundamentally different” (i.e., more dire)  than previous ones, from the Spanish flu of 1918-19 to 9/11. “Companies are considering not just how to safely bring back employees, but whether all of them need to come back at all.”

 In 2025, C-suite honchos are calling their troops back to their desks in droves.

The Times beat the “ghost town” drum again on Sept. 8, 2020, when it claimed that corporations were “showing even more hesitation about committing to the city long-term.”

Tell that to Citadel, Blackstone, Bloomberg,  Alphabet and Amazon, which have shown insatiable appetites for more space here since the infamous 2020 lockdown ended.

As recently as April 2023, when the market showed early stirrings of a rebound, a Times headline cited  a “bleak outlook for Manhattan’s office space.”

Not only leftists foresaw a commercial wipeout. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote on Feb. 25, 2021, under the cheery headline “The Old New York Won’t Come Back,” “The office towers of Midtown are empty.” She continued that although “people will come back to office life to some degree,” the “closed shops in and around train stations and office buildings are not coming back.”

In fact, retail space at or near Sixth Avenue, Brookfield Place, Moynihan Train Hall and the Fulton Transit Center is drawing more stores and restaurants than in the past — including around the WSJ’s and the New York Post’s home at 1211 Sixth Ave., where new hotels and restaurants are almost too many to count.

Nonprofit organ The City headlined in May 2023, “The city’s economy is recovering. The office market is not.”

And who can forget the 2023 “Doom Loop Cycle?” That much-cited essay by a Columbia University scholar claimed that  work from home spelled a “real estate apocalypse” that would inevitably collapse New York City’s municipal treasury.

Today we have a new bogeyman: President Trump’s tariffs. We can expect panic over how they’ll leave Big Apple landlords in a worse pickle than they seemed to be five years ago.

Maybe they will. But don’t pay them any attention until the dust settles — which if recent history tells us anything, it sooner or later always does.