Related Companies plans to build a supertall skyscraper on Madison Avenue rising to 1,200 feet, Related CEO Jeff Blau revealed to Realty Check.
The cloudbuster comprising luxury condos, stores and perhaps a hotel will rise at 625 Madison Ave., a property that includes next-door 39 E. 58th St., former home of restaurant Lavo.
Although Related’s desire for a new building was previously reported, its enormous scale was not known until now.
Related recently closed on the $632 million purchase of the site from SL Green, Blau said. The contract was announced by SL Green in December but the closing hasn’t yet been posted on the city Finance Dept. website.
The new supertall can be built “all as of right,” Blau said – apparently meaning it required no zoning changes or city land-use review.
Blau spoke to The Post after last week’s historically momentous, but not entirely surprising, departure of Related founder and chairman Stephen M. Ross to launch a new development company in South Florida.
Although it might seem to put Blau on the political hot seat as Related tackles the challenge of winning state approval for a casino license at Hudson Yards, Blau characterized it as essentially a “formality.” Ross, 84, mostly moved to West Palm Beach a few years ago. Related has been run since then by his good friend Blau, company president Bruce Beal Jr. and COO Kenneth Wong.
The new Florida company, called Related Ross, is an “entirely separate entity” from Related Companies, Blau clarified.
He didn’t have images of the 625 Madison plan to share yet.
“We have nine months of demolition ahead first,” he said.
Blau recalled emotionally, “I spent my first 15 years with Stephen in that building,” which was once headquarters to Ronald Perelman’s Revlon. It also was the setting for the first-ever Realty Check column – a 1999 interview with Ross there when demolition was underway on the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, future home to Related’s Time Warner Center.
Of course, the most ambitious item on Related’s Big Apple agenda is its proposal to build a 3 million-square-foot, Wynn-branded casino resort on Hudson Yards’ still undeveloped western side.
Blau couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for Related’s $12 billion plan to finally build out the entire western yard.
“It certainly doesn’t get any bigger than this,” Blau said. As The Post first reported last summer, the resort skyscraper would contain a 250,000 square-foot casino, a 1,700-key hotel and twenty restaurants.
The western yard plan also includes a two million square-foot office tower, a one million square-foot apartment tower to include 324 affordable units, a new public school and a near 6-acre public park – “larger than Bryant Park,” Blau said.
But it’s up to the New York State Gaming Facility Location Board, which expects to select a winning proposal of ten-odd submissions for a casino license in New York City by the end of 2025.
State officials are eager to see the completion of Related’s entire 26-acre Hudson Yards site. But other casino-partnership proposals also promise extensive neighborhood benefits.
SL Green, for example, touts its dream of a Caesars-branded casino at 1515 Broadway as necessary to arrest Times Square’s recent decline. Soloviev Group/Mohegan near the UN and Steve Cohen/Hard Rock International near Citi Field, among others, have their own selling points.
Formal offers are not due in until June 2025. The state legislature wants the deadline moved up to next month, but Gov. Kathy Hochul has yet to sign the bill.
Blau said, “We prefer submissions to happen sooner. We’d love to get it out there and start working with the community to address any concerns. But obviously we’ll do what’s required.”
He downplayed recent objections by Friends of the High Line over the height of a podium on which the casino/hotel tower would stand, saying Related has met with the group ten times in the past year and made modifications to the design.
Related is also busy with a new housing complex at Willets Point in Queens and a major project with Essence Development of NYCHA’s Fulton Elliott-Chelsea Houses in West Chelsea. The latter will create 3,000 new affordable apartments as part of a plan where “nobody gets displaced,” Blau said.
Related owns about $60 billion in property across the US. Although New Yorkers associate it mostly with large-scale office development, it’s also the largest private owner of affordable housing in the country.
