| 06/28/2003
The Associated Press announces signing
of new headquarters lease on Manhattan's West Side
The Associated Press announced it will
move its headquarters next year from Rockefeller Center to
larger offices on the West Side of Manhattan, where it will
consolidate all of its New York news and management operations
under one roof.
AP, the world's oldest and largest newsgathering organization,
will occupy the top three floors of a 16-story building with
views of the midtown Manhattan skyline and the Hudson River,
just west of Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
The building, located at 450 West 33rd Street, is owned by
Max Capital Management Corp. Financial terms of the new lease
were not disclosed. AP's current lease, in the building at
50 Rockefeller Plaza that has borne its name for 65 years,
expires in September 2004.
"The bigger, more open floors and high ceilings in the
new building will allow us to design a 21st century newsroom
for AP's television, radio, text, image and multimedia services
and to better support the way our producers, reporters, editors
and photographers work together," said AP President and
CEO Tom Curley.
The new space will also include such amenities as a large
outdoor terrace, athletic facilities and meeting and conference
rooms.
Currently, AP's New York operations are spread among four
locations. The main news and photo departments occupy most
of the fourth floor of "50 Rock," as the building
has been known through the years since AP moved there in 1938.
The news service also leases several other floors in the building.
AP's Internet newsroom is in a building across the street;
a technical support center is housed further west in Midtown,
and AP Television News (APTN) studios are on the Upper West
Side.
Curley said that in addition to providing space where all
those operations can be brought together, the move will allow
AP to avoid the substantial increase in rent that would have
come with renewal of its current Rockefeller Center lease.
"The move makes excellent sense for AP from every standpoint,"
Curley said.
The initial term of the new lease is 15 years and calls for
AP to take 290,773 square feet. The AP's four New York offices
currently total about 207,000 square feet.
"AP is a welcome addition to what has become a prominent
hub for media in New York," said Anthony Westreich, president
and principal of Max Capital Management Corp. The building
also houses news and business offices of the New York Daily
News, New York offices of U.S. News and World Report, and
public television station WNET.
The building, constructed in 1967, was extensively modernized
in 1991.
AP will be moving into space currently occupied by the headquarters
offices of DoubleClick, the Internet advertising services
company.
It will be AP's sixth New York City headquarters. The cooperative
first opened its doors in 1848 at 150 Broadway, near where
the World Trade Center would rise more than a century later.
Only one of those earlier buildings survives today, an ornate
19th century structure on Chambers Street facing the back
of City Hall. AP had its headquarters there from 1913 to 1924.
The AP provides content to more than 15,000 news outlets with
a daily reach of 1 billion people around the world. Its multimedia
services are distributed by satellite and the Internet to
more than 120 nations.
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