The Special Surgery Hospital is massively expanding its footprint on the Upper East Side with an extension to a new tower on which Extell Development will innovate this year.

Extell has long owned the entire East Front of First Avenue between East 79th and 80th Street, but Gary Barnett’s prolific outfit has not said what it will do on the vacant 20,000 square foot lot. Some neighborhood residents feared another condo skyscraper.

Mystery Solved: Extell is building a 30-story, 400,000 square foot medical tower. The Special Surgery Hospital – a leading musculoskeletal and orthopedic health facility and a New York institution since 1863 – has leased and will occupy 200,000 square feet on eight lower floors.

They will be used for doctors’ offices and auxiliary services of hospitals. Extell will market the upper floors to other medical users.

We reported in March that the fast-growing Special Surgery was building a new facility above FDR Drive attached to its main campus between East 71st and East 75th streets. The land was cleared this fall. The new hospital floor space at the Extell site will be twice the size of the FDR site.

Special Surgery Chief of Staff Jennifer Rentas said the addition “will complement what we are doing on FDR Drive by allowing us to relocate some facilities from our main hospital building, which will create space there so that we can focus our main campus on a complex [patient] care.”

Barnett called special surgery the “best place in the world” for musculoskeletal health and research.

“We’re all getting old,” he joked when we mentioned that several friends had successful surgeries there.

Barnett estimated the total cost of the project, including the acquisition of the land, at over $ 500 million. The design by architects Perkins Eastman will be presented to Community Board 8 on Monday, but it does not require public approval.

Extell has been swallowing chunks of the waistline for many years. A final crucial addition came in 2018 when he paid $ 35.8 million for the broadcast rights to St. Monica Roman Catholic Church on East 79th Street.

Barnett would not discuss the terms of the lease. But he said, “We will get a very low return on investment. The upside is that this is an exceptional tenant, so we are prepared to accept a more modest return.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard signs leases faster than it once built battleships. The modern and thriving industrial park has inked an additional 71,000 square feet in the past eight months alone, bringing the pandemic era total to 233,428 square feet.

Nineteen leases have been signed in six buildings since February, for tenants such as life sciences and cosmetics companies. Their size ranged from just 608 square feet for household goods maker Zagami Piccolini to 10,092 square feet for medical supplier Woodley Equipment.

Johanna Greenbaum, Director of Development, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., said, “Despite the obvious challenges of the past 18 months, the Yard remains one of the city’s top destinations for high-tech companies from various industries.

New tenants are a cross section of technology, design and manufacturing users. They included Stefan Beckman (production design), Contemporary Conservation (upscale kitchen renovations), CLL Creative (photography studio), Yoga Democracy (sportswear), and Syncrhon (neuro-implant design and prototyping).

Rents per square foot for manufacturing tenants range from high teens in older buildings to their mid-twenties in newer buildings. Office rents range from $ 30 to $ 30.

The Yard is completing a billion-dollar expansion that will increase the site’s total number of jobs from 11,000 today to 20,000 by the end of the year. Steiner Studios, the city’s first Wegman’s store, and the Dock72 office tower are some of its best-known features.

New life is in sight for 9-11 W. 54th St., a pair of 19th-century red brick townhouses that architects McKim, Mead, and White designed to resemble a single residence.

Owner Orin Wilf’s Skyline Development hopes to land a single tenant for the entire vacant five-story, 25,000-square-foot property.

The 1896 period structures were built as a mansion for James Janius Goodwin, a business partner of JP Morgan.

Over the past century, they have also hosted a MoMA Photography Center, a Rhodes Preparatory School for Boys, and a US Trust Company Bank. Wilf’s company bought it for $ 75 million from JD Carlisle Development in 2019.

Wilf said London’s contemporary art gallery White Cube practically signed a lease in 2020 “when the pandemic hit and they decided to slow things down.”

Now, he said, “We are seeing a wide range of types of tenants interested in making this their home. They include financial companies, embassies and art galleries. Newmark’s William Cohen and Jeffrey Roseman sift through the offers.

The atmospheric interior features remnants of New York’s Golden Age and early 20th-century banking. But Skyline will work with a tenant to tailor the space to current needs.

Skyline’s offices are located in the adjacent 13-15 W. 54th Townhouses, which were once owned by the Rockefeller family. They are also home to the famous Italian restaurant Il Gattopardo – where, Wilf said, the new tenant next door “will always have a private table” thanks to his friendship with Gattopardo managing partner Gianfranco Sorrentino.

In addition, Skyline plans to open a 27-story luxury apartment building at 20 W. 55th St. behind the townhouse site next year.

“It will be built to high-end condo standards, but it will be rentals,” Wilf said. “We like to keep our real estate.