A Leadoff Home Run

In the 17th-floor corner office at 1221 Avenue of the Americas, two doors down the avenue, in a space repurposed by the company’s leasing group as a war room to hammer out details of new leases at 1271, confidence blossomed early. This was October 2016, when Major League Baseball inked a deal to take 400,000 square feet.

“When we got the MLB deal, I thought, we’re done,” recalls Edward J. Guiltinan, at the time Rockefeller Group’s senior vice president of leasing. “I knew we were going to be okay.” Yes, Guiltinan knew full well that he’d inked only the first deal and that Time’s lease for the vast bulk of the tower still had another 28 months to run—but a big tenant with a marquee name had sprinted aboard, sending all the right signals. A rejuvenated mid-century midtown tower had triumphed at the wire over a competitor offering virgin space in a newly minted neighborhood. Meanwhile, having a linchpin of American sports aboard at the late home of Sports Illustrated seemed doubly delicious, as a win for both 1271 and the Avenue of the Americas as a whole.

Prior to this moment, with its buildings aging and big tenants shopping around, murmurs of Sixth Avenue’s malaise had grown louder. Time’s exit became exhibit A, or, as some called it, the final nail in the strip’s coffin.

It took an over-the-top $600 million in construction and re-tenanting costs to rewrite that script. It also took taller windows, set in openings expanded upward by 16 inches through what had been solid concrete—demolition that alone added $50 million to renovation costs. But it quickly paid off on the 33rd floor, where a mock-up of the new building’s interiors included the taller windows wrapping around the southeast corner of the space. Rockefeller Group’s executive vice president of core holdings, Bill Edwards, still remembers prospective tenants being drawn to that corner and “standing there, soaking in” the expanded views that came with windows stretching nearly 30 inches taller than before.

As the renovation work on cladding, cooling, wiring, and everything else rose from the ground floor, so did the leasing, with global bank giant Mizuho signing on, followed by law firm Blank Rome (which, in the spring of 2019, became the first to move in). Others—law firm Latham & Watkins, insurer AIG, investment bank Greenhill, and family office Bessemer Trust—followed, in that rough order. In the second quarter of 2021, when Bessemer took up residence in the tower’s top seven floors (plus its own reception center off the lobby), 1271 boasted an occupancy rate of 98 percent.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S new home is an unmatched combination of groundfloor retail space, five floors in the tower, plus the top floors of the extension including the roof deck and auditorium. Interior staircases open up transition areas, making the most of the tower’s light (left). Communal spaces are crucial for modern work (right).