The initiative to attract larger tenants at the 2.8-million-square-foot 350 Fifth Ave. goes hand in hand with the $550-million Empire State ReBuilding program that W&H launched in 2006 to upgrade and reposition the property. It also goes against a tenancy profile that prevailed for much of the office icon's eight-decade history, starting with its opening in 1931.

"Buildings go in cycles, and the Empire State Building was completed in the middle of a depression—not a recession, a depression," William Cohen, who heads the leasing program at tells GlobeSt.com. "Hence, you had smaller tenants." And so it remained for the ensuing decades: in a 1997 City Review profile of a book about the property, Carter Horsley observed, "To this day, major corporate tenants have generally evaded the Empire State Building, whose huge tenant roster includes mostly very small space-users."

Since the launch of the repositioning program, the ESB's tenant roster has been reduced from nearly 600 to fewer than 300, initially under the direction of Stephen Eynon, then of CB Richard Ellis, and more recently via a Newmark Knight Frank team headed by Cohen. Along the way, it has attracted full-floor space-users including Skanska, Coty, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Taylor Communications and Funaro.