NEW YORK CITY-In its first Manhattan acquisition, Seattle-based developer Sabey Data Center Properties decided to go big. The company snatched up the 32-story, one-million-square-foot tower at 375 Pearl St. for $120 million, which will be repurposed into a new, state-of-the-art multi-tenant commercial data center here.

Built in the mid-1970s as a central office for New York Telephone, now known as Verizon, the tower has been a staple of Lower Manhattan’s skyline for more than 30 years. In an interview with GlobeSt.com, Dave Sabey, president of Sabey Corp,, tells us that the building will reemerge as “the next big thing” in the scientific community, as well as contribute to the resurgence of the high-tech market in Lower Manhattan.

“It’s a big splash for us and we have been anticipating this for some time,” Sabey says, explaining that the West Coast-based firm starting looking at properties across the five boroughs 18 months ago. The company purchased the tower from M&T Bank and Taconic Investment Partners. “We are building a national and eventually a global network of data centers with connectivity. New York is so important as a corner of the country because of its confluence of cable, density of population and density of data. This in our network was an absolute must.”