$140M Loan on NYC's Art Deco McGraw-Hill Landmark for Sale

An up-to-date $140M loan on the original McGraw-Hill Building, the Art Deco landmark on West 42^nd Street, has gone on the market a year before it is scheduled to mature.

Newmark is marketing Signature Bank’s floating-rate loan on the 33-story building at 330 West 42^nd Street. According to Newmark, the blended rate of the debt package is 6.59%, with a default rate of 24%. The balance on the debt package is about $241 per SF, scheduled to come to due in May 2024.

Signature has not specified a reason for selling a performing loan on the architectural treasure dating back to 1931.

The 580K SF building is owned by a consortium of private investors known as Deco Tower Associates. Deco has hired Resolution Real Estate to undertake a $120M renovation of the vacant building.

In October, the NY Post reported that Deco Tower is planning to reposition the top two-thirds of the McGraw-Hill Building into luxury condo rentals, including studios and one-bedroom apartments, with the building’s unique Art Deco crown housing amenities.

The bottom 10 floors of the building will remain office space. MDeas Architects is redesigning the office portion of the building to create open floor plans and add outdoor terraces.

With its green-tinted facing and unique levered top with the words McGraw-Hill chiseled into it in a linotype-style font—looking very much like the radiator for the Chrysler Building, which was finished a year earlier—the original McGraw-Hill Building is instantly recognizable, along with Rockefeller Center, as the iconic buildings of NYC’s Art Deco period.

The building was the headquarters of the McGraw-Hill publishing company until 1972, when the company put its name on a new headquarters across the street from Rockefeller Center.

Ironically, the company that distanced itself from its past by moving from its landmark building on 42^nd Street put its architectural signature on NYC’s skyline again in a late ‘60s genre epitomized by the series of identical, box-like 43-story steel towers that were built on Sixth Avenue across from Radio City Music Hall.

Several publishing companies, including Time/Life as well as McGraw-Hill occupied the new towers, making the neighborhood a media center with NBC at 30 Rock, a tradition maintained by Fox Corp., which operates Fox News from the tower on 48^th Street, across the street from McGraw-Hill on 49^th.

In January, Fox News and News Corp. announced that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is renewing its lease on its headquarters at the tower at 1211 Sixth Avenue.

Fox Corp. occupies 670K SF and News Corp. occupies 486K in the tower, which is owned by Ivanhoe Cambridge and operated by Hines. Both leases were extended through 2042.