No hotel deal for Durst, Schrager

A deal announced last fall between Ian Schrager and Durst Fetner Residential to build a ground-up Public Hotel in Herald Square is kaput.

Before speaking at a Crain’s real estate event yesterday in Midtown, Schrager told us the deal was no longer going forward but did not provide any details.

“We couldn’t make the financials of the deal work,” said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesperson for Durst about the future 855 Sixth Ave. “We are talking and meeting with other [hotel] people, and have been for a while.” The building is not yet designed, Barowitz said, because it’s “program first, design second.”

Meanwhile, Schrager said he is in contract for another, undisclosed site.

While he didn’t say where, during the panel discussion, Schrager said he likes the Bowery, and that the bar and restaurant action there “bodes well” for hotels and residential.

He’s not targeting the luxury market now, he told us, because people don’t want to spend more than $250 to $300 a night for a hotel room. “My sweet spot is [spending] $400,000 to $500,000 per room,” he added. He’s also looking at the mid-range 3.5 stars and at upgrading the food.

Schrager and Marriott International are also moving ahead with the conversion of the top of the Madison Avenue Clock Tower to an Edition Hotel.

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C. Bradley Mendelson and Alan Schmerzler of Cushman & Wakefield took home The Most Creative Deal in Manhattan award last night for their 2011 transaction “The Leasing of the Times Square Theatre.”

As has been reported extensively by Post colleague Steve Cuozzo, the net lease for Broadway 4D Theater NY with The New 42nd St., which oversees all the Deuce theaters, took two years of “due diligence, negotiations, delays, compromises and deal restructurings” and will combine the Broadway spirit with new technology.

At the same cocktail event at the 101 Club, the Real Estate Board of New York presented a second award, for The Retail Deal Which Most Significantly Benefits the Manhattan Retail Market, to Scott M. Bloom of Bloom Real Estate Group for “55 Fulton St.– Key Food.”

The small supermarket was expanded tenfold to 30,000 square feet and will operate 24/7 to serve the growing residential lower Manhattan community. Key Food will also control the loading dock and elevator for deliveries.

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Also downtown, in a direct deal, the brand strategy and communications design firm Addison signed a lease for 27,300 square feet representing the eighth and ninth floors of 48 Wall St., where it will move from 24,600 square feet at 20 Exchange Place. The asking rent was $35 per square foot.