# 745 Seventh Avenue

745 Seventh Avenue is a 575 ft (175 m), 38-story skyscraper in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and originally built in 2001 for financial services firm Morgan Stanley, it was instead purchased by competing firm Lehman Brothers and served as Lehman's headquarters until the bank's collapse in 2008. The building has since served as the headquarters of Barclays' investment banking division.

## Site

745 Seventh Avenue is in the Times Square neighborhood in Midtown Manhattan. It is located just north of the actual intersection known as Times Square and occupies the western part of the block bounded by 50th Street to the north, 49th Street to the south, Seventh Avenue to the west, and Sixth Avenue to the east. The building shares the block with 1251 Avenue of the Americas to the east. The lot covers an area of 62,459 sq ft (5,802.6 m$^2$) with a frontage of 200.83 ft (61.21 m) along Seventh Avenue and a depth of 350 ft (110 m).
The site was once home to the Brass Rail, a four-floor restaurant and tavern with a cocktail lounge. The restaurant originally opened as a sandwich shop during the prohibition era and grew to have a seating capacity of more than 1,000.

## History
### Initial development plans

In late 1986, the property was owned by the Rockefeller Group, a real estate development company in charge of developing the western blocks of Rockefeller Center. As the real estate economy was booming, the company developed plans for a new building on the property. At the time, the property was largely an empty lot, with the exception of a small plaza called Exxon Park occupying the easternmost section and a small four-story brick building facing 49th street.
In 1989, the Rockefeller Group announced plans to build a 55-story office building, then called Rockefeller Plaza West, as an expansion of the Rockefeller Center complex. The proposal, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, was to include a rehearsal studio, a restaurant and cabaret, and additional retail space, as well as below-ground connections to the Rockefeller Center concourse and surrounding subway lines. It would have had a total of 1,360,000 sq ft (126,000 m$^2$) of floor space, made possible by purchasing air rights from older buildings in Rockefeller Center, which were then also owned by the Rockefeller Group. To purchase the air rights, the developers applied for a special permit under New York City Zoning Resolution § 74-79, which allowed a developer with a "chain of ownership" over multiple contiguous properties to transfer air rights from one of their properties to another.
The building's design was well received by critics. It featured a limestone and glass facade with stainless steel ornamentations, drawing comparisons to the design of the center's older buildings and contrasting it with the monolithic design of the center's more recent buildings. Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times that the building "does not look like the RCA Building and it does not look like the Exxon Building, either, yet it looks capable of sitting comfortably beside both." The design won a citation in the Progressive Architecture magazine.
The proposal was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and Board of Estimate in May 1990, and work to clear the site began soon after. The building was expected to begin construction in 1991, take three years to build, and cost in "the half-billion dollar range". Shortly after work began, however, the project became involved in disputes over development rights, and after the economy went into recession, the project was scrapped, with the air rights transfer being abandoned. In 1994, Rockefeller Group received permission from the city to turn the site into a parking lot until an anchor tenant was found for the development.

### Modern development and construction

As the city's office market began experiencing a resurgence in 1997, 745 Seventh Avenue was one of only four major sites available for development in Midtown, and Rockefeller Group began negotiating with various potential tenants in seeking a renewed development on the site. Financial services company Bear Stearns was among the larger companies negotiating a deal as its lease at 245 Park Avenue was set to expire in 2002, and the building required major renovations would the company choose to stay there. Bear Stearns sought co-ownership of the development and required large trading floors at the base of the building which would require a partial redesign of the initial 55-story proposal. At the time Rockefeller Group also negotiated the possibility of a smaller building for other tenants like Reuters. These negotiations ultimately failed, however, and after further negotiations with Guardian Life Insurance also failed, Rockefeller Group began negotiations with Morgan Stanley in January 1998. The two companies discussed the development for 11 months, with negotiations almost breaking down in October, temporarily leading the developers to seek PricewaterhouseCoopers as a tenant before Morgan Stanley resumed discussions.
In November 1998, Morgan Stanley and Rockefeller Group finalized negotiations and signed a deal to begin working on a new development at the site, with Kohn Pedersen Fox once again in charge of the design. Under the arrangement, Rockefeller Group would continue to own the land, while Morgan Stanley would own the building. Morgan Stanley intended to use the building to supplement its headquarters at 1585 Broadway, only a block away from the site, desiring to keep its workforce concentrated in one area as part of a "Midtown urban campus".
Construction began in 1999 and was led by Tishman Construction. During construction, every floor on the building was raised to accommodate cables and wires designed so that the building would have the capacity to serve its occupant even as technological demands grew. Gregory Clement, one of the lead architects of the building, compared the project to the previous development planned in 1990:
   That 55-story building was a speculative office building; this is built specifically for Morgan Stanley, so its technical requirements, space requirements and other needs have been apparent from the beginning.
To accommodate delivery trucks, Tishman built a temporary loading dock behind the building in what had been Exxon Park, but restored and "enhanced" the plaza once construction was finished. The building was topped out in November of 2000, less than eight months after construction began, and was on track to be finished within the 25-month time frame required by Tishman's contract.
Morgan Stanley's sentiment shifted after the September 11 attacks, which exposed the vulnerability of concentrating workers in one area dependent on the same electrical grid and services. The company deemed the building's close proximity to its headquarters a risk, and instead sold it for $700 million to Lehman Brothers, which had just been displaced from its headquarters at 3 World Financial Center due to the attacks. The deal was at the time the most expensive purchase of an office tower on a square-foot basis, at $700 per square foot. The Rockefeller Group maintained its ownership stake after the deal, and Morgan Stanley went on to sublease office space elsewhere in the city before purchasing the former Texaco Headquarters in White Plains in an effort to disperse its operations.
Upon purchasing the nearly completed building, there were few adjustments left for Lehman to make. The building was already designed for the securities industry and featured the large, open trading floors on the lower levels and standard office space in the upper levels that the company desired. Lehman nevertheless worked with the construction companies previously contracted by Morgan Stanley to complete an additional $80 million in interior design adjustments — which included a redesign of the top two floors to add executive offices — before occupying the building in 2002.

### Acquisition by Barclays

In 2007, Lehman Brothers became implicated in the subprime mortgage crisis after closing its subprime lender due to poor conditions in the mortgage market. The company began taking on major losses in 2008 due to its heavy positions in subprime mortgages before declaring bankruptcy on September 15 of that year. The following day, Barclays announced it would purchase most of Lehman's North American operations, including 745 Seventh Avenue, for $1.75 billion. The deal was finalized on September 20 with the figure being reduced to $1.3 billion, the majority of which was for the building. Barclays went on to use the building as the headquarters for its investment banking division Barclays Capital.