By January 1986, Broadway State Partners, a joint venture between Bruce Eichner and VMS Development, was acquiring land on the east side of Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets for a retail and office tower. Eichner said, "We are going to have the most innovative, most attractive, most interesting-looking building on Broadway". The next month, Eichner acquired Loew's State, with plans to build a mixed-use complex on the site. The process involved buying out the theater's 45 tenants, some of which held long-term leases. To acquire four additional plots at the center of the block, Eichner had to find the identities of every person who had held title to these properties since 1870. In December 1986, the United States government informed Eichner and VMS that it could not relocate the USO recruitment center on the site within the 90-day period given in their eviction notice. However, the USO was able to find a temporary space within two months. By the next year, Eichner and VMS were negotiating with the final landowner on the site, who was hesitant to sell. The acquisition process took over a year.The building was known during early planning as the Broadway State Building. It was a speculative development, as it had not been built with a commitment from a specific office tenant. Initially, Helmut Jahn (who had designed CitySpire for Eichner) would have designed 1540 Broadway. The development was to contain 58, 59, or 60 stories, with a retail atrium, a parking lot, a four-screen movie theater, office space, and 600 hotel rooms across . The structure would cost $300 million. It would be built without tax exemptions, despite being two blocks from the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project, where builders had believed new development was infeasible unless tax exemptions were provided. To attain additional floor area, Eichner leased  of the Lyceum Theatre's unused air development rights from the Shubert Organization.