New York Tower Sells for $124 Million
One of Manhattan’s major office buildings, the 60-story Salmon Tower on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, has been sold for $124 million in what is being called “one of the largest single property transactions to take place in New York in recent years.”
It was also the first time that the building has been sold since it was built in 1930 by Walter J. Salmon for himself and his family. Salmon, a developer who built many buildings in New York City during the ‘20s, died in the ‘50s. His son, Walter J. Salmon Jr., died a couple of weeks ago. Salmon Tower was purchased by Joseph Neumann and Israel Green, represented by James Felt Realty Services. Realty Group Ltd. represented the sellers, WSLD Corp. and 500 Fifth Avenue Inc.
The building was designed by the same architectural firm that designed the Empire State Building, which opened in May, 1931. Known now as Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the firm then called itself Shreve, Lamb & Harrison.
Cowboy star Roy Rogers and his singer-author wife Dale Evans have opened a gallery of their movie memorabilia at a residential RV park that just opened west of Phoenix in Surprise, Ariz., but the name of the park shouldn’t be a surprise: It’s Happy Trails Resort.
“Happy Trails” was their theme song on more than 100 half-hour TV Westerns, and it was the title of the pair’s autobiography, published in 1979, two years after Dale Evans was acclaimed “the film world’s most successful author,” having written 16 books and sold nearly 4 million copies in 24 years.
Happy Trails Resort, a 320-acre development of Thousand Trails Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., and Western Savings & Loan Assn. of Phoenix, is planned as “the largest residential camping resort in the world.” It will have more than 2,000 lots for sale to RVers at prices from $20,800 to $34,800 and a $53 monthly association fee, covering water, garbage collection, sewer, cable TV and 24-hour security. Besides the gallery, the community will have a cafeteria, grocery store, post office, a ice cream parlor, medical facilities, library, grand ballroom, amphitheater, dining rooms and TV viewing rooms.
The gallery isn’t the only museum associated with the famous couple. They also have one in Victorville, more than 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, that attracts about 200,000 visitors a year.
Hooray for Hollywood! And hooray for Irwin Deutch!
He and his company, Century Pacific Investment Corp., not only raised more than $35 million for the purchase and renovation of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, but Deutch is working with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to hold the first reunion ever of the stars whose names appear on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
Purpose: to help raise funds to maintain the walk.
The date: probably in late April, after the hotel’s grand opening on March 7, which is shortly before this year’s Academy Awards. That’s significant, because the hotel was the site, in 1929, of the first Academy Awards.
Cannon Films, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cannon Group, is celebrating its new headquarters next Saturday with a black-tie dinner party there.
The company, which released “Runaway Train” with John Voigt (one of this year’s Academy Awards nominees), bought a five-story, 70,000-square-foot office building at 640 San Vicente Blvd. in West L. A. Its facilities were previously in Hollywood. Wells Fargo Realty Finance of Santa Monica arranged $14 million in permanent financing for the acquisition.
That Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin Associated Architects and Taliesin Gates Development Co. project in Scottsdale, Ariz., will be dedicated at 3 p.m. Thursday at the Gate of Taliesin West, with a reception following.
Only 54 homes are planned at the 600-acre educational, architectural and social compound where the renowned architect and his wife, Olgivanna, built their Taliesin West home in 1937. He died in 1959. She died last March.
Funds from the sale of the homes will go to existing Taliesin West facilities and programs. The homes are priced from $500,000 to $1.5 million or more, if a house is built on more than one lot.
An auction for eight renovated condominiums (including two fully furnished) on the Golden Mile, that high-priced condo area along Wilshire Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Hills, will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.
The condos are in the Wilshire Westwood Terrace at 10645 Wilshire Blvd., a 19-unit building completed 31 years ago. Joel D. Zegart, president of JBS & Associates Inc., the Chicago-based national real estate consulting company handling the auction, said there will be no minimum bids and that all eight homes will be sold by the end of the auction.
The end might come sooner than you think. It only took half an hour for bidders at an auction his firm coordinated in Chicago to snap up units worth $275,000 for $147,000, $125,000 for $92,000 and $110,000 for $80,500.
Before-auction prices on the Wilshire units range from $177,500 to $275,000--still not a bad deal considering that new units along that glittering stretch go as high as $5.8 million!
Hollywood is getting a helping hand from the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency in the form of apartment financing.
Agency bonds valued at $8 million were sold to finance construction of the Goldrich & Kest project at 7021-7033 Lanewood Ave., near Hollywood High. Construction is expected to start this month and end in mid- to late-1987.
