The 110 Tower, the newest addition to the Fort Lauderdale skyline, makes its debut this week, taking its place as Broward County’s tallest building.
Local officials and analysts say the building is a step toward stretching the city’s boundaries and a sign of things to come.
“The 110 Tower shows how the south side is developing itself,” said Bill Johnson, assistant city manager. “I think developers around here are going to be looking at it as the standard to be set.”
The 30-story building, a collaboration between developer Herbert Sadkin and the family of Broward Circuit Judge Arthur J. Franza, will open on Saturday with a gala in its seventh-story club. Its restaurants and health club will open on Feb. 15.
Sadkin wants 110 Tower to make even more of a mark on Fort Lauderdale than its blue neon stripe leaves on the skyline. So he calls the building, which took 2 1/2 years of planning and construction, “the Building of Tomorrow.”
“When tomorrow comes, we won’t be outdated,” Sadkin said. “This building will never be obsolete.”
He also spent $70 million to ensure that even when his building ages, it does so gracefully. Besides its signature blue stripe, 110 Tower is wrapped in red granite, brightened with brass pillars and stocked with high-tech systems.
Its brass revolving doors spin into a lobby layered in marble, two floors of hotel rooms, a health spa, a private club, a disco and two restaurants. Construction was delayed several months, partly because shipments of granite from Italy were slowed by a strike.
“He (Sadkin) went first class, no doubt about it,” said Gary DeCesare, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who will move his practice to the building next month. “It’s sort of a New England building. But when you look at the marble and look at the whole picture, it’s really nice.”
Local observers, however, see the whole picture as more than marble floors and fancy fixtures. Many consider the building a sizable symbol of the city’s planned evolution from beach town to business center.
Location is a major reason. The 110 Tower is the first office building to stretch the downtown district to the area south of the New River, near the Broward County Courthouse.
“Predominantly, the downtown market has been recognized to be north of the river,” said Sudhakar Sharma, research director at RealData Information Systems in Miami. “This new building, located on the south side, is tending to move the gravity southward. One or two more projects would certainly tend to redefine the boundaries of the downtown.”
For years, the tallest buildings in the Fort Lauderdale area were the condos that line the county’s beaches. As the city became less of a resort town, the high-rises along Broward Boulevard began to rival them. Because the bulk of the office boom has remained on Broward Boulevard, some people were skeptical about whether anyone would move to the other side of town.
So when Alamo Rent A Car chose the 110 Tower as its headquarters, it surprised many observers, said William Farkas, director of the Downtown Development Authority.
“That kind of exploded the myth that only lawyers would be interested in that area,” Farkas said. “I’m surprised there was that significantly sized building even contemplated for that area. (Sadkin) certainly gambled and he certainly won, and that’s to his credit.”
Although the tower sits on the border of the business district, it is in the center of the city’s latest cycle of growth. Its completion comes at the far end of a construction boom that started in 1984 and shot office space inventory to more than 1 million square feet.
The building also leads into the start of the next cycle, which should start this year — and could include as many as six downtown skyscrapers.
One of them — a proposed 160,000-square-foot building with Capital Bank as a tenant — will be the second building on the river’s south side. Another, a planned partnership between developer Terry Stiles and the News/Sun-Sentinel, is on the north side. Both are set to start this year. Four other projects — all on the north bank — are pending.
The speed at which 110 Tower leased in a soft office market could entice other developers to get projects started. Although about 30 percent of Fort Lauderdale’s downtown office space was vacant last year, 110 Tower is now 83 percent leased. Of its 258,000 square feet of office space, only about 53,000 square feet remain. It got a boost from Alamo, which rented 135,000 square feet — the building’s top nine floors. Leasing also was helped by the fact that no new high-rises broke ground in the last two years.
M.J. “Reese” Stigliano, a vice president at Lehrer & Co., said that though the downtown vacancy rate still stands at 21 percent, the amount of full-floor office space left is small.
Stigliano, who handled leasing for the 110 Tower, said the next wave of construction will more than correct the shortage.
“If these all get going within a year, you’re going to have a major glut of space,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it’s impossible for the city to grow.”
Stigliano says the building was a boon for businesses such as Alamo that wanted to gather growing operations under one roof. Many of the other tenants are attorneys such as DeCesare, who wanted to expand their practices closer to the courthouse.
But Stigliano said that the building did not drain tenants from any other Class A buildings.
“None of the 110 Tower space caused any vacancies,” Stigliano said. “There’s been a lot of expansion and growth.”
Indeed, developers such as John Mercede think the building’s success has spread.
Mercede, who owns Mercede CityCenter at Andrews Avenue and Las Olas Boulevard, watched his occupancy rate grow from 33 percent to 50 percent in the last three months.
“As their space becomes occupied, it works together,” he said. “The more businesses that locate downtown, the more new businesses will want to be here. It has to be cooperative.”
Will such success continue? Although some Fort Lauderdale officials do not predict a mass migration to the south side, they hope the 110 Tower will be a catalyst.
Mayor Robert Cox sees the building as the new southern boundary of the city. Bill Johnson, who directs Fort Lauderdale’s Riverwalk project, said the 110 Tower will be the anchor for a judicial district that will tie into the city’s ambitious plans to develop an entertainment, shopping and residential area along the New River’s north bank.
One of the projects city officials are watching closely is an 8-acre tract on the river’s south bank near Third Avenue. Broward County owns the property but it will soon put it up for sale as surplus.
“We’re looking at it as a sizable mixed-use development,” Johnson said. “I think there is enough critical mass there now to attract the top developers in the country.”
