666 Fifth Avenue....not as special as it used to be but still OK

I am not aware of much happening at 666 Fifth Avenue these days, compared to how it used to be, but its address still makes it quite an expensive bit of real estate.

Briefly, I used to work for a division of the Loews Corporation, Loews Representation International, which for years had its offices here ( before  being moved to Park Avenue and 33rd Street and then shut down overnight by the robber-baron type owners, the Tisch family ( who only divested themselves of Lorillard Tobacco when a woman flew a small plane above the posh suburb on Long Island where Laurence Tisch lived reading " Larry Tisch sells cancer" and New York University which had accepted millions from the Tisches and named all sorts of buildings after them (as well as the Tisch School of the Arts and part of its Hospital Complex) had, after a stormy board meeting, declared it would accept no more tobacco-tainted money ( by this time NYU had achieved a huge endowment, helped in doing this of course  by the Tisch family, but also due to the enormous success and contributions of NYU graduates to their alma mater).

And then there was the neat restaurant at the top, appropriately named "The Top of the Sixes," with great high views of Midtown Manhattan....much earlier I believe it had been a Stauffer's Restaurant.

Just a bit here from Wikipedia ( these endless Wiki articles are getting tiresome I fear)

The Tishman family via Tishman Realty and Construction built the 1,500,000-square-foot (140,000 m²) tower in 1957. It was designed by Carson & Lundin and the building was called the Tishman Building. One of its most famous exterior features was the prominent 666 address emblazoned on the top of the building. The other distinctive exterior features are embossed aluminum panels.
The original design included lobby sculptures by Isamu Noguchi including the "Landscape of the Cloud" which consists of sinuously cut thin railings in the ceiling to create a cloud effect. The cloud is also carried into a floor to ceiling waterfall.
The penthouse was occupied by the Top of the Sixes restaurant. For many years the building had a distinctive feature of a T-shaped atrium walk-through open to the sidewalks on 52nd Street, 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue with glass storefronts inside the walk-through. This included a bookstore and another area used for years by Alitalia Airlines. The entrance to 666 Fifth Avenue was inside this walk-through.

Sumitomo Realty ownership

Tishman Realty dissolved in 1976 and the building was sold for $80 million. In the late 1990s Japanese firms bought both Rockefeller Center and 666 Fifth Avenue. The new owner of 666 Fifth was Sumitomo Realty & Development Company. Major changes included replacing the Top of the Sixes restaurant with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar private club.

Tishman ownership

The newly reconstituted Tishman Speyer Properties bought the building for $518 million in 2000. At about the same time Tishman also bought Rockefeller Center. Shortly after the purchase, Tishman enclosed the atrium walk-through and added a third tenant, Hickey Freeman.^[2] The enclosure cut off the Fifth Avenue entrance. Access is now via 52nd or 53rd Street. In 2002 the 666 address on the side of the building was replaced with a Citigroup logo. Citigroup is now the building's largest tenant.^[3]
The 2006 sale was the third blockbuster deal involving Tishman in two years. In 2005 Tishman bought the MetLife Building for $1.72 billion, setting the previous record. A month before the 666 sale, Tishman bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village for $5.4 billion, which was the biggest real estate deal in U.S. history.

Kushner ownership

In December 2006, Tishman Speyer Properties along with the German investment firm TMW announced the sale of the building to the Kushner Properties for $1.8 billion, the highest price ever paid for an individual building in Manhattan.^[4]
The deal turned heads since at 483 ft (147 m) the building is not even on the list of tallest buildings in New York City. However, it is considered a trophy building because of its location on Fifth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center.
Kushner sold the retail condominium portion of 666 Fifth to a Stanley Chera led group for $525 million.