At least he knows he has a reasonable shot of repurposing and selling most of Summit off; the same cannot be said of Kenilworth.
Even so, as we last mentioned just after New Years 2014, Merck will have some significant trouble marketing the Readington/Whitehouse Station facility it is vacating shortly. It is just too big, too specialized and frankly, outdated for today's nimble, small, cost and environmental foot-print savvy (tech-driven) Millennials-led businesses to want to occupy -- even as start up space. Today -- by way of confirmation of that fact, we read of a series of local government town-halls around Whitehouse Station, where it is openly being asked whether the facility needs to be abandoned; stripped clean, and restarted nearly from scratch, in order to get large chunks of it back on the paying tax rolls.
See this, from NJ.com:
. . . .And the Readington session will focus on the “Future of our Corporate Campuses.” With Merck & Co. leaving its world headquarters here by next year, the huge building just north of Route 22 will be vacant. Real estate experts have talked about how difficult it will be to fill the 900,000 square-foot main building as well as others later constructed. Merck originally said it was moving headquarters to Summit, but then last year decided to be based in Kenilworth.
While it would be great to find one company to take over the entire building, the questions include “but is that a reasonable expectation, what else can we look at?” Dziamara noted.
“How to repurpose those sites” is among the items to be discussed in Readington, she said. . . .
[And, Ed. Note: from the link to the "town-halls":]
"[Millennials] are a tech-savvy generation wanting to live in higher-density activity environments, and they do not find one-dimensional office campuses particularly attractive." So said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, during his presentation at a July 12 conference on Reinventing New Jersey’s Obsolete Suburban Office Campus. . . .
We will keep an eye on this -- but (if he had so studied, I guess) Mr. Hassan might have learned that "pride," the good book says "goeth before the fall. . . ." He simply over-promised and then under-delivered
6 comments:
As a former resident of the K'worth campus, the executive palace was built before the arrival of the Hassaninator. He deserves blame for the demise of the place; but if you check the records carefully, I don't believe he built anything....buildings or business. More into tearing down!
Condor;
Anon #2 is correct, Kenilworth was planned out by Kogan. Fast Freddie just took over the K-1 Castle after Kogan was bumped out.
Also, if my memory is correct, Summit was also all Schering/Plough. It was the old Ciba/Geigy site that S/P bought and began renovations just prior to the consent degree fiasco.
Condor,
Hassan "over built" nothing. He had nothing to do with the building of K-1 or K-15 or Merck Whitehouse Station. Hassan just orchestrated the final destruction of S/P. As the other responders have said, Summit is originally Ciba-Geigy and not Organon
The Ciba-Geigy site in Summit became a Novartis site when Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz merged in the mid-90s. Schering-Plough purchased the site from Novartis.
Thank you one and all --
I should not have tried to blame Hassan for the gaudy Kenilworth campus, he inherited it.
And while it is true that Organon USA occupied Summit after Hassan bought it, the facility clearly has been the sadder but wiser girl -- as to most of New Jersey pharma, over the decades. . . .
I will be more precise in the future -- there are plenty of more materially negative things Fast Fred did -- but this one isn't near the top, at all.
Namaste
while fred was in charge, I thought the only building added was k23, the old warehouse that they acquired and put offices in half of it. that wasn't a palace by any stretch.
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