Cooper Union is poised to regain control of the iconic Chrysler Building after terminating the lease of powerhouse developers Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs over $21 million in unpaid rent, The Post has learned.
The school, which owns the land under the 1,046-foot-tall Art Deco skyscraper, sent Rosen and Fuchs’ firm RFR a lease termination notice on Sept. 13 and the ground lease was ended Thursday, said John Ruth, vice president of finance at Cooper Union.
“We are engaging a world-class property management firm, Cushman & Wakefield, to ensure a smooth transition for our tenants,” Ruth told The Post on Friday.
RFR had partnered with Austrian property tycoon Rene Benko’s Signa Holding to buy the ground lease for the landmark tower in 2019 for $150 million, but Signa suddenly collapsed and declared insolvency last November.
Months later, an Austrian court ordered the company to sell its stake in the building, leaving Rosen scrambling to find a new partner, as The Post previously reported.
R&S Chrysler – the joint venture between RFR and Signa – has withheld money from vendors and Cooper Union for the past four months, the school’s lawyer wrote in a letter to RFR’s head of acquisitions obtained by The Post.
“Cooper Union provides substantial tuition assistance to its students,” the lawyer wrote.
“While Cooper will continue to meet this obligation, your withholding of $21 million is not acceptable to us and demonstrates bad faith.”
But RFR isn’t backing down without a fight. The company filed a lawsuit on Thursday that accuses Cooper Union of seeking “an improper and fatally defective eviction proceeding.”
The suit claimed the school failed to serve RFR with a proper notice of defaulted rent and lease termination and claimed it demanded incorrect amounts of payment.
RFR is seeking for the eviction to be annulled.
The firm did not respond to requests for comment.
The lease termination will have no impact on student scholarships or the recent announcement that Cooper Union’s senior class will not have to pay tuition over the next four years, Ruth told The Post.
The college had “built in guardrails” to protect against such situations, he said.
