Hitachi leases last block at 90 Park Avenue.

Hitachi Data Systems has leased the last piece of a major block of space at 90 Park Avenue that was being offered for sublease by the pharmaceutical giant, Sanofi Aventis.

The firm, a division of Japanese electronics maker, Hitachi, that specializes in the manufacture of data storage equipment, took 27,000 s/f on the building's second floor with rents that begin at $48 per s/f for the first five years of the 10 year deal and then jump to $53 per s/f for the remainder of the term

The space was the last of 240,000 s/f that Sanofi Aventis, the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world and the largest in Europe, had tapped a CB Richard Ellis team led by Peter Turchin and the firm's New York co-chairman Robert Alexander to sublease. While big deals seemed to proliferate as the city's office market began to tighten, a succession of deals would fill the space in 90 Park Avenue faster than a single large lease, Turchin indicated.

Among the handful of tenants that came to the building was First New York Securities LLC, a stock-trading firm that subleased the entire fifth floor for rents in the low $50s per s/f. Other deals included the 90,000 s/f sublease of two floors in February 2006 to C.V. Starr & Co., the insurance underwriting firm founded by former AIG head Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. The 8th floor was leased in a 44,000 s/f deal just a few months later to the computer software firm Matrix, which was represented by Mitchell Kunikoff, an executive managing director at the brokerage George Comfort & Sons. "We really took the chance to reacquaint bro kers and tenants with the building because it hadn't been on the market for so long," Turchin said. "We wound up getting a group of absolutely top credit tenants."

Of the 250.000 s/f located on floors 2 and 5-9 that Sanofi originally leased in the 900,000 s/f Vornado owned tower, the company only occupies 11,000 s/f now.