Daily News from New York, New York • 188

Spectacular opportunity to own the finest in winter-warmth with incredible savings! i X-Xxx XXX xXxX x-x- xxxxx Another tall tale of Manhattan Otfl LOW-PRICE By OWEN MORITZ Urban Affairs Editor 1 hi XX XXX -x XXX XX XX X- THE MOMENT, he is an obscure Brooklyn attorney. But Bruce Eichner will mot be unknown much longer. This is because Bruce Eichner is making millions out of thin air. He is one more meteor racing across the Milky Way heavens of Manhattan real estate, coming from nowhere to become a multimillionaire somebody. lucnner, 39, is parlaying air rights and real estate smarts into wf, -wx Beverly Sills (1 the construction of New York's tallest skyscraper in a generation a soaring 68-story, $170 million mass of condominiums and offices that will rise on narrow W.

56th behind, next to and over City Center. To some he is the savior of the City Center, a New York City home for the performing arts since Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia proclaimed it a "dream come true" in 1943. Eichner is giving the financially pressed center up to $14 million in exchange for its air rights. Eichner is buying the air over the four-story City Center to add to properties he owns next to il so he can take a site zoned for 34 stories and turn it into one accommodating a building twice as high. The funds provided by Eichner would be split among three groups the Fifty-Fifth Street Dance Fund, which operates City Center; the New York City Opera, and the New York City Ballet.

But others are not so sure that Eichner deserves much praise. Some suggest the Koch administration, the Board of Estimate and the super sophisticates involved with City Center, desperate for operating funds, fell for the bait dangled by this unknown Brooklynite and settled for too little. Here, in a way, is a New York story, or maybe 68 stories, starring opera great Beverly Sills, who is general director of the City Opera; a host of supporting figures, and Eichner himself, a young man in a hurry who is now on the verge of pulling off a master coup. "How can they say that?" asks Howard Hornstein, Eichner's lawyer and a former Planning Commission-member who will soon plead Eichner's case before that panel. Last week, the Eichner-City Center deal was cleared by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

That approval was required because City Center, housed in a former Moorish temple, is a landmark. "The agreement resulted from an independent appraisal done for the city," says Hornstein. "The Board of Estimate in August reviewed it. This was negotiated at arm's length and approved by lawyers for the cultural institutions. "I think it is a good deal for the cultural institutions.

It makes a lot of sense because it stabilizes two major cultural institutions opera and balletand it takes a landmark and preserves it" Perhaps. But critics like William Hadley, a retired oil executive who served as the Metropolitan Opera's finance director for 10 years, believes the city was shortchanged. City Center's air rights, which were sold for $32.50 a square foot, should have commanded $50 a square foot, the value of the land, Hadley says. That alone would add an additional $6 million to $7 million to the City Center package. Sills and others associated with City Center welcome the deal because it provides up to $14 million that can inject new life into ballet and opera here.

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But Hadley's wife, Ann Hadley, who represents the W. 55th St. and W. 56th St. block associations, suggests the city was a neophyte in the way it negotiated: "They never did a deal like this before.

They should have held a public auction." Moreover, the money may be only a short-term solution, maybe a three-year cushion. After that, the center could again be in a cash-flow crunch. One thing is clear. Eichner will get his investment back almost immediately. This is because 45 of the 68 stories are earmarked for luxury condominiums about 300 in all.

A just-released analysis of the Manhattan market by the Real Estate Board of New York reckons an average condominium in the City Center neighborhood could fetch $500,000 or. so. If that's the case, Eichner will gross $150 million alone from the sale of the condominiums. Maybe more, since condos in Trump Tower and Museum Tower routinely fetch $1 million and more. Both are less than two blocks from Eichner's planned tower.

Then there are the rents from the 23 stories that Eichner has set aside; for commercial use. For Eichner, it is a colossal jump from Brooklyn. Ten years ago he was in government, first as an assistant district attorney, then as a planner for the state Division of Criminal Justice. He began dabbling in a real estate as a sideline, he says. "I needed to find something I could do to protect myself in the long run from the income limitations of government and vagaries of politics," he said.

He parlayed one deal after another. After scoring with controversial deals in Brooklyn Heights, he vaulted into Manhattan, following a path blazed by- Donald Trump, George Klein and other Brooklynites who have since scaled the heights of Manhattan. In short, young Eichner has struck urban gold. TO READY SUN. 12-5 P.M..

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