Celebrate the start of spring beneath hundreds of vibrant kites in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy is hosting its annual Sound & Color! Spring Festival on May 18 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., a free family-friendly event that celebrates the beginning of the season with kite flying, live music, food vendors, [...]
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Another new residential project is headed to bustling northwest Queens, although the developer is not in a rush to decide whether this one will be rentals or condos.
The project at 23-42 31st Drive in Astoria comes from Bayside-based Bassaly Development, and it will stand five stories and 50 feet tall with 22 residential units, according to plans recently filed with the Department of Buildings. The building will span about 15,000 square feet and feature 11 parking spots and a roof deck.
Bassaly hopes to start construction in the next month or so and finish in about a year and a half, according to company principal Andy Bassaly. He is keeping his options open when it comes to making the residential units available to rent or buy and will pay attention to factors like mortgage rates and the new affordable housing tax break expected to be in this year's state budget before committing.
"We're open to both," he said. "It really depends on what the market is like a year from now."
Demolition permits were filed for the three-story, six-unit residential building at the site in August 2020, and Bassaly bought the site vacant in February 2023 for about $4 million, city records show.
Bassaly Development is a second-generation family-run firm that focuses on residential projects in the city and on Long Island. Its projects include the 22-unit Cooper Tower Condominium at the Bayside Long Island Rail Road station and the 82-unit Queens Regency Condominium by the Rego Park Center Mall.
Astoria's recent residential boom has not been quite as high-profile as the one in nearby Long Island City, but the Queens neighborhood has still seen a major influx of projects. Developer John Pantanelli is at work on one near the waterfront at 33-35 11th St. that will span about 286,000 square feet with more than 300 residential units, while Miami-based NuVerse Advisors is at work on a condo project at 30-55 Vernon Blvd. with 122 residential units and a roughly $161 million expected sellout.
Median rent in northwest Queens dipped to $3,200 last month, and the area saw a record-high number of new leases at 704, according to the latest report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel. Stubbornly high mortgage rates and Manhattan rents likely contributed to the surge in activity, Miller Samuel CEO Jonathan Miller said.
No hitting the brakes here.
Electric automotive company Tesla is opening up its second showroom in Brooklyn and third in the city, amid layoffs at the Austin-based enterprise elsewhere across the globe, Crain's has learned.
The maker of the divisive Cybertruck — which starts at $60,990 and has been beset by accelerator complaints — debuted its New York City dealership in the Meatpacking District at 860 Washington St. in 2009. The second Tesla dealership in the city opened in Red Hook at 160 Van Brunt St. in 2016, and now, a third is planned to open at the Roulston House at 94 Ninth St. — just steps from the fetid Gowanus Canal.
A polarizing figure in the business world, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk has no apparent plans to back out from his imminent expansion in the borough, according to Joseph Hamway of Industrie Capital Partners, who owns the Ninth Street office building at the corner of Second Avenue as part of a 50-50 partnership with Bobby Cayre of Aurora Capital. The Roulston House opened two years ago and is fully operational as a "successful, creative office" building, according to Hamway, save for the forthcoming Tesla showroom. Hamway declined to say for how much the Musk-owned company is leasing the space.
Hamway told Crain's Thursday that Tesla is "about to" open soon, but could not specify exactly when. He declined to comment on the news that Musk, who also runs the private rocket company SpaceX, is laying off 10% of his global workforce, including 285 employees across two different Tesla locations in Buffalo, according to a notice from the Department of Labor on Wednesday that cited economic reasons. Tesla's stock took a bit of a nosedive this week after the job cut revelations, falling to its lowest level in almost a year, according to reports.
City records indicate that the electric-vehicle maker most recently renewed its Certificate of Occupancy with the Department of Buildings last month — a filing that lasts for three months at a time and costs $130. The latest renewal was issued on March 12 and is valid until June 10, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings.
Tesla first obtained the required authorization in 2022 for a motor vehicle showroom, auto dealership, auto repair and accessory storage on the entire ground floor, according to city records.
The company's iconic red-and-white logo is now hoisted on the facade of the 4-story brick building. Just outside is the site where 37-year-old Sarah Schick was killed by a truck while riding a Citi Bike in early 2023. A white ghost bike now stands at that corner to honor her memory.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
No hitting the brakes here.
Electric automotive company Tesla is opening up its second showroom in Brooklyn and third in the city, amid layoffs at the Austin-based enterprise elsewhere across the globe, Crain's has learned.
The maker of the divisive Cybertruck — which starts at $60,990 and has been beset by accelerator complaints — debuted its New York City dealership in the Meatpacking district at 860 Washington St. in 2009. The second Tesla dealership in the city opened in Red Hook at 160 Van Brunt St. in 2016, and now, a third is planned to open at the Roulston House at 94 Ninth St.—just steps from the fetid Gowanus Canal.
A polarizing figure in the business world, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk has no apparent plans to backout from his imminent expansion in the borough, according to Joseph Hamway of Industrie Capital Partners, who owns the Ninth Street office building at the corner of Second Avenue as part of a 50-50 partnership with Bobby Cayre of Aurora Capital. The Roulston House opened two years ago and is fully operational as a "successful, creative office" building, according to Hamway, save for the forthcoming Tesla showroom. Hamway declined to say for how much the Musk-owned company is leasing the space.
Hamway told Crain's Thursday that Tesla is "about to" open soon, but could not specify exactly when. He declined to comment on the news that Musk, who also runs the private rocket company SpaceX, is laying off 10% of his global workforce, including 285 employees across two different Tesla locations in Buffalo, according to a notice from the Department of Labor on Wednesday that cited economic reasons. Tesla's stock took a bit of a nosedive this week after the job cut revelations, falling to its lowest level in almost a year, according to reports.
City records indicate that the electric-vehicle maker most recently renewed its Certificate of Occupancy with the Department of Buildings last month—a filing that lasts for three months at a time and costs $130. The latest renewal was issued on March 12 and is valid until June 10, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings.
Tesla first obtained the required authorization in 2022 for a motor vehicle showroom, auto dealership, auto repair and accessory storage on the entire ground floor, according to city records.
The company's iconic red-and-white logo is now hoisted on the facade of the 4-story brick building. Just outside is the site where 37-year-old Sarah Schick was killed by a truck while riding a Citi Bike in early 2023. A white ghost bike now stands at that corner to honor her memory.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Legion Investment Group has landed another one.
The luxury developer that splashed onto the Manhattan scene during the pandemic with the hit condo 109 E. 79th St. has picked up a huge parcel in West Chelsea amid a flurry of activity for the firm.
Legion, whose chief executive officer is Victor Sigoura, has purchased 540 W. 21st St., a nearly half-acre plot at 11th Avenue near the High Line, for $87.4 million, according to the city register.
Originally made up of a row of warehouses – and in the 1990s, nightclubs – No. 540 was previously owned by Casco Development Corp., which put the site into bankruptcy protection last summer after the company failed to come up with enough financing to cover a planned 20-story condo tower that expected a $539 million sellout.
Casco had paid $50 million for the property in 2014, when the firm purchased it from a Johnson & Johnson heir, so the firm appears to have nabbed a profit of 75% with the current deal, though bankruptcy court records suggest Casco has a long line of creditors.
Deutsche Bank provided Legion with nearly $56 million in acquisition funding for the deal, which went into contract Dec. 28 and closed April 15, the register said.
The corner site at the West Side Highway, where Casco did manage to pour a foundation, could accommodate a 141,000-square-foot residential building, according to Legion, which appears to also be considering a 172,000-square-foot commercial building, based on an emailed statement.
The property "represents an exceptional opportunity to create a landmark project on one of the last remaining sites of its kind in New York's most dynamic and trafficked neighborhoods,” Sigoura said in the statement. The firm otherwise declined to comment.
As multifamily development activity overall has declined, Legion has moved aggressively in a short time frame to build condos on the Upper East Side and in Gramercy, and now possibly in West Chelsea. For instance, the firm has secured permits to demolish six buildings at East 84th Street and Madison Avenue where Legion, working with equity partner Nahla Capital, has filed plans to put up an 18-story, 47-unit tower.
Legion has also taken major steps to construct an 11-story condo at a multi-lot site on East 21st Street near Gramercy Park, including offering $45 million to snap up a modest co-op in the face of some opposition.
The big bets come as demand for homes can appear tepid even as pricing remains strong. Manhattan had 9,827 sales of co-ops and condos in 2023, the lowest total in a decade except for 2020, when the pandemic essentially shut down markets for a few months, according to data from Douglas Elliman.
But 2023’s median sale price of $1.15 million was the second-highest in the decade, behind only the $1.195 million median in 2022, Elliman said.
Legion might also be heartened by the reception it got for 109 E. 79th St., its first Manhattan project. The condo near Park Avenue, which launched sales as Covid raged in September 2020, had sold all 31 of its units for a haul of $446 million by 2023. The last unit to sell, a four-bedroom penthouse, fetched $35 million.
Casco, which is reportedly controlled by real estate investor Uri Chaitchik, could not be reached by press time.
Legion Investment Group has landed another one.
The luxury developer that splashed onto the Manhattan scene during the pandemic with the hit condo 109 E. 79th St. has picked up a huge parcel in West Chelsea amid a flurry of activity for the firm.
Legion, whose chief executive officer is Victor Sigoura, has purchased 540 W. 21st St., a nearly half-acre plot at 11th Avenue near the High Line, for $87.4 million, according to the city register.
Originally made up of a row of warehouses – and in the 1990s, nightclubs – No. 540 was previously owned by Casco Development Corp., which put the site into bankruptcy protection last summer after the company failed to come up with enough financing to cover a planned 20-story condo tower that expected a $539 million sellout.
Casco had paid $50 million for the property in 2014, when the firm purchased it from a Johnson & Johnson heir, so the firm appears to have nabbed a profit of 75% with the current deal, though bankruptcy court records suggest Casco has a long line of creditors.
Deutsche Bank provided Legion with nearly $56 million in acquisition funding for the deal, which went into contract Dec. 28 and closed April 15, the register said.
The corner site at the West Side Highway, where Casco did manage to pour a foundation, could accommodate a 141,000-square-foot residential building, according to Legion, which appears to also be considering a 172,000-square-foot commercial building, based on an emailed statement.
The property "represents an exceptional opportunity to create a landmark project on one of the last remaining sites of its kind in New York's most dynamic and trafficked neighborhoods,” Sigoura said in the statement. The firm otherwise declined to comment.
As multifamily development activity overall has declined, Legion has moved aggressively in a short time frame to build condos on the Upper East Side and in Gramercy, and now possibly in West Chelsea. For instance, the firm has secured permits to demolish six buildings at East 84th Street and Madison Avenue where Legion, working with equity partner Nahla Capital, has filed plans to put up an 18-story, 47-unit tower.
Legion has also taken major steps to construct an 11-story condo at a multi-lot site on East 21st Street near Gramercy Park, including offering $45 million to snap up a modest co-op in the face of some opposition.
The big bets come as demand for homes can appear tepid even as pricing remains strong. Manhattan had 9,827 sales of co-ops and condos in 2023, the lowest total in a decade except for 2020, when the pandemic essentially shut down markets for a few months, according to data from Douglas Elliman.
But 2023’s median sale price of $1.15 million was the second-highest in the decade, behind only the $1.195 million median in 2022, Elliman said.
Legion might also be heartened by the reception it got for 109 E. 79th St., its first Manhattan project. The condo near Park Avenue, which launched sales as Covid raged in Sept. 2020, had sold all 31 of its units for a haul of $446 million by 2023. The last unit to sell, a four-bedroom penthouse, fetched $35 million.
Casco, which is reportedly controlled by real estate investor Uri Chaitchik, could not be reached by press time.
Get ready, New York sports fans. The Knicks and Rangers kick off their 2024 playoff runs this weekend. To build hype ahead of the round one games, the teams will host a free “playoff palooza” on Saturday with appearances from alumni from both teams, fun activations, face painting, a t-shirt press, photo ops, and more. [...]
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Leases
City takes space near Penn Station
Address: 31 Penn Plaza, Manhattan
Landlord: Vanbarton Group
Tenant: The City of New York
Lease size: 34,000 square feet
Lease length: 20 years
Asset type: Office
Brokers: CBRE’s Jeffrey Kilimnick represented the tenant. A JLL team led by Kyle Young, Matthew Astrachan, Mitchell Konsker and Thomas Swartz represented the landlord.
Asset manager inks lease in Midtown
Address: 340 Madison Ave., Manhattan
Landlord: RXR
Tenant: Northampton Capital Partners
Lease size: 5,542 square feet
Lease length: Three years
Asset type: Office
Brokers: Cushman & Wakefield’s David Mainthow and Steven Langton represented the tenant. JLL’s Paul Glickman, Matt Astrachan, Cynthia Wasserberger, Dan Turkewitz and Harrison Potter represented the landlord, along with William Elder and Andrew Ackerman in-house.
Korean barbecue joint opening in the Garment District
Address: 463 Seventh Ave., Manhattan
Landlord: The Arsenal Co.
Tenant: Sopo
Lease size: 3,156 square feet
Asset type: Retail
Brokers: Kassin Sabbagh Realty represented the tenant. Adams & Co.’s David Levy represented the landlord.
Sales
Condo developer picks up bankrupted parcel in West Chelsea
Address: 540 W. 21st St., Manhattan
Seller: Casco Development Corp.
Buyer: Legion Investment Group
Sale price: $87.4 million
Asset type: Development site
Please read more here.
Financings
Sabet Group refinances Gramercy Park apartment building
Address: 332 E. 19th St., Manhattan
Owner: Alfred Sabetfard
Lender: Greystone
Loan amount: $9.4 million
Asset type: Multifamily
In a city that often feels stitched together by scaffolding, the development known as the Alloy Block — on a bustling street in downtown Brooklyn, across from the red-and-silver sign of the Brooklyn Academy of Music — long seemed like just another construction site.
But there’s something unique about the project’s first phase, a 44-story tower that opened this spring. Surrounded by buildings that rely heavily on gas and oil for energy, 505 State Street is New York’s first all-electric skyscraper.
Energy-efficient buildings like it will be crucial to the city’s push to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80% over 2019 levels by 2050. Nationwide, the biggest single source of emissions is transportation, dominated by low-occupancy cars and trucks. But in New York, most people use mass transit instead of driving. That means buildings “are by far the largest source” of climate pollution in the city, said Christopher Halfnight, senior director of research and policy at the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on energy efficiency in buildings. Gas- and oil-burning furnaces and water heaters are together responsible for 40% of New York City emissions, according to Halfnight.
To try to shrink that, the City Council in 2021 passed a law prohibiting new buildings from burning fuels that emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. The rules took effect this year for most new structures up to seven stories high. But for towers, they won’t kick in until the middle of 2027. With 505 State, the developer-slash-architect Alloy Development is just getting a head start.
That wasn’t always the plan.
When Alloy first conceived of the project in 2019, “the assumption was the base building heat would be on gas, and maybe the cooktops would be gas,” AJ Pires, the company’s president, said during a walk through the site on a blustery day this past winter.
But two things happened. First, National Grid halted new gas connections in Brooklyn. It was part of a standoff between the utility and state regulators over a billion-dollar gas pipeline; the utility wanted it greenlit but regulators blocked a key permit, citing water-quality concerns.
Around the same time, the New York City Council passed Local Law 97, requiring a 40% reduction in GHG emissions from certain buildings by 2030, relative to 2005 emissions.
Though the law lacked clear guidance, the double whammy of gas connection woes and pending regulation led Pires and his colleagues to bet the city would over time incentivize electrification, or “penalize anything that was using a carbon-based fuel,” he said. “And that ended up being true.” So they decided to go electric.
When team members asked what the complex would look like absent gas, the answers were fairly straightforward. “Instead of a gas boiler, an electric boiler; instead of a gas cooktop, it was an induction cooktop. And literally that was it,” said Pires, noting that they had to revise the design of the electrical room to allow for higher amperage, since more incoming electricity would be needed for a larger electrical load.
Luckily, Alloy already had experience designing buildings that conserve energy, like One John Street, a mixed-use residential and commercial development in Dumbo that won an American Institute of Architects-New York award for its high level of sustainability. And they’d already designed the five structures that make up the Alloy Block with tight building envelopes to reduce the energy needed for heating and cooling.
The bigger difficulty was getting the school building authorities on board. The project site includes the current home of Khalil Gibran International Academy, the first English-Arabic public school in the U.S. Its building is an amalgamation of several structures built between 1873 and 1889. “But they were obviously inefficient for today’s high schools,” said Jennifer Maldonado, chief executive of the Educational Construction Fund. The ECF builds public schools across New York state through public-private partnerships.
Alloy Development’s plans called for refurbishing the old school for use by the community and apartment residents, and for moving Khalil Gibran into a new building at the center of the complex, along with a new 500-seat elementary school (P.S. 456). That building would meet the standards of Passive House — a design approach in which structures are so tightly constructed that they require very little energy to maintain comfortable interior temperatures.
“We declared that it would be a Passive House school building, to sort of set up a pilot for the School Construction Authority to test out new ways of building schools,” said Pires. Whereas the Educational Construction Fund oversees the school’s construction, once it’s finished the School Construction Authority will take possession of the property and be responsible for maintenance and upkeep. Across the city, the SCA maintains more than 1,400 buildings serving 1.1 million students. It is one of the city’s largest builders, and as such is a key part of helping the city lower building emissions. But because it serves a specific population — youth — it also has specific and strict requirements.
“There’s little things, like where banisters are put, where entryways are located, where security cameras are placed,” said Maldonado, noting that schools built for younger kids have railings and toilet bowls placed at lower heights than schools constructed for teens. Because this is a busy part of Brooklyn, windows were required to be triple-paned to isolate outside noises.
The main challenge was meshing Passive House requirements around heating and cooling with the SCA’s rules for ventilation, cooling and air systems. Engineers, architects and construction managers collaborated to get them in sync, Maldonado said: “In terms of building new buildings, this could potentially be a model moving forward.”
Like 505 State Street, the new school building will mark a first — the first Passive House public school in the city. It will open to students in September. Tenants of the residential tower, meanwhile, began moving in on April 5. Market rent ranges from $3,475 for a studio to $11,200 for a three-bedroom, although 45 of the 440 units were set aside as affordable housing.
The model unit that Pires showed off looked like any apartment in a new luxury building, with sleek, modernist fixtures and tall windows of triple-pane glass, designed to both quiet the cityscape outdoors and maintain comfortable indoor temperatures. The glass cooktop is induction, which some chefs say is superior to gas for its responsiveness. Each unit is equipped with an Ecobee smart thermostat that not only lets residents schedule when the heating and cooling turn on and off, but can also sense when the apartment is unoccupied and revert to a lower energy setting.
But much of what makes the building tick is outside of the tenant’s purview.
Heating and cooling operate on what’s known as a water-source heat-pump system. “That means there’s a loop of cold water and a loop of hot water that go to the units that are in the apartments, that then blow air over the loops, and heat and cool the spaces,” said Pires. The water loops recover much of the energy used for warming and chilling, reducing how much the boiler has to work and thereby maximizing efficiency
When Andrew Graham, Alloy Development’s asset manager, led us down to the basement, it was startlingly clean, and missing the tang in the air that usually accompanies gas boilers. 505 State Street has an electric resistance boiler instead. Pires noted that the building does have one exception to its all-electric credentials — a backup gas generator in case of emergency, which according to Pires was a building code requirement.
The backup generator will kick in if the building loses power, to ensure that the elevator and the lights in the fire egresses work. “It’s not part of the daily operations of the building. It’s not being used. But it does provide life safety services if there’s a blackout,” said Pires.
One common concern about electrified buildings is cost, both for developers and tenants. Halfnight pointed to recent research suggesting that for developers, all-electric new construction in New York City “is basically cost-neutral compared to a non-all-electric building.”
For renters it’s more complex. Many New York apartment buildings control the heating and cooling centrally and fold the costs into rents rather than give tenants a discrete bill. This isn’t without downsides — unable to turn down the heat, New Yorkers often prop open windows in winter — but it also means costs are consistent. Tenants in the Alloy Block will be able to control their own heat, but they’ll also have to pay for it themselves.
Pires acknowledged that Alloy — as the landlord — won’t really know the energy costs, relative to conventional heating and cooling, until the building is fully operational. “I’m curious to see what my electricity bill is gonna be like when we turn it on and use it,” he said.
As more new buildings in the city go electric, “there’s work to be done to make sure that that transition happens in a way that is equitable and ensures that residents are not paying undue portions of utility bills,” said Halfnight of the Urban Green Council.
Rapid changes in technology may allow more dramatic efficiency gains in the later phases of the project. While 505 State Street relies on an electric resistance boiler, the second residential tower will feature newer tech. “We are designing the second building now, and there’s air-source heat pumps that can produce enough hot water that weren’t available five years ago, when we were designing 505 State Street,” said Pires. Heat pumps are more energy efficient than electric resistance boilers.
In its enthusiasm for going electric, Alloy Development stands in contrast to others in the real estate and construction sectors who’ve resisted New York’s green building push. In 2022 two Queens co-ops and an LLC that owns a building in Manhattan filed suit in New York Supreme Court to overturn Local Law 97. That case was dismissed late last year. Meanwhile, the state’s All-Electric Building Act — which mirrors the New York City law but with a slightly longer timeline for adoption — is being challenged in a federal district court. Fossil fuel companies, trade associations and unions whose members rely on the availability of gas appliances and systems for their livelihoods filed suit in October 2023.
From Pires’s perspective, it’s where the tide is heading and he and his colleagues just got there a little early. Of the engineers who worked on 505 State Street, he said, “if you ask them now what they’re doing on any multifamily building, they’re all-electric — all of them. It’s super great to be able to use the project to promote that type of a future.”