A commercial building in the Meatpacking District is set to get some rooftop art. Last Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a proposal to install an art mural on the side of a bulkhead atop 875 Washington Street, located between West 13th Street and West 14th Street in the Gansevoort Market Historic District.
Back in July of 2015, news broke that Brickman Real Estate and Daniel Loeb were planning to convert the three-story, 160,000-square-foot warehouse at 30-02 48th Avenue, in the Dutch Kills of Long Island City, into office space. DNAinfo now has updated details on the conversion. The building, which will retain its name as The Bindery, will get a 4,000-square-foot lobby featuring space for four food vendors and a communal work area, in addition to amenities like bike storage, a fitness center, a food court, an art exhibit, a cocktail bar, and a roof deck. Filings indicate 69,167 square feet of factory space, spread across all three floors, will remain in the building, while 72,269 square feet will be designated as commercial space. Gut-renovations are expected to begin within the next few weeks. Fogarty Finger is the architect of record.
Neighborhoods like Midwood and Sheepshead Bay are a largely untapped market for commercial development. But developers are starting to realize that there’s growing demand for new office space in heavily trafficked shopping corridors near the subway, even in southern Brooklyn. One property owner near the northern border of Sheepshead Bay took the plunge in 2014 and decided to demolish a few two-story commercial buildings at 1601 Kings Highway.
Park Avenue is about to get its first new office tower in decades as the 1957 office tower at 425 Park Avenue (catty corner to Rafael Viñoly’s 1,396-foot-tall 432 Park Avenue), once the pinnacle of modernity, is being reinvented for the 21st century via a partial demolition and a dramatic, 893-foot-tall restructuring by developer L&L Holdings and architects at Foster + Partners.
In August of 2015, news broke that Tishman Speyer was acquiring five stories of Macy’s nine-story commercial building at 422 Fulton Street, along with the parking garage at 11 Hoyt Street/217 Livingston Street, in Downtown Brooklyn, for $170 million. Macy’s is expected to consolidate their retail space into 278,000 square feet on the lower half of the building (basement through fourth floors). Speyer would then expand and convert the upper portion into 10 stories of office space. The Wall Street Journal now has the first glimpse of the renovations, which Speyer has agreed to fund (as part of the deal), that will go into Macy’s portion of the building. Macy’s and FRCH Design Worldwide are designing their space. Work is expected to begin imminently, and the renovation is expected to be complete in 2019. It was recently reported that Speyer would be utilizing the EB-5 program to raise roughly $60 million in financing.
