By: Anthony Salerno
West Chelsea’s huge Terminal Stores building will see much of its storage space gone, replaced by offices and a public-use walkway.
The 1.2 million-square-foot property’s half-million square feet of storage space is set to become a thing of the past, according to a piece in the New York Post.
L&L Holding Co., partner Normandy Real Estate Partners and another investor are making their plans known to the public after shelling out $880 million for the edifice in 2018. It occupies the block surrounded by Eleventh and Twelfth avenues and West 27th and West 28th streets.
“Both properties are visions from a long-ago time when the Far West Side was a port gateway. The area fell into disuse in the second half of the 20th century, but has been revived, piece-by-piece, through adaptive reuse of derelict industrial buildings and piers,” the Post reported. “The Terminal Stores team was to present its plans before Community Board 4 on Monday night — a first step toward review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which must bless the redesign because the building is within a historic district.”
It was just over a year ago that the deal came together. It “amounts to a good payday for its owners. Coleman P. Burke, Waterfront’s founding and managing partner, and investors paid about $12 million for the property in 1983. In 2014, GreenOak bought a 49% stake that valued the property at about $300 million,” reported the Wall Street Journal at the time.
Indeed, it continued, the purchase “underscores the dramatic changes that have taken place over the last several decades and those that are slated to come. New office, residential and retail buildings in the Hudson Yards District are on the rise to the north, filling with tenants across the sectors. In Chelsea and other neighborhoods in the Midtown South area, technology companies, firms in the creative sector and financial firms continue to devour space, sometimes paying rents well above $100 a square foot.”
Constructed in 1891, Terminal Stores originally served the railroad lines that dominated the middle Hudson River waterfront, according to rew-online.com. “In 1983, the complex was purchased by Coleman Burke of Waterfront NY and was converted into self-storage space and commercial office use. Its current tenant roster includes ridesharing giant Uber Technologies Inc., cosmetics company L’Oréal USA, and architectural firm Grimshaw.”
“One of the central features of the business plan is the introduction of a through building cut-through to create a courtyard (similar to the Empire Stores building in Dumbo) – which would allow more light into the central interior of the building, providing the opportunity to add floor-to-ceiling glass spaces facing the courtyard and to create terraces along the cut-through,” according to a project set-up detailed by therealdeal.com.
