799 Broadway Receives $187M Construction Loan

NEW YORK CITY—Normandy Real Estate Partners and Columbia Property Trust received $187 million in construction financing from Apollo Commercial Real Estate for the planned development at 799 Broadway in the Village in Manhattan.

The 12-story, 172,000 square-foot office tower will comprise 147,688 square feet of office space, 12,688 square feet of community space and 21,929 square feet of retail and a gym. Designed by Perkins+Will, the new building will have terraces on each floor, oversized glass windows and ceiling heights of 15 to 17 feet.

A Newmark Knight Frank capital markets team led by Dustin Stolly and Jordan Roeschlaub, with Nick Scribani and Chris Kramer arranged the financing. Cushman & Wakefield’s Adam Spies, Adam Doneger, Kevin Donner and Josh King advised Normandy and its former partner Ares Management on the partial sale to Columbia. In-house, Gavin Evans and Travis Feehan were the project leads for Normandy while Kevin Hoover represented Columbia Property Trust.

“The state-of-the-art development will be a trophy boutique office building, certain to attract New York’s most prominent tenants,” says Stolly.

799 Broadway is located at the corner of 11th Street and Broadway where the East Village meets Greenwich Village, close to Union Square. NKF notes that “799 Broadway will be the closest new creative office development to Union Square, the cultural and transportation hub of Midtown South.”

The project, other neighborhood developments and characterization of this area as Midtown South have not been universally met with enthusiasm. On September 29, a group of approximately 100 people led by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation rallied in protest at 799 Broadway. They say the upcoming construction is yet another example of how building by building the character of the neighborhood is being threatened.

GVSHP had advocated for creating neighborhood protections limiting development with the upzoning at 124 E. 14th St. for the tech hub. In community board meetings, city council hearings and at demonstrations, residents have voiced opposition to large projects, which they characterize as out of scale with the Village. The Landmarks Preservation Commission is considering landmark designation for seven buildings in the neighborhood, resulting from the tech hub approval. But GVSHP says this is only a handful of properties, leaving 95% of the surrounding neighborhood unprotected.

The group also points to the history of the former St. Denis Hotel, which currently stands at 799 Broadway and is set to be demolished to make way for the new boutique office. The modest, pinkish-colored building was the site of multiple historical encounters, as described in an article published in The New York Review of Books. As just a couple of examples, the author, Jeremiah Moss, wrote it was where Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone to New Yorkers for the first time, and where with the assistance of Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs.

The NKF press release notes that the new office plans have “been met with significant demand from tenants willing to pay premium rents.” Buildings housing tech-related companies in the neighborhood include Edward Minskoff’s 51 Astor Place, occupied by IBM and St. John’s University, Vornado’s 770 Broadway, leased to Facebook, and Normandy’s building at 888 Broadway, which is leasing to the Australian software company, Atlassian, and to Netflix.