Life Science Lab Planned for Lou Gehrig's Manhattan Birthplace

New York-based life sciences developer Taconic Partners this week announced plans to build a 200K SF lab project on the 94^th Street site in Manhattan where baseball great Lou Gehrig was born.

In an homage to the Yankees first baseman and Hall of Famer, Taconic and its partners, Nuveen Real Estate and Flatiron Equities, said the facility will be named Iron Horse Labs—a reference to the nickname fans gave Gehrig when he set the original record for playing in consecutive games.

Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive games stood until 1995, when it was broken by Cal Ripken. Gehrig had to stop playing when he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a rare ailment which became known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Before he died in 1941, Gehrig made an inspirational speech on July 4, 1939 at Yankee Stadium in which he referred to himself as “the luckiest man in the world.”

The new Class A research labs will be located at 309 East 94th Street, near a cluster of Upper East Side medical facilities, including Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell, Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYC Health + Hospitals and the Hospital for Special Surgery.

Iron Horse Labs, which is scheduled to open in 2025, will feature double-height ceilings. The building will be designed with triangular sun shades modeled after baseball pennants, and it will include a refurbished mural pointing out Gehrig’s birthplace.

The project will be built and operated by Taconic’s wholly owned Elevate Research Properties subsidiary, which operator of a 1.4M SF lab portfolio.

Life science leasing activity in New York City reached new heights in 2022, despite a noticeable drop-off in venture capital in the second half of the year.

Leasing activity totaled 455K SF, a 5% increase over the total in 2021, with average rents reaching a record high of $108.47 triple-net per SF, according to a recent market report from CBRE. Lab exclusive inventory grew in NYC from 1.9M to 2.7M, but demand was robust enough to keep the available rate for occupancy-ready pre-built lab space at a tight 3.8% as of the end of the year.

A tidal wave of venture capital funding that began flooding into the life science sector in 2017 crested in 2021, when it was augmented by additional funding from the federal government as the National Institutes of Health prioritized life sciences during the pandemic.

NYC’s life sciences VC funding fell to $615M across 31 deals in 2022, moving in tandem with the broader pull-back in VC funding across the U. S. While NYC’s NIH funding declined to $2.52 billion in 2022, it remained 11% ahead of 2020’s level.

The total leasing activity in NYC’s life science sector exceeded 400K SF for the second consecutive year in 2022. CBRE’s report noted that lab demand notched a slight decline.

The steady lease-up of several recently redeveloped lab projects across Manhattan and Long Island City, including Cure, Hudson Research Center, ACLS LIC, and Innolabs, drove leasing activity to an all-time high in 2022, the report said.

The launch of West End Labs in Manhattan and Hatch in Long Island City during 2022, both full-building repositioned lab developments, also provided a boost to NYC’s lab supply with a blend of build-to-suit and spec lab offerings.