Downtown Brooklyn

A venture of Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners, Rose Associates, P/A Associates and Washington Square Partners seems to be moving forward with the redevelopment of Albee Square into the City Point development, with plans to build a 65-story, Greenberg Farrow-designed mixed-use tower in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle writes today.  read more »

The city has changed its plan for downtown Brooklyn to eliminate the need to take a home on Duffield Street that had some connection to the Underground Railroad.

A spokeswoman for the city Law Department, Kate O'Brien Ahlers said in a statement,

"The city is pleased that this litigation was resolved in a manner favorable to all the parties involved, and is now looking forward to proceeding with its plan for commercial and residential growth in downtown Brooklyn, together with the Mayor’s initiative to commemorate the area’s abolitionist history."

A press release from South Brooklyn Legal Services, which represented one of the home's owners, Joy Chatel, is after the jump.  read more »

The planned City Point building--a.k.a Albee Square, a.k.a. The Gallery at Fulton Street--has brought another residential developer on board, according to Joe Chan, the president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a public-private entity overseeing the neighborhood’s development.  read more »

Joe Chan, the head of the public-private Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, is scaling back expectations that downtown Brooklyn will ever achieve the dizzying heights of central business district-dom once imagined way back in 2004.

“You are not seeing historically what has happened in downtown Brooklyn, which is exclusively commercial office towers being built,” Mr. Chan told a gathering of reporters this morning in one of those exclusively commercial office towers at MetroTech. “I think you are going to see smaller increments of office space being built within what we call hybrid buildings, like the City Point building, a mixture of residential, retail, in some cases hotel, and office.”

Mr. Chan has sounded this note before, though never so definitively. The partnership now says that it expects just 1.6 million square feet of office space to be built in the next five years, compared to 4.5 million square feet that the city Economic Development Corporation estimated would be built when it proposed a massive downtown Brooklyn rezoning three years ago.  read more »

A heavy day for eminent domain news: Property owners on two Brooklyn blocks that were about to be condemned as part of an urban renewal project are getting a short reprieve thanks to a bureaucratic blunder.

The two blocks have attracted a good deal of attention because one of them, along Duffield Street, was supposedly a hotbed of Underground Railroad activity, and because the other, at Ashland Place and Fulton Street, was supposed to be acquired and turned into an arts complex (PDF) even though the current tenants there are planning to do much of the same thing.

The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development has rescinded its eminent domain determination for the two sites, although the agency is not backtracking from the city’s plans. Rather, HPD spokesman Neill Coleman said in an e-mail that the city had failed to enter a blight determination into the public record. That means the public process has to start over from the beginning, with a new public hearing, Oct. 29, and a new determination period. (The original hearing took place in May.)

“The people involved are using it as an opportunity to try to get the politicians to convince HPD that they should alter the footprint,” said Candace Carponter, an attorney for the Amber Art and Music Space, a new business that just spent $1.2 million on renovating a former liquor store on Ashland Place before they learned about the condemnation. “It’s good news to the extent that we can garner more evidence to make a more formal showing at the hearing.”

Given that an outside consultant failed to find evidence that the Underground Railroad stopped at seven imperiled rowhouses on Duffield and Gold streets (PDF), Mayor Bloomberg could have pressed on, letting the properties be condemned and then flattened to make way for a park and underground parking lot envisioned in the 2004 Downtown Brooklyn Plan.

Today, though, comes the news that he will heed the recommendations of some of the peer reviewers of that study and has committed $2 million for capital and construction of “a project to commemorate abolitionist activity that occurred in Brooklyn in the 1800s.”

That doesn’t mean the houses will be saved; most likely the opposite will occur. But the memorial project—what it turns out to be will be decided as a result of a bidding process this fall—signals a more conciliatory approach toward City Council Members and others who criticized the Underground Railroad study when it came out in the spring.  read more »

Make no mistake about it: the developers who shelled out $120 million to buy the Gallery at Fulton Mall (a.k.a., the Albee Square Mall) are serious about bringing dough to downtown Brooklyn. In a promotional brochure circulating among prospective tenants, the new owners say that “Albee Square will dramatically change the profile of the area, providing opportunities for larger scale national retailers as well as smaller local entrepreneurs.”  read more »

A number of community groups thought they might have forced the city to reconsider a downtown Brooklyn real estate deal by packing public hearings with dissenters, but the transaction closed anyway last week pretty much as planned.

The big difference was that the developers have scaled down expectations for the number of apartments—a change that might end up diminishing what critics thought was the one redeeming, if limited, feature of the plan: affordable housing.

The buyer, a partnership consisting of the White Plains-based Acadia Realty Trust, MacFarlane Partners and two smaller entities, closed on the deal to buy real estate developer’s Joe Sitt’s groundlease for the Gallery at Fulton Mall on June 13, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The purchase price was reportedly $120 million, compared to $25 million that Thor Equities, Mr. Sitt’s company, paid in 2001.  read more »