Geothermal Hotel Work Continues in Bushwick for Summer Opening

A 10-story hotel, one of a handful of buildings in Brooklyn and beyond to use geothermal heating and cooling, is progressing in Bushwick, with opening slated for the summer, according to the developers. After years of fits and starts, there is now a full grey concrete building, with large windows and a two-story podium, which, judging from what is visible, has a modern and sleek appeal, while still conforming to the area’s industrial feel.

The geothermal aspect of the new development, set to include a pool, spa, and restaurant, has potential to greatly reduce emissions while also drastically reducing utility costs for the building owner. The technology can be challenging to apply in already existing buildings, including historic row houses, but its use in new construction is helping push the technology forward.

Plenty of workers were busy at 25 Stewart Avenue when Brownstoner visited in late February. Not much more than a three-story partial skeleton in 2022, the 149-foot-tall concrete structure topped out late last year. All but the top stories are now visible, a row of greenery peeks over a broad terrace ringing the building, and all the windows appear to be in.

The new hotel will include 154 rooms, as well as 35,061 square feet of community facility space, and parking for 138 vehicles, according to building permits. An owner told Brownstoner Wednesday the development team plans to open the hotel this summer, and the spa by October/November, but the team is yet to decide on a hotel operator.

While black netting covers most of the upper floors, the two-story podium and lower levels are exposed, showing a grey concrete facade with big glassy windows and plants atop the podium. While renderings attached to the construction fence depict the podium as light green, along with the balconies on rooms from the third to fifth floors, the latest renderings indicate the facade will be finished in light grey concrete, with darker grey for a setback at the eighth floor.

David Bench of Bench Architecture is working on the hotel, according to permits filed with the Department of Buildings.

Plans for a hotel on the derelict brownfield site were first filed in 2015, but there was little progress until 2021 when it was purchased by 25c LLC for $12.271 million. Over the past couple of years, the team behind the development, which permits show includes Dawson Stellberger, has received approval from the Board of Standards and Appeals for the project’s continuation, following a December 2021 zoning text amendment that required proposed new hotels in protected manufacturing districts to go through a public review process rather than be built as of right.

City records show Stellberger is one of the owners behind a number of other commercial properties in the neighborhood, including music venue Elsewhere, event spaces 53 and 99 Scott Avenue, and coworking space and spa SAA at 154 Scott Avenue. He is also one of the people behind Water Street Associates‘s trendy office tower and event space at 175 Water Street and was involved in the recent purchase of 180 Maiden Lane, both in Manhattan.

In a 2021 interview with Brownstoner, architect Nick Liberis of Normal Buildings, who was involved with the project prior to the LLC’s purchase and continued on with the new team and works on the green architecture, said the aim is to reduce the energy usage of the entire building, starting at construction. Liberis has worked on other hotel projects nearby, including the William Vale Hotel and Williamsburg Hotel.

The geothermal energy at the Bushwick hotel will come from around 60 bore holes that go around 300 to 500 feet deep and contain the geothermal pipes, he said. Those pipes will all connect to a larger pipe that then runs to heat pumps in the hotel, creating a geothermal loop.

The closed loop uses the constant heat of the water underground (which stays at around 55 degrees year-round) for cooling in summer and heating in winter by conducting a heat transfer through the geothermal pipes and heat pumps. In summer, heat will be pulled from hot air in the hotel and transferred into the ground to cool the hotel. In winter, heat will be drawn from the ground to warm the hotel.

Prior to the wells being drilled, the development team had to conduct significant remediation on the site, which had been used for scrap metal processing and as a car yard.

In 2015, former owners James and Louis Ruggiero, who owned the frying pan-shaped site since at least 2004, filed an application for a permit to build the nine-story, 140-room hotel. A new building permit was issued in 2017. In 2019, with no development on the horizon, an entity linked to developer Yoel Goldman bought the property for $14.3 million. Then, just two years later, the group sold it to 25c LLC, city records show.

[Photos by Anna Bradley-Smith unless noted otherwise]

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