Thor Equities Drops $40 Mil for Old Sugar Factory
Revere Sugar Factory. Photo from Forgotten NY We just got a heads-up thatThor Equities, which is also redeveloping Albee Square Mall in downtown Brooklyn, closed last week on the old Revere Sugar Factory on Beard Street in Red Hook. The price reported on Property Shark? 40,520,000 bones. The real winner in the deal was a…
Revere Sugar Factory. Photo from Forgotten NY
We just got a heads-up thatThor Equities, which is also redeveloping Albee Square Mall in downtown Brooklyn, closed last week on the old Revere Sugar Factory on Beard Street in Red Hook. The price reported on Property Shark? 40,520,000 bones. The real winner in the deal was a group called Liberty View Plaza, LLC that paid just $6.5 million for the property only a year ago. Not a bad return on the roughly $2 million or so they must have put down in equity!
I grew up in Redhook and you can only get into Redhook at three different points. To move so many people they should look to the past and rethink the trolley plan that was put down a couple years ago. That area has too much old Brooklyn charm to be torn down for a mall. If they should build condos , do it with a new york look and fell with lots of details. If it was up to me i would like the neighborhood of my childhood to remain
Not sure if anyone is still reading this, but JoshK, zoning is not the problem, it’s having one developer in charge of an entire huge site that is. The areas you mention such as the French Quarter etc. were not built by one multinational absentee developer looking to maximize profits, but by a network of smaller builders. Back then it was profitable to build at a small scale; today the mega-developers drive the small guys out and you get huge characterless profit-maximized buildings. Zoning may have faults, but you’re waging a war against it on the wrong grounds.
ok … I know that R.E. is still getting alot of “hot money”
but I still think this property either was sold in 2003 for that figure or if it sold in 2004 it sold for a higher price than $ 6.5M
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/forgottentour13/tour13.html
I meant to write “now offshore”. Sorry.
Believe me, I’ve been complaining about ugly buildings being erected during this housing boom (bubble?). Still, we shouldn’t swing to the extreme and make development next to impossible. We’ve been suffering from the migration of jobs out of the N.E. to the South and West–and no offshore—ever since World War II.
I strongly suggest that anyone who has not seen this factory should do so. It is an amazing piece of NYC industrial history. NYC used to be a sugar refining powerhouse (think the Domino factory,now closed in Williamsburg) and this factory was part of that heritage.
Film production companies used to shot inside the Red Hook factory to capture scenes requiring industrial-decrepitude backdrops.
I cannot think of a worse use of beautiful waterfront property than to have a stinking butt ugly mall… and have no doubt, that is what they will build. How is it that manhattan gets miles of beautiful waterfront park and now brooklyn heights gets its park too but Red Hook gets a stinking mall and that puke inducing blue and yellow of Ikea.
And who ever that JoshK is who thinks that developers will build beautiful things if you leave them alone, you are delusional. Perhaps there is some truth in the idea that zoning regulations are some times misguilded but if modern history has taught us anything, it is that developers will produce the worse kind of shit if given the opportunity.
Any development in Red Hook will entail more traffic because there is no subway, just a couple of buses. So there are three scenarios: 1. Build a subway line to Red Hook to accomodate the new development (won’t likely happen); 2. Develop defunct factory and marina sites and have an increase in traffic; 3. Leave it as is, an “up and coming” area that is really run down with no services.
Can someone explain to this reader why replacing a defunct (apparently) industrial site with a mixed-use development including a marina, “luxury” condos, and shopping is a bad thing for this part of Brooklyn. There is very little retail here, and very little waterfront housing of any sort in South Brooklyn. Is it the traffic impact? That’s the only significant concern I have about something like this, but that’s true of almost all significant development projects. Maybe there is still the idea of stopping residential development to revitalize the commercial port functions, but I haven’t seen any real ideas in this vein.
Also, are there any marinas along this part of the bay? I thought that most of them are out facing the Jamaica Bay, but I could be wrong.