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!
So let me understand this. The owner of the Revere site should be allowed to build whatever he wants, regardless of zoning or impacts on traffic and the surrounding community. When that happens, he will magically build a beautiful building like the Dakota or a new French Quarter just for Red Hook.
The reality – With or without zoning restrictions, he will build what ever he can at minimal costs to maximize his return. Thats what he should do. But to assume that lifting zoning will encourage better looking buildings is a folly. Buildings cost $ and if a developer can fill his buildings with commercial or residential tenants without paying attention to architectural details, that is what he will do.
Look at many of the buildings that are going up all over Brooklyn. Many conform to zoning but others have variances and bonuses. There are very few in either category that can be called architecturally distinctive.
Spoken by someone who is running for office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I wonder how JoshK would feel if a mall opening up next door to his apartment building. I am sure he would have no opinion.
I agree with Anonymous 5:56. We will see in a few years. But I suspect that this is being poorly planned, and traffic will be a mess. Quality of life will decrease in the neighborhood.
Yeah, sure, Ikea and others will provide jobs for people in Red Hook, but what kind of jobs? Do administrators in this city know what “sustainable development” means??
It seems that those industrial buildings in Red Hook, Williamsburg and Greenpoint, are not very appreciated by many people who read this blog. But some of us appreciate industrial architecture of the 19th and early 20th century. It is a important part of the history of the city, and some of those building are very interesting aesthetically and architecturally.
Progress should not be stopped, and I agree that some of those buildings would be difficult to keep and transform for another use. But can we do better with the Red Hook waterfront than suburban type retail?
I hope that we will at least keep the grain elevator.
if you don’t live there or have never been there you can’t imagine the damage that lots of cars will be.
busses are the only public transportation in and out of the area and if they can’t get out because of all the traffic, the neighborhood might as well put up a sign saying “RICH PEOPLE ONLY PLEASE”
so unless there’s some really good planning
any development that draws lots of traffic is a rotten idea.
Ugh, mixed use – marina, condos, retail. How horrible that would be.
Better yet they should spend 40million and let us admire decaying remains of our glorious industrial past tucked away in some corner of the city that only a few adventurous ones have ever seen anyway.
Lets not redevelop – lets have no tall buildings,
heck just because NewYork is one of the largest most dynamic cities in the world – doesn’t mean we should have a vibrant economy.
Albee Square Mall is the one with Toys R Us.
it’s over by the fulton mall + metrotech.
http://www.thorequities.com/fultonst.html
where is Albee Square Mall in downtown Brooklyn?