[Image via Wikipedia Commons]
Last spring, The Real Deal reported that Normandy Real Estate Partners was in contract to buy 797-799 Broadway at 11th Street for somewhere in the $100 million ballpark.
Now The Real Deal hears what might be in the works for the corner:
Normandy Real Estate Partners and Ares Management are weighing plans to develop a boutique office building on Broadway ... not far from the commercial property at 51 Astor Place that locals have dubbed the Death Star ...
The partners would develop a 200,000-square-foot, Class A office building at 797-799 Broadway, which they bought last summer for $101 million, as TRD reported at the time.
A 138,000-square-foot Class B office building ... now sits on the site, and the developers would not be able to begin construction until leases expire in 2019. The tenants are a mix of medical offices and small-time retailers.
51 Astor Place/the IBM Watson Building/Death Star is 400,000 square feet, so this new project, while quite larger than the current building, would still be half the size of its neighborhood to the southeast.
797-799 Broadway is noteworthy for many reasons. It opened in 1853 as the St. Denis Hotel, which is where Ulysses S. Grant wrote his post-Civil War memoirs and Alexander Graham Bell provided the first demonstration of the telephone to New Yorkers.
