Sloane Chelsea, 360 West 34th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 360 West 34th Street by Carter Horsley

One of the city's handsomest Georgian-style buildings, this large, red-brick rental apartment building between Eighth and Ninth Avenues is in a quiet area not far from the Javits Convention Center to the west and the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station complex to the south and Macy's at Herald Square to the east.

The vast convention center, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, had been expected to lead to a significant redevelopment of this area close to the Garment Center, but that redevelopment has been extremely slow in occuring.

The spectacular renaissance in the 1990's of Times Square to the north and the influx of art galleries and boutiques to Chelsea to the south, however, and the planned creation of a new Penn Station facility in the General Post Office Building on Eighth Avenue at 33rd Street gave new hope that this area will likely undergo a significant upgrading.

In the late 1990's, for example, B & H, the city s most important and largest photography store, opened new and large facilities in the low-rise building immediately to the west of this property.

While Mayor Bloomberg's dream of erecting a football stadium on the rail yards to the west of Penn Station never came to pass, his administration promoted another gargantuan redevelopment scheme known as Hudson Yards that was supposed to be connected to midtown by an extension of the No. 7 subway line that runs on 42nd Street. A competition was held and won by Tishman Speyer Properties, but it then withdrew and the large site was then given to the Related Companies although many critics felt that the finest plans had been submitted by Extell Development and Brookfield Properties.

The financial crisis that began in late 2008, however, threw into doubt many of the most ambitious plans in the city and the future of the Hudson Yards project remains in doubt.

This very elegant, 14-story, red-brick building has 262 apartments, a canopied entrance, some terraces, a concierge, video security, high ceilings, a laundry room on every floor and permits pets. It is also convenient to public transportation. It is not far from the less attractive, Georgian-style former Manhattan Center at 311 West 34th Street that was originally built in 1906 as the Manhattan Opera House.

This building was built in 1928 and for many years was known as the William J. Sloan YMCA.

In 1991, the Young Men's Christian Association of Greater New York put the property on the market and hoped it might fetch $15 million or more.

There were no takers, however, so in January 1994 the Y.M.C.A. held a sealed-bid auction through Edward S. Gordon & Company and Sheldon Good & Company, and got a high bid of $4.2 million.

After a few months, however, the bidder failed to close and the property was eventually sold to Joseph H. Gardner and Henry Kibel for $4.9 million in December, 1994.

In a May 12, 1996 article about the building in The New York Times Alan S. Oser write that "The project has provided an unusual example of the creation of market-rate apartments without tax abatements or rent subsidies, using conventional financing from Fleet Bank. And it offers rental housing affordable to people earning starter salaries in professional fields in New York City. 'We designed the building for the young people who want to live in Manhattan, and also for people who are moving along,' said Joseph H. Gardner, one of the developers. 'There's a tremendous demand for smaller apartments from people making about $40,000 and up,' Some of the new tenants earn as much as $100,000, he said. But there are also many with two starter incomes, for whom two-bedroom apartments are affordable."

The building was converted by the developers into a rental and the article emphasized that its relatively low rents were made possible by "the develpers' ability to buy the property at a reasonable price - about $20 a square foot...and construction costs have been held to about $75 a square foot, compared with $110 to $120 a square foot in standard new construction."

The property consisted f the 14-story Y.M.C.A., with 220,000 gross square feet of space, and a connected two-story commercial building with 55,000 square feet of retail space and 25,000 square feet of basement space. The two-story building ran the length of Ninth Avenue from 34th Street to 33d Street.

"On the roof of this structure the developers are building 12 maisonettes -- two-story, 850-square-foot apartments with separate entrances along a paved courtyard, or mews. The courtyard is entered through a door on the third floor in the main building. The courtyard will be open to the elements, but will have a snow-melting system buried within it. The apartments are expected to rent for an average of $2,250 a month," according to Mr. Oser's article.

"The architect of the Y.M.C.A. reconstruction project," according to the article, "is the firm of Kibel Levenson Jagger, in which Mr. Kibel, 77, is the senior partner. He is the son of the late Charles Kibel, founder of the Kibel Company, which has developed 16 buildings with more than 3,000 apartments since 1950. The company still owns 8 of them, with 1,600 apartments, including 300 East 34th Street and 351 East 84th Street. Mr. Gardner, 68, was the Kibel Company's accountant before he started his own business, P & J Realty, in 1968. It is a management and development company that has has developed 14 buildings, most of them gut renovations of Chelsea loft buildings into residential space....Organized as Charlil 34th LLC, a limited-liabilty partnership, the partners already have found a tenant for most of the commercial space. B & H Photo Video, a mail-order and retail business, will move to Ninth Avenue from its space in one of Mr. Gardner's buildings at 113 West 17th Street. The store has leased 48,000 square feet of space on two levels, plus 25,000 square feet in the basement....The building will have laundry rooms on every floor and a small exercise room but no pool or other common facilities. There will 24-hour concierge service."