Jamestown Properties plans buy out its partners, Irwin Cohen, Angelo, Gordon & Company and Belvedere Capital, in the fabulous Chelsea Market for about $225 million, according to an article by Dana Rubenstein in today's edition of The Wall Street Journal.
The article said that the deal "values the property at about $800 million" and added that "in the early 1990s, when Mr. Cohen purchased the debt on what would become Chelsea Market, he paid less than $10 million." Mr. Cohen told the Journal that the neighborhood was then the "Wild West" and that "there had been three gangland-style murders in the building, with people on their knees shot in the back of the head" and "the building was controlled by street prostitutes."
The article said that Jamestown is also planning to add a 300,000-square foot tower to the 1.4-million, full-block property between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets. Jamestown recently sold 111 Eighth Avenue to Google for about $1.9 billion.
The article, however, did not indicate on what part of the block the tower addition will be, nor how tall it might be, but indicated it might be for office or hotel use.
Chelsea Market consists of 16 industrial buildings that were converted in the 1990s by Irwin Cohen into one of the city's most spectacular rehabilitated buildings, including a through-block retail emporium strewn with intriguing artworks and upper floor office space.
The building complex began as a bakery for the National Biscuit Company in the 1890s in several Romanesque style red-brick buildings designed by Romeyn & Stever. Albert G. Zimmerman later became the biscuit company's staff architect between 1905 and 1912 and in 1913 he designed the 11-story building in the complex and a later company architect designed a skybridge to connect to the former American Can Company building at 447 West 14th Street. In 1932, Louis Wirshing Jr. replaced some of the original bakeries along Tenth Avenue with the present structure that accommodates an elevated freight line which is now the High Line Park. Wirshing also designed another skybridge to connect two National Biscuit buildings facing one another across Tenth Avenue.
By 1958, according to the Chelsea Market website, "National Biscuit was producing its line from a plant in Fair Lawn, N.J., and in 1959 it sold its New York complex - 22 structures, with 2 million square feet - to the investor Louis J. Glickman. Telephone listings from the 1970's and 80's list no baking operations, only light industrial tenants, in an area that was sliding into a sort of Rust Belt-like graveyard."
In the 1990's, Mr. Cohen organized a syndicate to buy the principal National Biscuit buildings and he and his designers, Vandeberg Architects, created a long interior arcade of food stores, now a well-known destination in west Chelsea.
"To walk through the Chelsea Market," the website adds, " is to stroll through a sort of postindustrial theme park, carefully festooned with the detritus of a lost industrial culture, interspersed with food stores and restaurants. The old factory floors weave and bob, and the central hall is a jumble of disused ducts, an artificial waterfall, the original train shed, old signboards and other elements. Mr. Cohen's group remade the 1913 building on the west side of 10th Avenue into a regular office building, but the lobby is just as astonishing as Chelsea Market's, an amalgam of old cast iron light poles, plate girders, portholes and banks of television sets - it could be the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's submarine in '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.' Fragments of the National Biscuit heritage are sprinkled all over the complex, like the trim, elegant 'NBC' monograms in the mosaics in the little entryways along 15th Street.
The article said that the deal "values the property at about $800 million" and added that "in the early 1990s, when Mr. Cohen purchased the debt on what would become Chelsea Market, he paid less than $10 million." Mr. Cohen told the Journal that the neighborhood was then the "Wild West" and that "there had been three gangland-style murders in the building, with people on their knees shot in the back of the head" and "the building was controlled by street prostitutes."
The article said that Jamestown is also planning to add a 300,000-square foot tower to the 1.4-million, full-block property between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets. Jamestown recently sold 111 Eighth Avenue to Google for about $1.9 billion.
The article, however, did not indicate on what part of the block the tower addition will be, nor how tall it might be, but indicated it might be for office or hotel use.
Chelsea Market consists of 16 industrial buildings that were converted in the 1990s by Irwin Cohen into one of the city's most spectacular rehabilitated buildings, including a through-block retail emporium strewn with intriguing artworks and upper floor office space.
The building complex began as a bakery for the National Biscuit Company in the 1890s in several Romanesque style red-brick buildings designed by Romeyn & Stever. Albert G. Zimmerman later became the biscuit company's staff architect between 1905 and 1912 and in 1913 he designed the 11-story building in the complex and a later company architect designed a skybridge to connect to the former American Can Company building at 447 West 14th Street. In 1932, Louis Wirshing Jr. replaced some of the original bakeries along Tenth Avenue with the present structure that accommodates an elevated freight line which is now the High Line Park. Wirshing also designed another skybridge to connect two National Biscuit buildings facing one another across Tenth Avenue.
By 1958, according to the Chelsea Market website, "National Biscuit was producing its line from a plant in Fair Lawn, N.J., and in 1959 it sold its New York complex - 22 structures, with 2 million square feet - to the investor Louis J. Glickman. Telephone listings from the 1970's and 80's list no baking operations, only light industrial tenants, in an area that was sliding into a sort of Rust Belt-like graveyard."
In the 1990's, Mr. Cohen organized a syndicate to buy the principal National Biscuit buildings and he and his designers, Vandeberg Architects, created a long interior arcade of food stores, now a well-known destination in west Chelsea.
"To walk through the Chelsea Market," the website adds, " is to stroll through a sort of postindustrial theme park, carefully festooned with the detritus of a lost industrial culture, interspersed with food stores and restaurants. The old factory floors weave and bob, and the central hall is a jumble of disused ducts, an artificial waterfall, the original train shed, old signboards and other elements. Mr. Cohen's group remade the 1913 building on the west side of 10th Avenue into a regular office building, but the lobby is just as astonishing as Chelsea Market's, an amalgam of old cast iron light poles, plate girders, portholes and banks of television sets - it could be the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's submarine in '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.' Fragments of the National Biscuit heritage are sprinkled all over the complex, like the trim, elegant 'NBC' monograms in the mosaics in the little entryways along 15th Street.
Architecture Critic
Carter Horsley
Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.
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