On Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) approved the revised redesign of 675 Hudson Street, clearing the way for BKSK Architects’ restoration and rooftop addition at one of the Meatpacking District’s most distinctive buildings. The former Herring Safe and Lock Company factory, sometimes called the “Little Flatiron” for its sharp triangular footprint, is now poised to become the first international outpost of the London private club Annabel’s.
The approval comes as Caprice Holdings, a unit of Abu Dhabi-based DIAFA, purchased the building from Aurora Capital Associates for $100 million, according to The Real Deal. Aurora had acquired the 29,300-square-foot property in 2023 for $50 million, effectively doubling its investment in just a few years.
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The new owners plan to turn the former factory into the New York outpost of Annabel’s, the famed London private club associated with Richard Caring’s hospitality empire. If completed, it would be the club’s first international location outside London, with dining rooms, bars, event rooms, and hospitality-focused programming planned inside the restored building and its new rooftop enclosure.
The newly approved 675 Hudson Street from West 14th Street (BKSK Architects)
As we terrifyingly witnessed last week, rooftop additions are tricky and sometimes risky business, and not just because preservationists tend to notice them. Structurally, adding new floors to an older building is a structurally complex endeavor, especially when new weight, altered load paths, cantilevered sections, or removed interior floors are involved. The recent scare at the former Pfizer headquarters conversion at 235 East 42nd Street, where support columns buckled and several upper floors sagged in a new addition, offered a reminder that this kind of work is extremely complicated, and at the scale of New York's buildings and density, require some of the most knowledgeable structural engineers in the field.
Architecturally, the challenge can be just as delicate. That is if you have a developer sympathetic to design, or the property is within a historic district. How do you place something new on top of something old without overwhelming the historic building.
For most NYC landmarked buildings and historic districts, LPC tends to prefer rooftop additions that keep a low profile. The usual ideal is discreet, set back, and not especially visible from the street. But 675 Hudson Street is not a quiet midblock building falling cohesively into a streewall. Rather, the triangular property sits at the busy, theatrical meeting of Hudson Street, Ninth Avenue, West 13th Street, and West 14th Street, where the street grid bends, widens, and opens up around it.
In this case, BKSK’s rehabilitation and addition do not try to make the rooftop addition disappear. Instead, the revised design intends to make the existing building sharper, and more of industrially minded extension of the building’s odd geometry. From some angles, it can be read like a greenhouse or factory monitor tucked behind the cornice. From others, the darker framing and pitched roof give it a more robust industrial rhythm.
Prior design for 675 Hudson Street that was sent to be reworked (BKSK Architects)
That was not where the proposal started. When the project came before LPC in May, commissioners took issue with the curving glass rooftop form. They felt it fought against the angular shape of the historic building, questioned the scale of the addition, and asked the team to further study the relationship between the glass enclosure and mechanical bulkhead, the reflectivity of the glass, and the amount of lighting. No action was taken at that hearing, and the applicants were sent back to rework the design.
The new version is calmer, lower, and more disciplined. The earlier vaulted glass form has been replaced with a rectilinear, sloped shed-like structure inspired by industrial roof monitors and skylights, the kind of utilitarian rooftop elements commonly found on old factory buildings. The revised design follows the triangular logic of the building rather than floating above it like an unrelated object.
The building itself has always been a bit of a character. Built circa 1849 for Colonel Silas Herring’s fireproof safe business, expanded in the mid-19th century, and altered again around 1884, it began life as a factory for safes, vault doors, bank locks, and burglar-proof equipment. Historic images show the brick building wrapped in painted advertising.
Over the years, 675 Hudson saw the kind of constant reinvention that defines the Gansevoort Market Historic District. According to the presentation, the building was tied to manufacturing, storage, warehousing, market uses, nightlife, and later commercial life.
The broader overhaul also calls for repairing and restoring the brick façade, reconstructing a missing section of cornice, reopening historic areaways, installing new multi-light windows, adding louvers in select openings, removing the large billboard, and reworking the ground-floor openings. The proposal also includes subgrade work, cellar excavation, and the removal of interior floors.
The applicants pointed to other visible rooftop additions approved in the area, including the Diane von Furstenberg headquarters, arguing that the district has long allowed contemporary interventions when they are carefully handled. LPC materials also cite prior findings that visible additions have long been consistent with older industrial buildings.
With fears of structural failures still fresh on the minds of New Yorkers, the project team described a revised structural approach that would brace the historic perimeter walls from the inside, rather than from the outside, and replace each floor one at a time from the top down. At the hearing, DeSimone Engineers' structural team described threading new concrete columns through the perimeter of the building, removing the wood roof structure, replacing it with concrete, and bringing new structure up through the building before dismantling and rebuilding from above.
That kind of structural choreography is difficult anywhere, but especially in Manhattan where construction happens on tight sites, next to occupied streets, subways, utilities, adjacent buildings, and sidewalks that cannot simply vanish for a few years. Temporary bracing, shoring, underpinning, vibration monitoring, facade protection, access logistics, crane placement, and waterproofing all become part of the unglamorous process of bringing new square footage to market.
Older load-bearing masonry buildings and steel frame buildings also pose different kinds of challenges. Pre-war masonry buildings often have thick walls, heavy timber or early steel framing, irregular past alterations, hidden voids, and foundations that were never designed for modern loads. Their façades may carry the building's vertical and lateral forces, and if interior floors are removed, those perimeter walls often need to be carefully braced so they don't fall over.
Rendering of the former Pfizer headquarters post-residential conversion (Credit: Streetsense)
Post-war office buildings can seem more straightforward because of their steel or concrete frames are more visible and better documented. But they come with their own challenges. Adding floors to a postwar tower means understanding how loads travel through columns, beams, transfer structures, foundations, and existing slabs. It may also involve cutting courtyards, redistributing floor area, adding cantilevers, strengthening columns, recladding façades, and threading new residential systems into a building designed for cubicles and deep office floorplates
As vacant buildable sites are nearly non-existant in many parts of Manhattan, more developers are looking upward, not just inward, when rethinking older commercial buildings. In Midtown East, near Grand Central and the Pfizer conversion, Rudin has begun work on overhauling 355 Lexington Avenue, a 1959 office tower between East 40th and East 41st streets. The terraced mid-century office block will transform into a 297-unit residential rental building with ground-floor retail. The project, designed by Hill West Architects, would increase the building from 22 stories and 241 feet to 26 stories and 278 feet.
Construction in full swing at 355 Lexington Avenue as of July 2026
That project is a different architectural animal from 675 Hudson. It is not a 19th-century brick factory in a historic district, but a postwar Midtown office tower with a steel frame structure, commercial floorplates, and a different set of engineering assumptions. Still, the team has to answer the same underlying questions of much new life can the older building carry, and how well can architects and engineers make the old and new work together.
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