C.J. Hughes

Yet the current cycle is drastically testing this staying power, say pastors, preservationists and city officials, even as the chance to develop church property is also presenting opportunities for reinvention.

Facing a shortage of conventional parcels, developers are taking aim at structures with stained glass and bell towers, whose owners are often saddled with mounting bills and declining membership.

But while the moves might seem mutually beneficial, controversy often clouds them.

Some critics accuse developers of preying on struggling organizations, while others call churches the bad guys, betraying their mission by encouraging luxury housing and spurring gentrification in the process.

“There are some who say, ‘You’re selling out the church, you’re selling out the neighborhood, you are having an adverse impact, yada, yada, yada,’ ” said the Rev. Wesley W. Wilson Jr., the pastor of Second Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem, which is replacing its former home with a new church and a residential condo with finishes like walnut vanities.

“But if you don’t undertake projects like this, chances are the ministry will fold, because the continuing costs of maintaining an old building will sink you.”

Heeding the Call

From 2013 to 2018, more than three dozen houses of worship and similar buildings in Manhattan were razed or redeveloped to make way for different uses, according to the Manhattan Borough President’s office, which analyzed changes to tax classifications.

While some sites are still holes in the ground, replacement buildings elsewhere are up and running. A longtime synagogue on West 179th Street, for instance, has given way to the Ammann, an eight-story, 24-unit condo from Orient Development. The Washington Heights Congregation, which relocated to an existing building nearby, sold the site in 2014 for $2.6 million. Last month, the least expensive unit at the Ammann, which faces the George Washington Bridge, was a one-bedroom for $598,000.

Similarly, the 1906 brick parish house for the Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 31st Street in NoMad has been replaced by 30E31, a 40-story, 42-unit condo from Ekstein Development Group and Pinnacle Group opening this fall. One-bedrooms start at $1.7 million.

And the Lagree Baptist Church, which had been based since 1975 in a Beaux-Arts-detailed former movie theater on West 125th Street, has been razed for Eleven Hancock, a glassy 12-story, 71-unit condo. Nortco Development, a Manhattan developer making its first push into Harlem, bought the property from Lagree in 2016 for $28.5 million.

Priced from $585,000, Eleven Hancock offers mostly one- and two-bedrooms, with floor-to-ceiling windows, black-toned kitchen faucets and quartz counters. A three-level space aimed at big box retailers is also in the building, which cantilevers over a neighboring building.

Jeff Krantz, an associate broker agent at Halstead Development Marketing who is handling sales, declined to say how many contracts had been signed since sales began in August. But Krantz, who has lived in Harlem for a decade, said church conversions are a common local sight. “They’re doing deals to raise capital,” he said.

Non-divine Intervention

With more than 900 sites in Manhattan currently classified as religious buildings — a list that includes synagogues, rectories and convents, a few dozen lost buildings might not seem calamitous.

But the number is significant enough to worry some city officials and other watchdog groups.

Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan Borough President, for one, has compiled a list of nearly 200 properties that could be vulnerable, perhaps because they aren’t as big as they could be under zoning laws, which means they have loads of unused development rights, or air rights, to sell. Staff members from Brewer’s office have been paying visits to the properties to determine whether they are in harm’s way.

On the list of potentially threatened sites, which Brewer’s office is reluctant to broadcast over fears it might have the unintended effect of piquing developers’ interest, are many structures that are relatively small, like Bethany Baptist Church, a diminutive red brick building on West 153rd Street in Harlem, and Saint Cyril’s Church, a brownstone-style structure for Slovenian Catholics on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village.

But higher-profile institutions are also a concern, like Park Avenue Synagogue, a Moorish-style confection on East 87th Street on the Upper East Side that is outside the bounds of the area’s historic districts.

If churches do decide to play developer, Brewer hopes that affordable housing — and not market-rate units — will result. To that end, in September she announced the formation of a task force made up of religious leaders, affordable-housing developers and preservationists that will hold its first public hearing in November.

Also working to balance solvency and morality is the Rev. Donna Schaper, the senior pastor at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where five congregations share a single space to help defray costs.

Three years ago, Schaper founded Bricks and Mortals, a consulting service that encourages parishes to rent out their rooms to soup kitchens, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and musical performances, to help balance their books.

A more sweeping solution would be to change zoning rules to let churches sell air rights to noncontiguous sites, like the 2017 Midtown East rezoning, which would be a dramatic expansion of existing rules.

Otherwise, “churches are just going to sell to the highest bidder and become high-end restaurants and high-end buildings, which we don’t need any more of in New York,” Schaper said.

A Need for Caution

Some churches are wary of redevelopment because they worry that developers will exploit them. The Charities Bureau of state attorney general’s office reviews all development deals involving churches to make sure the nonprofits aren’t being scammed.

But the transition from church to condo can lead to problems. In 2015, Saint Luke Baptist Church sold its property at Morningside Avenue and West 123rd Street to Azimuth Development Group for $5 million. In exchange for letting Azimuth build a new apartment building on the site, the developer agreed to also construct a new sanctuary for the church in the building.

But two years after its promised completion, the building is still not finished, which has created major financial hardship for Saint Luke, according to a fraud suit the church filed against Azimuth this summer.

Not only has Azimuth failed to make good on about $21,000 a month in “delay payments,” according to the suit, the church also has had to shell out $15,000 a month for its temporary home in a different part of Harlem, a storefront at Park Avenue and East 130th Street.

“Azimuth, a sophisticated development company that has made its fortune by targeting low-income neighborhoods for gentrification,” the suit says, “has now used its expertise to take advantage of a church.”

Azimuth denies the charges, though Guido Subotovsky, the firm’s president, said that the new building, a 12-story tower with either 23 rentals or condos, should be completed this fall.

Subotovsky, who is also converting the Bronx Pentecostal Deliverance Center, a church in the Soundview neighborhood, into a 326-unit mixed-use complex, says developers like him can offer churches much-needed help.

“There are so many churches that say they have 500 people but only 35 show up on Sunday,” he said. “We can put them in a position where they can flourish for years to come.”

Pastors like Wilson of Second Canaan remain wary. To avoid the fate of Saint Luke, he chose not to merely be a purchaser in the new building, but signed on to actually codevelop the site with a partner, Level One Holdings.

The new church is on the ground floor of an eight-story building located a block from Central Park. The $25-million project, known as 10 Lenox, will open this fall with 29 studios to three-bedrooms, plus a roof deck with grills.

Twelve of the 29 units, which start at $615,000, have gone into contract since April, according to a spokeswoman for Halstead, which is handling sales. But already, Second Canaan has tapped proceeds from its deal for a new bus and van, while also setting up an endowment for the 72-year-old, 300-member organization, according to Wilson.

Brooklyn: The Borough of Churches

In the mid-2000s, many houses of worship in Brooklyn, especially in neighborhoods with historic landmark protections, were converted into apartment buildings. This time around, developers are casting wider nets.

For years, the Rev. Sharon Williams of the Baptist Church of the Redeemer at Flatbush, at Cortelyou Road and Ocean Avenue, says she watched as her bell-tower-adorned building fell into disrepair. “There was water coming in everywhere,” she said.

Developers of market-rate condos regularly phoned to get her to sell, including one persistent caller who disguised his voice on a second attempt, she said. Ultimately, she went with Mutual Housing Association of New York, a nonprofit that paid $5 million last year and is now building a 76-unit affordable complex on the site.

“When you walk through the neighborhood, new apartments are going up on every block,” Williams said. Going with affordable over market-rate units “was a necessary response to gentrification.”

When completed in 2020, the building will feature a smaller nave that’s a better fit for her 60 parishioners. But a soup kitchen that had been shuttered because of a lack of suitable space will be reinstated, she said. The church has been temporarily housed a few blocks away at the Emmanuel Church of God on Flatbush Avenue, near Foster Avenue.

Not everybody is impressed. Twice, neighbors asked the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to declare the 1920 church a landmark. But they were unsuccessful. Others took issue with the height of the new tower, which at nine stories, seems enormous compared with wood-frame Victorians around the corner. “But everything in New York City is changing,” Williams said, “and our change is in the direction of serving the underserved.”

Churches in need of basic repairs can turn to the Sacred Sites Program of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, an advocacy group. Since 1986, the program has awarded grants of up to $50,000 to hundreds of churches for things like patching roofs.

Ann-Isabel Friedman, the program’s director, said she wished her funds had been tapped to fix the Church of the Redeemer, an 1866 bluestone building at 24 Fourth Ave. in Boerum Hill before it became too run down to repair.

Instead, the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island sold the Gothic Revival-style building for $20 million to the Jackson Group, a developer, which bulldozed the church. In 2017, the developer Adam America Real Estate, bought the site for $36 million and is now building Five Six One Pacific, a 12-story, 63-unit condo.

Apartments there feature oak floors and marble counters, while amenities include a parking garage. A spokeswoman declined to share sales figures at the condo, whose lowest-priced apartment a studio, was $700,000.

“With every real-estate cycle, developers will systemically call on religious institutions because their sites are soft,” Friedman said.

In a way, it’s an odd time for churches to disappear. The number of congregations in New York is actually increasing, according to census records. There were 1,426 congregations in Brooklyn in 2010, up from 959 in 2000, records show, with large gains in Manhattan and Queens, too. And the 2020 census is expected to show more growth, religious leaders predict.

But small mosques and storefront churches account for a lot of the uptick. Older and highly visible institutions that once served Episcopalians and Lutherans, for example, are indeed closing. And dozens of Catholic churches, facing low attendance, have also gone dark in the past 15 years.

“Every time we turn around, another is being sold,” Gilford T. Monrose, who directs the Office of Faith-Based and Clergy Initiatives on behalf of Eric L. Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President.

Concerned that the borough is losing an important source of community services, Monrose has been working over the past few years to get churches to consider affordable housing as a lifeline.

Besides informing churches about grant opportunities and offering them work space in Brooklyn Borough Hall, the office also invests in faith-based development projects, Monrose said.

“We’re still the Borough of Churches,” he said.

Conversions in Queens

After the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outgrew its two-story column-fronted chapel in the Murray Hill section of Queens, near Flushing, it sought to build a soaring new facility on a residential block in nearby Linden Hill.

Despite some local opposition to the construction of a church building on a street lined with houses, the city granted a zoning variance for the new chapel, which has a 92-foot steeple and which claimed three houses in order to be built.

Rong Xin Realty, meanwhile, bought the old site for $27 million in 2018, where it is building Flushing Garden Condominiums, an eight-story project with 131 one- to two-bedrooms, about half of which have balconies. Sales will start next year at the market-rate building, which hopes to sell apartments for around $1,000 a square foot, said Benny Chen, a Rong Xin principal. The condo will open in 2021. “We got the last spot in Flushing,” Chen said.

Good deeds were on the mind of the leaders of the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, which has partnered with the Bluestone Organization, a for-profit developer, on a 12-story, 174-unit affordable tower on a former church parking lot.

Called the Tree of Life, the $74 million mid-rise will have studios to three-bedrooms, and feature solar panels and a roof deck, plus job training facilities for the public. Individuals with incomes as low as $32,000 can qualify to live at the project, which opens next summer.

“We had the sense we could do more for the community,” said the Rev. Patrick O’Connor, who heads a 500-member church that has continuously operated in Jamaica since 1662 and which currently offers a soup kitchen, recovery services and health screenings.

O’Connor arrived at his decision to marry God and mammon, so to speak, after surveying more than 1,000 neighbors, who said what Jamaica was lacking was reasonably priced apartments.

The Tree of Life, rising from property purchased by the church in 2008, didn’t require the demolition of any historic structures on the church’s tree-shaded multi-building campus. But the church did transfer air rights to the building, which is by far the tallest on its block.

As O’Connor sees it, some churches rightfully deserve a bad rap for being too profit-minded about real estate. But at the same time, the city has become so expensive for working-class people that it has pushed churches to take action, which in many cases means putting shovels in the ground. “In a sense,” he said, “it’s forced churches to be better stewards of the resources that are available to them.”

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — The sight of old spires squeezed between new towering high-rises suggests the ability of churches and other houses of worship to hang on through block-altering building booms.

For Churches, a Temptation to Sell

With their herringbone-pattern ceilings, app-based vehicle-retrieval systems and furnished waiting rooms, garages currently being constructed in residential developments seem designed to take the lowly parking spot to new heights.

Even more significant may be the fact that the facilities are often private, aimed at those who can fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for parking rights. No day-trippers in search of space by the hour need apply.

The latest members-only facilities — tucked into boutique buildings and full-block structures at more than two-dozen locations across the city — are arriving at a challenging time for drivers. Many surface-level parking lots have succumbed to development in recent years, while the ride-share industry continues to pour extra vehicles onto streets.

Whether or not parking spaces with price tags as high as $800,000 will have many takers, brokers and developers believe their presence can help a new development stand out in a slow market.

“It’s sort of becoming an expected amenity for a high-end condo,” said Andrew Bradfield, a principal of Orange Management, a developer that has installed automated garages in two Brooklyn condos: Waverly Brooklyn in Clinton Hill and the Symon in Downtown Brooklyn. “To not have parking hampers marketing.”

Below-ground parking garages have generally been pricey to build, since developers have to dig out so much rock. But modern automated garages, which use programmable elevators to move cars into the equivalent of bunk beds, have helped cut construction costs. By eliminating the need for ramps and other areas like space for attendants, automated garages require far less space than traditional versions.

“I don’t think this garage would have been viable a decade ago, to be honest with you,” said Arthur Blee, a senior vice president Cape Advisors, referring to the automated facility at Greenwich West, a condo he’s codeveloping in the Hudson Square neighborhood.

The 170-unit building started selling its studios to three-bedrooms last fall for an average of about $2.7 million, or $2,300 a square foot. (A project spokeswoman declined to say how many units have sold.) A year ago, the condo, which is slated to open in 2020, began marketing its 30 parking spaces, which range in price from $225,000 to $325,000, depending on their size. None of the spaces have found a buyer yet, said Blee, who remains optimistic.

“We’re not exactly pushing them out the door,” he said, adding that parking spaces are analogous to storage units, in that buyers often pick them up down the road.

Not Quite a Car Town

In a famously walkable city crisscrossed by subways and buses, the pro-car maneuvering can seem at odds not just with modern trends, but with longtime policy.

As cars began filling New York’s streets in the mid-20th century, garages attached to apartment buildings (known as accessory garages) enjoyed a rapid rollout — consider the parade of 1960s apartment towers on the Upper East Side with parking downstairs. At the time, private developers in much of the city were required to provide a parking space for 4 out of every 10 apartments in their buildings. But city officials, concerned about worsening air pollution, eventually pumped the brakes.

In 1982, the city effectively banned any new public parking lots in Manhattan below West 110th Street, while also sharply limiting private garages there by inverting the old rules: Parking would no longer be required, and in fact had limits. Today, the number of parking spaces cannot exceed 20% of the total number of apartments in buildings from Midtown down to Manhattan’s southern tip, while a 35% cap applies to the Upper East and West Sides.

But efforts to discourage driving by making it tougher to park may not have had the desired effect. Indeed, cars are on the rise, or at least holding their own. In 2017, there were 225,179 nontaxi cars registered in Manhattan, on par with 2007, when there were 225,047, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which counts cars used for ride-share services like Uber in its totals.

The spikes in the other boroughs have been dramatic. In Brooklyn, there were 457,980 cars in 2017, up from 387,328 in 2007, according to the data, and in Queens there were 725,906, up from 671,816. Added congestion has meant increased demand for the dwindling number of parking spaces, advocates for garages say.

Parking for Sale

Besides Greenwich West, other recent Manhattan condos to offer hefty amounts of accessory parking include 70 Vestry Street in TriBeCa, 76 Eleventh Avenue by the High Line and 565 Broome SoHo.

Although these buildings are within the capped parking zones, some of them received special permission from the city to go above and beyond the limits, according to lawyers familiar with the projects. Developers can argue that the new parking spaces are merely replacing parking units that might have been lost to development when a tower was built on a parking lot or garage was torn down.

Most of the new crop of private parking garages sell their spaces in-house and by way of licenses, which aren’t tracked in real estate databases the way deeded properties are. But brokers say current values citywide range from $100,000 to $800,000. Licenses, which require monthly fees ranging from $100 to $800, usually have to be resold to residents within a building when buyers move.

There are also garages with deeded parking, more like conventional real estate. Owners can hang onto them as long as they like and sublet them to outsiders. But like condos, they’re subject to common charges and taxes of about $100 to $400 a month.

Deeds for the 11-space garage at 40 Bleecker, a 61-unit condo from Broad Street Development that’s under construction in NoHo, are $500,000 a pop. About half of the parking spaces have sold since sales began last year, a spokeswoman said.

The city still requires parking at some developments, particularly those on blocks outside the zone where it was restricted in the 1980s, such as north of West 110th Street. Vandewater, a 183-unit condo at 543 West 122nd Street, is in Morningside Heights, and so outside of the limited-parking zone. Savanna, its developer, added 70 private, on-site parking spaces, which can be reached through a motor court.

If the condo, which opens next spring, were in a busy office district, Savanna might have sold the entire garage to a landlord specializing in parking, which was the typical fate of parking garages developed in apartment buildings in the past. But because of its location near Columbia University, where day-to-day traffic is relatively minor, the list of potential buyers for the entire garage was small. That informed Savanna’s decision to hang onto the 70-space facility and use it instead as an amenity, capitalizing on the demand for private parking, said Peter Denby, the Halstead agent handling marketing.

As with other condos, the Vandewater’s parking licenses, which cost $225,000 plus a monthly charge of $256 to cover valets, can’t be folded into a home loan. Buyers typically need to fork over cash.

It’s unclear how the inability to finance the spaces will impact sales in the building, which began last winter. The condo has sold about 15% of its apartments, which range from studios to four-bedrooms, for about $1,700 a square foot. Denby declined to say how many spaces had sold.

Savanna could always hold on to unsold parking spaces and rent them, Denby said. They could also be used as a concession, to coax hesitant buyers. “It’s another asset in the process,” he said, “and it becomes a very valuable asset.”

Parking in Brooklyn and Queens

In Downtown Brooklyn, where the parking requirement for market-rate buildings was reduced in 2012 from 40% of a building’s apartment total to 20%, developers are also embracing garages.

The Symon, Bradfield’s project, is marketing nine automated spaces. Although pricing can’t be locked down until he receives city approvals, similar offerings sell in the $200,000 range, according to Orange Management, which has teamed with Lonicera Partners and the Davis Companies. The Symon’s 59 one- to four-bedroom apartments, which will come to market this month, start at $800,000.

The developers hope to attract families. Despite the popularity of ride services like Uber, families that depend on children’s car seats are less likely to use them, Bradfield said: “It will be a long time before those trends in transportation supplant families’ need for cars.”

At another condo that opened in 2017, the 48-unit Waverly Brooklyn, in Clinton Hill — an area with a 50% requirement — Orange also added an automated garage. The owner of that garage, a separate commercial unit, is now selling 75-year licenses for spaces there for $150,000, plus a $250 monthly fee.

Parking requirements were waived a few years ago for Long Island City, Queens, a densely settled area served by several subway lines. But garages are still required for new developments in nearby Astoria, home to The Rowan, a 46-unit condo from RockFarmer Properties. Although the developer had to include 23 spaces, the Rowan offers 96, thanks to automation. A parking spot costs $90,000, plus a “nominal monthly common charge,” RockFarmer says. Many spaces not purchased by condo owners will be available on a transient basis, at more typical hourly rates, by people who drive to shop at the 16,000-square-foot grocery store and another large store at the condo’s base.

Yair Goldberg, an executive vice president of U-Tron, the company behind the Rowan’s technology, noted that more parking spaces mean fewer cars having to circle blocks and belch exhaust while hunting for street parking. Besides, he added, “garages help differentiate a development from the rest of the products in the market.”

Taking Public Garages Private

In another trend that could significantly alter the city’s parking landscape, developers have bought existing parking garages that are open to the public, and taken them private.

The Parking Club, a 150-space condo at 185 Pacific Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, is currently selling deeds for $185,000 to $200,000, plus $220 a month in common charges and taxes. Built in 1957, the building largely operated as a conventional by-the-hour parking garage until 2016, when it was purchased by Lonicera, one of the partners at the Symon, and underwent a $500,000 renovation, including a new lounge, according to Jamie Anthony, a firm founder. About 25 spaces have sold since then, Anthony said.

Similarly, last year Iliad Realty Group paid $9 million for a 90-space garage at 94 Laight Street in TriBeCa that offered hourly and monthly rentals. Iliad is now converting it to a members-only facility with just 60 spaces, with the assumption that more space between cars equals fewer dings. Other improvements include turning a bike area into a furnished waiting room and the addition of lockers for golf clubs and surf boards, said Simon Anderson, a Douglas Elliman agent who’s marketing it.

“That’s really where you are elevating the entire experience,” said Anderson, who moved to New Jersey last year after living in New York City for 25 years and shuttling among 12 different public garages in search of cheaper parking. The parking spaces on Laight Street, which are licensed, were unveiled this summer for $400,000, plus a $500 monthly fee. By September, 17 contracts had been mailed out, mostly to condo owners in the upstairs River Lofts complex, but also other nearby buildings, he said.

Developers are next targeting public garages in the West Village and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to convert them as well, said Anderson. “I think I have identified a real trend here,” he said.

I'll Take a Condo for Me and One for My Car

NEW YORK — Parking, like so much else in New York City, is going upscale.

Amid a squeeze of large-windowed apartments and a stream of passers-by, where shades often go unused and cameras snap furiously, residents and visitors can seem locked in a perpetual state of performance.

Reliable stars, residents say, include a woman in the curtainless unit on West 23rd Street who regularly blow-dries her hair in the nude. Other shows seem more improvised. On a recent afternoon, under a chandelier on West 19th Street, a brown dog hopped on and off a table, prompting a parkgoer to whip out her iPad.

A young girl who likes to blow bubbles on a balcony at West 24th Street has also drawn upward stares over the years, said Cheryl Skura, a neighborhood resident who also happens to be the girl’s grandmother. “I think that tourists have more photos of her than we do,” said Skura, 68, a retired jewelry importer.

But far from complaining about the downside of living in a fishbowl, Skura, like others, had high praise for a lively, well-kept enclave that finally seems to be coming into its own, nearly a decade after the park’s first section opened.

“The High Line is pretty, all the plantings are beautiful, and it’s idyllic to look at — at least at 7 in the morning,” she said. “Maybe not when 20 million people are walking.”

Skura’s first apartment was a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo, with the balcony that functioned as a stage. It cost $1.4 million in 2006, when Skura, recently widowed, left suburban Long Island to be closer to her SoHo office. The night life in the area, once thick with restaurants and clubs, was appealing. The High Line? Not so much, Skura said, as it was then an abandoned freight track awaiting conversion.

The first phase of the 1.45-mile park, which runs from Gansevoort Street up to West 34th Street, opened in 2009, with the bulk completed by 2014; a spur at 10th Avenue and West 30th Street is expected to open in 2019.

Once the park was up and running, Skura quickly became a fan. In fact, after selling her condo for $2.8 million in 2015, she bought another in the neighborhood, on the other side of the tracks. It is not exactly hidden away. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom condo, for which she paid $5.5 million, has a park-facing terrace where Skura sits a couple of times a day.

Noise can be an issue. “There’s a slightly elevated buzz. You can hear people talk,” said Atith Pagdi, 36, whose one-bedroom, one-bathroom cond-op, which cost $800,000 in 2017, has a balcony that serves as a veritable opera box for the action.

Pagdi, who works for a bank, wasn’t seeking the spotlight when he moved from New Jersey after a divorce. Indeed, to make sure his home-to-be was private enough, he asked a friend to stand in the apartment while he paced the High Line.

“But this is New York City,” he said. “You are bound to be seen at some point anyway, in any apartment, in any neighborhood.”

Besides, Pagdi added, the convenience of the High Line, which allows traffic-light-free passage from one block to the next, can’t be beat. In addition to hitting the park for early-morning jogs, he uses it for speedy commutes to the beer garden at the Standard Hotel and to his gym near West 17th Street. “The location is awesome,” he said.

— What You’ll Find

The High Line touches Hudson Yards and the meatpacking district. But in a city with a tendency to chop neighborhoods into ever smaller pieces (all with their own names), the block-wide district should be considered a stand-alone place, say many who live and work there.

That wasn’t always the case. Lined with storage facilities for clothes, meat and mail, the area was for decades mostly indistinguishable from the industrial West Side, or the “Wild West,” according to a common sobriquet.

In the early 2000s, about the time the Friends of the High Line organization began agitating for the preservation of the elevated metal trestle, large-scale rentals began arriving in the area. Condos followed.

Today, the neighborhood, which the city rezoned in 2005 to cap heights and lure apartments, has lost much of its grit. Longtime parking lots are gone, as are most of the bars and clubs where music thumped late into the night. Bungalow 8, a mid-2000s mainstay on West 27th Street, is now the site of an art gallery whose concrete shape resembles an oversized picture frame.

But Marquee New York, a bottle-service joint on 10th Avenue, and Scores, a strip club on West 28th Street, endure.

Some developers have paid homage to the past, including Tamarkin Co., whose 508 West 24th Street, a 15-unit condo, and 550 West 29th Street, a 19-unit version, feature casement-style windows reminiscent of factories.

Mostly, though, the High Line seems like a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses type of showcase for whimsy.

The series of silvery fins along 520 W. 28th St., a 39-unit condo from architect Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016, gives the facade the look of an egg slicer. Its developer was the Related Cos., a firm whose huge footprint in the neighborhood is about to get bigger with 515 West 18th, an underdevelopment condo that will flank the park with a pair of towers, akin to the 505 W. 19th St. building designed by Thomas Juul-Hansen. Related has also broken ground on another condo, at 555 West 22nd.

In a similar spirit is XI, a condo-and-hotel complex at 76 11th Ave. from architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, with two towers that lean and twist so much they seem on the verge of falling over. The 236-unit complex, which started sales this fall, is slated to open in 2020.

At the splashy Soori High Line, at 522 W. 29th St., from architect Soo K. Chan, some living rooms come with saltwater pools. There is also the 14-unit Fitzroy, at 514 W. 24th St., whose jade-colored, terra-cotta exterior was designed by Roman and Williams, a firm known for residential interiors and hotels.

It’s all enough to make the few tenements remaining, like those on West 23rd and West 29th streets, seem small and plain by comparison.

— What You’ll Pay

On Dec. 5, there were 85 apartments listed in the area, according to StreetEasy, almost all of them condos, for an average $6.92 million. The least expensive was an alcove studio for $780,000; the priciest was a triplex penthouse for $50 million.

Sales are cooling. In 2018, through Dec. 5, 49 apartments had sold, for an average $3 million, according to StreetEasy. During the same period in 2017, 73 units sold, for an average $3.7 million. Still, the neighborhood is no bargain compared with the rest of Manhattan, where the average sale price in the third quarter of 2018 was $1.93 million, according to Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

Rental options in the area include contemporary high-rises like the Tate, Ten23 and Abington House. As of early December, the average rental studio in the neighborhood was asking $3,800 a month, according to StreetEasy, while the average one-bedroom was listed for $4,300.

— The Vibe

Around the High Line, art and retail can blur. The stylish interior seen through tall windows on West 28th might at first seem to belong to a gallery, but it is actually Il Piccolo Ristoro, a new cafe. Likewise, the cartoonish colors of a carwash at 10th Avenue and West 24th Street, with blue walls and a lighted red sign, suggest a clever set piece, but autos do get cleaned there.

The sculpture-lined park, which closes at 7 p.m. in winter, hosts about 8 million visitors a year. A more vexing issue, some say, is the relentless construction activity nearby.

Restaurants that once largely catered to gallery patrons still dot 10th Avenue. Their ranks are thinning, however, with the closure of Trestle on Tenth, in May, and the Red Cat, which will close at the end of December. But Cookshop and the High Line Hotel, both at West 20th, remain popular draws.

For pharmacies, haircuts, manicures and groceries, residents mostly have to trudge east.

— The Schools

Students are zoned for two public schools, both outside the neighborhood.

P.S. 33, or Chelsea Prep, offers prekindergarten through fifth grade. On last year’s state exams, 67 percent of students met English standards, versus 46 percent citywide; 65 percent met math standards, versus 47 percent citywide.

P.S. 11, the William T. Harris School, also offers prekindergarten through fifth grade. There, 72 percent met English standards on last year’s state exams, and 74 percent met math standards.

The zoned middle school is M.S. 297, on Morton Street in the West Village. Students can choose their high school; several are on West 18th in the multi-school Bayard Rustin Educational Campus.

A private option is Avenues: The World School, a for-profit that opened in 2012 on 10th Avenue. Annual tuition at the school, which enrolls about 1,600, is $54,000.

— The Commute

For subway service, most residents hike to Eighth Avenue, which offers C and E service, at West 23rd Street, and A, C and E service, at West 14th Street.

— The History

The final cargo on the High Line train, which was in service from 1934-80, was three boxcars of frozen turkeys.

Originally, the railroad — officially, the New York Central viaduct — ended at the St. John’s terminal near Spring Street. But in the 1960s, sections along Washington Street began to come down; in 1991, the city razed a five-block span from Gansevoort to Bank Streets.

But some railroad stops remain, including 95 Horatio St., now part of TF Cornerstone’s West Coast rental complex. A tiled section of its otherwise yellow-brick facade, at the second floor, is a tip-off to where turkeys once rumbled through.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/realestate/the-high-line-a-place-to-see-and-be-seen.html" id="9fca2439-aff4-344d-a2df-57c77b919014">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — For confirmation that all the world is indeed a stage, consider the High Line, the elevated park that threads among buildings in the west Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Living Along the High Line: An Urban Park Creates a Space to See and Be Seen

The long avenue stretches nearly 10 miles, across two boroughs, from East 32nd Street in Manhattan to East 189th Street in the Bronx, where it ends near an Applebee’s.

But it is perhaps best known for the section below 96th Street.

For much of that stretch, a ribbon of lawns, trees and hedges unfurls between the avenue’s northbound and southbound arteries. In recent weeks, slender tiny parkland has welcomed beds of scarlet tulips and sculptures with yellow rubber wrapped around poles.

To be sure, there is not a lot of open space. Although the park runs on and off from Murray Hill to Carnegie Hill, it totals barely more than 4 1/2 acres. And that acreage is squeezed into a space not much wider than a deli, with almost no place to sit.

But if the greenery must be enjoyed in passing, it still adds elegance, brokers, shopkeepers and residents all say.

Also attractive, they point out, is the spaciousness afforded by the physical street, which is 140 feet across, making it among Manhattan’s widest, according to the borough president’s office.

Likewise, the obsessively maintained prewar buildings that line the 3 1/2-mile stretch, Park Avenue’s most populous section, rarely top 20 stories, ensuring lots of light.

“We like the character of the street, and we like the scale of it; it’s one of the most appealing things about the neighborhood,” said Andrew Soussloff, an investment manager who has lived at his current home in a 12-story apartment house with a granite base and terra-cotta trim for 17 years, after 15 years at another Park Avenue address.

Soussloff, 65, demurred when asked to share apartment details. But a five-bedroom in his building is listed for $8.5 million.

“Park is literally right in the middle of New York,” said Sara Kahen-Kashi, 34, an optometrist who in 2013 bought a studio co-op in a prewar former hotel for about $400,000, after five years of renting in the building.

The apartment, with a beamed ceiling and casement windows, might fetch $500,000 today. But Kahen-Kashi isn’t selling.

Although she has rented out the unit for two years, since moving to Long Island, where she lives with her husband and two children, a future pied-à-terre has not been ruled out.

“Park,” she said, “has cachet.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="c6a4910f-9efb-4397-8c99-b5435efb277b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/realestate/park-avenue-flowers-and-financiers-in-the-thick-of-it-all.html">The New York Times</a>.

Park Avenue: Flowers and financiers, in the thick of it all

(Living On Park Avenue): NEW YORK — The inspiration for street names like Canal and Spring may be lost to time and development. But the landscape feature that prompted Park survives, front and center.

For the better part of two decades, New York City officials and business owners have been trying, with modest success, to revamp Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, the 7-mile thoroughfare that stretches from Park Slope to Bay Ridge and is often criticized for being ungainly, overly busy and even dangerous.

Now a spate of rentals and condos, together with improvements such as bike lanes and zoning changes that allow taller buildings, finally have real estate professionals optimistic about the long-awaited makeover.

“This will someday be like Park Avenue,” said David Ennis, CEO of the Daten Group, the developer behind 575 Fourth Ave., a 70-unit condo in South Park Slope that began sales this month. Hedging a bit, Ennis added, “We at least think Fourth Avenue will be completely different.”

Strung between two borough icons — the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower — and barreling through Bay Ridge, Sunset Park and Park Slope, Fourth Avenue is dotted with businesses that cater to drivers. Indeed, banks, restaurants and garages, and even a dry cleaners at 18th Street, offer off-street parking for cars, suggesting the street may have a ways to go before being known as a place to live or stroll.

But there’s little doubt that development is shifting into high gear.

More than two dozen condos and rentals have recently opened, are underway or are planned, according to Halstead Property Development Marketing. Most are concentrated along Fourth Avenue’s northern half, like Ennis’ condo, a charcoal-toned, 11-story structure at Prospect Avenue that took the place of an auto-body shop, next to the Prospect Expressway.

With a mix of one- to four-bedroom units, plus a pair of town houses, 575 Fourth offers amenities like a roughly 9,000-square-foot courtyard with lawns, benches and pergola-shaded grills. Truck noise won’t interfere with a barbecue, Ennis promised: “It’s secluded.”

Apartments at the building, which is slated to open in fall, range from about $1 million to $2.5 million, or an average of $1,100 a square foot.

Farther north, a different auto-body shop and car-detailing business near President Street is being replaced by Parlour, a dun-brick condo with arched windows at 243 Fourth Ave. Developed by Brodmore Management, the 12-story building, which began selling in March, is offering 19 two- to five-bedroom units starting at $1.7 million.

Perhaps no developer has taken more interest in the corridor than Adam America Real Estate, which has undertaken more than a half-dozen projects since 595 Baltic St., a rental, opened in 2017. Other rental buildings include No. 470, which is open, and Nos. 535 and 555, which will welcome tenants this year.

Also among Adam America’s latest projects is Arbor Eighteen, a condo at 185 18th St. being codeveloped with CGI Strategies in the Greenwood Heights neighborhood. The building has 73 units, which sell for about $1,200 a square foot, or starting at $565,000 for a studio. It came to market in January and is set to open by the end of the year, said Omri Sachs, an Adam America co-founder.

There, too, developers are offering owners a way to tune out traffic, courtesy of a tucked-away courtyard that’s lush with bamboo and ferns. But if that doesn’t do the trick, they say residents can leave the tree-challenged block and head to nearby Prospect Park (which is nearly a mile away).

A few blocks closer is Green-Wood Cemetery, the sprawling historical landmark that is a bullet point in Arbor Eighteen’s marketing campaign. “It’s a place where people can go with their strollers,” Sachs said. The building’s location, Sachs added, is also ideal for Manhattan commuters. An R subway station that also offers occasional D, N and W service is a block away; the financial district can be reached in about 25 minutes.

For years, Fourth Avenue served almost like an electric fence, especially for those coming from points east, corralling people into Park Slope, residents say.

“It was a psychological barrier, 100%. Fourth was never your destination,” said Carly Robins, who last year traded a two-bedroom condo in Boerum Hill, where she had lived for 12 years, for a three-bedroom condo on Fourth Avenue, in the Park Slope section. The apartment, at 613 Baltic, a 43-unit building from JDS Development Group, cost $2 million, said Robins, who works as a voice-over actress.

Since the condo kicked off sales in 2015, it has struggled to find takers for its one- to three-bedrooms, which currently average $1,500 a square foot. The least expensive two-bedroom in early April was $1.48 million. Brown Harris Stevens took over marketing in October at the building, which has nine units left.

Across Brooklyn, the average sales price for new condos in the first quarter of 2019 was $1.06 million, down about 20% from the same period in 2018, according to Douglas Elliman Real Estate. But Tim Simmons, the Brown Harris Stevens associate broker in charge of sales at 613 Baltic, said that a sluggish luxury market, and not the shortcomings of the street, is the reason.

“I never had the same prejudice against Fourth Avenue that people who lived in Brooklyn do,” said Simmons, who relocated to the area in 2017 after 15 years in Manhattan.

In fact, Fourth Avenue reminds him of Tenth Avenue in West Chelsea, before the creation of the High Line — a conveyance for vehicles without much in the way of foot traffic. Fourth Avenue will change “fundamentally in the next five or 10 years,” he said.

There’s been no shortage of plans to spur investment. In 2003, city officials rezoned a 17-block chunk in Park Slope to encourage apartment buildings with as many as 12 stories, significantly higher than the five-story walk-ups that had dominated the street. In 2005, a nine-block segment in Greenwood Heights got similar treatment. Ditto for Sunset Park and its length of Fourth Avenue, in 2009.

But government intervention has its limits. Despite the zoning changes, the street still lacks the classic Brooklyn streetscape of boutiques and independent restaurants. A more familiar sight might be a place to order cheap cheeseburgers from a drive-through window, especially as you head south.

Recognizing that development wasn’t solving all of the avenue’s problems, city officials amended much of Fourth Avenue’s zoning in 2011. Today, from 24th Street north to Atlantic Avenue, the city requires that stores take up at least half the ground floor in new buildings, to avoid extra-large apartment lobbies or other sidewalk-deadening uses.

Rezoned areas could also get rezoned again. A plan is afoot to change the look and use of the Gowanus neighborhood, which extends west of Fourth Avenue. Under the current proposal, blocks from 15th Street to Pacific Street would be changed to allow for buildings of up to 17 stories, from the current 12 stories. The city is expected to launch the official review process in winter.

“If the rezoning happens, it will be like a development frenzy,” Sachs said.

At the same time, this wide street with skinny median strips is the continuing target of a comprehensive, if slow-moving, makeover.

About a decade ago, the Bay Ridge section of Fourth Avenue was deemed one of the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in the region. But after improvements were made in 2014, including extended curbs and extra crosswalks, the accident rate fell. Similarly, reducing the number of driving lanes in Park Slope made the street safer there, too.

In addition, the Department of Transportation has promised to add bike lanes, install sculptures, elevate median strips and plant trees in the medians, according to plans.

When more apartments do come, they’re likely to be condos. Rentals, which make their money over time and not in one fell swoop, are usually only possible when land costs are low, developers say. And Fourth Avenue is now a hot submarket, said Miki Naftali, CEO of the Naftali Group, which in 2013 built Landmark Park Slope, one of the first major Fourth Avenue projects.

C.J. Hughes

Articles written by the author

For Churches, a Temptation to Sell

I'll Take a Condo for Me and One for My Car

Living Along the High Line: An Urban Park Creates a Space to See and Be Seen

Park Avenue: Flowers and financiers, in the thick of it all

Change descends on a busy Brooklyn thoroughfare

Long Beach, N.Y.: A bedroom community that began as a resort

Long Beach, N.Y.: A bedroom community that began as a resort

A creative suburb thrives on the Hudson's left bank

Where luxury meets accessibility

The present revels in what was once a sleepy backwater