I did some digging and there’s some pretty interesting stuff going on here.
Here’s the zoning lot:
Rockefeller owns the following lots: 7 (the Night Hotel), 53, 56, 57, 58 and 59.
Lot 49 is the Cort Theater (Shubbert)
Lot 11 was a parking garage; it’s been nearly fully demolished at this point. It appears that Tribeach Holdings owns this lot. See this thread: NEW YORK | RIU Hotel (145 W 47th St) | 519 FT | 48 FLOORS
It looks like we’ll get 2 new buildings on this zoning lot. Rockefeller is doing the following:
- Stripping the unused “as of right” air rights from the Cort Theater (around 112,000 sf)
- Taking the 25 most eastern feet of lot 53 and giving the footprint to the Cort Theater
- They’ll have about 420,000 sf of buildable area to put on their lots
Separately, Shubbert is going to expand/rehab the Cort Theater. This will allow a Theater Rehabilitation Bonus, the amount of which may be as high as 20% of the underlying buildable sf. It will be based upon the entire zoning lot, so that’s a bonus of approximately 119,000 sf. That’s then where Tribeach Holdings comes in-- they will then purchase all of these bonus sf from Cort Theater and put them into their new building on lot 11. That should get them up to about 265,000 sf.
All said and done, we should be looking at around 685,000 sf (buildable) on this lot, but configured as 2 buildings.
Sadly, I think this is going to be a bit of a slow burn. The theater rehab bonus is not a quick process and Rockefeller hasn’t even shut down the Night Hotel yet.