West 43rd Street property last sold for $42M in 2008
July 14, 2014 03:30PM
By Rich Bockmann
From left: 505-513 West 43rd Street and Andrew Scandalios
A Hell’s Kitchen development site fetched just $1 million more than its sales price from six years ago when the Elad Group picked up the 43rd Street property for $43 million earlier this month.
Elad, owner of marquis properties such as the Plaza Hotel, paid the $43 million in early July to Magna Hospitality Group for the vacant 20,010-square-foot lot at 505-513 West 43rd Street, records made public today show.
The Rhode Island-based Magna purchased the property from hotelier Sam Chang’s McSam Group for $42 million in 2008 with reported plans to build a 198-room budget hotel on the site. But brokers at HFF last year began shopping the property asking $50 million, the Commercial Observer reported.
Neither Elad nor Magna could be immediately reached for comment. Andrew Scandalios, the senior managing director at HFF who brokered the sale, declined to comment.
The site is located just north of the red-hot Hudson Yards area where developers are investing billions of dollars in a bevy of new developments. The property sits on top of an active Amtrak line and any new potential development reportedly requires two permits from the city’s Universal Land Use Review Procedure.
The Elad Group is anxious to build a residential building on a vacant West 43rd Street lot with 15- and 16-story towers over Amtrak lines, but the developer needs special permits to build over the tracks and to have some regulations waived. With only generic designs as placeholders, Elad’s plans were met with resistance from Community Board 4 during a meeting this Wednesday. The board said that Elad is rushing the permitting process and that the request to breach height limits is an order too tall.
The property at 501-511 West 43rd Street is zoned with a height limit of 135 feet. Elad wants to crank it up to 164 feet. There are much taller buildings existing (and coming) nearby, such as the 31-story Gotham West across 44th Street. But smaller building heights are still a fixture in the Clinton neighborhood. “These are heavy negotiations because we have Hudson Yards going to the sky in the south, we have the Extell stuff to the north in the Riverside South project going to the sky,” said board member Joe Restuccia. He then referred to the negotiations over Gotham West in 2009 when efforts to establish height limits in the area ultimately became part of the 2011 West Clinton Rezoning plan. “We’re talking two years of public debate.”
BY: STEPHEN SMITH ON SEPTEMBER 25TH 2014 AT 2:15 PM
505 West 43rd Street, open railroad cut in center, image from Bing Maps
Eran Chen and ODA Architecture have been quite busy lately, with designs sprouting all over Manhattan and Brooklyn (with the occasional foray into Long Island City for good measure). Now comes an application for yet another building, this time in Hell’s Kitchen, to be built on a deck over the railroad tracks that Amtrak uses to reach Penn Station from points north of the city.
ODA filed for a new building permit on behalf of developer El Ad Group, submitting plans for a fairly short 13-story building at 505 West 43rd Street, a block-through site just west of 10th Avenue, from West 43rd to West 44th. Measuring 134,000 square feet, the project’s short size is explained by the area’s height limits, though oddly, El Ad recently presented plans to the Department of City Planning that called for a 16-story building.
The building will contain 120,000 square feet of net residential space and 81 condos, for an average unit size of just under 1,500 square feet. Unusually for a condo building, it will include some units to be sold at below-market rates as affordable housing.
While we have yet to see a drawing, ODA produces consistently attractive designs. The building will no doubt be an enormous step up from the hotels that were almost built on the site, as the McSam Group and another hotelier owned the lot before it was sold to El Ad for $43 million earlier this year.
Im surprised they have built over the tracks already. I felt like that would have taken longer. Ill try to get a pic next time I walk by ( which is often).
