101 Franklin Street
135 East 57th Street
The family real estate firm signed a ground lease with the Wallace family that will allow TF Cornerstone to turn the 32-story office tower at 135 East 57th Street into a residential property, adding to the city’s housing stock amid a national shortage.
The narrow structure’s 12-foot ceiling heights and floor-to-ceiling windows means that natural light will be able to penetrate the floor plates, which range from 5,700 to 14,000 square feet. Typical offices in New York have floor plates between 30,000 and 50,000 square feet. Floor plates in the 10,000-square-foot range are rare, according to Shell.
The majority of the rooms in the residential units will be on the perimeter of the building, giving them access to light, though there might be a few rooms in the units that don’t have windows.
The project is expected to be completed by 2028, according to Shell.
144-02 135th Avenue (Queens)
356 hotel rooms, double-loaded corridors, precast plank and concrete walls, a glass-enclosed pool, sheetrock walls, ribbon glass windows. These were the building blocks of the JFK Hilton Hotel, built in 1987, that operated for 35 years until it closed in 2023.
Architects cut, molded, and reconfigured those pieces to turn that behemoth structure into 318 affordable homes. Hundreds of formerly homeless residents will move in this fall.