The former Bialystoker Nursing Home building and two adjoining properties have been sold for $47.5 million. The transaction was first reported this morning by the Real Deal.
The Ascend Group picked up the parcels — 228 East Broadway, 232 East Broadway and 226 East Broadway — for $47.5 million. That’s almost twice the price paid last year by Jon Goldberg of Turtle Bay Partners, which acquired the landmarked building for just under $18 million.
The property at 228 East Broadway was designated as a city landmark in 2013 after a lengthy advocacy campaign from Friends of the Lower East Side, a local preservation group. While the main building cannot be demolished, the parcels on either side of it are primed for new development. They include the former Dora Cohen park and an office building.
UPDATE 11:09 a.m. More about the Ascend Group. The firm, owned by Rob Kaliner, has developed condo projects such as the Georgica on the Upper East Side and the controversial A Building on East 13th Street. The East Village development was a collaboration with Ben Shaoul, one of the neighborhood’s least-loved real estate moguls. The Real Deal reported in 2010:
Beneath the two-year-old building’s reputation for hosting raucous rooftop pool parties lies a reality worse than the most killer hangover — flooding, crumbling balconies, alleged mismanagement of the condo board’s funds and two unresponsive developers who have left owners banging their heads against mold-ridden walls, claim several residents who forwarded dozens of documents detailing these issues to The Real Deal.
[UPDATE-ADDED 1/2017: In an interview, Kaliner told The Lo-Down that Ben Shaoul has absolutely no involvement in the project on the Bialystoker Nursing Home site.]
A few more details. The company Ascend Group set up to purchase the parcels hired ubiquitous lobbyist James Capalino to represent its interests with the de Blasio administration. Capalino, of course, has come under attack for his role in the early stages of the Rivington House fiasco. According to public records, “222 East Broadway Holdings, LLC” paid Capalino $17,000 in 2015 and another $20,000 in 2016 to lobby the Department of Buildings, Landmarks Preservation Commission and other agencies.
Then there’s this — a “feasibility study” on the website of Space4Architecture. There’s no date on the page, so we don’t know whether these drawings reflect current plans. But the zoning analysis and accompanying drawings are definitely of interest as we wait for official Buildings Department filings. One other note. The Bialystoker building’s neighbor, Seward Park Cooperative, has received preliminary inquiries about the sale of its air rights. The co-op board can only approve an air rights sale if two-thirds of the shareholders agree. No formal offers are yet on the table.
Here’s the plan that was described by Space4Architecture::
The goal for this project is to design and maximize an apartment complex by merging three lots into a single zoning lot, with the added challenge of working with an existing “Landmark” structure, precisely the Bialystoker Nursing Home. We transformed the challenge of the occupied middle lot into our advantage: the new identical towers we proposed in our design read as having been separated at birth by the Landmark building, which through this move assumes even more importance and rather than suffering from the presence of the new towers, gains from being framed by them. An open garden on 3rd floor acts as a visual separation between the 2 stories volumes dedicated to community facilities and the 13 stories above where the apartments are located. The lot line zoning regulation requirements directed the design of the main core/structural elements of the new towers (which contain elevator and stairs) towards the inner side of the lots facing the Landmark building, which provided us with the possibility of taking advantage of the East-West axis allowing best exposure for the apartments.
