Bushwick commercial building trades for $20.8M

Emmes Asset Management bought 117 Grattan Street — a 125,400-square-foot, four-story commercial building in Bushwick — for $20.75 million, according to public records filed yesterday.

Coming on the heels of a $30 million Queens purchase, Emmes made the latest buy for a pension fund client. The company declined to identify the purchaser, however, and the name could not be immediately found in city records.

“We have convictions about that market,” said Emmes’ managing director Seble Tareke Williams of the area. “It’s in a very robust commercial and creative community … that is still burgeoning.”

The building is located at Porter Avenue, just several blocks from the Morgan Avenue Subway station and the popular eatery Roberta’s.

Artist studios primarily take up the 90 commercial units here, with the remaining ones occupied by other commercial tenants.

“We like it in its current use, so we’re not looking to change it up,” Williams said of the building, adding that the structure is in good shape.

When natural vacancies occur, the plan is to bring retail to the ground level, Williams added.

An entity named Venus Knitting Mills Inc. is listed as the seller. Records indicate the entity had owned the building since 1983, but it’s unclear how much it paid for the property. Several calls to the telephone number listed online were not answered.