Emmut to replace old “Montel Williams” studio with two rentals

Developer pays $25M for Hell’s Kitchen facility at 433-440 West 53rd St.

From left: 433-440 West 53rd Street in Hell's Kitchen and a still from "The Montel Williams Show" (credit: CBS) (inset: Richard Guarino)
From left: 433-440 West 53rd Street in Hell's Kitchen and a still from "The Montel Williams Show" (credit: CBS) (inset: Richard Guarino)

The site of a Hell’s Kitchen TV studio that long housed “The Montel Williams Show” will soon become a pair of rental buildings.

Emmut Properties just paid $25 million for 433-440 West 53rd Street, a two-story property where Montel Williams, veteran host and payday loan pitchman, ran his show until its cancellation in 2008.

The developer plans to build a pair of six-story luxury rental buildings with more than 60 units in total at the 42,500-square-foot site. The property lies within a Special Clinton zoning district and has a maximum floor-area-ratio of 4.2.

The seller is the Duke family’s All Mobile Video, which took ownership of the studio in 2001, upon buying all soundstages owned by Unitel Video. Unitel had bought it in 1993, records show.

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Friedman-Roth Realty Services’ Richard Guarino, Nadeem Haque and Kevin Nguyen were the brokers on the deal. Lawyer John Gregory Kost represented the seller.

The studio is currently used for a variety of short-term projects, said Eric Duke, head of mobile production at All Mobile Video.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, the Gotham Organization’s 1,238-unit luxury rental complex Gotham West, which opened in 2013, has rents ranging from $2,750 to $8,700 per month, as previously reported.

Emmut has developed several mid-rise rental buildings in the area, and in October, picked up a five-building assemblage on the Bowery in Nolita for $47 million.