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L3 buys Soho resi co-op for $42M, plans office conversion
Unit owners and retailer Carson Street vacated prior to sale
In 2014, the owners of co-op units at a Soho apartment building decided to join forces to sell their homes. Now, L3 Capital, a Chicago-based investment firm that specializes in retail properties, is buying the property for $42 million, with plans to convert it to an office building.
The deal at 61-63 Crosby Street, which closed Monday for $2,040 per square foot, is a rare example of a co-op building’s residents banding together to not only sell their property, but also to vacate it prior to the closing.
The 20,600-square-foot building, located between Spring and Broome streets, holds seven loft apartments and a ground-floor retail space formerly occupied by clothier Carson Street. It comes with 6,500 square feet of air rights.
L3 plans to begin the office conversion later this year. The retail component, which shares the ground floor with one of the apartments, could be expanded as part of the repositioning, said Eastern Consolidated’s Adelaide Polsinelli, who represented the firm in the deal. Meridian Capital Group’s David Schechtman and Abie Kassin and Eastern’s Michael Coghill represented the seller. Schechtman and Kassin were brokers at Eastern when the property hit the market for $50 million in 2014.
Carson Street moved last month to a 3,300-square-foot space at 20 Greene Street, also in Soho.
The Italianate and neo-Greco loft building at 61-63 Crosby was built in 1876 and converted into a co-op in 1981. From 1971 to 1994, A.I.R. Gallery, the city’s oldest women’s artists collective, called the property home.
“The co-op owners decided to take some chips off the table and move out,” Polsinelli said.
Not all developers have been as lucky with co-op residents. In Brooklyn Heights, developer Anbau Enterprises made a $130 million for a retail development site, but shareholders of a co-op building at 75 Henry Street voted against the deal. Anbau was looking to develop a 40-story luxury residential tower with ground-floor retail at the site, which runs from Henry Street to Cadman Plaza West.