Normandy buying Village office building for $100M: sources

UPDATED, 8:46 p.m., May 3: Normandy Real Estate Partners is in contract to buy a nearly 138,000-square-foot Greenwich Village office building for about $100 million, sources told The Real Deal.

The six-story, 138,000-square-foot property at 797-799 Broadway is best known as the former St. Denis Hotel, where Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs after the Civil War and where Alexander Graham Bell gave his first New York demonstration of the telephone. The hotel was built in 1853 and converted into a Class B office building in the early 1920s.

The property is now home to a mix of medical offices and small-scale retail tenants such as an art gallery, hair salon and an acupuncture clinic. The seller is Cambridge Associates, a company led by Robert Ciaglia and Robert Pappas that has owned and managed the building for more than 45 years, property records show.

The deal is set to close for about $700 per square foot, sources said.

It was not immediately clear what Normandy plans to do with the building. A representative for the Morristown, N.J.-based real estate investment firm, led by David Welsh and Finn Wentworth, did not respond to requests for comment.

The building has an alternate address of 72-84 East 11th Street.

In September, Normandy closed on the $510 million sale of 575 Lexington Avenue to Angelo, Gordon & Co. The firm is also renovating an office building it owns at 119-125 West 25th Street, and recently signed indoor cycling fitness startup Peloton as its first tenant there.