While it hasn’t become Park Avenue, every development step taken on the Bowery moves the Lower Manhattan artery a little farther from its Skid Row heritage.
Broker GVA Williams announced late last month that the Salvation Army put its Chinatown Community Center on the block for upward of $25 million. That sale would be another piece of the ongoing transition from nonprofits and flophouses to higher-end condos.
GVA, the exclusive sales agent for the property, is marketing the 60,000-square-foot building on Bowery as a residential conversion, said Jonathan Plotkin, GVA’s lead account manager for the project. It has already piqued the interest of hoteliers and condo developers.
The building at 223-225 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets, will likely be gutted, rather than demolished outright, because it is overbuilt by 19,500 square feet. He said it’s better to work with the existing space than lose it with new construction. “If you take it down you can only go about 40,000 square feet,” Plotkin said.
The Chinatown Community Center, a soup kitchen and assistance center that serves hundreds of meals a day, occupies the first three floors of the otherwise vacant 10-story building. Because the Bowery “has turned more into a trendy, young hipster community,” Plotkin said, it’s not an ideal location for a community center catering to the Chinatown community. GVA is looking for 20,000 to 25,000 square feet in Chinatown to relocate the center.
Vestiges of the old, gritty days of the Bowery aren’t hard to find. Chinatown properties, a few remaining flophouses, restaurant supply stores and lighting shops still populate the strip. The Bowery Mission — a homeless shelter — is at 227 Bowery. But, the new development has changed the general flavor of the historically down-at-the-heels thoroughfare. New luxury buildings and shops are rising up. Even one of the flophouses, the Andrews House at 197 Bowery, is undergoing a $7-million facelift (see below).
Condos and co-ops sold along the Bowery five years ago for about $700 a square foot, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Now, the units sell for about $1,000 a foot.
Rents, too, in the area are moving up as sales mount.
At the new Avalon Chrystie Place, a 15-story rental building at the south side of East Houston Street between Chrystie and Bowery, rents start at $2,300 for a studio.
“These are rents that would be commanded on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” said GVA Williams CEO and president Robert L. Freedman, who is also working on the Salvation Army deal.
The New Museum of Art at 235 Bowery is also seen as a future neighborhood draw. A cluster of galleries is already springing up nearby, and retailers are following. Caf Colonial on East Houston Street near Bowery is already there and Whole Foods is to set come on the first floor of Avalon Chrystie Place.
Fred Shank, a spokesman for Whole Foods, said the Bowery and Houston location will open in the spring of 2007. It will be the largest Whole Foods in Manhattan at approximately 70,000 square feet, and will have sit-down eateries, Shank said. Whole Foods already has stores in Chelsea, Union Square and in the Time Warner Center.
Whole Foods opted for the Bowery because “it’s a great location. Our Union Square store is very popular. We know many of our customers come from the Lower East Side,” Shank said.
The Bowery is becoming the “spiritual alternative to Chelsea,” GVA’s Freedman said.
One newer property, Nolita Place Condominiums at 199 Bowery, is a full-service condominium in an area better known for walk-up tenements and small co-ops.
“Finding a condominium with full-time doormen is not easy in the Nolita-Lower East Side area,” said Shelley O’Keefe, a vice president at the Corcoran Group who is the sales broker for the property. The 12-floor building is a rental-to-condo conversion. Apartments range between $420,000 and $1.1 million.
At 195 Bowery stands a 16-story building with commercial tenants on the first five floors, with 11 condos on the floors above, said Andy Gerringer, managing director of the development marketing group at Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is selling the project. The units are all loft style and range from 865-square-foot one-bedrooms to 2,400-square-foot three-bedrooms. Prices are about $1,100 to $1,200 a foot. Units in 195 Bowery were being snapped up by people from Soho, Nolita and Tribeca, Gerringer said.
“It’s just remarkable,” Gerringer said, “that this was a place that people wouldn’t have even thought of living in five or six years ago.”
High-end help for the homeless
Building prices are skyrocketing along the Bowery — even those that now house cheap short-stay hotels, or flophouses.
The nonprofit group Common Ground Community paid $2.5 million to purchase the 97-year-old Andrews House in 2002.
The value of the property, at 197 Bowery, today would be up 300 percent from four years ago, said GVA Williams CEO and president Robert Freedman, who is marketing the Salvation Army property nearby, which may become condos (see above).
A decade ago that property “would have been worth virtually nothing,” he added, saying it likely would have sold for around $500,000.
The Andrews House building is currently undergoing a $7 million renovation, adding three partial floors to expand the space to 25,000 square feet.
Rosanne Haggerty, who founded Common Ground, which develops supportive housing for homeless people, said once the construction is finished early next year, Andrews House will house 146 short-term living units for men for an average rent of $36 a week.
“The goal is to essentially reinvent the lodging house as an alternative to public shelters and life on the street for those who have been homeless for long periods and are trying to reenter the housing market,” Haggerty said.
Common Ground hopes to found other higher-end lodging houses in the Bowery, Haggerty said. The juxtaposition of higher-end housing and space for those in need isn’t mutually exclusive, she said. She added that she doesn’t think housing for low-income people diminishes the value of real estate in the neighborhood.