Aurora Capital picks up GW Bus Station retail leasehold

Bridges Development joins $46M deal for 100K sf property in Washington Heights

GWB Market and Bus Station with Midtown Equities Joseph Cayre (Midtown Equities, Loopnet)
GWB Market and Bus Station with Midtown Equities Joseph Cayre (Midtown Equities, Loopnet)

Two developers picked up a piece of an Upper Manhattan retail center.

Aurora Capital Associates and Bridges Development Group became the leaseholders at the 103,000-square-foot GWB Market in a $46 million deal, New York Business Journal reported. The market is the retail portion of the revamped George Washington Bridge Bus Station.

The property, at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge between West 178th and West 179th streets, is 82 percent leased. RIPCO’s Jason Pennington and Jessica Hedrington are tasked with filling the remaining 18 percent, which is mostly smaller spaces inside the bus terminal.

Aurora and Bridges are taking over from previous leaseholder JMB Capital Partners Lending LLC.

Work on the Washington Heights station began in 2014, with an expected completion time of one year. But the station did not open until 2017, two years later and at a cost of $17 million more than planned.

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The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and partner SJM Partners had signed discount retailer Marshalls, supermarket Fine Fare and gym chain Blink Fitness to leases ahead of the property’s renovation. The deals amounted to around half of the available 105,000 square feet of retail space.

Landing those tenants marked a turning point for the property, the Wall Street Journal reported, as the neighborhood appeared to be gaining more residents with spending power.

Elsewhere in Upper Manhattan, a Harlem retail corridor notched New York City’s largest recent increase in asking rents. The average asking rent on West 125th Street jumped 15.1 percent from the spring to $165 per square foot, the Real Estate Board of New York reported this month.

That brought asking rent along the stretch, which was recently awarded the state’s first licensed cannabis dispensary, above where it was in fall 2019.

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