The Daily Dirt: The mystery of Site 5

More than eight years ago, developers revealed plans to build office towers on the former sites of a Modell’s and P.C. Richard & Son — together known as Site 5. 

In 2016, the development team — then a partnership of Forest City Ratner and Greenland USA — announced a plan to turn the sites into two office towers totaling more than 1 million square feet. Details about the towers were elusive.

As with the Pacific Park megadevelopment in general, these plans have not panned out. The sad former Modell’s sits vacant. P.C. Richard has not moved. The future of Site 5 is still kind of a mystery, at least to the public. 

A Thursday meeting of the Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation, which I went to virtually, picked up the thread on Site 5, yet still didn’t clarify much. The group’s discussion of previous changes proposed for the site was vague. Norman Oder’s “Learning from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park” blog provides some more detail, like the fact that Site 5 was potentially going to include 1 million square feet of residential space, using the development rights for another never-built tower, the “Miss Brooklyn” office site, which is now the plaza in front of Barclays. Alongside the Site 5 proposal, Greenland also proposed adding 1 million square feet to the six railyard sites, according to Oder’s blog. But apparently because that increased the scope of the project, the state has not moved forward with the Site 5 changes, per Empire State Development officials.

The board on Thursday asked ESD to give a presentation of that older Site 5 proposal and explain it in the broader context of the development. 

It felt like everyone was dancing around the words “developer” or “developers” the whole time. As we’ve reported, Related Companies is in talks to take over the platform sites, but Site 5 is still controlled by Greenland, so it’s not part of that deal. The public portion of the meeting took on a quality of “we’re going to talk about how we can’t talk about the project,” though more was likely said at the executive session. 

It is not clear if Greenland will remain the developer of Site 5, nor what the plans for the railyard will look like under a new developer.  

Hopefully, once the new developer of the platform sites is finalized, we’ll have a clearer picture of where things are headed.  

What we’re thinking about: How much would you pay to hear Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman (allegedly) lobby against newts? Send more amphibian real estate stories to kathryn@therealdeal.com. 

A thing we’ve learned: The New Jersey Pine Barrens are home to three types of carnivorous plants: sundew, pitcher plant and bladderwort. 

Elsewhere in New York…

— Gov. Kathy Hochul has appointed Mamadou Siré Bah as her administration’s first director for Muslim American affairs, City & State reports. Bah previously served as a senior advance associate for the state attorney general.

— A police officer in the Bronx was indicted Monday on charges that he put a man in a chokehold while responding to a call in July 2023, the City reports. The man in that incident passed out. Officials say Officer Omar Habib is the first to be charged under the 2020 law that barred the use of chokeholds. Habib was reprimanded for using the same tactic in a 2017 incident. For that, he lost 30 vacation days and was put on probation for one year.

— A makeshift goldfish pond and attempts to rescue the fish are a point of tension at this intersection in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the New York Times reports.

Closing Time 

Residential: The priciest residential sale Thursday was $20 million for a 5,355-square-foot condominium at 500 West 18th Street in Chelsea. Deborah Kern and Steve Gold of The Corcoran Group had the listing. 

Commercial: The largest commercial sale of the day was $48 million for a 104,526-square-foot office building at 57 Willoughby Street in Downtown Brooklyn. 

New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $12.8 million for a 3,302-square-foot condominium at 520 Fifth Avenue in Midtown. Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group has the listing.