Enjoy some interim community uses while you wait!

Last week, when Domino Sugar Refinery owner Jed Walentas made his first community meeting appearance after announcing SHoP Architect's revamped plan for the site, he was greeted by—as The Brooklyn Paper put it—"snark, derision, and anger" (otherwise known as the Williamsburg welcome).

"He comes across like Jesse Eisenberg with his tennis shoes and his hoodie," said community activist Susan Pelligrino, presumably referring to Mark Zuckerberg, "but he's a total capitalist." (Last we checked, the multibillionaire Facebook founder is also a total capitalist.)

Two Trees has worked hard to soften that image, with promises of an accessible waterfront and over half a million square feet of office space, to be let at half the going rate of luxury housing in the neighborhood, and today they unveiled their first offering to the community: "interim community uses for Domino site E," as their announcement so fondly put it.

"What is currently a vacant 55,000-square-foot lot on Kent Avenue between South 3rd and South 4th Streets will be transformed," read the statement, "into a neighborhood destination with a community farm, bilingual reading room, community green space, family-friendly bike courses, affordable food and goods from local vendors and"—they're not done yet!—"a variety of seasonal programming, including kids days, yoga classes, and hands-on urban farming classes."

The release repeatedly refers to the area as "South Williamsburg," although we've always known the land between Broadway and Grand Street as Southside Williamsburg. A subtle distinction, but one that distinguishes the mixed hipster and Latino neighborhood adjacent to the Domino site from the ultra-Orthodox enclave south of the Williamsburg Bridge, where we're guessing the extensive bike facilities—run by local bike shop Ride Brooklyn, and featuring a "free, family-oriented bike course which will include a basic skills training area for children, novices, and intermediate riders, as well as an advanced pump track for the more skilled riders"—would not be so well received.

The release hits all the right buzzwords, and the Two Trees/SHoP rollout has been nothing if not slick, but is it enough to placate the community?

To be honest, it doesn't really matter. Despite the happy face that Mr. Walentas is putting on the effort, looming in the background is the fact that Two Trees doesn't actually need community consent to build on the Domino site. When he acquired the property from the CPC/Katan consortium last year, it came with over 2.75 million square feet of already entitled development rights. While Two Trees is seeking to get the new SHoP-master planned design approved by City Council, he's got the old Viñoly plan in his back pocket, which he could legally start building tomorrow if he wishes.

"We spent $185 million to purchase this site," Mr. Walentas told the crowd last week, "and we're going to get a return on our investment."

Would a library in a private developer's high rise be the same? (Brownstoner)

The City of New York, like many other large landowners, has been selling its land for centuries. However, these last few months have brought what many consider to be a disconcerting flurry of real estate transactions as the city, citing a cash crunch, moves to sell off a number of schools, libraries and municipal buildings.

The city and others have lauded the sell-off as a way to bring much-needed monies to institutions that are in dire need of help. Trading in valuable real estate, we are told, will keep the city's civic institutions afloat. If only it didn't have the vaguely desperate vibe of a pawn shop swap.

Is the city is making bad—or at least short-sighted—deals in exchange for a little cash right now? As The New York Times, which examined the sudden spate of sales argues: the decision to sell certain properties and keep others is being driven by the logic of developers, not the virtues and the problems of the library branches and schools themselves.

And when private, rather than public interest dictates the city's real estate decisions, that's a real cause for concern, even if those sales will ultimately benefit the public, as the city claims.

For example, the 52-year-old Brooklyn Heights branch requires a $3 million overhaul of its air conditioning system, as well as other repairs, but it's certainly not the oldest or most dilapidated library in Brooklyn, according to The Times. The parcel just happens to be in a posh neighborhood where developers are eager to build luxury housing for the kinds of residents who can afford to do without libraries.

(The Brooklyn Public Library, via a spokesman, has contacted The Observer to say that while it does not dispute that the value of the real estate is a huge factor in the decision to sell the branches, it does feel that the Brooklyn Heights branch is among the system's most dilapidated and was closed for 30 days last summer because of air conditioning problems.)

The same could be said of the Beaux Arts library branch on Pacific Street, located just steps from Barclays Arena. Library officials say that selling the land would allow the branch to build out a more modern space.

While the Pacific Street branch will increase slightly with the move, from about 15,750 square feet to 16,500 square feet, according to the Brooklyn Public Library, the 60,000 Brooklyn Heights branch will shrink considerably. (The library argues that the part of the library that houses the local branch will remain nearly the same, given that much of the of the space is used for storage and the business library is being relocated off-site.)

There's a tendency, in these situations, for both the city and the developers to focus on what is being given, rather than what is being gained by private interests—and what is being gained, rather than what is being given, by the public.

In the case of the Brooklyn public libraries, it's not all that much—while the two libraries are said to need repairs totaling $9 million to $11 million each, most of the proceeds of the sale would go to building the new spaces out. Moreover, whatever money is gained would be just a one-time infusion, rather than a strategy for supporting an under-funded institution in the long run. There's a real question as to why, if New York's economic development during the last decade is benefiting the city as much as Mayor Bloomberg has claimed, such sell-offs are necessary.

The public has been generous to private developers—particularly in the case of Barclays, with city and state subsidies granted on the basis that their developments would be enriching the entire community, rather than just the developer. If that's the case, why is it that the local public library by Barclay's can't afford to stay in its long-time home? What can we expect of even more public-private partnerships that transfer public property to the private sector, relocating to inferior spaces on property that was once theirs in exchange for a one-time windfall?

kvelsey@observer.com

Correction: The Observer previously misreported that the square footage of the Pacific Street branch. It is 15,750 square feet, not 60,000.

Contextualism may be an opiate, but it feels so good.

As Vishaan Chakrabarti, a principal at SHoP Architects, was unveiling the Southside Williamsburg master plan they designed for Two Trees, he evoked the image of Manhattan's skyline. "Just like in the dead center of New York," he told the assembled group of reporters, "we have this parabolic moment—there's this moment of exuberance that happens" as the towers rise on the waterfront, culminating in the towers at the Domino site. The tallest will reach 598 feet, or about 60 stories, making it taller than any other building in the borough.

"And that," he continued, "that's the stuff of postcards all around the world."

But despite the best efforts of SHoP and Two Trees, the plan does not succeed in aping the natural parabolic shape of an organic thicket of towers found in midtown, downtown or even downtown Brooklyn. Nor could it—Williamsburg's new planning regime, instituted in the 2005 rezoning and reinforced in 2009, makes sure of that.

Traditional downtowns grow around transit hubs, and are built by myriad different developers and architects, all working in competition. Through thoughtful zoning and market forces, the tallest towers sprout at the center of the transit network, with heights tapering off as you travel farther away.

But the new Williamsburg and Greenpoint skylines are more Bal Harbour than Brooklyn.

The towers form a narrow stockade on the shores of northern Brooklyn, a sort of Potemkin village of development to be admired from Manhattan. But behind them—nothing.

Dramatic density differentials are par for the course on the waterfront.

A block or two away from the old Domino refinery, the skyline plummets to near zero—most sites across the street are zoned exclusively for industrial use, and cannot be developed beyond one and two stories. There is no gradual downward gradient. "There's no way to hide that," admitted Mr. Chakrabarti of the disparity in heights.

It's not hard to see how it ended up this way. The rezonings took the path of least resistance between the pro-development wishes of the Bloomberg administration on the one hand, and the anti-growth attitudes of vast inland neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint on the other.

Manufacturing districts, where there weren't existing residents to bother, were upzoned. Development in established residential neighborhoods, on the other hand, was restricted.

The result is an awkward hybrid that pleases nobody. There isn't enough supply allowed to meet demand and temper the wave of gentrification shooting over northern Brooklyn, but what supply is allowed comes in the form of towers so out of place that they spark resentment throughout the community.

When the existing neighborhoods of New York were built before World War II, it was during a time when increases in demand were met by gradual but widespread redevelopment. Two- and three-story townhouses were replaced by six-story tenements, and when demand reached a fever pitch, as in Manhattan and a number of neighborhoods in brownstone Brooklyn, these were in turn redeveloped into grand apartment houses and skyscrapers. The redevelopment thinned as you got farther from the city center and subway stations, the result being the "parabolic moment" that Mr. Chakrabarti spoke of at the Domino unveiling—the true "stuff of postcards."

But today, the zoning code does not afford the opportunity for such organic development in the neighborhoods of northern Brooklyn.

Away from the glassy waterfront towers, much of northern Williamsburg is frozen in its vinyl-sided past.

With high-rises on the waterfront and row homes farther inland, the planning lacks provision for mid-rise buildings. Six stories or more, the traditional New York mid-rise smooths out the transitions between towers and townhouses, marrying the density needed to meet demand with a human scale that doesn't cast shadows for blocks.

But the standard new law tenement, a design that developers were eagerly building in the early 20th century in Southside Williamsburg, is now twice as dense as what's allowed in vast swaths of Northside, Greenpoint, East Williamsburg and Bushwick.

The word that leaps to mind is "capricious." Why are Manhattan-style high-rises acceptable west of Kent Avenue, while landowners across the street are not allowed to build so much as a single-family home, their land instead reserved for low-value industrial use?

And from a transit point of view, the planning makes little more sense. High-density building is allowed more than half a mile from the Bedford Avenue L, on the waterfront, but no housing is allowed at all on the blocks immediately adjacent to the Morgan Avenue stop. And it's the pre-war neighborhoods, which sprouted naturally closest to the L, where residential development was most restricted in the rezonings.

The development on the Brooklyn waterfront may look nice from Manhattan, but it's hard to see what it's given its home borough.

From a pro-development perspective, the amount of supply allowed is clearly insufficient to meet demand, evidenced by a near-tripling of housing costs in Williamsburg since 2004 and the wave of gentrification racing across Bushwick. Rents there recently jumped a stunning 17 percent in just 30 days, according to real estate brokerage MNS.

And far from allowing enough supply to bring down prices, the towers on the waterfront may have backfired. Despite being insufficient to bring down prices, the outsized heights on the river have helped foster the widespread impression of an overdeveloped Williamsburg. Anti-development sentiment has flared across northern Brooklyn, out of proportion to the relatively paltry number of new units.

Far from being a model for the rest of northern Brooklyn, the Williamsburg rezonings are seen as a cautionary tale.

Bushwick—soon served with the high prices of Williamsburg, but none of the new housing.

"We don't need the speculation that Bushwick is the next Williamsburg," Councilwoman Diana Reyna told The Wall Street Journal in October, angling for a rezoning that would limit development in Bushwick to low-rise structures. (Though given the pace of things, it might be more realistic to talk about preventing Broadway Junction and East New York from becoming the next Williamsburg.) Even Mayor Bloomberg doesn't dare rezone the manufacturing districts of East Williamsburg.

The location of the new development also raises concern. Newly built market-rate apartments in Brooklyn these days are almost never affordable, but some are less unaffordable than others. There is new construction in Bushwick, for example, that was overbuilt during the boom and is now within reach of upper-middle-class strivers. The waterfront, on the other hand, where most of the new housing is allowed, is reserved for the unabashedly wealthy.

None of this is the fault of SHoP or Two Trees, who, unlike some waterfront developers, had no role in the rezoning. But it's hard to see their piece of the waterfront as emerging any more organically. Even if Jed Walentas' waterfront towers are built to a higher quality than the Northside Piers—and there's every indication they will be—they are unlikely to be resented any less by the community.

The L is about to get some new, non-formstone-faced neighbors.

In the midst of yesterday's frenzy of Domino Sugar Refinery-themed press coverage, squished L train riders could be forgiven for asking: how much more development can Williamsburg handle? With only two tracks in a largely quad-tracked system, the L is not as well-endowed as some lines—so how much more Williamsburg can the L really take?

As it turns out, quite a bit.

The L recently underwent an upgrade to its signaling system, with the MTA installing something known as communications-based train control, or CBTC. The installation was riddled with issues, as any nighttime L rider can attest to, but now that it's done, the line's maximum rush hour capacity is up to 26 trains per hour. Not the highest-capacity tracks in the system—the express tracks on the Lexington Avenue line are capable of 27—but significantly more than the 19 trains per hour that currently run during the morning peak, or about one every three minutes. (And this is nowhere near the theoretical maximum capacity of a two-track system—some lines in the Moscow Metro do a whopping 40 trains per hour during rush hour.)

The maximum capacity of 26 trains per hour on the L, a 38 percent increase over current peak service, would require some upgrades, but nothing on the scale of the CBTC installation and debugging that drove L riders crazy for years.

For one, the MTA would need more rolling stock—that is, more trains. The MTA already has an order in for 300 brand new R179s, as the next model will be called, and the 2015-19 capital plan will include an order for an even newer model, the R211. (And while American subways have been reluctant to embrace them, there's always the possibility of buying new articulated train sets, which can hold more people without having to lengthen platforms.)

"And when we get up to a point where we run 22 trains per hour," MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz told The Observer, "then there's the issue of traction power that we need to address." He couldn't cite a concrete cost, but said that it would be a "minor fix."

And that's just for peak periods, which have the highest ridership and tightest capacity constraints. But outside of rush hour, the subway has a virtually unlimited supply of excess track and train capacity. Aside from periods when the tracks need to be worked on, the MTA should have no problem keeping up with the L's much-touted night and weekend ridership.

Mr. Ortiz also emphasized that these capacity issues are much further down the line than Two Trees' Domino project. The L's excess capacity is measured in the tens of thousands of riders per day, while Jed Walentas is only looking to add 2,284 new apartments to the waterfront—apartments that will be as close to the Marcy Avenue stop on the J/M/Z as they are to the Bedford Avenue L.

As for Mr. Walentas's planned office space, it will be essentially "free" from a transit capacity point of view. Workers coming in via Manhattan will have roomy reverse-peak trains all to themselves, and workers arriving from farther out on the L will disembark at Bedford Avenue, before the most congested segment between there and Union Square.

Two Trees also plans to incorporate a new ferry landing at the southern end of their site. But the ferries, though pleasant, are little more than a rounding error compared to New York City's subways. Luckily for Williamsburg (and its developers), there's plenty of train capacity left before people have to take to the water.

A bird's eye view of the Domino Sugar site, as Two Trees would like to develop it.

When Two Trees Management bought the old Domino Sugar site from CPC Resources and a reluctant Katan Group, a local developer told The Observer that Jed Walentas would be "crazy to go back to ULURP" for a rezoning of the site, which had already been approved for thousands of high-rise apartments.

But going back to to everyone's favorite acronym (to pronounce, at least) is exactly what Mr. Walentas intends to do. He and SHoP, the New York-based architecture firm that Bruce Ratner tapped to design the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards after Frank Gehry proved too expensive, called a group of reporters to SHoP's offices near City Hall on Friday to show off their plans for the site.

The first thing Mr. Walentas spoke about was Two Trees' desire to expand the amount of parkland included in the project—adding two new acres—and to make it more accessible to the public.

He criticized the open space in the old site plan as something that "felt very much like a privatized front lawn for people who lived there," and spoke about his desire to pull the buildings back inland to make more space for the quarter-mile-long waterfront park, as well as add a new public street between his buildings and the waterfront.

The old sugar refinery will house office space.

But the extra park space comes at a price: the towers will have to rise higher to make up for the smaller footprints. The tallest tower on the site would rise to 598 feet, or about 60 stories—much taller than the 340-foot maximum height in the currently approved plan.

Of the project's height, Mr. Chakrabarti conceded that "there's no architectural way to hide that" on the edge of a neighborhood that otherwise tops out at around six stories.

"Contextualism is an opiate for the masses," said Mr. Chakrabarti at one point during the Q&A. Refreshing candor, but a line that he may want to work on before the community board meeting.

Overall built square footage would rise to about 3.4 million, with a full half a million extra square feet of office space, which the developer claims will triple Williamsburg's existing commercial space. As previously reported, the office space will rent for much less than the apartments—about $25 a square foot, half what Mr. Walentas says he can get for housing—though with so much of it, perhaps he's hoping he can make up for it on volume.

Jed Walentas says he'll accept lower rents to get independent retailers.

To accomodate all the extra office space, the site would lose 116 apartments (which should please the community), as well as some of its retail (no two-story big box stores in this plan) and about a third of its parking.

In lieu of the Rafael Viñoly masterplan that CPC-Katan wanted to build, Two Trees will be bringing in SHoP to design two of the buildings, with the other sites handed off to other architects.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, the SHoP principal who spoke for the the firm at the meeting, seemed eager to build the taller rectangular tower with the cut-out in the middle, whose rendering bears a faint resemblance to the towers SHoP has planned for Atlantic Yards. The differentiated window framing, featured somewhat haphazardly at Atlantic Yards, will be accentuated and formalized into a "game of squares," as Mr. Chakrabarti called it, though he downplayed the similarities to SHoP's work at Atlantic Yards.

The Observer spoke to local councilman Steve Levin, who represents the waterfront neighborhoods from Brooklyn Heights to Greenpoint, and his first observation about the plan was that "from a design and architectural perspective, it's certainly bold."

His number one concern, though, is affordable housing.

Two Trees, the councilman said, "had their lawyers look at it, and they said you're not bound by the commitments made by CPC" on affordable housing. "But from my perspective, I want to make sure that whatever commitments CPC made are realized."

"They've committed to 660" affordable units, he continued, "but they aren't going to say that's necessarily going to be 30 percent." (Two Trees wants to build 2,284 units in total under the new plan, and 30 percent would be 685.)

And commercial, too. (CPC Resources)

Union Square too expensive for your tech start-up? DUMBO too full? Downtown Brooklyn too... Downtown Brooklyn? Jed Walentas has a new suggestion: how about the Williamsburg waterfront?

Two Trees is looking to return to its commercial roots at the old Domino Sugar factory site, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jed wants to convert the 11-acre site's signature structure into office space and throw up a new office building, for a total of 630,000 square feet. If successful, that would be nearly twice Williamsburg's paltry existing stock of 350,000 square feet of large-block space.

In explaining why, he took a dig at the rest of the waterfront and Long Island City to the north, which lack the vibrancy of mixed use developments. "They don't make great urban places," he told The Journal. "They don't integrate into the neighborhoods."

And to sweeten the pot, Two Trees is looking to offer the space with a massive subsidy: office rents will average about $25 a foot, or about half the price of space in midtown south. (Jed told The Journal that he thought he could get four times that for apartments.)

The Walentases are no strangers to taking a loss on one part of a project to boost another—back in the early days of DUMBO, David Walentas gave 100,000 square feet of free space to arts groups to liven up the neighborhood. And while Two Trees is waiting to develop one of its inland lots on Kent, it's looking for "creative interim uses" for the long-vacant 55,000 square foot property.

"You're drawing people largely from that community," Sean Black, a broker at Jones Lang LaSalle, told The Journal. And with good reason—both the Bedford Ave. L and the Marcy Ave. J/M/Z stops are a three-quarters of a mile walk from Two Trees' site down under the Williamsburg Bridge.

The plan would have to go back through the zoning ringer, though local councilman Stephen Levin seemed warm to the idea, telling The Journal: "I'm supportive of mixed-use development all up and down the waterfront."

The top 10 floors of the massive Mercedes House have been sold off to an investor. (Urban Edition)

The second phase under construction. (Skyscraper City)

For more than a year now, ever since the very first rental units at the monolithic, magnificent Mercedes House came on the market, Two Trees Management has been debating what to do with the rest of its zig-zagging luxury building on the Far West Side of Manhattan. The massive block-long project was a gamble for the Brooklyn firm, about as big and brash and far away from its home turf in Dumbo as one could get (without going to Godforbid, N.J.).

Mercedes House was built in two phases, a swooping base and a connected tower. There would be two sets of rentals, and, the cherry on top, a contingent of condos crowning the 1.3-million-square-foot building, with better finishes and excellent views, on floors 22 through 32. "Everything was high end," Two Trees managing director Asher Abehsera told The Observer late last week.

He had called in part to set the record straight about the sale of those condos units in a block to Invesco, the Atlanta-based investment management group, that was widely reported last week. Mr. Abehsera was annoyed by the apparent suggestion in some outlets that the 162 condos, which had traded for $170 million, had somehow been sold from a position of weakness, which he insisted was not what happened. "It was totally not the case that we could not sell the condos individually," he said. "It was that we found a deal that met our numbers, and met them quite nicely."

According to Mr. Abehsera, he had reached out personally to a few long-time partners—no brokers, just him and his professional pals—and Invesco came back with a deal that worked for all the units, so why wait? Why waste time and money on condo offerings, marketing, sales? "The idea was, for them, their worst apartment started on the 22nd floor and almost every one has water views," Mr. Abehsera said. So it was a good deal for both sides.

An Invesco representative declined to comment on the deal.

It does fit a pattern for the firm, though. Earlier this year, Invesco bought two nascent condo projects in Brooklyn, 75 Clinton in the Heights and the Arias in Park Slope, and is in the process of converting them into rentals. "This is not a new strategy for them," one person familiar with the deal said.

Mr. Abehsera said that Mercedes House is starting to fit the pattern for residential development in the city, which remains difficult because of lending standards, especially on 80/20 projects where one-fifth of the units are set aside for affordable housing (albeit in exchange for subsidies)."Large-scale 80/20 projects today in Manhattan is just not economically viable anymore," he said.

"Look at us and MiMA," Mr. Abehsera continued. "You sell off the bottom, in our case to Mercedes, in theirs the Yotel, you build a mix of rentals in the middle, and you put condos on top, but maybe you sell them in a block instead of pieces," he said. Like the Mercedes House, though, the rental market has proven so strong that Related decided to swap its top-of-the-line, top-of-the-tower 1 MiMA condos for high-end rentals.

"Simply put, we achieved the value we were seeking," Mr. Abehsera said.

A sweet deal?

During our conversation with Two Trees managing director Asher Abehsera on the success of the firm's massive Mercedes House project, we turned briefly to the topic of the Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg.

As we previously reported, Two Trees is rethinking the entire Domino project, including the controversial move of how much affordable housing to include. We asked Mr. Abeshsera how things are progressing. According to him, the planning process is just getting under way.

Domino is really about us working internally and optimizing the best development plan and also working with the powers that be to make sure it’s something we’re all excited about executing, that’s good for the city and good for everybody. It’s so big, you can’t—right now we really don’t know.

You think about in what’s the best and highest use? Obviously the previous owners, well, they’re still the owners until we close, but maybe their plan wasn’t the most viable for the site, and paying homage to the culture of the area, and, more importantly, what people want, and we do a very good job at that.

So the honest answer is, we’re thinking, creatively about how can we use the footprint, how can we use the allowable FAR, how can we use the market-rate component, the affordable component, and come up with the most exciting project, that’s well program and that’s not too saturated in one respect or another. Programming is the real word there right now, we’re focusing on how to program it right now.

Should be an interesting one to watch.

Welcome to West End Avenue?

Who would want to live all the way out on 11th Avenue, at 54th Street, no less? What’s there? Nothing! Except the Mercedes House, where the answer to first question appears to be: everyone!

According to Two Trees' Asher Abehsera, the second phase of the massive Far West Side development has been renting faster than a sports car, with more than half of the units gone since coming on the market a little over two months ago. So far, 174 of the 384 units have been leased, and move-ins are underway—without the help of any outside brokers, Mr. Abehsera said.

"I don’t know that other people have done 170 apartments at market-rate prices with no outside brokers in two and a half months. That’s probably a big deal," he said.

Mr. Abehsera credits this to factors both in the market and at the company. "I think to some extent there’s obviously a shortage of product in the marketplace, so anything that’s out there and aesthetically is nice, people have a real interest in," he said. "At the same time, I think, we’re probably doing better because our design is so spectacular. It’s an odd shaped building, it’s really impressive, it really feels when you walk in the lobby or see the building from a distance, it has a premium feel."

Take a tour of the Mercedes House >>

The project was designed by Enrique Norten, the inventive Mexican architect whose profile has been on the rise in New York during the boom. His biggest project yet, it features a unique zig-zagging design that creates courtyards on two sides of the building, perched atop a Mercedes Benz dealership (hence the name). Mr. Abehsera said that open space was among the features that was helping to attract renters.

"We have a spectacular amenity program with 28,000 square feet of interior, contiguous space, with light and air and 60,000 square feet of outdoor space," he boasted. "Within that interior space there’s weight lifting, boxing, yoga studios, an indoor pool, spin room, juice bar and all that. One of the outdoor decks had a lounge pool, which is pretty impressive. That’s actually a big role in the decision making of people moving out to the building."

According to Streeteasy, rents start around $3,600 for a one-bedroom, $4,150 for a two bedroom. The entire first phase of the project, which hit the market in spring of last year, have been leased.

For those without the means to lease, check with the city, because there are 96 affordable units in the building, part of the inclusionary housing program. There are also condo units on the top 10 floors of the 32-story building, but it looks increasingly like those units will be rented, instead. "As we approach completion, around Thanksgiving time, our thinking would be probably to rent them," Mr. Abehsera said.

Despite what seems like a challenging location, well, it's not, according to Mr. Abehsera: "I think that going into the product, when we first came to market, we had no expectations, we had no real confidence in terms of what we would be getting. And what happened was a couple of things. We didn’t realize the built-in audience who works on 8th Avenue, 7th Avenue in the 50s, the financial firms, for them it’s a breeze in terms of walk to work. You also have a real audience concentrated in living on the waterfront, you know, spectacular views, you have the Hudson River Park. You’re only a very short walk to Columbus Circle, you’re a very short distance, also, to the Upper West Side, if you wanted to go that route. Or to Midtown or the Theater District."

"I’m seeing, just from the people moving into the building, who we’re interacting with, it’s a real, dynamic, young New York market that’s just excited about living on the West Side," he added.

Still, to further his efforts, Mr. Abehsera has hatched an ingenious plan to help the once dowdy area's cache: he wants to extend West End Avenue all the way down to 42nd Street. He said the idea dawned on him once while walking to the project from the Upper West Side. Looking around at all the development going on, he believes it makes perfect sense.

"If you got to 58th and 11th Avenue, there’s no such thing, it’s 58th and West End Avenue," Mr. Abeshsera said. "If this was called 53rd, 54th and West End, you’re talking about a very different building. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, between us, Silverstein, Related, Gotham West, and you have Durst, as well, with their project on 57th."

"People don't realize it yet, but this is the place to be."