The makeover of 1932-vintage 70 Pine St. from insurance company offices to chic, contemporary apartments cost $50 million more than planned, and took a year longer to complete than expected.
For a project which mere “conversion” seems inadequate to describe, owner Rose Associates had to come up with creative solutions to bizarre challenges — which included a deal with a private club to swap a whole floor for an easement that Rose needed to put bedrooms on one side of the tower.
But quietly, over the past few months, 70 Pine St. — a landmarked, 66-story Art Deco skyscraper dark since AIG moved out in 2009 — finally got a new heartbeat. It welcomed its first new life in November — guests at Q&A, a 132-room apartment hotel designed for stays of up to 30 days, on floors 3 to 6.
And this month, tenants began trickling into the first wave of 612 luxury rental apartments designed by Deborah Berke & Partners Architects, of which 150 will have private outdoor space. A stroll through finished units revealed spacious layouts, hardwood floors, thermopane operable windows and washer-dryers in every unit.
Right now, floors 7 to 10 are open, with starting rents of $3,000 for studios, $4,730 for one-bedrooms and $9,250 for three-bedrooms. Two-bedrooms coming online in a few weeks will start at about $7,000.
But rents will be much pricier on higher floors as they’re rolled out over the next few months until all are ready by November.
“In the fullness of time, we will have the highest rents ever downtown,” Rose Associates co-president Adam R. Rose predicted. They’ll reach above $90 a square foot “at least,” Rose said of the highest floors.
By comparison, at reigning downtown rental champ 8 Spruce St., Streeteasy.com lists 16 units on the market asking $82 per square foot, compared with 814 “previous” rentals at $94 per square foot. Miller Samuel analyst Jonathan Miller attributed recent lower rents at 8 Spruce to “what we see as signs of cooling in the luxury rental market.”
The seven-year vacancy at brooding 70 Pine had cast a pall over downtown, where an influx of residents to more than 60,000, twice as many as pre-9/11, has been a prime mover in the river-to-river renaissance.
But recasting the skyscraper for a new era tested the mettle of Rose Associates, the New York real estate dynasty that took it over in 2012 after two previous developers walked away.
The project by Rose and partner DTH Capital ultimately cost $600 million.
Unlike Rose’s earlier offices-to-apartments conversions, “There was nothing about it that was standard or predictable,” Rose said.
Conversion architects Stephen B. Jacobs Group had to preserve the tower’s designated city landmark aspects — not only its facade, but also a sprawling, marble-drenched lobby and certain esoteric interior features, such as absurdly wide corridors laid down in 1930.
Yet Rose said 70 Pine’s protected status “was the least problematic” issue. He praised the Landmarks Preservation Commission as “cooperative and terrific.”
But “construction was much more complicated and expensive than we thought.”
The major issue “was its size,” Rose said. Converting a 90-year-old, 300,000-square-foot building such as 21 West St., which Rose did in the 1990s, “is something we can do in our sleep.”
But 70 Pine St. has more than 1 million square feet and stands nearly 1,000 feet tall. “Every single element of design, permits, approvals, was a one-off, special situation,” Rose said.
One particularly daunting dilemma involved putting bedrooms on 70 Pine St.’s west side. But their lot-line windows overlooked the roof of 60 Pine St. — home to the venerable (1859) Down Town Association.
Because the club could theoretically build above its current height, and thus cover up 70 Pine’s western windows, rooms on that side of the tower could not legally be used as bedrooms. To forestall such an eventuality, Rose horse-traded a “light and air” easement from the club.
In a deal where “money was involved, too,” Rose said, he gave the association 70 Pine’s entire second floor, where Rose built 33 guest rooms for the club reached by elevators from its own lobby.
Coming soon to 70 Pine are an Urban Market gourmet store, a Black Fox Coffee shop and a two-level, 23,000-square-foot La Palestra fitness and wellness center below ground, half of which is already open.
Sexiest of all is a four-level, tower-top restaurant, lounge and event space run by Spotted Pig star chef April Bloomfield and her partner Ken Friedman. This page shows the first image of one floor of the complex, to open in February 2017.
Rose calls it “Spotted Roof.” But he laughed, “Don’t worry, that won’t be its real name.”