The largest apartment building at Brooklyn’s Pacific Park is finally going vertical. The long-awaited tower at 18 Sixth Ave. has started to rise atop a foundation — thanks to a just-closed $460 million construction loan from a consortium led by M&T Bank and Bank of New York.
Joint venture developers Greenland Forest City Partners and the Brodsky Organization plan to open the building in 2022. It’s a key component of the 22-acre complex that was launched 14 years ago as Atlantic Yards, but stalled under previous developer Forest City Ratner.
The $710 million, 500-foot-tall tower will have 858 rental apartments, including 258 affordable ones. Brodsky has also started work on 664 Pacific St., which will consist of mixed-income rental apartments and a new public school.
Greenland EVP of development Scott Solish termed the loan closing a “major milestone in developing Pacific Park’s most ambitious building to date.”
Brodsky teamed up with Greenland Forest City Partners in April 2019. Brodsky is developing 664 Pacific St. on its own.
Early this year, Greenland Forest City sold two other Pacific Park sites to another major New York developer, TF Cornerstone. The involvement of Brodsky and TF Cornerstone brought long-overdue progress to the complex, which inched along during a 13-year-long go-slow.
TF Cornerstone is to break ground in 2020 on 595 and 615 Dean Streets, which will contain 800 apartments, a 72,000-square-foot park and retail space.
Work is also set to start in 2020 on a deck over the exposed LIRR yard on the site’s Atlantic Avenue side, pending MTA approvals. Demolition of old buildings adjoining the yard is underway. The platform will support several more structures.
Bruce Ratner was originally tapped in 2005 to create what was then called Atlantic Yards. But after putting up Barclays Center and one other building, Ratner sold them off. Fearing a residential construction glut in the downtown Brooklyn area, he later sold all but 5 percent of his stake in the entire project to Greenland USA.
Pacific Park is to have 15 buildings with 6,430 apartments — of which 2,250 will be affordable — as well as offices, stores and eight acres of public park space. Greenland USA must complete all the affordable units by 2025 to meet a state-city deadline.
It took a few years, but the large retail space at the Trump Organization’s 40 Wall St. that was supposed to be for Dean & DeLuca finally has a tenant.
Signs just went up for Nerolab Italian Food Zone, an Italian restaurant and bar. The space is 18,500 square feet, but no other details were available. Cushman & Wakefield’s Joanne Podell, who repped the landlord, declined to comment.
D&D signed a lease in 2015, but the crumbling retailer never opened and walked away from the deal in 2017.
Sad news for restaurant-lovers: Le Colonial, the fine Vietnamese-themed restaurant at 149 E. 57th St., has closed after nearly 26 years. No reason was given.