Real Estate

Bowery Salvation Army to become new Ace Hotel

Even the homeless are getting priced out of Manhattan.

The Salvation Army Chinatown Shelter has sold out for $30 million and is moving to Brooklyn. In its place will be a hip Ace Hotel and a luxury boutique condo complex.

The 55,000-square-foot shelter, which also houses the Chinatown Community Center, had served as a soup kitchen and a gathering place and activity center for everyone from “little kids to 80-year-olds,” who must now trek to Brooklyn’s Chinatown to receive the same services, said broker Alan Miller of Eastern Consolidated, who represented the buyers, Omnia Group and North Wind Group.

The developers will keep the building’s structure and do a gut renovation instead of blasting it to smithereens and starting from scratch — because the current building is larger than current zoning rules allow.

The new, 180-room Ace Hotel, which will take at least 18 months to open, is especially valuable because it backs onto a private street that is closed to cars: Freeman Alley, which now houses Freemans, a popular restaurant. Ace Hotel will likely put an entrance there and an additional restaurant, sources tell The Post.

The Salvation Army had underused the property at 223-225 Bowery for years. The community center used the first few floors, but the remaining eight floors of the 10-story building had been vacant for around 13 years.

It had been used as an SRO, or “single room occupancy” hotel, before then. Each floor contained 40 small rooms and one communal bathroom.

The Salvation Army is known for having some of the best real estate in the city. In 2010, it sold its Gramercy Park building for $60 million to the Zeckendorf brothers, who developed 15 Central Park West. That building, 18 Gramercy Park, broke a downtown record when its penthouse sold to Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander for $42 million in 2012. That building, which boasts keys to Gramercy Park — the city’s only private park — was created in 1927 and had been used as a dorm-like residence for young women since 1963. The Salvation Army also owned a property at 347 Bowery, which sold for $7.6 million in 2010. The new owners sold the building last year for $19.2 million, Miller said, adding that it was just another example of this “crazy, rising, real estate market.”

The Salvation Army Chinatown Shelter (right) and the Bowery Mission.
HOW THINGS CHANGE: The Salvation Army is seen down the block on The Bowery in 1956. The area, once known as a haven for the homeless, is becoming increasingly gentrified.