Real Estate

Gotham West Market developers deploy gourmet grub to woo renters

Manhattan property group The Gotham Organization clearly ascribes to the “Field of Dreams” school of real estate development: Bundle first-of-their-kind/best-in-class commercial amenities into luxury residential rental projects and deep-pocketed residents will (hopefully) come. Such is the case with Gotham West, a brand-new rental scheme on the farthest end of West 45th Street.

Opened barely one month ago — and arriving with a $500 million price tag — Gotham West is nothing if not ambitious. More than 550 apartments with some 80 different configurations are packed into four mega-towers set on a nearly full-block slice of 11th Avenue. Renting for between $2,750 and $10,000 per month, Gotham West’s units are clearly aimed at the types of Manhattan professionals typically drawn to Chelsea or the West Village. But this is Hell’s Kitchen’s far southwestern fringe, where quality services are still relatively rare despite the 2011 West Clinton Rezoning scheme — which allows for new development across 18 area blocks between 10th and 11th Avenues from West 55th to West 43rd Streets.

So rather than wait for fellow developers to arrive with brand-name shops and chef-driven restaurants, Gotham decided to bring the goods themselves. Armed with 10,000 square feet of flexible commercial space, Gotham President David Picket — along with architecture firm AvroKO — have created Gotham West Market, a restaurant-filled mini-mall that is reimagining the boundaries between operators, consumers and tenants. “Our first inclination was to get a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but the space was just too small,” Picket says.

Inspired by European market halls and the street-food stalls of Singapore, Picket has substituted a single Whole Foods with more than a half-dozen quality restaurants and purveyors — from Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop and the tapas-focused El Colmado to The Brooklyn Kitchen retail shop and a branch of San Francisco-based Blue Bottle Coffee. (Gotham says these spaces are renting at market-rate prices.)

Arranged along the space’s ground-floor perimeter, each restaurant may cook independently, but they share clients, floor space and (for the most part) alcohol service. Diners indulging in a Slurp Shop noodle bowl can simultaneously sip a beer or ale from bierhaus-inspired Cannibal or a glass of Rioja from Seamus Mullen’s El Colmado.

“Folks flow through the entire market in a way the exposes each purveyor to the most customers possible,” Picket says. “There’s no formal hierarchy here — it’s eight chefs playing off each other and everyone sinks or swims together.”

Convincing such high-profile culinary talent to take a risk on both the location — and each other — proved challenging, admits Julian Hitchcock, managing director at KAM Hospitality, the real estate consultancy which helped secure Gotham’s tenants. “Usually chefs are completely in charge of their entire restaurants,” Hitchcock says. “Our tenants really had to buy into the cooperative nature of this place.”

After barely a month of service, Picket says Gotham West Market is already proving a neighborhood fave — particularly on weekends. And just opened is the Market’s final space — a showroom for hip bike company NYC Velo, along with home delivery to Gotham’s growing residential base. With ample advertisements for Gotham West’s still mostly empty apartments displayed throughout the Market, Picket is clearly hoping his novel food emporium will result in signed leases. “We can’t say for sure that this has happened,” he admits, “but (residential) traffic has picked up since the Market opened.”