Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Real Estate

Brooklyn Navy Yard office building gets unique ferry dock

The “cool factor” looms huge in today’s office leasing. Tenants, especially in creative fields, demand features and amenities such as communal work areas, outdoor terraces, on-site cafés, health clubs and game rooms.

Many new projects as well as some retrofitted older ones are full of bells and whistles that appeal to millennials and creative types of all ages. But Dock 72, now rising at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, will have at least one feature that’s not only cool, but unique: a ferry dock right at its feet.

In fact, the new Citywide Ferry Service stop, to open in 2018, isn’t just for Dock 72, a $410 million, 16-story, 675,000-square-foot joint venture of Rudin Development and Boston Properties. It’s a new entrance portal for the entire Navy Yard, a 300-acre, city-owned, modern industrial park between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.

But those coming to work at Dock 72 might feel the ferry landing is theirs alone, as it’s almost at the building’s front doorstep.

Dock 72 got off to a hot start. The anchor tenant, burgeoning shared-space provider WeWork, claimed 220,000 square feet and participated in the design of the lobby, common areas, and 35,000 square feet of amenity space by Fogarty Finger Architecture.

(The building itself was designed collaboratively by S9 Architecture and Perkins Eastman.) The fun stuff also includes a basketball court and a 10,000 square-foot landscaped recreation area.

The project boldly wades into a Brooklyn office market that’s seen 900,000 newly created square feet come on line this year, raising the borough’s total office inventory to 45 million square feet. The new construction has not surprisingly spurred buzz about a possible “glut.”

But Rudin Development Chief Executive William Rudin brushed off any concerns.

“Dock 72 is a unique product, surrounded by water on three sides,” he said. “It’s priced very competitively. There are no real estate taxes because it’s on city-owned land.”

Rudin said asking rents for the roughly 440,000 square feet still available are in the the mid- to high-$50s per square foot on lower floors and in the low- to high-$60s on higher floors.

Dock 72 renderingS9 Architecture, interiors by Fogarty Finger

Even with its curtain wall yet to be installed, the project cuts a striking profile on a 60,000-square-foot site jutting out into the East River. A hard-hat stroll through its still-skeletal innards revealed eye-popping views of passing ships and the lower Manhattan skyline.

Some 70,000 people toiled at the Yard to build much of the mighty US World War II fleet. By 2001, the number of workers had dwindled to 3,600. But 16,000 people are expected to work there by 2020, in such fields as film production, organic rooftop farming, digital innovation and fashion design.

Rudin acknowledged Dock 72’s “cool factor,” but noted, “You need the cool and you need infrastructure, and we have both.” The latter includes 14-foot-high ceilings, large open spaces on floor plates of 40,000 to 60,000 square feet ( plates of 33,000 to 54,000 square feet remain available), sustainability features, state-of-the- art wiring and HVAC. V-shaped columns at ground level elevate the office floors well above any flood danger.

The project originated in the last year of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. It was enthusiastically carried forward by Mayor de Blasio as part of his effort to create more tech jobs in the city.

Ground was broken in mid-2016. Developers closed on a $250 million construction loan in January 2017.

Reflecting Dock 72’s unusually collaborative nature, brokers for two firms that are normally archrivals are handling leasing — Cushman & Wakefield’s Joe Cirone, Ron Lo Russo and Patrick Dugan, and CBRE’s Freddie Fackelmayer.