CHARGE ACCOUNT: Battery Park City got the culinary wattage it needed when Floyd Cardoz (above), who won Top Chef Masters last year, recently opened North End Grill with restaurant mogul Danny Meyer. (Gabi Porter)
Real estate in the area is thriving, including the Solaire a rental building that’s fully occupied. (
)
Even once-troubled condo buildings like One Rector Park are back on track and selling units. (Lorenzo Ciniglio)
Battery Park City had always been one half positive, one half negative.
BPC was nice, certainly. It was quiet. It came with a stunning view of the water. The buildings were eco-friendly. (One-fifth of Manhattan’s LEED-certified residences are in the nabe.) And it came with greenery and good landscaping.
But it was also dismissed by some as too isolated, too antiseptic and too suburban to compete in this gritty metropolis.
In recent months, though, there’s been a surge of restaurants and gourmet markets into Battery Park city — establishing it, finally, as a real neighborhood.
“We didn’t expect what’s here,” says Salvatore Rasa, who moved to the Verdesian, an eco-friendly rental building at the north end of the neighborhood, three years ago with his wife, Maggie Allen, after spending roughly 30 years in Greenwich Village. “We expected a corporate environment; dull and uninteresting. What we found is really diverse. There are more kids than we thought, more pets than we thought.”
It was always a tall order, getting the necessary commercial venues to make this neighborhood work. For one thing, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of available space. (“There are no remaining sites” available for development, says Lydia Rapillo, vice president of residential leasing at Albanese Organization, one of the pioneer developers in the neighborhood.)
Plus, all the new buildings erected have to be eco-friendly, according to guidelines set by the Battery Park City Authority, which made them slightly more expensive.
But now Danny Meyer has set up shop with not one but three eateries: a Shake Shack (a big hit with the Goldman Sachs crowd, with offices in the adjoining building), a Blue Smoke barbecue joint at 255 Vesey St. and North End Grill, Floyd Cardoz’s high-end restaurant serving up hamachi sashimi and seared diver scallops, at 104 North End Ave.
“It’s fantastic,” says Steve Katz, a resident at another rental in the neighborhood, the Solaire, about North End Grill. “The food is outrageously good.”
Meyer is not alone; pastry whiz Francois Payard is hawking pistachio and passion-fruit macarons at his new bakery across from Shake Shack. Doughnuts from Brooklyn’s Dough and fancy gourmet coffee from Maine’s Coffee by Design are sold at Battery Place Market, the gourmet market that opened last year and did well enough that it opened a second outpost in “Goldman Alley” — the Goldman Sachs complex at 200 West St. Harry’s Italian Pizza Bar is opening a branch, and the Conrad Hotel is also being readied for a launch in Battery Park City.
“Over the last seven years, it’s a wildly different landscape,” says Katz. “Where Goldman Sachs is now was a parking lot [back then] . . . the choices west of the West Side Highway were pretty much zero.”
In short, BPC got the dining boost it had been looking for.
“I did enjoy that we were the quiet, sleepy nook that nobody knew about,” says Barbara Ireland, a broker with DJK Residential, who has lived in the neighborhood for 16 years. “But in order to entertain an out-of-town guest, you had to jump in a cab or go to TriBeCa. Now we’re the hottest spot. Blue Smoke is packed almost every night.”
And if you’re trying to find a vacant apartment in BPC, you might have to duke it out with some fierce competitors.
“Right now we’re seeing a very strong rental market, with the lowest vacancy rate in the last six months,” says Rapillo.
Rapillo’s Albanese Organization manages the 29-story, 293-unit Solaire, which was built in 2002 (and has a LEED Gold certification). The company also developed the 27-story, 254-unit Verdesian. Rapillo notes that both buildings are currently fully occupied, though come April and May several units will come on the market at strong rents. A one-bedroom at the Verdesian will start at $3,850, and two-bedrooms will start at $5,900 per month. Two-bedrooms at the Solaire can go up to $7,500 per month. (In May, a southwest corner unit will go for $9,650.)
BPC may be doing well now, but there were stumbles along the way. The behemoths Liberty Green and Liberty Luxe were originally poised to be condos but when the mortgage crisis hit, they reinvented themselves as rentals and opened last year.
But as rentals, these buildings appear to have done nicely. Liberty Luxe went so far as to ask $29,500 per month for one of its penthouses last year. (Of course, not everything is that pricey. Ireland estimates that overall rents in the neighborhood average $2,900 to $3,600 for a one-bedroom and $4,200 to $6,000 for a two-bedroom.)
Sales are something of a mixed bag: At the Visionaire, which is 85 percent sold, studios start at $670,000; one-bedrooms start at $900,000; two-bedrooms start at $1.455 million and three-bedrooms start at $1.865 million. The 16 units for sale at Riverhouse (according to StreetEasy) range from $850,000 for a one-bedroom up to $4.838 million for a four-bedroom.
Today at One Rector Park — another condo that was selling during the middle of the housing crisis — a 550-square-foot studio can be picked up for $460,000, and, according to StreetEasy, the average sales price was a relatively low $830 per square foot. (Control of One Rector Park went back to its lender, iStar, and prices had to be slashed.)
Owning in BPC is generally a more expensive proposition than in other parts of the city; the Battery Park City Authority owns the land that developers build on, and developers lease the land from them. In turn, condo owners make PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) to the authority every month. That means higher monthly fees (in the form of property taxes) than you’ll find in much of the rest of Manhattan.
And renting in BPC is getting more and more expensive, as well.
“We’ve had an approximate 5 percent increase [in rents] every year,” says Rapillo. “We see people coming in from all over Manhattan — it’s got the gorgeous esplanade; it’s very attractive to families — especially those employed in the financial sector.”
Proximity to Wall Street was, in fact, the first thing that drew Katz to Battery Park City.
“I moved there because I had a job at the World Financial Center,” says Katz. “To live in New York City and have the opportunity to live on the water, have access to the park and have a seven-minute commute to my desk [was great]. I’m a divorced dad of two and it was the perfect combo” of city and greenery for his daughters.
And when Katz’s job moved to Midtown, he paid BPC an enormous compliment: He stayed.
“It’s not like a tourist area,” says Allen, “where you have people falling down drunk or stoned and you have so many tourists — especially on the edge of the [Meatpacking District]. It was just horrendous.”
“It’s wonderful to see people on the weekend — people having picnics,” says Rasa. “Kids can play freely — it’s safe and clean and open to the public.”