Bush Terminal’s Reinvention

Jamestown, Belvedere Capital, and Angelo Gordon’s 16-building Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is 70% leased, but that doesn’t mean it’s mostly done. We visited Jamestown’s Caroline Pardo, who oversees leasing there, and snapped her with a vintage picture of the properties when they were known as Bush Terminal, New York’s first multi-tenant intermodal facility. (The buildings started rising in 1892, back when it was accurate to call the basketball team Knickerbockers). She says the rehab project has been doing a lot of small leases (5,000 SF and up) but some larger ones (closer to 200k SF) are in the works. And there are still nine years of the 10-year plan to go.

We snapped two of the the buildings across the Gowanus Expressway, including Caroline’s office at 882 Third Ave, on the right. When she joined Jamestown from Two Trees eight months ago and Jamestown took a stake in the 30-acre project, 2,400 people worked in the 6M SF, which was used mostly just for storage. The new goal is to form a job-creating community that’s home not just to manufacturers but also to others who make things like designers and engineers. The owners also want to “activate” the ground floors of the industrial buildings. They won’t be rezoned to allow retail, but manufacturers can both build and sell their wares on the ground floor (think a shoe cobbler in Italy). And a food hall is in the works, too, something Jamestown, the owner of Chelsea Market, knows a bit about.