Inside One Wall Street, Harry Macklowe's Huge Downtown Condo Conversion Built For New York Lovers

Macklowe Properties, the developer of skinny supertall condo tower 432 Park on Billionaires Row, is getting set to deliver its long-awaited follow-up: the conversion of a historic bank tower — designed in 1929 by the architect who designed The Barclay-Vesey Building — into a 566-unit condo building over 175K SF of retail.

Bisnow toured One Wall Street, famous for its 650-foot limestone curtain facade, this week as Macklowe prepares for the official launch of sales early next year. The building is hitting the market at an inflection point in the condo market as sales volume across the city hit a 32-year high this year, although prices haven’t come back with the activity.

With a wide variety of unit prices and a new window-filled extension that will house the Financial District’s first Whole Foods, a 75K SF Life Time Fitness and a European department store that Macklowe officials declined to identify, the building is positioned as a neighborhood center that represents its evolution and honors its history, Macklowe Properties Director of Marketing Richard Dubrow said.

“Why it was interesting to redevelop wasn't just because we could have a lot of condominiums to sell, but also it had great downtown placemaking capability that we were poised to take advantage of,” Dubrow told Bisnow on the tour. “Downtown is really the only neighborhood in New York City that still has the layers of history. They're preserved here in a way that's really not in Midtown, on the Upper East Side or in other residential corridors. It's like a New York-lover’s kind of neighborhood.” 

In 2014, Harry Macklowe paid the Bank of New York $585M for the property, which sits at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street. Since then, he has invested $1.5B into the conversion, the New York Post reported in June. A Macklowe spokesperson declined to give an updated cost estimate. 

One Wall has studios, one-bedroom, two-bedrooms, three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments at prices ranging from less than $1M to more than $12M. The size of units listed on the market range from roughly 500 SF for a studio to more than 3,600 SF for a one-bedroom, according to StreetEasy. 

Forty-seven of the units have an outdoor terrace, said Compass broker Katie Weisz, who is marketing the property. There is a studio marketed at under $1M, a one-bedroom for $1.3M and a two-bedroom for under $2M and a four-bedroom in the mid-$12M, she said. 

The most expensive apartment listed reaches $12.7M, Macklowe Vice President of Sales Matthew Chook said, but the triplex penthouse on the 51st floor hasn’t yet been priced. Weisz and Chook said several buyers have signed contracts to buy units, but declined to give specifics. 

Drawing from his famed Apple store at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, Macklowe added a glass-cubed extension onto the Irving Trust Bank’s 1960s extension along Broadway, which will hold its retail space and some condos.

“We wanted to pull the building back out to re-engage the pedestrians, “ Dubrow said. “[This is] what we are calling a Rockefeller Center kind of approach to the building. It's a kind of a city within a city.”

While the exterior of the building needed little repair by the time Harry Macklowe purchased the building, there wasn't much left from the original interior, Dubrow said, after the Irving Trust Bank built the extension and renovated the property. 

Upon entering the building at the residential entrance along Broadway, a newly created lobby with stone floors inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art antiquities wing, leads to double doors opening to a concierge room complete with a fireplace, desk and jewel tone furniture.

The sales gallery, called the Red Room, contains one of the only parts of the original interior. Macklowe spent $1M to restore the famous Hildreth Meière-designed mosaic, Galerie Magazine reported in 2017.

The sixth floor of the building boasts a Macklowe Properties-operated coworking space near a children’s playroom. On the 38th and 39th floors, there are 100K SF of amenities, including a 76-foot lap pool, a private fitness center, a 4K SF landscape terrace, and a bar and lounge.

The shape of the building allows for unique layouts — there are 190 different floor plans for the 566 condos, Dubrow said.

“There's no lines that just go all the way up and they're all the same,” he said. “They're basically changing every floor.” 

One of the model units — a 2,458 SF three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath condo on the 25th floor with a private terrace — will hit the market at nearly $8.2M. All of the units have kitchens with induction ovens and stoves and countertops made with marble from Lincoln, Nebraska. The terrace overlooks what was once New Amsterdam, with views of hundreds of years of distinct New York City architecture.

The units are hitting the market at a turbulent moment. In the third quarter, there was an 84% year-over-year increase in total units sold in the Financial District, according to quarterly sales data from Platinum Properties, but a decrease of 18% from the second quarter. The average price per unit in the neighborhood is down nearly 12% since Q3 2020, per Platinum. 

But throughout the city, buyers have been particularly interested in new development. This summer, the number of contracts for new development soared over 100%, Bisnow previously reported. 

Jonathan Miller, the president and CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, told Bisnow Friday that One Wall’s introduction will “serve as a significant anchor” for the luxury condo market in the Financial District, but its scale could have ripple effects for the other luxury units on the market in the area.

“It’s a project that introduces an unusually broad range of prices, and I think that’s largely because of the sheer size of the project,” Miller said. “When you introduce a tremendous volume of units being offered against the backdrop of buildings that never sold out in pre-pandemic, it softens conditions throughout the market, which improves affordability, which is a potential draw for new people, new buyers into the market that were priced out before.”

Miller predicts that, because of its size, it could take up to five years for the building to sell out, a timeline that its developer isn’t publicly fretting over.

“Do you want to know if I’m concerned about a plethora of apartments? Absolutely not,” Macklowe told the New York Post in June. “We’re extremely well capitalized. We have low debt. There’s no pressure that we’re compelled to sell.”

This is also the first project that Macklowe has launched since the developer was sued for $125M by residents of 432 Park Ave., who claim there were design flaws that have caused floods, noise and power loss at the 1,400-foot ultra-luxury skyscraper on Billionaires Row.

Macklowe officials told Bisnow the lawsuit, which was first reported by The New York Times, isn’t affecting reception of One Wall Street.

“We haven’t heard about it here, I don’t expect that we will. It’s a completely different building, a completely different neighborhood,” Chook said.“That’s for the legal system to decide or what have you, but we haven’t had any backlash, so we don’t see that as any hindrance to our process.” 

CORRECTION, NOV. 8, 11:40 A.M. ET: The architect of One Wall St. also designed The Barclay-Vesey Building, not the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, as a previous version of this story incorrectly stated. This story has been updated.