Dock 72 Lands 63K SF Relocation Of Pratt Institute Grad Program
Boston Properties and Rudin scored a new tenant at Dock 72, their beleaguered 675K SF office development in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The Pratt Institute has signed a 63K SF lease to relocate its graduate fine arts and photography facilities to the sail-shaped building that looks out on Wallabout Bay, the landlords announced.
The Pratt Institute will occupy the entire third floor of the 16-story building. It expects to welcome students by the start of the fall semester in August. BXP and Rudin, which own the building in a 50-50 partnership, are building out 100 individual art studios, seminar and critique spaces, gallery spaces, a black box for performances and projections, and a computer lab before Pratt’s move-in date.
“Pratt’s forthcoming Fine Arts and Photography studios are exactly the sort of creative use that will flourish in this environment,” Rudin co-CEO Michael Rudin said in a statement.
Pratt’s fine art and photography graduate facilities will move more than 2 miles from the Pfizer Building at 630 Flushing Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
BXP Senior Vice President Andrew Levin and Rudin Senior Vice President Robert Steinman repped building ownership in the deal, while Pratt represented itself.
“There is a long-standing connection between manufacturing and art, much of which is steeped in the practice of making and creating,” Pratt Institute President Frances Bronet said in a statement. “The corridor that connects Pratt and the Brooklyn Navy Yard brings together emerging artists with Navy Yard designers, fabricators, inventors and business owners.”
Dock 72 has, to this point, been a financial albatross for its developers. BXP took a combined $111.2M in impairment losses on the value of its investment in Dock 72 between 2020 and 2022, according to its annual report last year.
The developers' construction loan on the building was originally set to mature last month, but they modified and extended the debt in December 2022, pushing the maturity date to Dec. 18, 2025, according to the company's regulatory filings. The loan had an outstanding balance of $198.4M as of last February.
Even more uncertainty clouds its fate. More than 200K SF of the building is leased to WeWork, which stopped paying rent last year, prior to filing for bankruptcy.
While WeWork has shuttered dozens of locations in New York as part of its restructuring efforts, it has continued to operate its space in Dock 72, a landlord spokesperson told the New York Post.
It isn't clear whether WeWork has restructured its lease at the building. A WeWork spokesperson told Bisnow last week that it was withholding rent from landlords who weren't meaningfully engaging in renegotiations. Attorneys for a group of landlords estimated in court filings the company didn't pay roughly $33M in January rent.
