The owners of a long-vacant retail space on the ground floor of the storied Belnord Apartments — where businesswoman Martha Stewart and her daughter recently bought a duplex — are seeking permission from the city to allow a bank to occupy the empty berth.
Manhattan-based firm Extell Development, which owns the 4,639-square-foot commercial portion of the 12-story, mixed-use building at 2360 Broadway on the Upper West Side, has tried to rent it out for more than a decade. Fashion retailer Banana Republic vacated the premises in 2012, and a small section of the space had recently been leased to a Starbucks, according to the application, which was filed Monday by attorney Frank Noriega of the Midtown-headquartered law firm Belkin Burden Goldman.
Zoning regulations dating back more than a decade prohibit a bank from taking over the storefront that fronts both Broadway and West 86th Street, though there are already a handful in the area, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Appliance store P.C. Richard and Son and the chain dentist office Tend lease adjacent space, and CVS currently occupies the opposite end of the building, at the corner of Amsterdam and West 86th Street. Otherwise, roughly 26% of commercial spaces in the area are now vacant.
Extell believes welcoming another financial lending institution — though it’s so far unclear which — to the neighborhood would “help activate the Broadway streetscape and reinvigorate this portion of the [district],” according to the application.
Between 1994 and 2017, Extell owned the entirety of the 600,000-square-foot Belnord, which spans a full city block from 86th to 87th streets between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue until it sold off the residential portion about seven years ago to HFZ Capital Group. It still owns the retail space, but Westbrook Partners took over the condominiums above it from HFZ in 2021, records indicate.
The historic Belnord — in which the Stewarts recently bought one of its 209 apartments for about $12 million, Crain’s reported last month — is famous for its large interior courtyard and the cameos of its facade in the Hulu comedy series Only Murders in the Building. Built in 1909 and designated a New York City landmark, the Belnord was once considered the largest apartment building in America.
Extell President Gary Barnett, who signed off on the application under the limited liability company Belnord Retail, did not respond to a request for comment. His attorney Noriega also did not respond to a request for comment.
Julianne Cuba , 2024-06-04 19:28:04
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