Olympia. Photo by Michael Young

BY: MICHAEL YOUNG 8:00 AM ON FEBRUARY 7, 2022

YIMBY went to check out the views from Olympia, a 33-story residential building at 30 Front Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Designed by Hill West Architects and developed by Fortis Property Group, the 401-foot-tall sail-shaped tower will yield 76 condominiums designed by Workstead. The units will come in one- to five-plus-bedroom layouts with sales and marketing led by Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes of the Eklund Gomes Team at Douglas Elliman and Karen Heyman at Sotheby’s. Urban Atelier Group is managing the ongoing construction, Manhattan Concrete created the superstructure, and King Contacting Group is in charge of the CMU work, exterior insulation finish systems, and roofing for the project, which is bound by Front Street to the north, Washington Street to the east, and York Street to the south.

A good deal of progress has occurred since our last update in September, when façade installation had recently passed the halfway mark on the main tower. Now the building is largely enclosed in its system of large windows and dark gray paneling.

Some of the curved metal corner panels around the edges of the flat southern elevation also saw visible progress.

The cladding for the sloped crown will soon be complete, finishing off the curved profile and blending cohesively with the rest of the exterior.

YIMBY got to go up to the 33rd floor to check out the views from the expansive balcony. A major selling point for the property is its unobstructed view of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge with the recently completed two-acre Emily Warren Roebling Plaza directly underneath, the Statue of Liberty and New York harbor, and the World Trade Center complex towering over the Financial District across the East River. All of these elements creative a picture-perfect scene from this sprawling penthouse residence, which is known as Penthouse B and is currently listed at $19.5 million with five bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms measuring 4,298 square feet. The outdoor space is an additional 552 square feet.

Further up the river are the equally iconic Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro Bridges. In the distance are the rising Hudson Yards and Manhattan West master plans, and the architectural mix of supertall residential towers and office buildings from the Empire State Building to One Vanderbilt, the Chrysler Building, and Billionaires’ Row.

Also visible is the growing waterfront skyline of Long Island City and Hunters Point South, Queens, and Greenpoint Landing in Brooklyn.

Olympia will feature over 38,000 square feet of indoor-outdoor amenities spread across three floors in the form of The Garden, The Club, and The Bridge. The Garden will measure 3,515 square feet with a triple-height lobby space and a commissioned sculpture by Jacob Hashimoto, a custom-designed mahogany lobby desk with inlaid red jasper marble counter and inset chamfered edges, Rain Drop Black-mosaic flooring and a variety of wall finishes including raked maple and hand-raked plaster, a lounge with double-height ceilings lined with light ash wood flooring and maple millwork, custom built-in banquettes and lounge furnishing throughout, a private landscaped garden with curated plantings by MPFP, a porte cochere, and a pet spa located just past the lobby via a side entrance.

The 7,237-square-foot Club is tucked in the cellar level with a two-lane bowling alley with custom bleachers and leather cushions, a playroom for kids, a flexible fitness and wellness space for yoga, pilates, barre classes, and personal training, a fitness center, a boxing gym, a lounge with a kitchenette and dining area, screening room, and billiards tables available for private parties or everyday use, a spin studio with a virtual instructor on fully customizable Schwinn virtual trainer spin bikes and a Wellbeats flat screen HD display, and locker rooms with a towel drop-off station, showers, and digital locking systems.

The largest amenity tier, The Bridge, measures 24,476 square feet and is located on the 10th floor. The Bridge features a 60-foot-long, two-lane indoor lap pool, a treatment room, a dry sauna and steam room, a juice bar, an outdoor tennis court with views overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, a 58-foot-long outdoor swimming pool and an additional hot tub, a shipwreck playground for children, a water park with geysers, and an outdoor lounge and barbecue space with al fresco dining.

Olympia is expected to be finished in the latter half of 2022.

Attacked by virus and city government, owners renew call for help

New York /January 31, 2022 12:32 PMBy Lois Weiss

Hotel Association of New York City CEO Vijay Dandapani (Getty, iStock)

How do you sell relief?

With occupancy back down to 42.5 percent, the city’s hotel owners launched a web and TV campaign Monday to tug at the hearts and minds of elected officials.

Specifically, they want financial aid and a break on late tax payments.

“We need real property tax relief. We had a liquidity crisis and now have a solvency crisis,” said Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City, told The Real Deal.

The group did not say how much it is spending on the effort.

The trade group’s new campaign website, StayNYC.com, says, “Saving hotels would be a downpayment on our recovery.” It adds, “Common sense measures like property tax debt relief and assessments that more fairly represent the current value of hotels will keep hotels open and workers employed.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/2lgfOAlDV60

By debt relief, the hotel owners mean a lower interest rate than 13 percent — they would prefer zero — on overdue property taxes. They made a similar call one year ago, and in December released a report showing their taxes as a percentage of revenue had tripled in 2020, to 30 percent.Read more

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The new website says that prior to the pandemic, city hotels employed 50,000 people — largely “immigrants and people of color” — accounted for $3.2 billion in revenue and supported $22 billion in spending from global tourism.

“The future for hotels is even less certain,” said Dandapani, who is hopeful that new Mayor Eric Adams and the overhauled City Council will craft targeted measures that drop assessments, reduce the penalty for unpaid taxes and help hotels stay open.

The association is already suing the city in federal court to strike down a law mandating severance pay of $500 per employee for 36 weeks for hotels that did not re-open by November.

“It’s money that the hotels simply don’t have,” wrote David Paz, president of Omnia Group, which owns the Sister City hotel, in a Jan. 27 Crain’s op-ed.

A few hotels did open, perhaps to avoid the penalty, but Dandapani said 145 have closed since the pandemic began.

The city delivered a blow to hotel developers as well by requiring a special permit to build hotels, a law that is expected to stifle nonunion hotel projects. The measure was passed as a favor to the hotel workers union, although in a few years it could help existing hotels by limiting competition. A pipeline of supply that pre-dated the law includes a Ritz-Carlton opening in May, a Virgin Hotel opening this summer and the Fifth Avenue Hotel opening this fall, all in Nomad.

Before Adams was sworn in, Dandapani told him the industry was looking for “safety and cleanliness.” But the ad campaign is more about money. The city’s hotel property taxes are the highest in the country and “inequitable, unfair and unsustainable,” the trade group leader said.

Of the city’s new proposed tax assessments, he said, “It doesn’t reflect the fact that in the first year of the pandemic, revenues were down nearly 65 percent from 2019 and down 44 percent in 2021,” he explained. “We need short-term real property tax relief.”

The new assessments, released Jan. 18, will affect taxes beginning in July. But these were calculated by the city’s Finance Department when hotels were rebounding. Their occupancy rate was 82 percent in December — the highest in two years — but plunged to 43 percent last week. “Omicron took the wind out of our sales,” Dandapani punned.

The assessments push hotels’ average billable values up by 5.9 percent citywide. Many owners figure to challenge their assessments by the March 1 deadline.

“You have to be in a cave in Afghanistan not to file,” Dandapani said.