Demolition Prep Underway At 335 Eighth Avenue In Chelsea, Manhattan

BY: MICHAEL YOUNG 8:00 AM ON JUNE 18, 2023

Demolition preparations are underway at 335 Eighth Avenue, the site of an upcoming seven-story residential building in Chelsea, Manhattan. Designed by COOKFOX and developed by MAG Partners, the 200,000-square-foot structure will yield 188 residential units with 30 percent dedicated to affordable housing for low- and middle-income residents under the Affordable NY Program, as well as a 23,000-square-foot Lidl grocery store on the ground floor. Titan Industrial SVC Corp is the demolition contractor and Urban Atelier Group is the general contractor for the property, which is located at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 26th Street within the Penn South affordable housing cooperative, officially known as Mutual Redevelopment Houses.

Recent photographs show sidewalk scaffolding set up around the perimeter of the current occupant of the site. Black netting should soon be assembled over the rest of the structure, and demolition will likely unfold quickly given the building’s modest low-rise scale.

Photo by Michael Young

Photo by Michael Young

Photo by Michael Young

Photo by Michael Young

Photo by Michael Young

Photo by Michael Young

The main rendering depicts 335 Eighth Avenue clad in red brick with floor-to-ceiling windows and several stepped setbacks topped with landscaped terraces on the upper levels. A pair of short mechanical bulkheads cap the structure, and the ground floor will feature oversized windows for the retail frontage.

YIMBY last reported that the Lidl supermarket will feature a bakery, fresh produce, a floral shop, meat and seafood, and other everyday essentials. The store will be the company’s second location in Manhattan, following a Harlem market that opened in February 2022. Lidl is expected to work with Hire NYC to offer employment to residents in the local community and provide comprehensive benefits such as healthcare for all full- and part-time employees, regardless of hours worked per week.

The property is a short walk from the C and E trains at the 23rd Street station.

Demolition is anticipated to wrap up in the third quarter of 2023, and the new residential development and Lidl are expected to open in 2026.

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Power 100 – #50 MaryAnne Gilmartin

MAG Partners scaled its business in a big way during the past year and not long after the company’s birth.

The developer, which MaryAnne Gilmartin founded in July 2020, launched leasing in February for its inaugural New York project, the 480-unit Ruby residential development at 243 West 28th Street in Chelsea. Thirty percent of the units are designated as affordable, and the property includes 8,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. It is named after Black fashion designer Ruby Bailey, and it marked the first of a portfolio of multifamily buildings MAG plans to name after historical and influential women.

“Ruby embodies what we as a company did through the pandemic, where we doubled down on New York and we bet on the city when people were writing its obituary,” Gilmartin said. “We managed to get the financing and the construction underway in very, very difficult circumstances. And now, behold, we have this beautiful building.”

Two other New York City projects from MAG began to take shape in the past year, including at 335 Eighth Avenue, where demolition has begun for a 188-unit rental building. MAG’s project team also assembled a development site at 300 East 50th Street with plans for construction later this year.

Gilmartin also led MAG’s expansion into the Baltimore market by joining with MacFarlane Partners in May 2022 on a 177-acre master-planned community project in South Baltimore. The

1.1 million-square-foot mixed-use development also includes sponsorship from Sagamore Ventures, the family office of Under Armour founder and chairman Kevin Plank, as well as Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group. Since taking over in the developer role, Gilmartin

has signed two commercial leases and an extended-stay hotel development deal, and also started the residential lease-up of nearly 600 units, with a 20 percent affordable component.

“We’ll always be a New York company, but our love of New York and our ability to do what we do, which is to build multiple asset classes and think really big and boldly, brought us to Baltimore,” Gilmartin said. “I think that that was a high-water mark for us to grow the company outside of New York and actually put a flag in the dirt in Baltimore.”

Growing MAG’s footprint into Baltimore contributed to the company more than tripling its employee roster. It now has 33 on staff, 50 percent of them female.

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Lidl to Open New 23K SF Grocery Store in Chelsea

A new Lidl grocery store is headed to 335 Eighth Avenue and it’s anything but little, Commercial Observer has learned. 

Lidl inked a 15-year deal for 23,000 square feet at the base of the affordable housing development between West 26th and West 27th streets, according to developer MAG Partners.

Asking rents were $150 per square foot on the ground floor and $65 per square foot in the basement, according to landlord broker Cushman & Wakefield. The new outpost — set to open in 2025 — will be Germany-based Lidl’s second in Manhattan, after it debuted in Harlem at 2187 Frederick Douglass Boulevard in February 2021. 

Lidl also has locations in Staten Island and Queens and plans to “open even more stores” in the next few years, including a Brooklyn outpost, Or Raitses, senior director of real estate for Lidl’s New York region, said in a statement.

As part of MAG’s deal with 335 Eighth’s owner — the board of the neighboring housing cooperative — to build the 188-unit residential building, it was required to find a low-cost supermarket for the retail space, and Lidl fit the bill, according to MAG.

“Lidl shares our commitment to the greater Chelsea community and will bring excellent service and products to this neighborhood,” MaryAnne Gilmartin, founder and CEO of MAG, said in a statement. 

MAG will break ground on the seven-story project this month, demolishing the existing retail building previously occupied by a McDonald’s, a Gristedes supermarket and restaurant Taco Bandito.

CBRE’s Stephen Sjurset, David LaPierre, Robert Bonicoro and Duane Davis brokered the deal for Lidl while Alan Schmerzler, Sean Moran, Catherine Merck and Patrick O’Rourke of C&W represented MAG. A spokesperson from CBRE declined to comment.

Celia Young can be reached at [email protected].

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Clyde’s Restaurant Group to take over Baltimore Peninsula’s Rye Street Tavern

A Washington D.C. restaurant group is expanding to Baltimore with plans to take over a waterfront tavern in the Baltimore Peninsula development.

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Residents and businesses are moving to the Baltimore Peninsula. Here’s a first look.

Penelope Blackwell

Published on: April 27, 2023 2:13 PM EDT|Updated on: April 28, 2023 9:58 AM EDT

Our nonprofit news organization is made possible by subscribers and donors who value storytelling that impacts and uplifts communities. Thank you for supporting our journalism.

Commercial, retail and residential spaces have opened at Baltimore Peninsula, the ambitious, 235-acre mixed-use development on the site of an old industrial port in South Baltimore’s Port Covington neighborhood.

The first few office tenants and residents have moved into three newly constructed buildings at the historically underutilized site, which neighbors several predominantly Black communities to its south.

MaryAnne Gilmartin, founder and CEO of MAG Partners, the lead developer, is not stopping there.

“We need Baltimore to be on everybody’s radar,” she said.

More than 800 townhomes, a large entertainment venue and plans to reconfigure major nearby roads and highways are also in the works for the multi-block project, spanning some 200 acres. Existing tenants there include City Garage, Sagamore Spirit Distillery and Rye Street Tavern.

Hotly contested due to its record-breaking tax increment financing package — which allows developers to use property taxes generated at the site to pay back bonds issued early on for public infrastructure needs — the $5.5 billion waterfront venture promises more than 14 million square feet of new construction upon its completion. City residents, housing activists and economic watchdog groups also have opposed the use of such a large incentive — City Council approved $660 million in tax increment financing funds in 2016 — given Baltimore’s other pressing and existing needs.

Baltimore could be on the hook to pay back the bond costs if developers fail to lease up the site, which has only landed two new office tenants so far. Between the first two residential buildings, 11 units have been leased.

The H. Chambers Company, a planning and design firm specializing in private clubs and hospitality, is the first tenant to occupy an office within the Rye Street Market business complex located at 2455 House St. The company signed on for about 9,000 square feet of space.

The building can accommodate smaller businesses with spaces around 25,000 square feet, but there are larger floor plans as well. The rooms are divided by glass walls and doors, and “the sun, the light and air is abundant in the all corners of the floor plate,” Gilmartin said.

Robert Hickman, board chair of the design firm, said the company looked all over the region for their sixth office location.

But it was the Baltimore Peninsula that offered a place that was “really special,” he said, including access to an outdoor balcony.

“We needed something that really brings the outdoors in. And we deal in the world of private clubs … it’s all about inside outside,” Hickman said.

CFG Bank has also signed on to lease about 100,000 square feet in Baltimore Peninsula. They plan to move in by the end of 2023.

By 2024, Gilmartin expects enough activity to get nearly 75% of the commercial space leased, she said.

Just across the courtyard are two mixed-use apartments buildings, Rye House and 250 Mission, where maritime-inspired units — with natural wood, and glass and steel finishings — are available. Other amenities include ample green spaces, co-working spaces and some Juliet balconies.

Ryan Watts, the general manager at real estate developer Bozzuto, said the leasing since early April amounts to 15% of the units at Rye House and 10% of the units at 250 Mission.

Of the 416 units at Rye House, 54 will be dedicated to households earning 80% of the area median income, or AMI, while another 35 will be dedicated to those earning 50% of the AMI.

Last year, New York-based MAG Partners and the San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners took over the large-scale development, first pitched in 2016 by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and his Sagamore Ventures development firm. Plank and his associates began buying up the land for the site about a decade ago. Since then, sales at the sportswear company have dropped, and the company has scaled back plans for its new Baltimore Peninsula offices.

In November, developers at MAG and the San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners rebranded the development, changing the name to the Baltimore Peninsula from Port Covington. They said they hoped to turn a page on some of the project’s contentious history.

Sagamore Ventures still maintains a “major equity stake” in the project, and a new corporate headquarters for Under Armour is slated to open in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Gilmartin said the master plan allows for flexibility, and she envisions building a large entertainment or sports venue, as well as an accompanying hotel and conference center.

She also thinks the project’s scale and easy access to a major highway will make it attractive to the film industry.

“And so we are looking at ways the public sector could develop programs that will attract to that industry, because they’re really good jobs; they train the people both on the other side of the camera and behind the camera,” she said. “And they need the kind of space that our master plan is conducive for.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this story.

[email protected]

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Baltimore Peninsula begins transformation from construction site to community

Baltimore Peninsula, the once-industrial South Baltimore waterfront that’s being redeveloped, has turned the corner from longtime construction site to emerging community.

The first phase of the 235-acre project south of Interstate 95 has nearly completed streets, landscaped courtyards and a park with a children’s playground underway. It’s made up of two apartment buildings, now 15% and 10% leased, the Roost hotel, an office building that will be half-filled by CFG Bank and another where 125-year-old design firm H. Chambers Co. moved with 30 workers.

“These are no longer stories or part of a great vision of Kevin Plank. They’re no longer lines on paper,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, one of the developers and founder and CEO of New York-based MAG Partners. “They’re no longer part of a massive construction and infrastructure undertaking. This is a real place.”

Gilmartin’s firm, along with San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners, took over the then-partially built project a year ago as lead developer and investor with owners Sagamore Ventures and Goldman Sachs. Plank, the founder of Under Armour who heads the Sagamore investment firm, spearheaded the project nearly a decade ago, buying up land for redevelopment.

Part of the land Plank acquired is being developed in a separate project across East Cromwell Street as a new global headquarters for the Baltimore-based athletic apparel brand. It’s slated to open in the last three months of next year, with 1,500 workers, a flagship retail store and a multipurpose field.

Gilmartin spoke about Baltimore Peninsula during a media tour Wednesday to offer an initial glimpse of new buildings since the first occupants moved in.

A handful of residents first moved in last month to the project’s midrise, upscale apartments. Workers for H. Chambers — the first commercial tenant — have settled into hybrid schedules in an office building with outdoor terraces and a fitness center.

The developers are working on signing street-level retailers, and a sign just went up on one building for a Roost extended stay hotel, expected to open this summer.

Gilmartin predicted that by the time Under Armour’s new corporate campus opens at the end of 2024, the apartments will be close to 90% leased, while the commercial portion will be between 70% to 75% leased.

Despite a difficult housing market, high interest rates and high office vacancies in parts of Baltimore, including downtown, Gilmartin said she has reason to be optimistic.

For one, she believes economic conditions will improve by next year. Demand for housing in Baltimore, she said, remains strong. And she sees opportunity in the office market that Baltimore Peninsula can tap into, especially in a post-pandemic work world where she believes more people will return to offices as part of hybrid schedules and where fewer office buildings will be able to be built.

Bob Hickman, chairman of H. Chambers, which has been in the city for more than a century, said Wednesday that the firm needed space suited to a hybrid remote and work-from-office schedule that would be inviting for employees. The firm looked in Towson, Columbia, Annapolis and Baltimore. Besides offering a central location for employees, Baltimore Peninsula offered a “forward thinking and inclusive” spot, he said.

“We needed a much more collaborative kind of space,” Hickman said. “We needed something that really brings the outdoors in.”

Gilmartin said she expects office users to be attracted from outside the city with offerings such as build-to-suit options and short-term leases, both of which can be hard to find, and more efficient space for those looking to downsize.

In many ways, this project allows the real estate community in Baltimore to redefine what it means to go to work every day,” she said.

Gilmartin also said she hopes to see Baltimore Peninsula connected to, rather than divided from, the rest of the city and said developers are working on a long-term plan with state and federal highway officials to come up with alternative configurations for the nearby ramps onto and off I-95.

Looking to the future, she said residents will continue to want homes in work-play-live environments, including Washington commuters who may work more days at home.

She believes the project will be well-suited to meet demand from Baltimore’s medical and research sectors as well as the film industry, which she said is recession-proof, offers good jobs and requires access to highways and large spaces.

“I think the film industry could have a place here at Baltimore Peninsula, and we’re exploring that,” she said.

And eventually she envisions building a large-scale entertainment or sports venue that would draw large numbers of people, one that might even justify a hotel and conference center.

“We need Baltimore to be on everybody’s radar,” Gilmartin said. And when it comes to businesses and residents looking to relocate, “we need it to be on the short list.”

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Baltimore Peninsula Developer Leans Into Flexible Office, Considers Building Entertainment Venue

As the 235-acre Baltimore Peninsula megaproject marches toward the completion of its most extensive building phase yet, the development team has embraced agility as a key to negotiating the obstacles working against the $5.5B project.

That flexibility is reflected in lead developer MAG Partners adopting measures like pre-built office space to boost leasing or potentially constructing a new entertainment venue that could draw visitors and spur hotel demand. 

“We tend to think about the possibilities and to know how to pivot and be nimble,” MAG Partners CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin said during a tour of the project Wednesday. “That really separates the mediocre from the good.”

As she walked through the waterfront development’s almost completed Chapter 1B portion, which totals nearly 1.1M SF of office, residential and retail, Gilmartin detailed how her team has responded to headwinds since taking over as lead developer roughly a year ago.

Baltimore’s sagging office market presented arguably the most significant challenge to the development, which includes a considerable amount of office space. 

The office market has gone through a tumultuous period as more companies have allowed employees to work from home. In the first quarter, Baltimore’s office market vacancy hit a new record high above 18% after leasing activity dropped about 50% from the fourth quarter, according to CBRE‘s Q1 market report.

With office leasing lagging in the market and MAG Partners set to deliver a glut of new space, the developer explored measures to boost the project’s attractiveness to more tenants. 

Those measures include offering short-term leases, designing a pre-built office pilot program, and potentially converting office to lab space in the wake of the plummeting demand for office space.

“It’s been slow, but the world is coming back, and we think … that hybrid work is here to stay,” Gilmartin said.

Bisnow/Adam Bednar

Space in Rye Street Market that may end up pre-built offices or even lab space.

MAG Partners has identified pre-built office space — a concept where the landlord builds out, partitions, carpets and readies the space for occupancy — as a sector with the potential to attract tenants amid the Baltimore office market’s struggles.

She said Baltimore’s office market comprises about 14M SF of Class-A and Class-B space. However, she estimated only 10K SF of pre-built product is available in Baltimore. 

MAG Partners plans to offer roughly 6K SF of pre-built office space in its Rye Street Market building, featuring designed units between 1,800 SF and 2,700 SF.    

“I’m doing it as a pilot that I think is going to be very popular,” Gilmartin said. 

MAG Partners also plans to offer tenants short-term leases of two to three years. Generally, the shortest lease offered on office space is five years, with 10-year leases the most common deals.

“The world is still evolving in the post-Covid condition,” she said. “We’re offering short-term leases, we are building out the space, which capital is precious today. So, the idea that a company not in the real estate business doesn’t have to get into the business of building their own space is also an enormous benefit.”

Most innovative approaches to boosting office leasing are confined to the Rye Street Market building, which landed Baltimore Peninsula’s first office lease when interior design and architecture firm Chambers signed a 10-year lease for roughly 9K SF of the building’s 228K SF of office space in September. 

Robert Hickman, Chambers’ board chairman, said the development team’s vision for Rye Street Market as a home for smaller and emerging businesses fits well with the firm’s goals.

Chambers Chairman of the Board Robert Hinkman stands outside his firm’s office at Rye Street Market.

“We don’t want to be a huge company. We want to be a niche company,” Hickman said.

Given the demand for lab space in Baltimore, Gilmartin said the development team is also “experimenting” with turning office space at Rye Street Market into lab space. However, she said, that doesn’t mean converting the building to wet lab space that requires substantial infrastructure investment. 

“It could be places for scientists and researchers to get together where they’re trying new technologies and innovations in the life science, space or bioscience space,” she said. “But we have the building here, and we’ve done the research, and we believe that we should dedicate a portion of this building to lab space.”

MAG Partners still needs to decide what the next construction phase will include once it has fully delivered Chapter 1B and various infrastructure and park projects by the end of this year.

Gilmartin said one possibility is to build a large public venue that attracts enough people to justify building a hotel and conference center on the property. 

“This idea of there being a large-scale entertainment venue available here, whether it’s sports, culture, entertainment, we have inbounds that suggest that if we thought we’d pull it off, meaning that we could have a meeting of the minds, we could build a large-scale venue,” Gilmartin said.

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Five Questions With: MaryAnne Gilmartin Founder & CEO, MAG Partners

When Real Estate In-Depth pondered who would be the candidate for the Five Questions feature for Women’s Month, the logical choice was MaryAnne Gilmartin.

Her background in real estate as she tells it almost began by happenstance, but her hard work has led her to found her own New York City-based real estate development firm—MAG Partners—in 2020 that in a short time has built a $1-billion pipeline.

The Fordham University graduate (undergraduate and graduate degree) began her career with the New York City Public Development Agency (the predecessor to the New York City Economic Development Corp.) and since then has held chief executive positions with some of the country’s leading development firms, including Forest City Ratner and Mack-Cali Realty Corp. She has overseen a host of high-profile projects and has been frank about who has guided her and now pays it forward and mentors others in their real estate careers.

Gilmartin, who serves as a special advisor to Fordham Real Estate Institute’s Executive Advisory Council, recently said at a “She Builds” session held at the university’s Lincoln Center campus, “I’ve built my career trying to bump up against what people think of as a developer and identify more with ‘placemaker.’ If I use the word ‘developer,’ I refer to myself as a ‘civic developer’ because what we do is contribute to civic life and with that comes a great responsibility. I’d love the word developer to mean all that I know that it is, which is a person who creates place, changes the skyline and the ground plane in cities, and builds something of lasting quality that impacts the lives of the community in which it exists.”

Gilmartin served as President and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, where she oversaw a host of game-changing ground-up developments and managed its multimillion square foot residential, commercial and retail portfolio. She also served as Chair of the Board of Directors and interim Chief Executive Officer of Mack-Cali Realty Corporation.

In her tenure at Forest City Ratner Companies, she spearheaded the development of some of the most high-profile real estate projects in New York City. She led the efforts to build Barclays Center, the state-of-the-art sports and entertainment venue and the centerpiece of the $4.9 billion, 22-acre mixed-use Pacific Park Brooklyn development.

She also oversaw the development of The New York Times Building, designed by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano; New York by Gehry, designed by award-winning architect Frank Gehry; and the Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech, a new office building that is a first-of-its-kind space for tech innovation, designed by Weiss/Manfredi on Roosevelt Island. During her tenure at Forest City, the firm also developed Ridge Hill in Yonkers.

Today, MAG Partners is developing a number of distinctive projects, including 281 West 28th Street, a mixed-income residential building designed by COOKFOX that will begin leasing in early 2023. In addition, the company is developing two other residential buildings and a boutique office building in Hudson Square. In partnership with Sagamore Ventures, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and MacFarlane Partners, MAG Partners is leading the development of Baltimore Peninsula, a 235-acre masterplan in Baltimore, MD. In 2023, 1.1 million square feet of office, retail and residential development will open on a prime waterfront location.

Gilmartin is a civic leader in the New York metropolitan area, serving as Chair Emeritus of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a member of the Board of Trustees of The Brooklyn Academy of Music, a member of the New York Public Radio Board of Trustees, and a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Governors of The Real Estate Board of New York. At Columbia University, she is part of the Industry Advisory Board of the MS Real Estate Development Program as well as a member of the real estate advisory board in the Center for AI in Business Analytics & FinTech. In addition to her civic and industry board service, she was appointed a member of the board of directors of the global investment banking firm Jefferies Group LLC in 2014.

Real Estate In-Depth: Your background in real estate is very impressive, rising to president and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, serving as chairman and interim CEO of Mack-Cali Realty during a tense shareholder battle and founding your own real estate development company MAG Partners three years ago. Can you tell us what led you into the industry and what have been your keys to success in what has been a male-dominated industry?

Gilmartin: I call myself an accidental developer because this career path relied on serendipity. I had no inkling of what I wanted to be when I grew up, but coming out of university, I landed an Urban Fellow fellowship. I was assigned to New York City’s Public Development Agency, which is now the Economic Development Corporation. My plan was to spend a summer with them, and then go off to law school in September and fight for the rights of juveniles in the justice system.

At the Public Development Agency, I discovered that I had real estate development in my veins. At the time, leadership at PDC would challenge the team by saying, “Let’s look at the West Side, what should we do with it?” It was an incredible place to start a career and my path to meeting Bruce Ratner with whom I would work for the next 25 years.

My career grew in a meritocracy. Bruce always chose the best man or the best woman for the job. So, I always made sure to know the most, be the most prepared and worked the hardest. I never had my eye on the corner office, but it turns out, in a meritocracy, if you prove yourself, you can get the top job.

After serving as CEO at Forest City Ratner, I set out to build a company that looks a little more like the community for which we build, MAG Partners. This of course is a very simple statement, but I clearly have been a little bit of an anomaly in the business in a way that I wish I wasn’t.

Real Estate In-Depth: Were there people who were your mentors and/or helped you along the way in your career. If so, please explain?

Gilmartin: Mentoring has played an outsized role in my professional evolution. The role of mentor or mentee is critical to the career development of the women in our field, and I take my own responsibility seriously when I meet young women who want to get into the industry. My two most influential mentors have been Bruce Ratner and Mary Ann Tighe (CBRE). With both in my corner, I hit the career lottery. Because of the profound impact mentoring has had on my career, I have vowed to always be a mentor to others in order to pay it forward.

Real Estate In-Depth: What would you say were the obstacles you faced and women still must overcome in the commercial development arena and what advice do you have for women in commercial real estate?

Gilmartin: While I have said many times before that I never got that email that said, “you’re a woman so you should feel really intimidated” in this industry. But again, that is because I was part of a meritocracy and it was always the best man or woman for the job with Bruce Ratner. My advice is to be the most prepared and to not be afraid to show off your stuff.

Real Estate In-Depth: You recently began leasing MAG Partners’ first project—Ruby—a 480-unit residential project at 243 West 28th St. in Chelsea. In a short time, MAG Partners has built an impressive pipeline with projects planned at 335 Eighth Avenue, 300 East 50th St.; 122 Varick St. in the Hudson Square District; 44-02 Vernon Blvd. in Long Island City, as well as MAG Partners’ participation in the 1.1-million-square-foot Baltimore Peninsula Project. From what I understand, all of your New York City projects qualified for the now expired 421a tax incentive. Will the lack of 421a inhibit development in New York City in years to come if not reinstated in some form?

Gilmartin: Absolutely. But in the more near term, we are extremely focused on an extension to the deadline to complete these projects, something Governor Hochul put forward in her budget. This deadline is not just important to my company and the projects we have moving—the danger of missing the 2026 deadline is putting 33,000+ units in jeopardy of not moving forward. With the current challenges in the markets, it is critical that the legislature extend the deadline for vested projects.

Real Estate In-Depth: Does MAG Partners have any plans to enter other markets in the New York City metro area, specifically the lower Hudson Valley?

Gilmartin: The great thing about being a private company is that we can be opportunistic. We want to be rational and strategic, and we are not confined to New York City.

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How New York Developer MaryAnne Gilmartin Built a Career on Embracing the Complicated

Her MAG Partners Begins Leasing Ruby Residential Tower in Manhattan’s Garment District

MaryAnne Gilmartin, who founded MAG Partners in 2020, is known for projects including Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and the New York Times Building in Manhattan. (MAG Partners)

The older man on the other side of the chain link fence had a shotgun and two pitbulls. MaryAnne Gilmartin, then just 22, was armed with little more than a receptive attitude.

When the dust eventually settled after that on-site meeting, she had successfully dealt with his refusal to leave the land he occupied, helping to clear the way for a project New York City sought to build. Three decades later Gilmartin, now founder and chief executive of New York real estate developer MAG Partners, would be the first to tell you her embrace of projects with complicated issues has ended up serving her well.

Gilmartin’s career has gone from that first assignment involving a vehicle towing yard to include work on buildings such as Barclays Center in Brooklyn, reflecting what she called in an interview a “tendency to lean into projects that have hair on it [and] may require a little more heavy lifting.” She’s expanded her philosophy to include “pursuing opportunities that others may not want.”

The recent kickoff of leasing at Ruby, a two-tower, 480-unit luxury residential rental development that’s 30% affordable, is the latest example of chasing projects that others might turn down. It’s MAG’s first New York development to debut since Gilmartin founded the firm during the pandemic in 2020 after buying out her partners.

The midblock property, located at 243 W. 28th St. between Seventh and Eighth avenues across from the Fashion Institute of Technology in the Garment District, is housed on a former parking lot owned by Edison Properties. Ruby is the fruit of what Gilmartin described as “far from a typical real estate transaction.”

After developers failed to buy the land from Edison, Gilmartin eventually was able to structure a 99-year ground-lease deal that led to the project named after Ruby Bailey, 20th-century fashion pioneer who lived in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.

There was “a lot of handholding,” she told CoStar News. The deal had “a lot of hair and complicated issues.”

Some of the complications involved convincing MAG’s capital partners to proceed with funding construction during the pandemic when lenders didn’t want to back projects in New York, she said.

“The building became a referendum of sorts,” she said at a real estate event this month hosted by Fordham University, her alma mater. “It’s a bet on New York City.”

‘Accidental Developer’

Gilmartin is no stranger to tackling projects that may have deterred others. She became what she described as an “accidental developer” in the ’80s after graduating from Fordham, and that led to her involvement with a lot of different projects across the city through the Urban Fellows Program.

“It was there that I realized I had real estate in my veins,” she said at the Fordham talk. “It was fortuitous. It wasn’t at all part of my plan.”

When her first Urban Fellows assignment involved the towing site at an industrial park in Queens, she said a stumbling block emerged over the 82-year-old squatter. Gilmartin decided to hop on the train to go visit him, against the advice of others.

“I know nothing about the business,” she said. “All I know is this is a person who has a set of facts and beliefs and preferences and desires. I need to understand what they are. … I literally stood on the other side of the chain link fence and talked to this very disturbed older man. … Real estate is a collection of stories about the human condition.”

Her visit paid off and paved the way for the man transitioning to special housing, clearing the site for the towing facility.

After about seven years working in public service and a two-year stint as a broker, which made her realize “being a middleman is just not in my makeup,” she went to Forest City Ratner and ended up spending 23 years there, including as president and chief executive before the firm was sold to Brookfield Asset Management in 2018.

Making Her Way

Gilmartin, a New York native, grew up in both Rockaway Beach in Queens and in Woodstock, New York, a two-hour drive north of the city. She credits her can-do attitude in part to something her mom said despite growing up in what she described as a “dysfunctional childhood.”

“My mom said, ‘You make your own way. You make your own happiness,’” Gilmartin said.

On the career front, Bruce Ratner, who co-founded Forest City Ratner in 1985 and was its CEO before eventually passing his baton to Gilmartin in 2013, was a big influence.

“I was part of the meritocracy,” Gilmartin said. “Bruce Ratner had my back. We had the confidence we belonged at the table. He said, ‘If you can dream it and can defend it,’ we usually got approval to do it. … Know your wheelhouse. You can’t fake it. If you are substantive in this business, amazing business can happen.”

One of those pieces of businesses involved MAG’s first foray outside New York, partnering with Under Armour founder Kevin Plank as well as Goldman Sachs to oversee Baltimore Peninsula, a 235-acre mixed-use development in Baltimore. Some 1.1 million square feet of office, retail and residential is opening this year on a prime waterfront location as part of the project with 13 million more square feet left to be developed.

Loves New York

“My first love is New York City,” Gilmartin told CoStar News. But within a day’s commute, “between Boston and D.C., we see opportunities. … Land demand and ground-up opportunities are much more amenable” than in New York.

A case in point of how it’s “tough” getting things done in New York, she said, involves the June 2022 expiration of the 421-a tax exemption program that gave developers tax breaks on multifamily developments in exchange for a portion of units being set aside for affordable housing. Without the support of New York state legislators, the program, which Gilmartin calls essential for business, remains dead despite backing from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, she said.

“I’m a little jaded because of that,” she said at the Fordham event. “It’s nice to go to Baltimore. The answer in Baltimore isn’t ‘no.’ The answer is ‘yes.’ In New York, the answer is ‘no’ first. The city has to grow. … If there’s no tax-exemption program, we will have a homogeneous collection of condos that are highly unaffordable for people in the city. There’s a chilling effect” on multifamily development.

Ruby and two other Manhattan residential projects MAG has underway — 335 Eighth Ave., a 190-unit mixed-income apartment building, and 300 E. 50th Street, a 194-unit property on the east side — all qualify under the expired 421-a program, Gilmartin told CoStar.

“This isn’t a windfall for developers,” she told CoStar. “I would like to build more. Multifamily is still the darling asset class in New York. It’s difficult to imagine more projects” without the tax-exemption program.

As New York’s office vacancy rate has surged to new record highs, Gilmartin isn’t calling it quits on the sector. MAG is developing a 175,000-square-foot boutique office at 122 Varick St. in the Hudson Square neighborhood, where both Google and Disney are building major campuses.

“This is a bespoke offering. There’ll continue to be a flight to quality,” she said, adding that it will reflect “the post-pandemic world of how we want to work.”

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NYC Developer Opens Chelsea Rentals as Pipeline Gets Tougher

MaryAnne Gilmartin’s first project in the city since striking out on her own will start leasing. Future efforts might become more challenging.

New York veteran developer MaryAnne Gilmartin, who’s worked on the Barclays Center and New York Times Building, will start signing up renters for her new firm’s first completed project. 

Her firm, MAG Partners, begins leasing Monday at the Chelsea development called Ruby — named for the late Harlem-based fashion designer and dressmaker Ruby Bailey — that has 480 apartments spread across two towers. She also has two other Manhattan multifamily projects underway at 335 Eighth Ave. and 300 E. 50th St., but after the deadline to qualify for a key tax incentive expired last year, her outlook for more rental projects across the city is starting to dim.

Gilmartin is among developers warning that the New York rental market — already tough with rents hovering near record highs — could come under pressure as she expects it could take state officials at least a year or two to get serious about replacing the 421-a tax break, an incentive that encouraged building more affordable rentals. In the meantime, she expects the pipeline for rental construction to slow and some developers to turn to more lucrative condominium projects with fewer units and higher prices. 

“We’re going to have homogenized product — too much of it — brought online as a result of not having alternatives,” Gilmartin said. “That does not serve the people in New York City.”

For now, Gilmartin is focused on showing what MAG Partners can build. Ruby, the Chelsea building, plays up its proximity to the Garment District with a brick facade, herringbone flooring and generous closet space. Rents without concessions for Ruby’s market-rate apartments start at $4,330 for studios, $5,955 for one-bedrooms and $9,000 for two-bedrooms. Three-bedrooms will be priced once they’re ready to hit the market. The developer has also designated 30% of its units as affordable housing. 

Gilmartin previously led Forest City Ratner as chief executive officer before stepping down in 2018. At that firm, she worked on the Pacific Park project that includes the Barclays Center and Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building. Her new firm is one of the few New York real estate developers that’s owned and run by women.

“There’s something about our firm that’s not ordinary, which others tell us and sometimes we forget, which is that we don’t look like a typical New York City development firm,” Gilmartin said. 

The two towers are separated by a 70-foot (21-meter) courtyard that’s full of greenery and recreation areas for residents. There’s also a roof deck and swimming pool, as well as a 5,000-square-foot (465-square-meter) fitness center. About 10% of the units have private outdoor space. 

Gilmartin hopes the project will show that New York rentals don’t have to be penny-pinching commodities to be profitable. 

“There are plenty of really forgettable buildings that don’t actually stand up nicely over time and that don’t represent the best you could have done, but those buildings will still make money,” she said. “The value that we have is that principles of beauty, diversity and sustainability create long-lasting value — that you can actually build beauty and deliver returns.” 

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