More Details about Albee Square Mall
From the New York Times
February 13, 2007
Deal Would Triple the Size of the Albee Square Mall in Brooklyn and Add a High-Rise
By ANDY NEWMAN
The Downtown Brooklyn shopping plaza formerly known as the Albee Square Mall will soon undergo yet another incarnation: It will be razed, rebuilt at triple the size and topped with a high-rise with offices and a thousand apartments, its prospective new owners said yesterday.
The mall is being sold to a partnership of developers for about $125 million, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said. Today, the city’s Industrial Development Agency is expected to approve $3.2 million in tax breaks related to the sale for the new owners, a coalition including a nationally prominent firm, MacFarlane Partners of San Francisco.
The partnership, Albee Development L.L.C., has drawn up a letter of agreement with the current owner, Thor Equities, said Roxanne Donovan, the new team’s spokeswoman. Thor Equities, which bought the mall for $25 million in 2001, would not comment yesterday.
Albee Development’s plans, Ms. Donovan said, call for nearly half a million square feet of retail space, up from 150,000; about 125,000 square feet of Class A office space; and 1,000 rental apartments, 20 percent of which would be for tenants of moderate income.
The size of the project was made possible by the rezoning of much of Downtown Brooklyn in 2004, along with a seemingly endless economic boom.
The current mall, the Gallery at Fulton Street, is three stories high. There is no specific height planned for the tower, but the city’s deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel L. Doctoroff, said that the project would be “one of the tallest buildings in Downtown Brooklyn.”
The project, to be known as the Center at Albee Square, would have to go through several layers of government approval, but the new zoning allows more than 1 million square feet of development on the site. The pending sale was reported in Crain’s New York Business last week. The city owns the land under the mall, and Mr. Doctoroff said a tentative deal calls for the new owners to pay $28 million in rent over the next four years.