With 1,320 rental apartments and a host of amenities, 25 Water Street is the country’s largest office-to-residential conversion to date.
An office building in the Financial District has ditched cubicles and shed most of its original facade, making way for more than 1,000 new rental apartments and splashy amenities.
The building at 25 Water Street, now known as SoMA for South Manhattan, previously housed JPMorganChase, the National Enquirer and the New York Daily News. Co-developed by GFP Real Estate and Metro Loft, SoMA is the country’s largest residential building to be converted from offices to date, with 1,320 apartments. (Metro Loft and a partner are also converting the old Pfizer headquarters in Midtown, which will surpass SoMA with 1,602 apartments.)
Nathan Berman, the founder of Metro Loft, said that converting buildings removes “the millions of feet of space that are essentially obsolete.”
“They can’t compete as office buildings anymore, and we’re taking them, sort of, out of the race,” he said.
As remote work ramped up during the coronavirus pandemic, many offices in busy areas like Manhattan were left empty, and developers increasingly saw vacant office buildings as opportunities to create housing. Iconic structures like the Flatiron Building are being converted to luxury condos, and the former headquarters of Goldman Sachs on Broad Street began leasing last year.
