By Gus Delaporte 4/22 11:10am

Lease Beat

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Bike Share Sets Up Shop in Sunset Park

The NYC Bike Share program, branded Citi Bike, has set up its headquarters in a 39,200-square-foot space at 53rd Street and Third Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, it was announced today. Asking rent was less than $20 per square foot.

“It was a fairly quick search,” Alec Monaghan, senior vice president at CBRE, who represented the tenant, told The Commercial Observer. “We looked in Manhattan, but it became pretty immediate Brooklyn was going to be better in terms of price, product type and the acceptability of the road network.” Read More

By Billy Gray 2/13 4:22pm

Lease Beat

Industry City

Wireless Digital Group Signs 3,600-Square-Foot Industry City Lease

The cell phone company Wireless Digital Group signed a five-year lease for 3,600 square feet at Brooklyn’s 16-building, 40-acre Industry City compound.

Wireless Digital will be moving to Building 10 in the Sunset Park campus from Coney Island Avenue. Bruce Federman, director of real estate at Industry City Associates, represented the building.

“Wireless Digital was previously located in a nondescript location and wanted to have a more central location without having to pay Manhattan rents,” Mr. Federman said in a prepared statement. Read More

By Billy Gray 2/12 9:00am

Sunset Park

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The Sun Also Rises: Sunset Park’s Booming Artisanal Economy

The Brooklyn Army Terminal plays only a peripheral role in Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr.’s dystopian 1964 novel about the Sunset Park and Bay Bridge neighborhoods of Brooklyn. But the compound—still an active base in the book—is the fulcrum around which Mr. Selby’s panoply of broken soldiers, hookers, junkies and hoods circulates.

Last month, the rejuvenated B.A.T. won a major tenant. The artisanal chocolatier Jacques Torres signed for 39,000 square feet in the 95-year-old compound that served as the United States Army’s port of embarkation during World Wars I and II.

“The building has soul,” Mr. Torres said. “When you go there, you touch history. When I visit, I get that cold chill going through me.”

The ghosts of army grunts and the military-industrial complex are not the only historical vestiges that haunt the 4.1-milion-square-foot B.A.T. and the Sunset Park neighborhood that surrounds it. There’s also a residual perception of the forlorn squalor and grit that permeated Mr. Selby’s novel.

“You know, it’s actually not a bad neighborhood,” Mr. Torres said. “You can go there and not get shot.” Read More