Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall Gets New Owner After Nearly 4 Decades
By Celia Young July 15, 2021 1:12 pm
reprints
Grand Prospect Hall is making someone else’s dreams come true today.
Park Slope, Brooklyn’s historic banquet hall was sold to Angelo Rigas, an electrical contractor, under the entity Gowanus Cubes as part of a $30 million sale with 11 adjacent properties, The Real Deal reported.
All 12 of the properties sold in the assemblage — which cover 73,104 square feet of space — are located between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Brooklyn, TRD reported. The sale price of the Grand Prospect Hotel alone is listed as $22.5 million, according to property records.
Alice Halkias — known for her appearances in the iconic, low-budget, televised commercials for the hall — signed off on the sale, according to property records. Michael and Alice Halkias owned the hall since they first purchased the four-story event venue in 1981, New York Daily News reported.
The two made a name for themselves through the cheesy, and seemingly always on, TV commercials, which undeniably promised to make a couple’s dreams come true. The ads became so well known that the duo had no problem booking hundreds of events a year, the Daily News reported.
Michael Halkias died at the age of 82 due to the coronavirus in May of last year, which was a shock to the borough who remembered his appearances on the local airwaves, Brooklyn Paper reported. His commercials were parodied by “Saturday Night Live” and the couple even appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”. In 1999, Grand Prospect Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places, according to TRD.
Rigas’ plans for the project are unclear, though with the adjacent properties in hand, he could construct a larger building with that land. Rigas’ father, Gregory Rigas, previously built several projects in Brooklyn, including a rental tower at 574 Fourth Avenue, per TRD.
Rigas and Halkias could not immediately be reached for comment.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
