Jake Elghanayan

How are things shaping up with the office-to-residential conversion at 135 East 57th Street?

It’s exciting to bring a 350-unit rental apartment building to such a prime location at the nexus of Midtown East and the Upper East Side. This is an example of a deal that became possible because of the strength of our balance sheet, nuanced understanding of layouts and construction logistics, and, most of all, patience. 

Jeremy Shell, my partner and brother-in-law, and his team worked this deal for over a year and it almost died many times — and at times I thought we were wasting our time  — but our perseverance carried us through. We should have an exciting retail announcement on this project soon, but it’s still a little premature for me to reveal.

You’ve mentioned possibly expanding your portfolio along Newtown Creek and Anable Basin in Long Island City, Queens. Has TF Cornerstone made any progress?

We have been leasing up a pair of buildings at Malt Drive where the East River meets Newtown Creek. In some ways, this has been our most impressive project to date. We had to build a new private road, an extension of the public park along Newtown Creek with playgrounds and landscaping by the award-winning SCAPE design group, and a new stretch of 20,000 square feet of retail along Second Street to go with the 1,386 apartment units above. 

With those complete, we own additional parcels along 54th Avenue that we think would be optimal for residential housing and would allow us to continue the waterfront public open space along Newtown Creek. We have no direct ownership interest or affiliation to the Anable Basin  — aka OneLIC — rezoning, but updating the allowable mix of uses in that area would benefit the greater LIC neighborhood.

Has TF Cornerstone made any moves on office-to-residential in its Washington, D.C. portfolio?

We have prepared one of our office buildings in D.C. for residential conversion, but it’s less scale than is optimal for us, and so we’ll likely sell that building to a local group.

Here in New York, we recently announced the office-to-residential conversion of 135 East 57th Street. And, in Philadelphia, our most exciting adaptive reuse project is at the landmarked Wanamaker Building. It’s an incredibly handsome building that sits at the urban core of Philadelphia and plays a major role in that city’s commercial and cultural life. We’re converting the upper portion to about 620 loft apartments with minimum 15-foot ceilings and an amenity program that is like nothing else I’m aware of in that market. The bottom three floors (around 300,000 square feet) will be renovated for new retail and other cultural uses that should make this a major destination within Philadelphia.

What are you looking for in the next New York mayoral administration?

Seriousness and effectiveness. To be serious means engaging with our city’s problems grounded in common sense and the reality of governing a single municipality, not trying to make national headlines with foreign policy and social policy. 

By effectiveness, I have in mind the old adage: “There is no Democratic or Republican way of picking up the trash.” Before stepping into new fields like grocery stores, local government needs to improve the quality of its service in its existing responsibilities like public housing, our streets, etc.

Lighting Round:

Your pick for Fed chair in `26?
Kevin Warsh or Rick Rieder. 

Borrowing costs up or down by late 2026?
Who knows?

Last vacation and where?
I have two young kids, so just in Long Island this summer.

Like in ‘Freaky Friday’ you swap bodies with Jerome Powell. What would you do?
I think he has handled it all well — I hope I’d have the courage to do the same.

What’s your kryptonite?
Cookies and other baked goods.

If Stephen Starr asked you which restaurant he should next reopen, what would it be?
Any restaurant he wants at the Wanamaker.