Jed Walentas

At the beginning of COVID-19, it seemed difficult to imagine the words “new,” “Brooklyn” and “office” merging with the word “successful.” After all, the borough had a ton of new (or about to be unveiled) product on the market, and it seemed logical that Kings County would lose out to tenants who would prefer to be in Manhattan now that prices had fallen through the floor.

Not necessarily. “There were moments we were super nervous,” Two Trees’ Jed Walentas told CO back in February about the company’s newly opened office building at 10 Grand Street in the old Domino Sugar refinery. However, “the reality is we really leased up the entire building in the last 12 months. And it’s just been an overwhelming success story. I think, in terms of signed leases, we’re up to, I don’t know, 120,000 out of 140,000 feet.”

The Domino Sugar refinery has probably been Two Trees’ most ambitious project in the past decade. The company was tapped to redevelop the 11-acre site along the Williamsburg waterfront in 2013, and it still has about 10 years left of development on it, according to Walentas. It is ending up, in Walentas’ words, more of a “clean sheet of paper” than nearby Dumbo, the repurposing and branding of which established Two Trees as one of the city’s major developers.

Domino involved hiring best-in-the-business architects like SHoP and Cookfox to design something grand and iconic that could make its presence felt along the water; it meant forging a quarter-mile green space, Domino Park, between the river and the buildings; it meant developing from scratch thousands of apartments (2,800 when it’ll all be finished, 700 affordable), 200,000 square feet of retail, and another 600,000 square feet of commercial office space — all while keeping a real estate empire from crumbling under the weight of a global pandemic.

The fact that in the middle of this crisis Two Trees would open 10 Grand Street and it would actually rent the bulk of its office space speaks volumes to how sound the original conception was and how diligently Two Trees worked to keep things on track.

Next on Two Trees’ plate: the River Ring, a project north of Domino, also along the waterfront. The City Council approved the 1,050-unit development in December, and construction will start in 2024.