More than three years after the controversial 56-block rezoning of one of Manhattan’s most popular neighborhoods, SoHo, the worst fears of its opponents have not been realized. A forest of tall residential towers has not yet sprouted across the historic enclave even as city officials expected the changes to lead to 3,500 new homes.
But the few plans that developers have unveiled so far may help shed light on the impact of a rezoned SoHo and what it could look like down the road.
Consider one of the more recent proposals, which comes from the New Jersey firm Extended Management. It intends to build a 2-towered, 98-unit project on a low-slung hodgepodge of a Thompson Street block where spires of up to 275 feet are now allowed as of right.
One of the towers, with 23 stories, would rise from 30 Thompson, which once contained a garage, while the other, at 26 stories, would be at 32 Thompson, where a modest prewar rental once stood.
The complex would soar well above what is there now. The loftiest building on the block is 100 Sixth Ave., an office building that tops out at 16 stories. But more typical are rental buildings like 23 Thompson St. and 30 Grand St., nearly mirror-image red-brick prewar walk-ups with six floors apiece.
Adding dozens of new residential units would mark a major shift in tone for an area that also has an industrial legacy. In fact, a power plant once thrummed at 40 Thompson before being converted into office space, though there’s still an active parking garage next door.
And the Thompson Street team is not the first to embrace residences since the rezoning. Astral Management snapped up 40 Wooster St. in 2023 for $14.8 million and plans to convert the narrow 6-story site into a four-unit luxury rental. And the Laboz family’s United American Land, a major SoHo landlord, has similarly been approved to construct a 13-story, 100-unit rental tower at the site of a 3-story retail building at Broadway and Canal Street. But neither has opened yet.
Extended, which is partnering with Hudson Square-based firm Madigan Development for the project, according to filings, does not yet have a green light for its project. Its application for permits from the city’s Department of Buildings in late February was still marked “incomplete.”
And how Extended might feel about the area’s pivot is unclear. When reached by phone Friday, Larry Spada, an Extended principal, declined to comment.
The block has known changes before. A narrow alley at 24 Thompson in the early 2000s gave way to a new townhouse, though its five-story height seems quaint in respect to what could be coming soon.
30 Thompson St.
This skinny site where a one-bay brick garage stood for years appears to have bedeviled its share of developers. In 2015 a team led by investment firm Mavrix Equity Group snapped up the 29-foot-wide property for $13.1 million from the Gaslow family, operators of three-generation furniture business Empire Office and owner of No. 30 for about 40 years. The new owners, who received about $10 million in financing from the Gaslows for the transaction, according to the city register, reportedly planned to construct a 9-story condo building. But the parcel ended up back with the Gaslows after slipping into foreclosure. Next up was developer DHA Capital, which bought No. 30 in 2009 for $8 million (with the help of $6 million in financing, again extended by the seller) and reportedly intended to put up a 10-story office building. But in 2022, as the pandemic continued to keep offices empty, DHA instead unloaded No. 30 for $13 million to Newark-based developer Extended Management, which is planning a 23-story, 21-unit apartment tower at the now-vacant lot in conjunction with Madigan Development, which in 2022 built the 30-story, 100-unit tower at nearby 111 Varick St.
32 Thompson St.
For more than a century this property was home to a 6-story, 18-unit tenement-style rental building whose ground-floor retail berths were vacant for years. The property changed hands frequently in the 1960s and 1970s, according to the city register. In 2012, Paul Sub sold the building to the Vickers family for $6.3 million, records show, though Vickers held it only for two years. The 2014 buyer, which paid $8.8 million, was a shell company whose New Jersey address is the same as developer Extended Management. An attorney known for helping landlords defer taxes by quickly investing in other properties — called a “1031 exchange” — coordinated the deal. Developer Extended Management, in partnership with Hudson Square-based firm Madigan Development, wants to construct a 26-story, 77-unit residential building on the site that would have a sister tower at next-door No. 30, according to city Department of Buildings records.
30 Grand St.
In 1992 Vendome Property Management Co. bought this 6-story prewar mixed-use site out of bankruptcy for $675,000, according to the city register. Vendome still owns the walk-up building now, which offers 40 apartments above shops. The company’s CEO, Nino Vendome, was a restaurateur earlier in his career, operating the family-owned Italian eatery Nino’s at 431 Canal St. from 1974 to 2002. In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, Vendome served about 500,000 free meals to Ground Zero workers, according to news reports. For about two decades, No. 30’s corner retail berth contained Café Noir, a North African-themed tapas bar that was a regular stop on pub crawls in the once-bustling nightlife zone in this corner of SoHo. In 2014, a few years after a dispute with Vendome over rent, Café Noir closed its doors and was replaced by high-end lingerie store Maison Close, which did not make it out of the pandemic (although a French bistro around the corner confusingly bears the same name). A tattoo parlor came next, but its stay was brief, and the space is currently vacant. No. 30’s other retail berth features the coffee shop Now or Never, which has poured lattes since 2019.
23 Thompson St.
This micro-neighborhood seems to have more in common with nearby Greenwich Village than SoHo proper on account of its many brick prewar walkups. SoHo is more associated with cast-iron former manufacturing buildings, a difference that may explain why the block never received landmark status. No. 23, a 6-story, 28-unit rental with storefronts below, then, fits right in. The most recent apartment to hit the market, a two-bedroom, one-bath unit, was asking about $4,800 a month in December, StreetEasy says. The building has had just three owners since the early 1970s, according to online records. The current landlord, Lauenen LLC, bought the property for $13.4 million in 2023 after a judge ordered it sold to help settle an estate. The stores based in the building, which is alternately known as 25 Thompson, seem to reflect SoHo’s evolution from an industrial district to an arts enclave to a residential hub with a more mixed economy. Indeed, its retail spaces offered a rug restorer in the 1980s before giving way to the Mitchell Algus Gallery in the 1990s, while a hair salon called The Cutting Factory styles customers there today.
22 Thompson St.
In the 1940s, this 3-story building embodied a classic look. It had a small store at its base — one festooned with 7 Up ads and with an entrance at its corner similar to 30 Grand’s across the street, according to a historic tax photo — and two presumably residential floors upstairs. But brick walls had replaced the store’s windows a few decades later. In 1998 Borough Park-based entity Off West Broadway Developers sold No. 22 and a next-door alley at 24 Thompson to husband-and-wife designer-developers Bob and Cortney Novogratz for about $530,000, according to a deed. The renovation that followed was one of the first for the Novogratzes, who would go on to make a career of lucrative townhouse restorations and become reality TV stars in the process. Records show they initially borrowed $50,000 from the Bank of New York to get rolling at No. 22. In 2003, the couple unloaded the 3,100-square-foot, four-bedroom property, which has an 840-square-foot roof deck, to Samuel Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, the producer of the wildfire hit Grand Theft Auto. Houser paid $3.8 million for the property, according to the city register. Seven years later, he unloaded it to shell company 22 Thompson Street LLC for the slightly higher price of $4 million, the register shows. Whether it served as a primary residence is unclear. But in 2018, the company began marketing the battleship-gray, stucco-sided site as a rental for $28,000 a month, an asking price that had swelled to $33,000 a month by 2023. The owner took a stab at selling it, too, at a price of $15 million in 2020, StreetEasy shows, though it apparently never found a taker.
40 Thompson St.
As part of a construction wave in the early 1900s, Con Edison built powerhouses across the city to help safely convey currents from neighborhood to neighborhood. But the elegant Beaux-Arts facades of the buildings, which usually sported a tall arched window, gave little indication of the industrial uses within. An example is in this golden-brick structure, whose notched and angular lot recalls a Lego brick. In a 1984 conversion that now seems way ahead of its time, craft brewery Manhattan Brewing Co. started making and selling lagers inside the 7-story, 31,000-square-foot structure, though the business fizzled in the early 1990s. The latest in a series of restaurants to occupy the brewery’s space, which uses the address 15 Watts St., came in summer 2022 with the opening of colorfully appointed French eatery Maison Close. The building appears to have once been owned by a group of doctors, who in the mid-2000s unloaded the mixed-use retail-and-office site in a series of transactions to Vornado Realty Trust. In 2012 the developer sold No. 40 for $16 million to Steven Elghanayan’s British real estate firm Epic, whose U.S. division is based on site. No. 40, which has two tall billboards mounted on its facade, was collateral for a $67.8 million loan from TD Bank last year along with three other Epic-owned Lower Manhattan properties.
24 Thompson St.
The tiny 2-story mixed-use property that occupied this site in the mid-1900s later met a wrecking ball and by the end of the century was little more than a place to park cars. But this 19-foot-wide site came full circle in recent years. It added a building courtesy of the design duo the Novogratzes, who developed a 5-story, 4,600-square-foot townhouse in a rare from-scratch project for the couple. Known for adorning their properties with antique-store finds, the Novogratzes leaned into French finishes for No. 24 with a pair of salvaged round church windows, some Art Deco light fixtures and a Parisian train station clock, according to ads and listing photos. The couple offloaded the site for $6.3 million in 2006 to Darren Manelski, the CEO of money-transfer company Omnex Group, based on the city register. But a few months later Manelski quickly flipped the home, which has an elevator, a garage and a roof terrace, for $7 million to a now-retired professional basketball player. City appraisers, who typically undervalue real estate, put the townhouse’s market price at $12.6 million today.
