A developer’s plans to reinvent a Midtown office building are coming into sharper focus.
Vanbarton Group, one of the city’s most-active converters of commercial towers into rental housing, seeks to create 420 apartments at 1011 First Ave., the soon-to-be-former headquarters of the Archdiocese of New York, according to a new filing.
The filing, submitted Thursday to the city’s Department of Buildings, also calls for extending the height of the 398,200-square-foot structure by 6 stories, from 20 to 26. And Vanbarton intends to renumber the blockwide site as 1005 First Ave., according to the filing, which was first reported on by PincusCo.
Vanbarton, which has either completed or is undertaking several office-to-resi conversions in the Financial District, is apparently moving to start the First Avenue project before officially owning the site.
Although the national firm has been in contract to buy the 1973 building between East 55th and East 56th streets for $100 million since early 2024, based on Bloomberg reporting from the fall, the deal has not yet closed, according to the city register, which does not show any new deed for the Midtown East site.
But an official handover could happen soon. The Archdiocese has said that this summer it will relocate to a new home in leased space at 488 Madison Ave., an office building at East 51st Street across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s also not unusual for developers to line up permits while simultaneously preparing to close.
Before it contained No. 1011, the First Avenue property was home to the historic St. John the Evangelist church, which was razed in the early 1970s as part of a $25 million project to make way for the current charcoal-hued structure. Named the Terence Cardinal Cooke Building for the Catholic leader who commissioned it, the site also houses a contemporary version of St. John’s, which is scheduled to merge with the Church of the Holy Family on nearby East 47th Street this year.
For its part, Vanbarton has previously converted Nos. 160 and 180 Water St. into housing, and similarly in February it filed plans to turn 77 Water St. into a 651-unit apartment tower that would also add some stories in the process, in its case growing from 26 to 33 floors, a filing shows.
The initial burst of prepandemic excitement about office conversions largely focused on FiDi, a neighborhood that was ripe for reinventions of obsolete officer towers for decades before Covid. But Midtown East has emerged in recent months as a new hotbed, with the conversion of the former Pfizer complex on East 42nd Street—which with an expected 1,500 housing units would be the city’s largest-ever version—a major case in point.
Joseph Zwilling, an Archdiocese spokesman, did not return an email for comment by press time. And a phone message left at Vanbarton’s Grand Central-area office also went unreturned.
