The Hotel Bossert has a new owner and purpose.
The Brooklyn Heights site was once likened to the Waldorf-Astoria for its elegance but had become a half-developed reminder of a failed real estate plan by the time the Chetrit family lost it to foreclosure last winter. The property is now in the hands of SomeraRoad, which paid $100 million for it, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Wednesday.
SomeraRoad, which has a strong presence in Nashville but is making New York moves, plans on turning the 12-story Renaissance Revival edifice at 98 Montague St. into housing after a “thoughtful adaptive reuse,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement without providing further details.
The building’s new chapter comes as a long and torturous one has ended. In February lender Beach Point Capital, which owned the debt on the 187,200-square-foot property at Hicks Street, took control of the site after being the winning bidder at a court-ordered foreclosure auction.
And Beach Point, a Southern California-based hedge fund, wasted no time in flipping the property, based on the register. Formally closing on the Hotel Bossert on April 22 for just over $1 million, Beach Point went into contract to sell the property May 15 and closed May 23, the register shows.
The upset price in the auction, the minimum amount a bidder would have had to fork over to cover Beach Point’s loan plus fees and interest, was set at $122 million, but no other bidders stepped forward. The Chetrits had faced a $177 million judgment for loan defaults at the building, for which they paid $81 million in 2012.
SomeraRoad, founded in 2016 by Brooklyn resident Ian Ross, has another local architectural icon under its belt as well. In 2022 it purchased the upper stories of 1 Hanover Square, the landmarked brownstone in Manhattan’s Financial District that was once the members-only club India House.
The $5.9 million acquisition, which closed two years after going into contract, was followed by a $20 million renovation to restore and remodel the site as an upscale office building that counts SomeraRoad as a tenant. (Harry’s Bar and Restaurant, a Wall Street institution, continues to operate in a separate commercial condo on the building’s lowest level.)
In a way, the Hotel Bosset was always misnamed. In the decades after its 1913 construction by Brooklyn lumber mogul Louis Bossert, the building offered long-term accommodations, with hotel-level amenities, for guests. But beginning in the 1980s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious organization, once based in Brooklyn Heights, began leasing rooms to staff members before it purchased the site outright in 1988 and turned it into dormlike housing with more than 200 rooms, according to news reports.
The site was also home to a couple dozen rent-stabilized tenants starting in the mid-20th century, though it’s not clear if any remain.
The Chetrits, who once owned the site with developer David Bistricer, had in recent years apparently planned on installing an outpost of the IHG Hotels-owned Kimpton hotel chain, based on court filings.
But work at the site, shrouded by sidewalk sheds since 2020, moved haltingly and was controversial among residents of the city’s oldest historic district. Earlier this year the Chetrits owed the city’s Department of Building $460,000 in civil penalties for 56 active violations at 98 Montague, which also faced a stop-work order, situations that do not yet seem to have been resolved, based on public records.
The Chetrits’ loss of the Hotel Bossert was reportedly the first foreclosure ever experienced by family patriarch Joseph Chetrit. A Beach Point spokesman had no comment by press time.
