It could have been an easy comeback for once-dominant developer Kent Swig: revamping a prewar rental building, a common occurrence on its historic Tribeca block.
But the redevelopment of six-story 148 Duane St. has seemed to thwart the head of Swig Equities at every turn. Since Swig bought the site of a failed condo project eight years ago, the Civil War-era building has been dogged by lender battles, construction snags and tenant disputes.
The latest blow landed this month, when the lender Axos Financial sued in federal court to possibly foreclose on the mixed-use property near West Broadway because Swig has allegedly been in default since this fall on about $24 million in mortgages.
But problems have swirled around the 33-foot wide building since about 2017, when Swig plunked down $19 million for the renter-filled property. The presence of green fencing since then implies construction work has occurred, but Swig is just now replacing the building’s elevator, according to a new permit from the city’s Department of Buildings, and it is unclear from records what else has been done.
Some delays might stem from the fact that a contractor, K&K Group, dragged Swig to court in 2021 claiming he failed to pay about $3 million of a promised $7 million for renovations, although Swig argued that K&K was inflating the amount. That case wasn’t resolved until two years later.
Swig has also tangled mightily with some occupants. Rent-stabilized husband and wife tenants Timothy and Akiko Tabor, who first sued Swig in 2018 over his apparent reduction of heat and buzzer service and later won a $198,000 judgment in the case, continue to file actions against him, who in the meantime has had to pay to relocate the couple to a swanky Park Place pad.
Another longtime tenant of the four-unit building, Italian painter Cristina Vergano, sued Swig for keeping her security deposit when she moved out and appears to have won. Swig ended up cutting Vergano a check for $25,000, according to a 2021 filing in Manhattan state Supreme Court.
The developer also appears to have hit a wall in trying to evict the building’s longtime retail tenant, beach-themed store Bikini Bar. In 2020 he went after owner Aileen Oser over a supposed failure to pay back $26,000 in rent during Covid, though the case does not seem to have gone anywhere, perhaps because of pandemic-era tenant protections. In any case, Bikini Bar’s website claims it will re-open this year.
The hurdles are perhaps humbling for Swig. The grandson of San Francisco-based developer Benjamin Swig and ex-husband of Liz Macklowe, daughter of billionaire developer Harry Macklowe, he made a big splash in the early 2000s with a string of Lower Manhattan office building purchases.
Indeed, Swig was so omnipresent in the area, once owning towers such as 80 Broad St., 140 William St. and 5 Hanover Square, that no one seemed to challenge his claim that the nickname “FiDi” was his invention. But Swig, stung by massive debt problems during the Great Recession, later gave up most of the FiDi sites, some of which sold at hefty losses. No. 80 Broad, for instance, went for $50 million in 2011 after costing $70 million in 2004.
To be sure, converting even tiny rentals can be an expensive and drawn-out process. Investor Michael Tojner, who ran a similar playbook at nearby 131 Duane, didn’t bring his luxury homes to market for a decade. But Swig, an owner of Brown Harris Stevens, seems to have chosen an unusually vexing project for his second act.
Efforts to reach Swig through his Midtown office were unsuccessful. And lawyers for him and his legal opponents either did not return calls or declined to comment.
148 Duane St.
A former dry-goods outpost built during the Civil War, this Italianate-style structure has since at least the 1990s been home to a different type of apparel company, the surf-themed clothing-and-gear store Bikini Bar. A mannequin with a straw hat, a vintage Coke sign and a surfboard, naturally, crowd its window even as the store appears closed. About a decade ago, Florida investor Evan Seiden snapped up No. 148 and won approval for a $47 million condo conversion. The building did become a condo, but Seiden never sold any units, records show, and instead unloaded the building to developer Kent Swig, who once controlled a $3 billion portfolio. Swig’s exact plans for the site are unclear, and he could not be reached for comment. But two decades ago he did lead a conversion of the FiDi office tower 25 Broad St. into a luxury-rental building before losing the site to foreclosure in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ 2008 collapse. No. 148 is now adding a new elevator while it continues to battle lenders and tenants in court.
134 Duane St.
This spacious Civil War-era structure appears to be a combination of three separate buildings (though with four street addresses, confusingly: Nos. 134, 136, 138 and 140). Indeed, since the mid-1980s, it has functioned as a single 18-apartment residential co-op. Around the same time, one of its ground-floor berths welcomed a branch of Washington Market preschool, whose name refers to a historic moniker for an area once lined with storehouses for butter and eggs. The portmanteau “Tribeca,” for “triangle below Canal,” wouldn’t come along until the 1970s. Initially the school only occupied No. 134, but in 2001 it expanded into other storefronts in the building, according to a school history. No upstairs co-op units are currently for sale, but previous floor plans reveal some never strayed far from their artist-loft roots. They have wide-open living areas and windowless bedrooms carved from corners. A notable pre-conversion resident of No. 138 was Tony Shafrazi, who in 1974 infamously spray-painted the words “kill lies all” on painter Pablo Picasso’s antiwar Guernica painting as it hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Shafrazi later became a gallerist who represented the late artist Keith Haring, a neighborhood habitué.
130 Duane St.
The excavation required to build the IND subway line (offering A, C and E service) in the late 1920s required Church Street to be widened, a step that razed buildings that once stood at Nos. 128 and 130 Duane, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which surveyed the area for its 1992 designation as a historic district. But the 25-foot wide sliver of land remaining at No. 130 proved easy to reinvent. In the 1930s it gave rise to a Shell gas station, based on a city tax photo. Vendors in the 1980s hawked wares from newsstand-style stands and the site was rebuilt again in 2003 with a five-story mixed-use structure. Hotel landlords owned the property in the following decades. The 43-room Duane Street Hotel was a tenant in recent years; Graffiti Earth, a vegetarian restaurant, anchored the retail space. Both closed in 2021, the same year that Hersha Hospitality Trust unloaded the 17,500-square-foot building to Uzi Ben Abraham’s Premier Equities for $18 million. A hotel operated by Sonder, a short-term rental provider that uses Airbnb’s platform, came next. Premier reportedly has leased a portion of the ground floor to Modern Bread & Bagel, a bakery chain, but it has not started selling treats as of yet.
137 Duane St.
A century before the late 20th century reign of Greenwich Village’s West Eighth Street as the place to buy shoes, this Tribeca block had the market cornered. In the storefront of this five-story prewar building, which extends all the way back to Thomas Street, was the Diamond Shoe Co. In 1926 it took over Nos. 137 and 139, according to historical accounts, and in 1935 it expanded into No. 141 while also restyling the facade to give all three storefronts a uniform look. When president and Hungarian immigrant David Davidowitz died in 1933, the company owned five factories and 90 stores, according to his New York Times obituary. The inscription “Diamond Building” survives over a door at No. 137 today. Restaurants arrived after the shoe stores faded. There was Le Zinc, which opened in the early 1980s a few years after trendsetter Odeon cut its ribbon around the block. More recently Buddha Bar leased a long-vacant space on No. 137’s Thomas Street side in 2021. The upper stories contain condos, courtesy of Los Angeles developer Leonid Pustilnikov, whose $70 million “Diamond on Duane” plan in the mid-2000s created 20 units, state filings show. Two homes were listed as resales on StreetEasy in late January: a one-bedroom for $2.1 million and a three-bedroom for $11 million.
142 Duane St.
This Corinthian column-lined 1860 building, a co-op, sits on land that it has leased from the Drelich family until 2094, based on the city register and other records. The Dreliches themselves also appear to have a stake in No. 146. Land-lease buildings, which require ground rent payments in addition to usual fees, are somewhat common. But something about No. 142’s arrangement spooked would-be buyers of the building’s penthouse, which could not find a taker for 13 years, the unit’s broker told Crain’s last year. The 7,200-square-foot aerie, which was owned by building developer and architect Stephen Corelli, did finally trade in July for $9.3 million. But the sale price came in far below the nearly $20 million Corelli sought when first listing the unit in 2011. Corelli, who has had a hand in other Tribeca conversions, completed his No. 142 project in 1999, in an era when the neighborhood began to attract a surge of interest. According to the register, the buyer of the unit, which has a living room with a fireplace as well as a terrace, was a top executive at a broadcast media company focused on ultimate fighting and wrestling.
146 Duane St.
The Hudson River Railroad, which began hauling freight along Manhattan’s west side en route to Albany in 1851, would start its journey at a depot by nearby Chambers and Hudson streets at Bogardus Plaza, where a tall sidewalk clock has stood since 2020. Dry-good businesses sprung up around the train line, and No. 146, developed in 1860 by silk merchants James Benkard and Benjamin Hutton, according to a Landmarks Commission report, was a result. From the 1890s to the 1950s, the five-story, 21,000-square-foot structure housed shoe store Nathaniel Fisher & Co., which installed its own public timepiece: a wall-mounted copper clock that is green with age but still juts from the second story today. A later footwear concern, the Hersh 8 Back Shoe Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection in the 1970s as the area declined. Upstairs in the walkup building are 12 apartments; a fourth-floor studio with 850 square feet and 14-foot ceilings was recently available for $5,300 a month, a listing shows. The Milrod and Drelich families control the site through a leasehold, according to the city register. But the Laboz family’s United American Land, a major SoHo landlord, includes No. 146 on its own website, suggesting some kind of partnership. The Jewish Community Project Downtown, which offers a popular preschool, has leased the retail space since 2005.
131 Duane St.
No address perhaps embodies the whiplash of changes on this block more than this one. In the 1840s the site contained a small public school serving the block’s African-American residents, records show. Then in 1862 textile merchant Thomas Hope constructed the current building, a five-story white marble and cast iron-detailed structure whose cornice still spells out Hope’s name. Boot-makers, thread-suppliers and an iron works came later. Following them were artists, who commandeered the building’s upper stories as affordable live-work spaces starting in the early 1970s. In 1998 chef Henry Meer opened the restaurant City Hall at No. 131. Officials and lobbyists mixed it up frequently inside the eatery’s soaring dining room, which also reportedly sometimes received mail intended for the actual seat of city government. Meer, who owned the building, according to the register, was also known for serving lunch to those struggling with homelessness on Christmas Eve. City Hall shuttered in 2015. Meer then sold the 30,000-square-foot site to Austrian battery mogul Michael Tojner for $18.5 million, records show. Tojner, whose net worth last year was $1.3 billion, according to Forbes, then embarked on a years-long redevelopment that included clearing out long-term tenants. Last year the eight-unit rental introduced its penthouse for a hefty $78,000 a month, while a column-lined three-bedroom was asking $21,000 this month. The former City Hall space, a 12,000-square-foot two-floor spread, still seems to be looking for a new tenant, according to a recent marketing brochure.
