A real estate executive who dabbles in everything from Hollywood to self-storage has acquired the Queens plot of land home to his latest e-commerce building for more than $35 million, records show.
Adam Gordon, managing partner at the Chelsea-based development firm Wildflower Ltd., purchased the sprawling 313,496-square-foot facility at 28-10 Whitestone Expressway for $35.8 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Friday.
The seller was the New York Times Co., which operates an adjacent printing plant for its namesake paper and had owned the underutilized College Point site for decades before leasing it to Gordon to begin building the warehouse about three years ago, he said. Gordon, who signed the deed himself, is now the owner of the property, too. The Times did not return a request for comment by press time.
Gordon told Crain’s Friday that his firm just finished construction on the new warehouse in the fall and aims to lease it out to one tenant that serves the nearby Queens and Brooklyn markets.
Total consumer spending within a five-mile radius of the warehouse is nearly $17 billion, according to Cushman & Wakefield, which is marketing the space.
Dubbed the College Point Logistics Center, the facility features 80,612 square feet of space on the ground level and 159,656 square feet of space on levels two and three. Gordon said he is currently in talks with three different prospective tenants but declined to say who or how much they would pay per square foot.
This isn’t Gordon’s first warehouse, either. Wildflower owns and operates a handful of others in the city and on Long Island, including the 193,800-square-foot Brooklyn Logistics Center at 12555 and 12595 Flatlands Ave. and the 422,398-square-foot JFK Logistics Center at 253-51 Rockaway Blvd., both of which are solely occupied by Amazon, according to Wildflower’s website.
Outside of e-commerce, Gordon partnered with actor Robert De Niro to open Wildflower Studios last year — a 775,042-square-foot, 11-stage film and TV production studio at 35-15 19th Ave. in Astoria. He also has charging stations for electric vehicles as part of his portfolio and recently sold a roughly 40,000-square-foot parking lot in Maspeth to Tesla for $18 million.
