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Bryant Park back in fashion
Needle Park, R.I.P.: Area's residential renaissance includes prized views of spiffed-up square and spate of new projects


Not your father's Bryant Park: Ricardo Sobrevinas, president of the Bryant Park Place co-op, stands on the banister of the building's central staircase.
Ricardo Sobrevinas remembers the bad times on Bryant Park, when its most prominent feature was a floating population of drug dealers and their clientele.

Now the president of Bryant Park Place, the only co-op on the edge of the Midtown Manhattan park, Sobrevinas said the genteel way the park is now – a seasonal ice-skating rink was installed in October, outdoor movies are shown during warmer months, and much of the park has wi-fi for earnest cubicle dwellers from nearby office buildings – feels eons away from what it once was.

"There is no other building around Bryant Park that clearly parallels the experience of Bryant Park itself," said Sobrevinas, who has lived since 1995 in the co-op once known as The Columns. "Remember, Bryant Park was 'Needle Park.' Remember that? It used to be a drug haven. No one could go there safely."

The park's namesake co-op was also dangerous – financially. Sobrevinas said attorneys for would-be Bryant Park Place buyers would dissuade their clients from closing deals. Some apartments were simply uninhabitable, he added, and an entrenched co-op board, along with a managing agent eventually indicted, presided over a crumbling early 20th-century building originally constructed to grandly house Andrew Carnegie's Engineers Club.

In the late 1990s, though, just as the park across 40th Street began its revival, Bryant Park Place, too, under a revamped co-op board with Sobrevinas at the helm, underwent drastic improvements. The improvements, said a clearly proud Sobrevinas, have translated into financial advantages for the co-op's owners – 15 to 20 percent of which, he estimated, have been there since at least the early 1990s. A one-bedroom on the fifth floor sold for $145,000 in 2000. In late 2005, an apartment one floor below – "same layout," Sobrevinas said – sold for $670,000. A one-bedroom without park views now generally starts at $550,000. "In the mid-1990s," he said, "you could get them for $60,000."

This shift in the housing reality around Bryant Park has happened at the same time as – if not because of – a shift in the perception of the area. And developers and marketers have taken notice: At least four new condo developments are planned around the park's edges.

"Bryant Park today is probably one of the hippest neighborhoods in the city," said Michael Shvo, whose eponymous firm is marketing the luxury condos of the new Bryant Park Tower at 100 West 39th Street, the first such condos on the park. "Things are going in the nighttime, daytime, summer, winter."

Expected to open in January, Bryant Park Tower will feature a 24-concierge, a gym, on-site parking access, and a lobby designed by Costas Kondylis – unheard of amenities around Bryant Park only a decade ago. More than two-thirds of the tower's 94 units sold in four days in July. Half, according to the Shvo Group, sold for at least $1,300 a square foot.

The top 20 floors of 1450 Broadway, a 42-story office building at the southeast corner of 41st Street owned by the Moinian Group, are being converted to condos, said Shvo, whose group will be marketing them. The units will be ready for sale in about eight months. The rest of the tower will be left commercial.

The owners of the old headquarters of clothier Tommy Hilfiger at 485 Fifth Avenue plan to convert that 185,000-square-foot building into luxury loft condos overlooking the central branch of the New York Public Library. After buying the building in October, joint venture investors Belfonti Capital Partners and the Carlyle Group announced a $160 million conversion that would include a complete renovation of the building. While details of the conversion remain scarce, a spokesperson for the project did say that fashion designer Peter Som would design the interiors of the condos.

Finally, last month, Mermel & McLain Management and pension fund ASB Capital announced their $120 million purchase of the 20-story Springs Mills Building at 104 West 40th Street with plans to expand the 200,000-square-foot glass tower by 70,000 feet for apartments. Architects Skidmore Ownings Merrill have been signed up for the job, the New York Post reported.

Such hearty developer interest in the Bryant Park area seems almost routine now. It wouldn't have to Joy Greene some short years ago.

Greene, who's lived in Bryant Park Place since 1983, said "the area was rather unpleasant" until at least the early 1990s, when a redesign of the park added two restaurant pavilions, concession kiosks, and, perhaps most importantly, more entrances for a greater visibility that, along with a police crackdown, curbed rampant drug-dealing. By the late 1990s, then, she said, the shootings, drug dealing, and rat infestation of Bryant Park had decidedly given way to a more pleasant atmosphere.

"If you look at the gentrification over the last 20 years," Greene said, "it's really extraordinary."