Arts Business Expands at Navy Yard

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The New York Sun

“Neighborhood prospers — artists are priced out” is a common refrain in the narrative of New York real estate. Less attention is paid to the artisans and art businesses that are crucial, and highly profitable, tenants in the city’s remaining industrial areas.

One such business, Surround-Art, recently signed a 20-year lease on an 89,000-square-foot “green” building currently under construction at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. SurroundArt, which does art packing and transportation, as well as providing back-of-the-house functions for museums, currently occupies 71,000 square feet at the Navy Yard.

The president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, Andrew Kimball, said that artists and artisans are integral to BNYDC’s business model. Unlike traditional industrial tenants, who will pay more for a ground floor space, with access to loading docks, artists and fine-goods-manufacturers will pay a premium for space on an upper floor, because it has better light.

In its new lease, SurroundArt is paying $20 per square foot, a price that Mr. Kimball called “a new high-water mark for industrial spaces.” SurroundArt will sublet some of the space to related businesses, such as a private conservation lab, that are being pushed out of areas like Chelsea and Long Island City by rezoning and condominium development.

SurroundArt is also leasing the adjacent, much smaller Paymaster building, where workers at the Navy Yard once picked up their wages. The BDNYC is funding restoration of the building’s historic exterior, and SurroundArt is doing a gut renovation.

The chief executive officer of SurroundArt, Michael Murray, founded his business in Washington, after having been a cabinetmaker at the Smithsonian Institution. “We would get so many calls at the museum asking where somebody could get a case or a pedestal made, so I and a few others decided to strike out to sell these talents to the private sector,” Mr. Murray said.

When SurroundArt expanded to New York in 2003, the company experienced a tremendous boom in business.

“New York is the epicenter of the art world, especially in contemporary art,” Mr. Murray said. “Art that’s being shipped into the U.S., either for temporary exhibition or for purchase, all comes through the New York port. We started at Brooklyn Navy Yard with 8,000 square feet; within the first six months we expanded to 24,000 square feet, and soon after to 65,000.”


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