Development Gives Flatiron Area New Identity

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The New York Sun

Every weekday, when the weather permits, Madison Square Park fills with office workers on their lunch breaks. Some sit on benches and eat sandwiches from nearby delis. Others buy cheese fries and Chicago Dogs at the Shake Shack, an outdoor restaurant that opened last year. But there’s a relatively new addition to the area: children scrambling over a jungle gym at the playground built during the park’s 2001 renovation.


The neighborhood known as Flatiron or Madison Park is no longer just a 9-to-5 destination. Since the park’s renovation, families and professionals have started moving in. While the first developments sprouted up four years ago, the neighborhood is just now starting to blossom.


“The Flatiron district, I would say, is one of the hottest districts in all of Manhattan,” a Dwelling Quest broker, Robert Rosa, said. Brokers say apartments in the area are selling for $1,200 a square foot, compared with $800 in Midtown. The prices are partly a function of supply and demand: The neighborhood simply doesn’t have a lot of condos yet, Mr. Rosa said.


But that’s about to change.


The building at 50 Madison Ave., which was bought four years ago and converted into nine condos with more than 2,600 square feet each, is full. But other condo conversions around the park are in earlier stages of development. Just down the street at 225 Fifth Ave., Elad Properties is converting the Gift Building into 192 apartments. The 41-story MetLife building at 1 Madison Ave., which is actually two connected buildings totaling 1.4 million square feet, sold for $900 million earlier this year.The buyer, SL Green Realty, plans to convert at least part of it into residential space. Tenants of the International Toy Center, a 1 million-squarefoot convention center on the western side of the park, will have to move out when construction begins in early 2006. The building’s destiny? Condominiums, of course.


“It’s become so much more of an inviting area for residents,” Nick Athanail, a Corcoran vice president who lives on 25th Street, less than a block east of the park, said. “It’s really flourishing in a way that Midtown is not because of the commercial element of Midtown.”


Location plays a major role in Flatiron’s popularity. “It’s close to everything,” said Christine Wu, who paid $790,000 for a 650-square-foot apartment in Mr. Athanail’s building last year. “You’re close to downtown and you’re also close to Midtown, where I work.There’s a lot of trendy restaurants popping up, like Tabla. It’s just really convenient.”


The exclusive broker for 50 Madison, Halstead Senior Vice President Louise Phillips Forbes, credits restaurateur Danny Meyer for reinvigorating the neighborhood before it was trendy. He opened both Tabla and Eleven Madison Park in 1998, and owns the Shake Shack as well.


“He has been a great influence for Flatiron because he took a big risk investing in a project of that magnitude that may not have had an evening market,” Mrs. Phillips Forbes said. “He’s created that choice for Flatiron so you don’t have to leave the neighborhood for fine dining.”


Every broker defines Flatiron differently. Depending on who is talking, the border can stretch east to Lexington Avenue, west to Sixth Avenue, as far south as Union Square, and as far north as 29th Street. Until recently, those blocks had been lumped with the neighborhoods bordering them: Midtown, Chelsea, Gramercy, and Union Square. Now, however, brokers are seeing Flatiron, which gets its name from the iconic triangle-shaped building on the southern side of the park, as an area in and of itself.


“The Flatiron area used to be kind of linked with Gramercy,” a JC DeNiro vice president, Hunie Kwon, said. “I’d say recently, with the renovation of Madison Square Park, it’s kind of come into its own.”


The park-side developments anchor the neighborhood, but condos are popping up all around the area. The process accelerated with a zoning change last year, which allowed more residential development in the Ladies Mile Historic District, north of 16th Street and south of 22nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. The president of the real estate firm Massey Knakal, John Ciraulo, said the zoning change doubled the value of property on that strip.


“I know developers are just frothing at the mouth at the prospect of getting one of those buildings,” said Matthew Haines, the founder and co-owner of Property Shark, a Web site that aggregates real estate data. He added, “In that area between Fifth and Sixth, there’s definitely going to be an opportunity for mid-block development, where someone with a four-story building is going to add another six floors.”


Some developers need froth no longer because they have already taken advantage of the zoning change. A sales office recently opened for 4 W. 21st St., a building being developed by the Brodsky Organization. Another opened for the Altair Lofts, Extell’s developments on 18th and 20th streets. The cost for those luxury condos: nearly $1,200 a square foot.


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