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By late 2026, the Flatiron Building will be residential, with 60 luxury condos replacing the offices where Macmillan editors once pored over copy.
The new owners filed paperwork yesterday that sets the ball rolling on plans to convert the wedge-shaped 1902 landmark into apartments. The Commercial Observer broke news of the plans, which won’t change what you’ll see from the sidewalk. The owners — a consortium made up of the last owner, GFP Real Estate; the Sorgente Group, which focuses on historic renovations; and the Brodsky Organization, which specializes in residential — aren’t planning to add an addition or demolish any of its lovely terra cotta, and the ground floor will still be retail, though that’s being cut down by 2,000 square feet.
The paperwork shows that the building could fit 100 apartments that are about 2,000 square feet each. But the developers are asking to build only 60, given the need to use a big chunk of space for new elevators, fire stairs, trash compactors, wider hallways, and other residential requirements. There’s also a plan to replace the glass in the windows since they don’t meet noise requirements for apartments. If everything gets approved and built on schedule, the application predicts it’ll be ready for move-ins by the end of 2026.
The owners had suggested last fall that a conversion was likely, but they hadn’t specified whether the building would become condos or co-ops, luxury or affordable, and further hinted that half of the space could stay offices or turn into hotel rooms. The building had been mostly empty after the book publisher Macmillan moved out before the pandemic. Plans to renovate led to infighting between its then-owners, and the building was put up for sale, with the winning bid coming from an unknown whose failure to even put down the deposit turned him into a grifter icon. (You keep doing you, Jacob Garlick, wherever you are.) A second auction sold the building to the expected high bidder: Jeffrey Gural, whose GFP Real Estate had already held a 75 percent stake and simply wanted to buy its partner out.)
As my colleague Christopher Bonanos wrote when plans of the conversion surfaced last year, turning the Flatiron into living space makes sense. Not just because of the ideal location off a park, or the light-filled (no adjoining buildings!) and high-ceilinged rooms, but also because the narrow triangle shape that was an awkward place to squeeze in desks and bookshelves “will surely rank as one of the city’s great places to have breakfast.”
