High Line: hot! West 28th Street: not! So sayeth the track record of +Art, the 91-unit condo building developed by developed by "storage-warehouse-magnate" Erik Ekstein between 10th and 11th Avenues. At current tally, +Art is 65% sold after four months back on the market following a two-year hibernation. Which isn't that bad, except—horror of horrors—its hip factor is so not up to par with the High Line and Chelsea gallery district. (Guess the John Pawson and Jean Prouve pieces have yet to be installed?)
The WSJ takes issue with the faux-warehouse design, for one:
"Take, for example, its facade. Architect Leonard Fusco, of GF55 Partners, which designs apartment buildings that generally look more like new-age dormitories than places where anyone really builds a life, has rimmed the building's front windows in heavy frames of custom bull-nose brick with panels of pre-distressed aluminum running vertically between. The intention, Mr. Fusco says, was to give the building a "massive" feeling that mirrors the solid, meat-and-potatoes profiles of many of the turn-of-the-20th-century structures nearby. Instead, the facade looks like a stack of bug-eyed glass pods. It's a mediocre face to present to the street, compared to the character exuded by nearby behemoths like the Starrett-Lehigh building."
Which certainly doesn't help outweigh +Art's small floorplans with "cramped bedrooms", and a block lined with a scrap yard, a strip club, and a stalled construction site. If that's not enough to deter you, studios start at $530,000, one-bedrooms at $860K, and two-bedrooms range from $1.26 million to $2.15 million.
· High Line Hits a Snag [WSJ]
· Listings: 540 West 28th Street [StreetEasy]
· +Art coverage [Curbed]
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