Condos at Financial District’s 45 Park Place will average $3,400/square foot

Sharif El-Gamal’s 665-foot condo tower will be among the city’s most expensive

By Zoe Rosenberg@zoe_rosenberg May 13, 2017, 10:00am EDT

Soho Properties’s 45 Park Place is poised to launch sales any week now, after years in the development wringer. Some hints: A teaser site unveiled in February provided a first look inside the long-in-the-works tower, and a freshly published profile in the New York Times on the project and its dogged developer, Sharif El-Gamal, provides many-a new detail.

The most notable is that the 50 apartments will not be cheap, with the price per square foot averaging $3,400. By that metric, the Times notes that the price firmly plants the project within the top fifteen most expensive in the city, alongside company like 30 Park Place and 432 Park Avenue.

Condos in the building will start at $1.92 million for a one-bedroom, $3.725 million for a two-bedroom, $4.595 million for a three-bedroom, and $10.5 million for a four-bedroom. A duplex penthouse will go onto the market for $41 million, and a second will be listed for $39 million.

The Times notes that the property is unveiling itself “at a dark time,” when luxury inventory is still coming onto the market but buyers of such condos have pulled back in a major way. Compared to the first quarter of 2016, sales of luxury condos have dropped 25 percent in the first quarter of this year.

El-Gamal remains undeterred. “Real estate in New York is a blood sport,” he told the Times. “It’s not for the faint of heart.” The man would know: one of El-Gamal’s original proposals for the site, pejoratively nicknamed the Ground Zero Mosque, was met with fierce backlash. The proposal included bringing a 15-story Islamic mosque and cultural center named Park51 to the site.

Instead, El-Gamal is constructing a three-story Islamic center and museum designed by Jean Nouvel. “I didn’t give up on the original vision,” El-Gamal tells the Times, saying that he might look into bringing the facility to a different location within the city.