“With a smaller unit size, the [developer] plans to market the units at a 20% discount to other properties in the surrounding area, hoping to attract young professionals, students and small families,” said Paul Rahimian of Parkview Financial, one of the lenders on the project, in a May announcement.
The building was erected in 1929 as a clubhouse for the American Women’s Association and also as apartments for single women living in Manhattan. During the second World War, it was converted into the Henry Hudson Hotel.
Later, several floors in the building were used by television station WNET as its headquarters. In 1997 the Ian Schrager-founded Morgans Hotel Group bought it and conducted a massive renovation of the property. It opened in 2000 as an 878-room hotel.
Two decades later it was purchased by Eldridge from Sam Nazarian’s SBE Entertainment Group, which had acquired Morgans Hotel Group in 2016 for $805 million and took ownership of its properties.
CSC owns at least seven other residential properties in Manhattan as well as two in Brooklyn, one in Philadelphia and two in Mexico City.
CSC did not respond to a request for comment. Duval and Stachenfeld LLP, the law firm that negotiated the lease on behalf of Montgomery, did not respond to a request for comment, but on its website acknowledged that it worked on “the acquisition and ground lease of the Hudson Hotel located in Columbus Circle, Manhattan, for a $400M redevelopment of the site by affiliates of CSC Co-Living [sic].”
That information was removed from the firm’s website after the time of publication.