Essex Crossing Tower On Broome Street Reaches 26 Stories On LES

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — Another Essex Crossing building has reached its peak, the Lower East Side development team announced Wednesday.

The future office and mixed-income residential building building at 180 Broome St. just south of Delancey Street topped out at 26 stories, said Delancey Street Associates, the Essex Crossing development team which comprises BFC Partners, L+M Development Partners, Taconic Investment Partners, Prusik Group and the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group.

"From some of the most amenity rich Class A office space in the city to beautiful new apartments to the final section of the Market Line, 180 Broome will be an essential piece of Essex Crossing and help tie everything together when it opens next year," Isaac Henderson, the development director at L+M Development Partners, said in a statement.

The site at 180 Broome St. — located just north of the Lower East Side's new Target, Trader Joe's and mixed-income building dubbed The Rollins — is the sixth site to top out.

Construction is expected to be complete late next year.

The building will house 142 market rate and 121 below market rate units.

Area median income levels for the units will be set at 40%, 60%, 110% and 155%, according to a spokesman for the developers. Under 2018 statistics, families of three with an income ranging from $37,560 to $145,545 would qualify.

The ground floor will feature retail space, and the second through fifth floors will have office space. In the building's cellar, the future Market Line with various food vendors will run 700 feet along Broome St. and connect with the new Essex Street Market on Delancey St. An indoor park will also be built at the base of 180 and 202 Broome St.

Essex Crossing is the latest major development project in the Lower East Side, which will bring 1,079 units to the neighborhood with more than half earmarked as below market rate units. Some 350,000-square-feet of office space is also being built at the sites.

The development site, expected to be completed in its entirety by 2024, has previously been vacant or filled with parking lots after hundreds of families were displaced when old tenement buildings were razed in the 1960s. Families who were displaced at the time were promised they would receive priority to move into future buildings on the sites.

A spokesman for Delancey Street Associates has previously told Patch a little more than two dozen former tenants live in the new Essex Crossing — though some tenants have faced difficulty navigating the hurdles meet requirements to score a below market rate unit, Gothamist reported earlier this month. One former tenant, Gothamist reported, applied three times before getting a below market rate unit at one of the buildings after she was previously rejected for her income and credit score.

But after decades of the sites being largely vacant, Essex Crossing has been slowly coming to fruition on the Lower East Side. Earlier this month, the team won an award for excellence in mixed-use development.

Seven of the nine sites are either already open or in the works, according to Delancey Street Associates.

The first phase of the Market Line will open this spring, where longtime tenants of the existing Essex Street Market are expected to relocate. Regal Cinemas at 125 Delancey St. also opened earlier this month.

This fall, the International Center of Photography and the Gutter, a bowling entertainment center, will open at 242 Broome St.

"We're excited to keep moving full steam ahead on Essex Crossing into the fall, when we'll welcome the International Center of Photography and the Gutter to 242 Broome St.," Henderson added.