New York City Transit’s 370 Jay St. as seen from Google Streetview.
For years, any reference to 370 Jay St. was Big Apple slang for the New York City Transit Authority. The big hulking building at the corner of Jay and Willoughby in Downtown Brooklyn had housed the TA headquarters for decades, but in 2002, Transit operations moved to Lower Manhattan. The building at 370 Jay St. remains a very large thorn in the side of Transit’s real estate department.
Since 1995, the building itself has been shrouded in scaffolding. Pieces of the façade fell that year, and although the MTA has planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on repairing the building for the better part of ten years, the money has never materialized. Supposedly, the 2010-2014 Capital Plan, yet to be approved by the state, will appropriate money for the project, but in the meantime, the scaffolding still stands.
Over the years, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership has called upon the authority to sell or renovate the building. It is, they say, a blight on Downtown Brooklyn. The scaffolding creates a 420-foot-long corridor of dark shadows, and the storefront space sits empty and unused. In Oct. 2008, The Brooklyn Paper profiled the state of the protests and found that the MTA planned to spend $150 million to upgrade a building worth approximately $100 million. The work would not begin until 2012 at the earliest, and local pols were pressuring fast action.
Today, amNew York highlights the local anger over the state of the building, and the story is much the same. Now, the work is estimated to cost over $180 million, and no one knows when it will begin (or funded, for that matter). Heather Haddon has the MTA’s take on it:
Brooklyn business owners and residents are asking the MTA to wash its hands of its 370 Jay St. property, a 13-story hulk in the heart of downtown Brooklyn that has deteriorated since NYC Transit yanked most of its operations from there about four years ago…
The city owns the building and leases it to the MTA, so the agency wouldn’t make money by selling it. But the 418,000-square-foot property needs $184 million to gut it and replace the facade, up 23 percent from the previous estimate in 2008, according to MTA figures. “The MTA has failed when it’s tried to become a developer,” said Assemb. Richard Brodsky, (D-Westchester), who wants the agency to rethink its plans for 370 Jay St.
Money for the renovations was postponed by two years and is now included in the 2010 capital plan, MTA documents show, though it’s unclear when the building will be ready. In the meantime, the agency recently took out a lease in midtown for about $3 million a year to house operations that will eventually go in 370 Jay St. Once open, the new space will end up saving the agency money, “to the tune of approximately $25 million a year,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
In a sense, 370 Jay St. has now come to symbolize the problems at the MTA. It has been in a state of disrepair for 15 years, and renovations have been on the MTA’s massive To-Do list for at least the last eight years. Yet, it still sits there empty, devoid of economic activity and a visual sorespot on Brooklyn’s downtown landscape.
The MTA continues to say it will actually save money when it can move back to 370 Jay St. In the meantime, though, Transit will soon celebrate a decade away for its once and future headquarters. Maybe, as Brodsky said, it’s time to rethink that plan.
10 comments
If the city owns it, why is it not responsible for funding its repair? Separately, what is the purpose of the MTA building on Livingston or Schermerhorn Street?
I’m wondering that too. Usually the building owner is responsible for repairs, not the renter.
It depends on the terms of the lease. When government agencies lease each other property, there can be all sorts of aspects that wouldn’t be seen in leases between private entities. On the state level, the Office of General Services is usually the landlord for many other state agencies. As there isn’t any “rent”, the tenant agencies are responsible for coming up with money for major maintenance or renovation of their units.
In Oct. 2008… the MTA planned to spend $150 million to upgrade a building worth approximately $100 million.
The city owns the building and leases it to the MTA, so the agency wouldn’t make money by selling it. But the 418,000-square-foot property needs $184 million
If I was hemorrhaging $17 million dollars a year and could find a way to stop, that would go in the “making money” column. 1.7 billion pennies saved are 1.7 billion pennies earned. Lose the building and cut your losses, Walder!
The MTA has so many buildings that they have on numerous occasions refused to list there real estate holdings. They can easily merge alot of office work from the different branches into the same building rather than each branch having many buildings and then the MTA also having many buildings.
As for 370 Jay, it is no surprise that the TA is being a horrible neighbor. They do what they want and get away with it because as a rogue agency they can!
“Rogue agency”? Do you even know what you’re talking about? Anyway, malice is hardly the problem here. This is pure incompetence.
I find the renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn, with its sleek, luxury high rises popping up all over the neighborhood a curiousity and something that I thought (and still think) impossible as a long time Brooklynite. However, there they are, and this will only put more pressure on the MTA and the City to finally do something with the old TA HQ. I believe the reporting to be spot on.
I see that building all the time as my school is right across the street but it is so ugly. It looks like the exterior is just going to fall off and compared to the mariott right next to it, it really sticks out like a sore thumb.
The dirty little secrete is that the MTA outbid Goldman Saches group for the 2 braodway building in which golman built and moved over a thousand jobs to NJ as a result. The 2 Broadway move goes down as a bigger and bigger mess. The city should sell off 370 jay and let a developer pay the renovation or demolition cost and the mta should build a building on one vacant land at one of it’s rail yards or other underused less valuable area and return 370 jay and 2 broadway to the tax rolls. How about building a new building at the small rail yard along the west end around 9th ave station.
[…] asking for $35 per square feet for a total of $2.38 million. Meanwhile, 370 Jay St. in Brooklyn is still awaiting its $150 million renovation. Categories : Asides, East Side Access […]