It’s a Dumbo development double whammy!
The developers building two luxury towers on a vacant Jay Street lot they bought years ago from the Jehovah’s Witnesses revealed new renderings and a website for the high-rises, whose one-to-four-bedroom condos are expected to hit the market later this year, according to a rep.
Builders Cim Group and Livwrk’s towers at 85 Jay St. — which the firms christened Front and York after two of the streets surrounding the city-block-sized site — will rise on land the religious group sold off for $345 million in 2016, and previously used as a parking lot for its members.
The two proposed 21-story high-rises are going up as of right, because Witnesses leaders in 2004 got the city to rezone the site for housing, despite never building residences there.
Together, the towers designed by Manhattan–based architect Morris Adjmi will include 408 condos and an additional 320 rental units, according to the rep, and each will boast its own lobby and swimming pool, with additional spaces dedicated to retail and a community facility, plans filed with the city in 2017 show.
Cim Group and Livwrk leaders initially purchased the site in a real-estate partnership that also included the family firm of President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, scooping it up months after the trio shelled out an additional $340 million for the Witnesses old Watchtower building in nearby Brooklyn Heights.
Kushner held on to his personal stakes in the Jay St. project — and the redevelopment of the old Watchtower site into an office-and-commercial complex dubbed Panorama — long after he stepped down as the chief executive of his family’s Kushner Companies when his father-in-law took the oath of office in January 2017, but ultimately sold them to Cim Group last June, leaving it and Livwrk as the properties’ lone developers.
