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The future of the Battery Maritime Building
The historic Battery Maritime Building is slated for a $110 million makeover with a boutique hotel and rooftop restaurant. In July 2007, The Dermot Company and Poulakakos family were named by the city’s Economic Development Corporation as the new developers for the Lower Manhattan ferry terminal next to the Whitehall Staten Island ferry terminal.
The Dermot Company Inc. was formed in 1991 as a real estate investment and management company focused on multi-family sector opportunities. Dermot recently redeveloped the Williamsburgh Savings Bank in Brooklyn as a condominium building in partnership with Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds.
 The Poulakakos family has been a fixture in the New York City restaurant and catering business for over 35 years. Harry Poulakakos and son Peter are at the heart of a number of very successful restaurants in New York City’s financial district. Harry first opened Harry’s at Hanover Square, followed by two similar restaurants, one in the lobby of the American Stock Exchange, and the third in the Woolworth Building. He and Peter created the acclaimed Bayard’s in the historic India House above Harry’s at Hanover Square. Peter operates three French style pastry and espresso bars called Financier Patisserie, and with various partners, he opened Ulysses, an Irish Folk House, and Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, both on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan.
February 2008 – the updated plan
Community Board 1 has approved the plans to build a four-story glass addition to the landmarked Battery Maritime Building. The plans for the addition include public indoor space, a rooftop bar and restaurant, and a 140-room boutique hotel. Some Community Board members expressed concern about the renovations, especially in regards to how it would look from across the river in Brooklyn, but ultimately they determined that the addition was the best way to save the building from further decay.
Developer Dermot Company and its architects, Rogers Marvel, have added four historic cupolas to their plan for the Battery Maritime Building, in an effort to win Landmarks approval for its glass hotel addition.
To make the addition more palatable, Rogers Marvel reached deep into the building’s past. After examining drawings of the building’s original 1907 facade, the architects decided to restore four cupolas with aerials that stretch skyward.
“We want to integrate the new and the old in a very deliberate and powerful way,” said Jonathan Marvel, principal at Rogers Marvel Architects, at the Landmarks Committee meeting last week. “The new addition is now screened by historic elements of the old building.”
The cupolas were removed about 70 years ago to make way for a Department of Transportation addition. The four restored cupolas, coated in historic paint, will cost $1 million apiece and the developers will remove the D.O.T. addition.
The 140-room hotel will increase the overall height of the building roughly by half, tacking 48 feet onto the original building, which translates to 30 feet on top of what is there today. |
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