When the gargantuan Starrett-Lehigh Construction went up in West Chelsea in 1931, it was once temporarily hailed as a masterwork of commercial modernism, a triumph either one of engineering and of World Taste architectural aesthetics.
Occupying all of the block from twenty sixth to twenty seventh Streets between eleventh and twelfth Avenues, the 19-story behemoth was once a three way partnership between William A. Starrett, a financier-builder who was once additionally at paintings at the Empire State Construction, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which operated an open-air freight backyard at the web site.
Whilst the railroad saved many of the flooring surface for its rail terminal, Starrett Brothers & Eken constructed a 1.8-million-square-foot production and warehouse middle above it.
Minimizing the expensive inefficiency of curbside truck deliveries, Starrett-Lehigh was once designed to permit each and every surface to serve, in impact, as the bottom surface. Vehicles entered at twenty seventh Boulevard and headed down a ramp underneath the rail backyard to a bay of 3 jumbo elevators, which hoisted them as much as their desired flooring, the place they might again up for loading or unloading.
Within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, the railroad tracks have been torn out, and within the early 2000s, two of the 3 truck elevators have been changed through passenger elevators as Starrett-Lehigh was once remodeled into an place of job development catering to inventive tenants like Hugo Boss Models and Martha Stewart Residing Omnimedia.
Now RXR Realty, which purchased the development for $920 million in 2011, is taking the transformation to the following stage, changing the remaining truck elevator with extra passenger elevators because it completes its redevelopment of Starrett-Lehigh into an upscale Twenty first-century place of job development designed to foster a way of neighborhood and make other folks need to be at paintings.
Central to this modification is the introduction of a “vertical campus,” to be finished subsequent yr, that comes with facilities unfold over 10 flooring. In the course of the development, former truck bays are being reconfigured as game, front room and health areas, the place business tenants will likely be in a position to make a choice from a golfing simulator, billiards and a shuffleboard courtroom.
At the flooring surface, a meals corridor and a separate seafood eating place through the chef Marcus Samuelsson will open to the general public this spring, along side a brand new show off of Jean-Michel Basquiat works of art in a ten,000-square-foot exposition area. A brand new major front has additionally been added on eleventh Street, serving as a gateway to the meals corridor for house citizens and other folks visiting group points of interest like artwork galleries and the Prime Line.
Gazing all this transformation with willing pastime is Robert Montelbano, 50, the development’s director of logistics, who has controlled the loading dock for many years. Mr. Montelbano is accountable for choreographing the giant development’s tough ballet of deliveries and pickups.
“It’s very tough,” he stated, “as a result of twenty sixth Boulevard is an emergency path” that runs just about “from river to river, and the police need it at all times open.”
Mr. Montelbano was once first dazzled through Starrett-Lehigh as a 10-year-old in 1981, when he rode together with his father, who labored at a shifting corporate within the development, as he drove a truck into the enormous elevator and out into the second-floor storage, “a large open area, the scale of a complete town block.”
He additionally visited the development together with his uncles, who owned a merchandising device corporate and got here to Starrett-Lehigh to shop for video-game machines. (That was once how he were given to play Area Invaders prior to he ever noticed the sport in an arcade.)
Certainly one of Mr. Montelbano’s cousins ran the loading dock, and Mr. Montelbano was once employed to function a truck elevator phase time when he was once 16. The next yr he was once employed complete time, and round 1994, he took over because the loading dock manager.
In time, he started taking his personal youngsters to Starrett-Lehigh, both to observe the fireworks at the Fourth of July after they have been introduced from a barge within the Hudson — “the fireworks exploded proper above our heads, you felt like that you must contact them” — or to observe him paintings on Saturdays.
“I took them at the truck elevator, and so they beloved it,” he stated. “It was once a large thrill, identical because it was once with me.”
As development house owners and tenants have come and long past, Mr. Montelbano has regularly grow to be Starrett-Lehigh’s de facto resident historian.
When staff have been excavating the bottom surface in preparation for the brand new meals corridor, they unearthed teach tracks from the development’s early days, and Mr. Montelbano misplaced no time in salvaging a piece of teach rail for his rising selection of Starrett-Lehigh artifacts.
“I may just see they have been throwing some items away, and I sought after it as a time pill kind of factor,” he stated in an interview, whilst a pigeon wheeled in the course of the loading house previous the tailgates of supply vehicles. “It’s a part of the development’s historical past, and it felt important to have it at the loading dock.”
From the start, Mr. Montelbano beloved being a part of the entire production that went on within the development, and he specifically admired the Child Watson Cheesecake manufacturing unit. Hundred-pound baggage of sugar and huge bins of eggs would arrive and be shipped upstairs, the place they might be blended in combination and despatched via lengthy ovens on a slow-motion conveyor belt.
“It could are available as uncooked substances,” he stated, “and on the finish you’d see the cheesecake, shrink-wrapped on pallets, going out in refrigerated vehicles.”
With the assistance of his daughter Ashley, a nurse and a dogged web sleuth, Mr. Montelbano started finding out about producers that had occupied the development prior to his time.
In its early years, Starrett-Lehigh was once house to quite a few wine and spirits corporations, like B. Cribari & Sons, makers of Sonnie Boy California Chianti, a lot of whose corkscrews, wine labels and matchbooks Mr. Montelbano has gained as presents from his 4 youngsters.
“A tanker teach would come in the course of the loading dock” stuffed with wine “from a winery in California,” he stated. The liquid can be pumped upstairs to massive vats, and ultimately depart in bottles.
A 1931 commercial was once an epiphany for Mr. Montelbano, because it confirmed a teach pulled as much as a platform the place he works each day. Even supposing the previous monitor house was once way back stuffed in, the steel-covered fringe of the previous platform continues to be visual, curving incongruously in the course of the concrete surface.
Throughout Global Struggle II, a significant tenant was once the combustion apparatus department of the Todd Shipyards Company, which produced large burners to lend a hand energy United States Army warships.
“Driving roughshod over Nazi wolfpacks,” boasted a wartime advert. “In ships of every kind, Todd burners are operating for victory.”
Mr. Montelbano has accrued those commercials, along side vintage badges of Todd workers and a 1944 operations record.
“The commercials provide you with pleasure that this development was once contributing to the nice battle in opposition to the Nazis,” he stated. “That in point of fact amazes me.”
Despite the fact that annoying, the process isn’t boring. In 2011, america Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a tenant, requested Mr. Montelbano to put aside an elevator for pieces the company had seized from the landlord of an antiques gallery.
“Off the truck comes this factor, and so they unwrapped it, and my God, it’s an Egyptian sarcophagus such as you’d see in a museum,” he recalled.
As small companies have moved out of Starrett-Lehigh all over the pandemic, RXR has assembled blocks of area as massive as 100,000 sq. ft for primary tenants the realty corporate hopes will end up extra financially strong.
However at the same time as RXR appears to be like to the longer term, and as renovations within the development proceed, Mr. Montelbano nonetheless has a watch at the previous.
“This doesn’t glance so great, nevertheless it appears to be like gorgeous to me,” he stated, main a customer to the development’s twelfth Street automotive ramp and pointing conspiratorially to a time-battered, in large part illegible signal above an go out. The signal looked as if it would endure the phrases “STOP DANGER.”
Staring on the pale letters, Mr. Montelbano gave the impression transported again around the many years to a time when teach automobiles trundled around the boulevard from automotive floats at Pier 66 whilst a overwhelm of vehicles jockeyed for place on twelfth Street.
“That is one signal I don’t need them to peer, as a result of I don’t need it to be thrown away all over the renovations,” he stated. “If it ever comes down, I’m going to beg them to put in it in my loading dock.”
For weekly e mail updates on residential actual property information, join right here. Observe us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.
