Terry Pristin, The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2011
New York is a city full of historic landmarks. From the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building over to the Brooklyn Bridge, these and hundreds of other historic structures located throughout the five boroughs require regular maintenance and occasional restorative investments to remain standing in good condition.
For the majority of the city’s lesser-known landmark buildings, it’s these efforts towards preservation and restoration that contribute to their continued ex
In 1994, a little-known real estate investor, Gary Barnett, bought the Belnord, a 1909 landmarked 12-story apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bringing an end to one of the city’s longest and most acrimonious tenant-landlord battles. He paid around $15 million and agreed to settle a slew of pending lawsuits.
Mr. Barnett is now one of New York’s busiest developers, as the president of the Extell Development Company. He has spent tens of millions of dollars restoring and upgrading the long-neglected Belnord, which occupies the entire block from 86th Street to 87th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway and has 215 apartments. But like many other landlords of New York residential buildings that are subject to the city’s strict rent regulations, Mr. Barnett put more debt on the Italian Renaissance-style Belnord than its rental income could support. He stopped paying his sizable debt service on the Belnord in May and could wind up walking away from it, a prospect that alarms longtime tenants.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a writer who has lived at the Belnord since 1975, said Mr. Barnett, who was previously in the diamond business in Antwerp, Belgium, was able to appreciate the building’s European flavor and enhance it, using skilled artisans.
Read the full article in The New York Times.
