Two Lower Manhattan Hotels are facing headwinds. At the March 3 meeting of the Battery Park City Committee of Community Board 1, committee member Tammy Meltzer said, “I’ve heard from one of the people on the board at the Ritz-Carlton that they are actively seeking votes to boot the hotel, and to turn the entire building into apartments.” Committee member Jeff Mihok added, “they’re trying to sell it for $790 million.” Committee chair Anthony Notaro continued, “not only does the building want to sell, but the hotel operators want out.”
The Ritz-Carlton building houses both residential condominiums (in the tower section of the building, which is called Millennium Point) and a hotel at the structure’s base, which contains 298 guest rooms. The hotel was originally scheduled to open days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but did not launch until the following year. Although widely lauded for its high quality of accommodations and service, the hotel has struggled financially since the date it opened, with the 2008 real estate downtown and Hurricane Sandy further clouding its business prospects.
A spokesman for the hotel did not return calls seeking comment.
Elsewhere, the W Downtown Hotel, located at the corner of Washington and Albany Streets in the Financial District, is seeking to convert four floors of hotel rooms to apartments. Like the Ritz-Carlton, the W Downtown is an apartment tower with a hotel at its base.
Floors 23 through 26 of the hotel are currently used for extended-stay suites, but the Moinian Group (developer of the property) wants to sell the 32 units as apartments. A spokesman for the Moinian Group, which is trying to sell the four floors to a single purchaser, did not respond to requests for clarification about whether these units would be marketed as rentals or resold as condominium units. (The residential tower at the W Downtown contains both rentals and owner-occupied apartments.)
Ms. Meltzer noted that both buildings lie within the catchment of P.S.276, “where we already have waiting lists for kindergarten and first grade,” and and voiced the concern that adding several hundred new households to this zone would only make school overcrowding worse.