When I told Jed Walentas, mastermind of the $3 billion Domino Sugar site project, that the hulking former refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront looked scary from the outside, he said confidently: “Wait till you see the inside.”
He was right. I’ve never seen an interior as spooky as the Domino factory — a weathered, roughly 18-story-high, 1856-vintage brick-faced hulk where sugar was refined until the company moved to Yonkers in 2004.
A walk-through revealed a nightmare maze of girders and pipes. Floors and catwalks abruptly ended over mysterious voids; ghosts of 160 years of sweat seemed to dwell in shadows. I was grateful for light pouring through arched windows that afford fabulous views of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the East River.
But Walentas and his Two Trees Management aim to transform the eerie, high-rise catacombs into offices. Not just any offices, but a unique, custom-designed, 380,000-square-foot headquarters for a tenant — more likely to come from the creative, digital and media worlds than from financial services — who can see possibilities beyond today’s blackened innards.
The total space will include several new, 15,000-square-foot glass-box floors at the top crowned by the famous yellow Domino Sugar sign, which is now in storage.
The refinery, a designated city landmark, is to be the commercial core of Two Trees’ planned 11-acre “urban campus” including 2,800 apartments (700 below market rate); 600,000 square feet of offices; a six-acre waterfront park; and 200,000 square feet of retail and community space. Tenants are expected to begin moving into the first residential tower with 550 apartments when it’s completed by July 2017.
The refinery looked even creepier two years ago, Walentas said. “You can’t imagine how much machinery was part of this antiquated sugar-making process. We had to take out literally hundreds of thousands of tons, like enormous, 30-foot-high vats — and there were 106 of them.”
In a city full of “adaptive reuses,” the refinery would undergo a more radical transformation than, say, the conversion of the old Port Authority terminal warehouse at 111 Eighth Ave. into modern offices for Google.
Rather than put out a standard brochure showing floor plates and the like, Walentas hopes to find a single tenant willing to propose its own design scheme — and then make it real for them in collaboration with preservation architects Beyer Blinder Belle.
“If Facebook came along tomorrow,” Walentas said, “We’d say, ‘OK, put the columns wherever you want. If you want a 30-foot-high ceiling on the ground floor, no problem. You want the elevator core here or there, no problem.’ We have this incredible canvas.”
Or, as the brochure puts it, “The historic red brick facade will become a fitted sleeve for an entirely new steel and glass structure within,” which Walentas said could be ready within 18 months of a deal being struck.
He chuckled, “Our process is to go to 100 of those [creative] companies and try to get somebody interested.” A Newmark Grubb Knight Frank team led by David Falk is working with him. If no single tenant bites, Walentas might eventually install floors and market them along more traditional lines.
Walentas ballparked the rent at “a blended average in the mid-$70s per square foot for the whole building.” That’s based on the 380,000-square-foot total even if a tenant wanted fewer floors, and thus fewer square feet, in order to create floors with extra-high ceilings.