Carl Dranoff has rescued and transformed former industrial buildings such as the RCA Victor building in Camden and the GE building in West Philadelphia. Now the developer looks to be part of the rescue of Newark, N.J.
The New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Dranoff Properties Inc. will announce today that they have a deal to develop a mixed-use residential and retail project in the North Jersey city that has lagged Jersey City and Hoboken, which have emerged as real alternatives for Manhattanites. Called Two Center Street, the $200 million development would include a 250-unit luxury-apartment tower of between 30 and 40 stories, 30,000 square feet of retail space and parking.
The arts center opened in 1997 and has had aspirations to be the development engine for Newark. Two Center Street would be the first new building on the 12 acres that the nonprofit group controls.
Lawrence P. Goldman, president and chief executive officer of the arts center, said Dranoff Properties was selected from a short list of five developers. Technically, what Dranoff has won is a letter of intent giving him a nine-month period of exclusivity to reach a development agreement.
Dranoff's apartments would be right next to the 250,000-square-foot performing arts center. If that setup sounds familiar, look at Pine and Broad Streets where Dranoff built the 32-story Symphony House condominium near the glass-encased Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.
The $125 million Symphony House, which opened in June, is 80 percent sold out, Dranoff said yesterday.
But Symphony House wasn't the project that really caught the attention of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center officials. It was really the Victor building in Camden, in which Dranoff won the right from the state of New Jersey to redevelop a vacant factory into 341 luxury loft apartments.
"We checked with the state," Goldman said. "They said he was a stand-up guy."
Two Center Street is the type of project that fits Dranoff's style of urban residential development. Dranoff said he saw it catering to the professionals — 50,000 of them — that work in Newark's downtown and at branches of Rutgers and Seton Hall Universities. But it comes at a time when the housing market has collapsed in many parts of the country.
Dranoff said he had built in good and bad times over the last 30 years, and this current trough didn't faze him. The Left Bank luxury apartment building near Drexel University began leasing shortly before 9/11. "The market froze up, then it unfroze," Dranoff said.
"We never build for cycles. This seems like a little sneeze," he said.
Goldman showed equal confidence: "This is the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. Apartments are always in demand."
For Dranoff Properties, it will be its first project outside the Philadelphia region, where the firm has become one of the best-known developers of residential high-rises.
Both Dranoff and Goldman said the Two Center Street project would be the first market-rate, newly built apartments in the North Jersey city of 278,000 people in more than 40 years. (A 35-story office building near the arts center was renovated and turned into 316 luxury apartments in 2006.)
Dranoff called Symphony House the "perfect prototype" for what could rise in Newark. The design of the building has drawn criticism, but Dranoff said it had been "enormously successful."
Exactly how Two Center Street will look won’t be known for about a year. And, Goldman reminded, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center has design control over the proposed tower.
