Tribeca Citizen: In the News: The Roxy and Soho Grand owner is tossing in towel
February 5, 2021
The Real Deal reports that the owner of the Soho Grand and The Roxy hotels is handing over the keys to both hotels to the lender, according to notes on the hotels’ securitized loan. I don’t think I need to emphasize that this is bad news for the neighborhood. Both hotels have been fixtures here for more than two decades, creating some buzz but more importantly, adding life and light to the streetscape.
Billionaire Leonard Stern’s Hartz Mountain Industries “’no longer wants to fund the losses’ at the properties, and has requested to transfer the hotels to the special servicer on the $110 million loan via a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, according to a watchlist note from January,” the story says. “Hartz Mountain hasn’t missed a payment on the interest-only loan and is current through January, according to notes on Trepp [the company that provides data on the financial industry]. But the hotel’s financials were severely impacted by the Covid-19 shutdown and its ability to cover its debt service has decreased significantly.”
The Roxy opened as the Tribeca Grand in 2000, four years after the Soho Grand opened just north of Canal on West Broadway. The Tribeca Grand was rebranded in 2015 as The Roxy Hotel Tribeca and given a makeover intended to invoke both the ’20s and the ’90s — the Roxy movie theater and the Roxy dance club. That’s when Paul’s Cocktail Lounge, The Django jazz club and Blackstones salon opened, along with the movie theater. When the 352-room Soho Grand opened in 1996, it was the first boutique hotel in the neighborhood.
We have already seen the closure of three hotels in Fidi, including the AKA Wall Street, and the AKA Tribeca on Chambers shows no sign of opening (I’ve been in touch with the PR firm and they said they have no word.)
From The Real Deal: “As of the fall, 80 percent of New York City hotels, backed by $4 billion in securitized mortgages, were showing signs of distress. Hotel Association of New York City CEO Vijay Dandapani at the time said it would be a ‘great’ outcome if half of the city’s 640 hotels survive the pandemic.”