South Street is on its w﷽ay to💎 becoming downtown’s hottest ticket around.
The once-forܫlorn corridor astride the elevaꦜted FDR Drive is on fire with new development and new energy from the Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge.
The street has come a long way since we last wrote about it in July 2015. It’s a remarkable renaissance for the FiDi area’s eastern shore, which has bee𝓰n eclipsed in the public🐽 eye by all of the new World Trade Center-Brookfield Place area development.
On Oct. 7, the doors will open on the long-awaited iPic luxury ಞcinema complex at the Fulton Market Building, iPic founder and Chief Executive Hamid Hashemi told The Post. The Fulton site is an anchor element of Howard Hughes Corp.’s newly conceived South Street Seaport meant to appeal to New Yorkers as much as to tourists.
iPic’s eight auditoriums, containing about 500 seats, will offer movie-going amenities never before see꧃n in the city, including special plush reclining chairs and “ninja”-clad waitresses who will silently bring premium food and drink to film lovers as they watch the screen.
By next summer, H🌳ughes Corp.’s all-new Pier 17 across the street, which recently topped out, will 🐟open with restaurants from Jean-Georges Vongerichten and David Chang, among others.
On th💎e residential front, foundation work is accelerating on Fortis Property Group’s 1 Seaport — aka 60 South St. and 161 Maiden Lane — for a dramatically des✃igned condo tower to be completed in 2018.
A few steps north, Beijing-based China Oceanwide Holdings closed in March on a $390 million purchase of land and air rights at꧂ 80 South St.
The company plans another soaring residential skyscraper on the site of what꧙’s now a low-rise building directly across from sightseer-swarmed Pier 15.
We can only hope the project doesn’t snuff out tiny little taco and burrito joint El Luchador and its cute Airstre𝓡am trailer.
It’s good times on South Street for office towers, too. At Larry Silverstein’s 120 Wall St., at the corner of South Street, global strategic agency Droga5 recentlyಞ expanded by 110,000 square feet, bringing its total at the now-full, 650,000-square-foot address to 208,000 square feet.
Meanwhile, the City Council♌ in June rezoned nearby, parallel Water Street to allow landlords to replace office buildings’ useless “arcades” with retail stores that will f🍃inally bring life to the sidewalks.
Joggers enjoying the Waterfront Esplanade and crowds thronging indoor-outdoor café Industry Kitchen belie the not-so-lon💧g-ago doldrums, when South Street was largely deserted 🐻except for Seaport tourists and thrill-seekers searching for dead bodies.
All these milestones were noted in the Downtown Allian▨ce’s second-quarter report on the district, which is to be released on Tuesday.
The 🐎report noted enormous energy on the investment sale scene as well. China Investment Corp., a sovereign wealth fund, recently paid $700 millionꦗ for a 49 percent stake in Brookfield Property’s 1 New York Plaza, the massive office tower that’s home to businesses as diverse as law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, cosmetics giant Revlon and publisher Macmillan Science and Education.
The transaction valued the 2.55 million-square-foot tower at a healthy $561 a square foot — which CBRE Executive Vice President Bruce Surry, a downtown specia﷽list, called a remarkable number for a 46-year-old property.
Surry said the entire South Street corridor 🦹increasingly offers a “live, work and play” environmenඣt.
He cited recent nearby residential conversions — including 🔯at Rose Associates’ 70 Pine St. and at 180 Water St., another former office building that Nathan Berman is converting to apartments — that bring more locals to the Seaport, which once was mainly a tourist site.
On the of🌊fice side, Surry cited “virtually no vacancy” at Resnick’s 199 Water St. and “a lot of activity” at 180 Maiden Lane.
There’s only one qu꧒estion mark: the stalled plan to turn the landmark Battery Maritime Building at South Street’s foot into a hotel and dining destination.
The ꩲEconomic Development Corp. is in discussions with Stoneleigh Capital to see the job through by the end of 2017. The city reached out to Connecticut-based Stoneleigh after the original developers, several executives of Dermot Co. — but not Dermot itself — decided not to proceed.