HISTORY NOW!

Former Barneys Begins New Life

By Brian J Pape, AIA, LEED-AP

Nothing is easy or cheap to build in New York City, but we can still love the challenge. For the building owners, it isn’t always a straight-forward process. On Seventh Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets, this means reimagining what the buildings can be.

Barney Pressman, who died in 1996, opened the original Barney’s men’s discount store in 1923 in a 500-square-foot storefront lease of a newly built Romanesque-style building at 115 Seventh Avenue. Barney’s discount store prospered through the Depression and WWII, and with new post-war prosperity, Barney’s grew into the adjacent building spaces.

With Barney’s blessing, his son Fred Pressman slowly transformed the store into an international high fashion emporium. According to the Wikipedia posting, in 1970, Barney’s built a penthouse upon their original building’s fifth story, as well as adding five stories onto the adjacent building at 101 Seventh Avenue (between 16th and 17th streets), having acquired them in the preceding years. This created 100,000 square feet of selling space and 20 individual shops in their new men’s department store. Women’s clothing was introduced there in 1976, until a 70,000-square-foot women’s store opened in 1986 in a row of six circa 1915 townhouses and adjacent buildings Barney’s acquired at 138-154 West 17th Street. The new spaces included architect Andrée Putman’s steel-and-marble staircase that spirals through the six-story center. 

Barneys (by then dropping the apostrophe from their name) left its Seventh Avenue flagship location in 1993, moving to a new 230,000-square-foot Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed store on Madison Avenue at East 61st Street. The company opened stores in other states and countries, taking on investors and piling on debt. They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Jan. 1996, per Wikipedia.

Back at Seventh Avenue, Barneys leased 60,000 square feet of their building to Loehmann’s Department Store (Loehmann’s first Manhattan store) in 1994. Then in 1998, Donald and Shelley Rubin paid Barneys $22 million for the entire set of buildings on Seventh Avenue and 17th Street, and after extensive remodeling, opened Rubin Museum of Art in 2004 at 150 West 17th Street. Many details within the buildings were retained, most notably Putman’s spiral staircase which became the centerpiece of the 25,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Rubin Museum is dedicated to the collection, display, and preservation of the art and cultures of the Himalayas, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and other regions within Eurasia, with a permanent collection focused particularly on Tibetan art, according to their website. In Sept. 2011, the museum opened a new 5,000 square-foot Education Center adjacent to the main museum galleries.

In 2014, the Rubin Museum sold 101-115 Seventh Avenue for $57 million to Ashkenazy Acquisitions, as reported by Aaron Ginsburg in 6Sqft (Jan. 5, 2024). “Bargain hunters were distraught when Loehmann’s shuttered their NYC locations” (in 2014, including the 101 Seventh Ave. location). Ashkenazy then leased 101 Seventh Avenue back to Barneys New York, opening a four-story store in 2016 with an elegant spiral stair of its own inside the new entrance.

But on Oct. 25, 2019, Authentic Brands Group purchased Barneys for $271.4 million, and ordered all stores to be closed. As the 6Sqft article continued, “The closures came after Barneys filed for bankruptcy … due to Ashkenazy’s major rent increase at its Madison Avenue location to $30 million, according to the New York Post.” (Ashkenazy again!)

“Ashkenazy’s Acquisition Corporation started a gut renovation (of 113-115 Seventh Avenue) after buying it, but never completed the project.” 6Sqft article continued, “Douglas Tiesi’s Argentic Investment Management, which took over the shuttered department store at 115 Seventh Avenue from developer Ben Ashkenazy in 2020, sold the property to Flushing developer and architect Raymond Chan for $22 million, as first reported by the Real Deal. Chan plans to convert the property into a luxury residential development with ground-floor retail space, according to Curbed.”

A YIMBY report by Vanessa Londono on Jan. 7, 2024, updates with, “Permits have been filed for a vertical expansion and repurposing of an existing seven-story commercial building into a 12-story mixed-use structure at 115 Seventh Avenue. Robert Shengchu Huang is listed as the owner behind the applications.” It continues, “the proposed 145-foot-tall development will yield 53,624 square feet, with 38,911 square feet designated for residential space and 14,713 square feet for commercial space. The building will have 50 residences, most likely rentals based on the average unit scope of 778 square feet. The concrete-based structure will also have a cellar.”

Since it is not protected by historic districting, the 1923 original structure does not have to conform to its previous architecture, but it appears that the shell envelope is being restored somewhat, as seen in the recent photos. Unfortunately, a Summons and Order by the Department of Buildings has been posted on the building door since Dec. 2023, for a “failure to maintain exterior wall.” Timely correction is called for, but the notice remained in mid-April.

Just down the street at 128 West 17th Street, the building of the former Colored School has been recently landmarked, the only individually landmarked building in the immediate area.

Just this April 16, Phyllis Pressman, wife of Fred and purveyor of the expansion of Barneys into housewares and furnishings, died at age 95.

And in a final sad note, the Rubin Museum has announced its New York City building will close in Oct. 2024, when they will transform into a global museum with international programs and loans, instead of a physical museum.