New Yorkers Build This City! -With Jim Somoza

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0:32Jim Somoza:From the capability of the Equinox to the striking design of the Blazer, there's a Chevy that fits your life perfectly. Whether you want gas or electric, the choice is entirely yours. Entering is simple. Just head to ChevyDriveChicago.com to sign up. While you're there, check out the Chevy Truck Month incentives and find your local dealer. Chevy Drive Chicago, official partner of the Chicago Bears. Don't just dream about it. Go win it at ChevyDriveChicago.com. New York is constantly reinventing itself, but some of the most interesting transformations aren't happening in plain sight. Along the Brooklyn waterfront sits Industry City, once a massive industrial complex, now a place where food, art, manufacturing, and creativity all collide under one roof.

1:17But how does something like that actually happen? Who decides what it becomes and what it doesn't? Today, I'm sitting down with someone who's been right in the middle of all that story. Jim Somoza, managing director at Industry City to talk about the past, the vision, and the future of one of the most unique spaces in New York City. But above all else, Jim is a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next Brooklyn Bound, Trace is now right. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

2:02This is Time Square.

2:20Hello, everyone, and welcome to the New Yorkers, a podcast by New York City Cop. I am your host, Kelly Copp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. He is a true New Yorker, actually. I truly am. How are you doing, Jim? Welcome to the show today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, you know, I went out to see you at Industry City, you know, just recently too. I've been there before, but, you know, you gave me the amazing, you know, red carpet. I absolutely love Industry City, and I'm really excited for you to tell everybody all about it.

2:56So So tell us about you first. Me first. You start this tall. Yes. There's a child. Or even shorter. Yeah, exactly. Technically. Yeah. And yeah, just tell us all about you and then growing up in New York City, because I think it's really interesting your story. Sure. So, you know, I actually was born in Bronxville, right outside of the city and moved to the city, frankly, after my parents were divorced, uh, with, with my, uh, with my father and brother, uh, in 1979. And it just had always loved New York city. Uh, my father was in real estate in New York city with the, the Rudin family, a very well-known, well-respected real estate developer, you know landlord uh family in new york city and you know i just before moving there i used to love coming to the city with my father you know those days i want to be sure that people know that the city means manhattan okay all right yeah coming to so i used to love coming to manhattan yeah to go to work with my father yeah uh because we went to all these great restaurants restaurants uh these chinese restaurants the peking duck house i remember we used to go to i always wanted to go to paragon paragon sporting goods was like a highlight of mine of wanting to go because i all this amazing sporting goods equipment and i'm a big skier and snowboarder and all kinds of things so i so i used to love doing that and go to central park and just all the things and it was just so big I remember just being so impressive and even the train ride in and Grand Central and I was just in awe of the buildings you know and the design of these buildings it just so happens that my father's office was at 345 Park Avenue wow and two of my favorite buildings in the world are right there which is the Seagram's building and the Leverhaus building, which actually is my favorite building of all time.

5:06It's an understated, but really, you know, amazing, timeless design. And I just remember thinking about those things and being so interested. And when I did move, we did move to New York City. I went to high school, a place called McBurney. We lived on the West side. Upper West side? Upper West side. Close to Central Park? Yes. Right across the street from Central Park. Wow. How cool is that? But view of Central Park, view of the, of the, our apartment was very popular for the Thanksgiving day parade. Like, oh, I bet. We were on the fifth floor and all the balloons came by at eye level. And, you know, that was the party of the year and we loved it.

5:47All our family and friends came. And so, uh, you know, grew up in Central Park. My school, my high school was between Central Park West and Columbus on 63rd street. So my backyard and my playground for high school was Central Park. That's amazing. What a dream. It really was. It really was. Sheep's Meadow was regular after school and playing Ultimate Frisbee and riding BMX bikes and a little trouble along the way. So what years was this? 1979 to 83. I graduated high school in 1983. Wow. What a time. what what what made a picture what was it what was it like in the 70s and 80s when how old are you you're a teenager right and younger I was a I was and you could run around your parents let you run around it's a different time for all of us in general yeah yeah sort of you know my father was also uh partially divorced and kind of uh distracting shall we say uh with other interests right so I for you I perhaps had more uh leeway yeah than I maybe should have uh which made me very sort of street smart because uh new york city in those days was a very different city than it is today uh times square was filled with you know strip clubs and porn shops and things like that uh you know brian park was nothing like what it is today it was it was a drug den uh and i also was very into video games and that was really before you know quality video games square at home so i spent a lot of time in arcades in times square wow which you know had its challenges and put you in situations that perhaps i would not be thrilled to know that my kids today would be involved in but uh but you know it taught you how to be street smart it taught you how to watch out for things and take care of yourself i don't know if i mentioned this to you when we were in when you were showing me around industry city industry city but um but i think would be i think your life would be a very interesting movie because it you know has you first and foremost you know as you grow up in new york city and what people are about to learn about in a moment too what more you do for new york city and but i think it'd be really interesting you know yeah it's it was a really interesting life to go from westchester where we had a back with a backyard we had a tree house i had a little mo you know motorcycle you know motocross bike to uh living in you know central park and my best friend in high school actually lived in the village on washington place yeah so after school was either central park or the west village wow and so we get on the a train after school and we would hang out in washington square park and around nyu we used to sneak into the lobe student center at nyu to play arcade games yeah uh looking nowhere near college age but back then you could kind of do what nobody really yeah nobody really cares as long as you didn't cause any right trouble uh and so that's kind of was my you know adolescent upbringing uh going back and forth and hanging out at night and going to uh music venues like the back fence and the bitter end and yeah i never went to the blue note because i was a little too high end i couldn't i couldn't afford that still there too it's still there i just recommended it some people the other day so i went there later uh when i was a little bit more of an adult but uh you know we just would hang out at my friend's house or you know we would just walk around and we played wiffle ball um there's a building it's called the archive building um on uh christopher street uh that actually was a government archive building and back then it was basically abandoned if you look at it today it's luxury housing uh windows were all broken and we used to play wiffle ball in the parking lot of uh saint david's uh school which is right across the street and if you hit the building that was an uh that was a grand slam if you went over the fence that was a home run and if you hit the building it was an automatic grand slam oh you make me sad that they missed all that yeah and there was nobody there i mean you would hit the building nobody cared there was nobody in it the board the windows were all boarded up and that was there was a lot of that you know Lower East Side had a lot of uh brownstones and tenement buildings that were basically abandoned right squatters in them and things like that it was a it was a different time you know the subways you couldn't even see the the the metal of the inside of the subway cars they were so tagged up well yeah you know and the power used to go out I don't know a lot of people they don't remember like the power would go out on the subway so there were times where um if I you know vacation.

10:41I used to have a job at this Hallmark store down on one Whitehall Street. I would get early in the morning and I would take the train, the one train from 66th Street down there. And I'd be one of the only ones on the train. And while you're sitting there, all of a sudden the lights would go out. Wow. Because it would lose contact with the third rail and you would just sit there and go, please go back on, please go back on. Because I'd be like, and I was a little kid at the time. I hadn't really run around the city, run around the city. please go back on please go back on and if it was summertime because the air conditioning was always broken the windows would all be open so it was really loud in there you know clack clack clack clack clack all the stuff going on then the lights would go out you'd be please go back on please go back on and you know it was uh you know there are a lot of people who think about that era wistfully right which i can understand from a new york city grit standpoint but i can tell you there were many aspects of it that I would not, uh, want to revisit, you know, but, but also made me, you know, street smart.

11:43It made you realize how to get yourself out of trouble or what to avoid and what to do. But it also was, gave me exposure to so many different things and music and people, and there were street performers that we got to know when, you know, knew us. And so it was, uh, it was just a really interesting fun way to grow up i'm really jealous i couldn't experience that you know what what you know would be a really interesting conversation too is you and jay's dad because jay's dad grew up in brooklyn too you know in the city in new york city and that's you know you both have your roots here in the city they both have great stories really interesting stories yeah um you know when you're mentioning the the subway with the lights going out it took me back to which a movie I just rewatched, which will come up later in the podcast is the warriors.

12:33Sure. You know, when you're, I was picturing that in my mind, so that you lived the warriors. I kind of did. MJ, have you seen that movie? It's yeah. I see it. It's really good. It's a, it's a pretty, I mean, it's, it's even exaggerated compared to what it was then, but it, but it kind of does capture a bunch of that. And it was a, you know, it was a different place, you know, I mean, I lived, I mean, honestly, I lived on Central Park West and 66th Street. You couldn't even, you didn't really walk west, certainly not west of Amsterdam, didn't really want to go west of Columbus Avenue. And if you walked through Lincoln Center at night and there were no activities on, you were getting approached.

13:18Wow. But you just were, right? And so there were these things. But I will tell you, you know, you, you think about, I think about all these stories and they're like, well, why are you such a New Yorker? Cause I just loved it. I don't know. There was something about it. There was something about the action and the danger, but not so much danger. I wasn't afraid I was going to get killed or anything, but there was this, there was this kind of like, you know, action and adventure. I mean, honestly, we used to go to, um brian park back when they had there were hedges all the way around brian park you couldn't see into it which was probably a mistake and from a planning standpoint years and years before so the inside it was like lots of drug dealers and crazy and we would go not to get drugs by the way we would go uh good to know just to get approached and we were teenagers and we were fast and we were faster than them so we literally would play this game wow where we would walk through and play chicken to see who was going to let them get the closest to you before you ran i mean it was basically like you know how what in the suburbs they play chicken with cars and things like that this was our version right exactly i was gonna say that and we were just faster and so we could so you did these things that that you you know they're not if you think about it that the essence of them in that much different than when people do in the you know rural and suburbs but uh you know you just found ways to entertain in a in an urban environment but there it was still new york city and there was still broadway and there were still great restaurants that i really got turned on to remember i had sushi for the first time when i was probably 14 it was probably 1980 when that was like super exotic and i was like oh i like this this is interesting oh i haven't had Chinese food we used to love hanging out in Chinatown because where did you have that outside you know and uh and it's just all this action like where we are now in Canal Street I used to go to Canal Jeans all the time and buy all kinds of crazy clothes and McDougal Street and I got turned on to falafel for the first time I was like what the heck is this or you know the first time I went into John's Pizza, which was my first taste of like great New York pizza.

15:40And as somebody who had recently moved to the city, I did what a lot of people do. I went in and ordered a slice and they looked at me like I had three heads because I don't sell slices. Actually, the owner's license plate says no slices. And I was going to visit a friend that evening to have dinner at their house. And I said, yeah, no, I was trying to find your place before I got here. I want to get a slice of pizza and i went into this place john's and i ordered a slice and they looked at me like you did what yeah i said they they don't have slices i said i didn't i wasn't used to that but i was like this is interesting like and then i had to it just so happened they ordered it that night for dinner you know they so we had and i was like this is amazing i understand why they don't do it by the slice right got to come out of the oven fresh so you know all of these experiences that you have that have to do with quality, but also I think what interests me, what I love about New York City the most, and I've traveled, you know, I've been fortunate enough to travel all over the world to, you know, most major cities.

16:39New York City is the only city that has every country in the world and their food and their culture represented. Perfectly said, yeah. You know, and I say that to my kids, if we're coming back from someplace and we're flying over the city and I would tell them every time, look down there, every country in the world is there. Oh, wow. And there is no other city. If you think about it, there is no other city. You could say that there are cities, you know, London has a big Indian population, big Muslim population. So other cities have populations and concentrations from other countries. Of course, New York City is the only one that has every one.

17:21And part of that is from Ellis Island, right? And so that's kind of where it started. My grandfather was put on a boat from Spain. He was originally was born in Spain when he was 12 years old. Didn't speak a word of English. Came through Ellis Island. Actually, went to Cuba first because there was family there. But then when the revolution in Castro started, he had to get out of there and come to New York and came through Ellis Island and got himself a busboy job at the Waldorf Astoria. We still have, he stole, because he didn't have this, a fork, a knife, and a spoon for his apartment. And we still have it.

18:03My father has it to this day. And it's engraved Waldorf Astoria, you know, and it's those kinds of things. And then he went on to be a real estate developer himself. And, you know, just amazing. It's the American dream. And it's all of those countries. I mean, he was Spain. My grandmother was from Italy. My other grandparents from, you know, first and second generation, he was right from Spain. But that's where the culture comes from. That's where all the different, I'm big into food and walking around industry cities, it probably shows. but international food and you know the the types of food that you get you know i've i've spent a lot of time in seoul korea for example years ago on some business that i was working on and you know it's not a complaint but you ate korean food every night that's what you did there were a couple italian restaurants a couple of this and that but you get so used to being in new york and like you know my kids who are now you know just started college but very much Brooklyn, New York City kids, the thought of them even eating the same cuisine multiple nights in a row is not something that they're used to.

19:12And you think about that and that's, you know, just indicative of all of the different true cultures because you're really eating these foods that aren't just, you know, fast food knockoffs of some of that stuff, the actual stuff that you get elsewhere. I love that you just said that because that actually ties in to the field of Industry City. So then how did you get from being a teenager in Times Square at the porn shops to Industry City? The arcades is really where I was. The porn shops were next door, but I was in the arcades. To Industry City. So I went to college. I went to Syracuse University and kind of, you know, trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

19:57I was actually a psychology major, uh, which I tell people I probably use that degree, you know, a lot because I'm half therapist in what I do. Uh, and then got out of school. So I was going to, I was thinking about being, I was actually thinking of being a, uh, a therapist and just realized I just, I liked it, but I didn't like it enough to do another six years of school of it. And, you know, know, number of years of internship. It just, I just realized I enjoyed it, but not that. And so I decided actually to go to law school. Um, because I, I had always thought about that. And my grandparents and parents used to tell me that I should go to law school because I argue all the time.

20:44So I was, I was a child who didn't just accept, you know, and so I would debate them all the time. And I'll never forget like being in the car with my grandparents and being like, you should be a lawyer. You, you, you debate us and argue with us on everything. And that kind of stuck in my mind. And I always kind of liked the law. And so I went to law school, actually went right around the corner, went to New York law school. And I always loved real estate. And I remember taking my first property class and then it clicked. I didn't have like a click moment up until that point. I liked psychology, but I said, man, I really like this.

21:22And New York City is real estate. And I also like design and I like buildings. And my father was doing it. And I remember growing up around a lot of real estate brokers and executives and things like that. And my grandfather built some shopping centers and Yonkers and nothing big scale, but it's what he did. And it all just kind of like came together. And I really loved that. So I did a concentration of real estate in law school, got out of law school, and the worst possible time to want to be in real estate law was in 1992, which was the depth of not just a recession, a real estate recession.

22:03I mean, there were buildings on 6th Avenue, 1177 Avenue in the Americas. It's called the America's Tower. It was actually half built and, if you can imagine this, unfinished, left open in 1992. I think it was being developed by Sumitomo Real Estate, our office. So there was no place. And so getting a job in a law firm, I would interview. I did well in law school. I would interview at firms and this is what I, they would say, true story. Oh, we actually just closed our real estate department last week. So there really isn't, maybe you should go into bankruptcy. You do bankruptcy law. And I said, oh, that's not really what I want to do.

22:46I kind of feel like I have a passion for this and I know I'm going to be better at that. And I found my way to a job at Cushman and Wakefield, the real estate brokerage company, which happened to be right across the street from 1177. We were at 1166, every of the Americas. And I started in the legal department and realized that while I liked the practice of law, it wasn't going to be what I did for the rest of my career. And I started becoming friendly with brokers that were at Cushman and Wayfield. And they all said, you know what? You're not a typical lawyer. You can talk and you can do this and that and come hang out with us.

23:29Right. So I, I was the only lawyer in the legal department that was allowed by the brokers to hang with them. And, uh, one thing led to another, I became friendly and one of them said to me, Hey, you know, I'm looking to grow a brokerage team. Why don't you leave, uh, that and do it? I promised my father I would practice for five years because he paid for law school. So I said five and I will five years in a month later. I went into brokerage and really enjoyed that. And my legal degree helped quite a bit. I could negotiate commercial leases right away and all that. And all that was really, really interesting.

24:10I like doing it. I did a big concentration in data center. So this is before the dot-com bubble. This is like the mid to late 90s. And there were all these companies that wanted to develop. And it's happening again right now. These data centers, it's all now it's AI. Back then it was just the founding of the internet. You know, Amazon was$10 a share in a bookstore on the internet. Yahoo was the Google of the time, right? There was no Google, right? Now look at how all this. And so we were doing that. And then that crashed, a huge crash. I actually was in Korea. I was in Seoul and it happened just like in a movie.

24:55We were looking at buying some buildings in Seoul to turn them into carrier, what we used to call carrier hotels or data center buildings. I am literally in my room with a letter of intent in my hand, ready to go to the office of the owner to sign it, to buy this building. And in Korea, letters of intent are more binding than they are here in the United States. and I'm in my room and I have CNBC up on the, on the screen. And I literally watch the 1999 tech rec bubble burst, like just through the floor, everything, all the stuff. And people think like, you know, the movies, it, it, it only happens this way in the movies.

25:37No, I got a call like literally 10 minutes later from the person I was working with that was here in New York couldn't make that trip. And he said, you, have you gone to that meeting yet with the letter of intent? And I said, no, he goes, don't, we're not doing it. Book yourself the next flight. We're out. Come home. Wow. It was just like that. Just like in the movies, literally happened that way. Booked a flight the next day. And I was doing other things, um, along the way office. I had never really done retail up until that point. And then I had this moment that was like my real aha moment i was walking around chelsea with my girlfriend at the time now my wife uh and there was this building that was the old nabisco baking building did you say nbc nbc on the outside of it and it had all these crazy sculptures i remember seeing it as a kid but you didn't really pay much attention to it that area was truly me packing it wasn't me pa right it was actually a meatpacking place there wasn't really much reason to go there but i remember seeing this building was brick with arches and all this stuff but suddenly it had these incredible stone sculptures in front of it i said what is that let's go in there so we walk in they had already done the the man named erwin cohen who was it was really his you know he started uh the development of chelsea market um there weren't really many stores but the storefronts were all there and the fountain was there and the arch with the you know the brick arch with the clock was there and I looked at that and I said this is incredible you know I love old buildings I love history I like and I said to my girlfriend at the time I said I don't know who did this but I have to meet this person and someday I have to work with this person yep and several years later this was even before the dot-com.

27:36I was representing a client, a telecom client, that wanted to buy a building called 85 10th Avenue, which is technically part of Chelsea Market, but is across 10th Avenue between 15th and 16th. And they were looking for a building to do a data center. So they wanted to buy the building. So they bought the building from Erwin Cohen and his investors. I did not meet Erwin at the time because he did not want to sell the building. His partners did. So he refused to even meet with me. Like I didn't take it personally. They just wouldn't. And I spent, I was spending time down there and I really wanted to meet him, but I guess I was associated with that sale.

28:14He didn't really want to talk to me or, you know, associate. But a couple of years later, that same client after the dot-com bubble burst came to us, me and my partner and said, we want to sell this building. We, they, they just put$200 million into rebuilding the whole thing. They wanted to keep a couple of floors where they want to sell this building. What do you guys think? And I said, we should go right back to Irwin, Belvedere Capital, Angelo Gordon, who were the, you know, developers, owners, investors at the time. I said, because I know they kind of didn't want to sell it to begin with.

28:47They sold it because they wanted to really just focus on Chelsea market. I know they can execute. I know they would like to. And so we went back and then Irwin wanted to meet with me. And we met and we just hit it off immediately. Like, I just loved what he did. And just the way if you walk through there exposing history, but not in a hokey way, in a real grit way, which kind of gets back to the grit of New York city. Like that was, he embraced that. And, um, he and I just hit it off. And then he said, Hey, do you want to be the leasing agent for this building that you just sold back to us? And I said, of course I do.

29:25And I just started spending all my time at Chelsea market. People at the Cushman Wakefield office would be like, where's Jim? We know where he is. He's at Chelsea Market. He's with Irwin. I think most people listening know Chelsea Market. Yeah. It's just a great place. The design, all of that. And it gets back to community also. Because bricks and mortar and old details are great. But if they don't, and this is what I really truly learned from Irwin, who really became my mentor doing what I would do later and get to Industry City, Um, I, we just kept working together. And one day he called me, he said, you know, you really love what I do here.

30:08You, you like, you get it. I haven't met work with somebody like you that really gets it. You should leave Cushman, come here, continue the development with me, Chelsea market. We're going to, we'll redevelop 85 10th Avenue. We'll work on other buildings. And I said, yes, I have to do this because if I don't do this and I had a very successful, you know brokerage practice at the time I had some people telling me don't do that you don't understand and I said look I I just have a love for this and I I know I will regret never having done this yeah and I could always be a broker if I wanted and so I did it and he taught me you know how to do this and what I mean by this is not just that it is the design it is the history but it is the community.

30:59And at the time we were working with people like Manhattan Fruit Exchange, Lobster Place, Bon Italia, Amy's Bread, Sarah Beth. And they were more than tenants. I almost wish there was a better word than tenant and landlord, right? Because it didn't feel that way. We were in it together. Our office was on the ground floor. Erwin didn't even have an office. he had a two foot by two foot table marble, you know, with a pedestal and a phone on it right in the window. It's where Chelsea Market Basket is right now. Most people wouldn't do that because people didn't walk in, tenants complain, blah, blah, blah, and people kind of want to separate.

31:42We were the opposite. We were right there front and center. And if you wanted to talk to us, we were there to do it. There's more of a connection that you like with your, with the tenant, so to speak. Yes. You know? So, Jim, do you also know what is famous about Chelsea Market, the origins of Chelsea Market, what was invented there? I do. What is it? The Oreo cookie. There you go. Yep. I figured you would know. We used to tell that story all the time, that it was burnt pieces, you know, the left, like the overcooked pieces of cookies, and that the filling was actually originally lard. That's the story goes.

32:19I didn't know this. The story goes, and you never know, people embellish, but the story goes, it was originally somebody took some of the remnants, put them together, and there was lard there and put lard in between. And that was now, obviously, it did not stay that way because that wasn't quite as attractive as the sugar center. But yes, I did know that. Well, that makes me laugh because now thinking back, because you and I are the same age, basically. And when we were kids, our parents cooked with lard. Yeah. Right. funny how we how much larder we ate right yes it turns out it's not so bad right right it's actually not go it's not hydrogenated it's not fake it's like it turns out hey they were right it's the real stuff yeah okay but go ahead but um yeah so we did that we ended up doing 85 10th avenue i brought you know del posto which i i had met mario batali and his partner uh joe we did that we did craft we did something with tom colicchio craft steak we did morimoto budicon which is still there right and then the buildings were eventually sold and so you know i worked on a bunch of other things in the meantime we uh angelo gordon bought crunch fitness uh and asked me to work on that before that i said to my wife we got nothing i want to just travel through southeast asia for a couple months we did that in the middle of that towards the end of that trip I got a call.

33:47I was on literally on the Mekong Delta at a floating market. And I love markets. And that's why all are just, you know, and, uh, Hey, we're buying crunch. You want to work on this? I don't know anything about the health club industry. You don't need to. It's the design. It's a similar design. It's real estate is construction. So I came back. I did that for a period of time. And then, um, industry city came along and they said, Hey, we, you know, can you come and work on this with us? and i looked at it i just happened to live in carol gardens right total coincidence 10 minutes away i knew the buildings i knew them growing up yeah and exactly and uh i said let's look at this and i went to visit and i said oh my god i mean chelsea market was a million one square feet that's incredible what year is this uh this would have been 2015 oh wow okay 2015 24 yeah i actually started working on the deal 2013 i was still doing my thing with crunch because the idea was fix it up and then it was sold so those investors said hey can you wait a little bit those that's fine and um so really the construction on that really started in like 2015 um but you know that's it's six million square feet 16 buildings 35 acres it's a massive it's incredible too i thought when i was working on chelsea that was massive that was a million one with 85 tenths maybe a million seven all of a sudden six million i was like whoa this and we own the streets how many buildings 16 16 buildings it's uh 130 elevators 40 lobbies you know it's it's basically two and a half empire state buildings uh put together but sort of on their side so we started looking at that and we said okay you know we could do something with this those buildings actually were i i described as shipping containers before the advent of shipping containers so before shipping containers things goods would come off of boats going to be pulled out and you know in nets you see in the old films go on to train cars train cars would put it into what are our uh courtyards and hand hoisted up into the buildings and then back out to a train or truck off the end user as soon as you had uh shipping containers you didn't need that those buildings anymore the step was unnecessary so everything moved to new jersey because you needed a lot of land those buildings sat underutilized uh for many many years you know 15 occupancy maybe 1500 people working there every day and we said look we could do something like this that's like chelsea on a much bigger scale it was going to be harder because chelsea at least was in the middle of chelsea correct um although not the chelsea of what it is today but it still had that you know and dense residential around it but we felt like we could do something because of its size uh there was no office uh you know, use in the area.

36:37So we did basically what we did with Chelsea market. And this is really the secret behind the whole thing, because you need retail, you need things, services and things like that in order to get people to lease the upper floors. Right. And that's where the majority of the space is. And so, but who's going to do retail when you've got no foot traffic and you got nobody upstairs. Yeah. And so, and also this is in Brooklyn. Yeah. This isn't in Manhattan. This is in Brooklyn off the, but it's a real quick, I want to say it's super easy to get there you just take the d train from times square slash bryant park straight shot to brooklyn yep it's straight shot the d n and r and uh yeah it's actually on the manhattan bridge as you're going there and coming back yep yeah no absolutely it's actually uh very close yeah uh but it didn't have the dense residential around it so that was a challenge yeah having the subway stop there was key we i don't one block we wouldn't have even we wouldn't have done this if if that wasn't there it was very important that we had that but uh you know so how do you get retail if you got no foot traffic and then you can't get people upstairs so what we did was which was this is something that erwin you know uh had come up with a long time ago and by the way the subsequent owners uh jamestown properties uh continued that vision i think very well um understanding the dna of it and some people wouldn't have and maybe it would be different I feel it's very, it still has like what it had back then.

38:03You go to wholesalers and commissaries, bakeries and things like that, who are looking for production space. Yep. And you say, okay, we're going to lease you the production space. We'll make you a good deal, but you have to do some retail with us. And they all hate that idea. They all go, what are you crazy? I'm not going to do retail here. There's nobody here. Well, then you're not going to get the space and you want commissary space. And here's, you know, the bad news is there's no foot traffic right now. The good news is there's none because you don't have to double up your employment for retail.

38:32So the person at Lilac Chocolate's making the chocolate when somebody walks in, turns around and sells them a chocolate. And just start us that way. That allows us to lease the upper floors. And that's what got that going. Once that gets going, those people that are in the upper floors in the offices are now coming down and buying from those folks who normally, like in the case of Colson Patisserie, you know, sell, makes croissants there, um, for wholesale and things like that. So let's say they're making those and you get a quarter on the wholesale market. Suddenly you're getting$3 retail and that's, that's how it starts, you know?

39:09And they're like, Oh, I like this, you know? And they come back to you. Oh, how do we get more people here? How do we do more of this? We like this. And the ball starts rolling. And that would get you to the point where you continue to lease the upper floors and you get. So when we took over, there were 1500 employees working there. Now there's 9 ,000. Wow. And so that's a lot of people to buy from the retailers, which keeps them healthy. And they have to be kept healthy because without them, nobody's leasing the upper floors. Nobody's coming there with their employees. If their employees can't get lunch or a drink or have some entertainment, we did a lot of that too.

39:42We do a lot of music, performing arts, visual arts, things like that in the beginning, which we underwrote. And then eventually it sustains itself. Yeah. You know, and that's the idea. You're, you're, what you're doing is you're putting down kindling and you're getting the fire, you know, started. And eventually if you do it right, it turns into its own fire, which is where we have gotten to with this. Right. It's amazing. You know, you know, going back to what you said earlier too, with the tenants, you know, you introduced me to some of the tenants there, you know, when everybody is, it's, it's a different feeling.