Photo: Shutterstock
The Hotel Bossert, once known as the Waldorf Astoria of Brooklyn, has been languishing for the past 13 years, after a planned yearlong renovation to turn it back into a luxury hotel dragged on, then stalled out, ending with a foreclosure auction earlier this spring. Now, the Brooklyn Heights hotel has a new owner, according to the Brooklyn Eagle: SomeraRoad, a real-estate firm with offices in New York and Nashville that bought the building for $100 million. But the company has no plans to revive it as a hotel. “SomeraRoad plans to honor the property’s rich history and restore and reopen the building as residences,” the company wrote in a statement. A spokesperson said more details would be released in the coming weeks.
The property, situated on Montague Street near the promenade, has been the source of much speculation since the Jehovah’s Witnesses sold it to Joseph Chetrit and David Bistricer for $81 million in 2012 — hardly a week goes by when it is not the subject of a discussion thread on the Brooklyn Heights blog. A year before he bought it, Chetrit, a mysterious, press-averse Moroccan American developer, had also purchased the Chelsea Hotel. The plan was to renovate and reopen both properties as boutique luxury hotels, but the Chelsea Hotel (and its ornery tenants) seems to have been more of a headache than Chetrit anticipated, so he sold the property to Ed Scheetz a few years later. (The Chelsea, one of the longest-running renovations in New York, reopened in 2022.) The complexity of the Chelsea renovation may have offered a clue as to what was to come with the Bossert’s revival. But Brooklyn Heights residents were hopeful, even as the scaffolding became a seemingly permanent fixture on the building.
The hotel, photographed in 1958. Photo: Geo. P. Hall & Son/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images
Built in 1909, the Bossert was one of the few truly grand hotels in the borough along with the Hotel St. George a few blocks away. During its early years, it boasted double-filtered drinking water, an on-site nail salon, and, most famously, the Marine Roof, a double-decker rooftop restaurant and bar that called to mind the promenade deck of a ship and was known for live-music broadcasts and its excellent views of Manhattan. Children’s-book illustrator and author Barbara Cooney, whose grandfather built the hotel, was born there, and it’s where the Brooklyn Dodgers celebrated their 1955 World Series win. During the 1960s, the Bossert became an SRO, but not a particularly seedy one. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses bought it in 1988, a few dozen rent-stabilized tenants were still in the building, and apparently everyone coexisted quite nicely for a number of decades. The Jehovah’s Witnesses undertook much-needed repairs — restoring the lobby, replacing the rotted window frames with mahogany ones, and replastering and hand-painting the ceilings. The group won several preservation awards and rented out the dormlike rooms to visiting Witnesses until divesting themselves of their extensive Brooklyn Heights real-estate portfolio in the mid-aughts. When Chetrit and Bistricer bought the Bossert, it was in good, if not glamorous, condition. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses took care of the building,” says Lara Birnback, the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association. “They fulfilled their community obligation, but it went downhill after it was sold.”
Still under Chetrit’s ownership, the five remaining rent-stabilized tenants living there in 2019 described a renovation in progress to a New York Magazine reporter who paid them a visit (one of the tenants, having moved back into their renovated apartment, complained that their living room had been sacrificed to create a palatial bathroom, likely as a result of ADA codes). That same year, Chetrit bought out Bistricer, his partner on the project, but things took a turn for the worse after COVID: Chetrit fell behind on loan payments, scaffolding encased the largely empty building, and construction seemed to have stopped completely. There was a glimmer of hope in 2023 when Chetrit teamed up with hoteliers Ian Schrager and Ed Scheetz to try to get the project back on track and restructure the loans, but that didn’t pan out. (The scaffolding, at least, came down.) The building sat in limbo with a single tenant living there until this past April, when Beach Point Capital, a hedge fund that acquired the debt, purchased it at the foreclosure auction for $90 million. (There were no other bidders.) Crain’s reported that, earlier this year, Chetrit and his brothers owed the city nearly half a million in fines on the property, which had 56 active violations, and that it was believed to be the first foreclosure ever for Joseph Chetrit. It also seems to be part of a bigger pattern of real-estate trouble for the Chetrits, who have, altogether, defaulted on at least $1.6 billion worth of debt.
Beach Point flipped the Bossert, pretty much immediately, to SomeraRoad, a firm known for its handling of distressed assets. It’s a relatively new commercial-real-estate firm founded in 2016 by Ian Ross, a then-30-year-old self-described “commercial-real-estate junkie” who previously worked in finance. SomeraRoad has been described by the Commercial Observer as a “private equity real estate shop” that focuses on distressed, off-market real-estate deals that larger, institutional firms pass over, and it has grown quickly with 40-some employees. In 2022, it acquired the top floors of 1 Hanover Square in the Financial District, a landmarked 1854 brownstone where the private club India House was once located, and turned them into boutique office space (it also moved its own headquarters into the building). The company is in the process of developing a number of ground-up projects in the Midwest, the South, and Pennsylvania, including the Pendry Nashville hotel and residences, and a $500 million public-private revitalization of Kansas City’s West Bottoms neighborhood. Ross now lives in Brooklyn, and the Bossert is the company’s most high-profile New York project to date.
But Brooklyn Heights residents will have to live with a construction site for a while longer. Unlike a luxury-hotel revamp, a residential conversion will likely mean a much more drawn-out renovation as architects combine small hotel rooms into (presumably) luxury apartments. And several observers note that a residential conversion will probably preclude any reopening of the Marine Roof, the most famous artifact of the hotel’s heyday. But Birnback at the Brooklyn Heights Association says there is an area off the lobby that could potentially be a restaurant, so a venue that’s open to the public isn’t out of the question.
The neighborhood, Birnback says, is “cautiously optimistic after so many false starts. And guardedly excited that it will finally be in the hands of people who will be good stewards.” Some people are disappointed the building won’t be a hotel, she adds, but others are relieved that there isn’t likely to be a rooftop bar anymore. Either way, a restored Bossert will probably contribute more to the slow-going revival of Montague Street than would a permanent construction site.
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