The building that once held the original Barneys on Seventh Avenue is completing its real-estate cycle of life and becoming luxury condos. As the Real Deal reported, Douglas Tiesi’s Argentic Investment Management, which took over the building from developer Ben Ashkenazy after it foreclosed last year, sold the Chelsea retail space for $22 million — less than half the $57 million Ashkenazy bought the building for in 2014.
Barneys was perhaps the most notorious casualty in the 21st-century department-store apocalypse, closing its flagship store after the company went bankrupt in 2019. The space stood empty for two years until it entered its inevitable next phase — turning into a Spirit Halloween pop-up (other pop-ups soon followed). The developer who bought it in 2014, Ashkenazy, has been in a number of ongoing real-estate disputes, including a lawsuit for not paying back the loan on the Barney’s building. Now, the space has been bought by architect and developer Raymond Chan, who is behind a number of generic-looking glass condo buildings in Flushing, the Lower East Side, and Long Island City.
While the Barneys building will no longer be subject to the indignity of housing sexy scarecrow costumes, its next chapter is a bit anticlimactic. “The new buyers are planning on building residential condos with ground floor retail with a beautiful modern design,” the firm that sold the building announced. Raymond Chan Architect describes its work as “providing crisp and spatially clean contemporary designs that are timely, cost-efficient and architecturally stimulating.” Which is code for: Get ready for a new glass box.