The 25 Kent Avenue development on the Williamsburg/Greenpoint border, known as “25 Kent,” has signed its first longterm “anchor tenant.”
The streetwear brand Kith will move its office from the current NoHo location to a 57,679 square-foot space on the third floor of the mixed-use industrial and commercial building.
In total, Kith will relocate its 75-person production and office operations team, along with opening a new ground-floor retail space at 25 Kent, according to the Commercial Observer:
The company will occupy two-thirds of the property’s 87,000 square feet of manufacturing space, and it will open a new 2,000-square-foot retail store on the ground floor. This will be the second Brooklyn retail location for Kith, which also has stores at 233 Flatbush Avenue in Prospect Heights and its Soho flagship at 337 Lafayette.
The 25 Kent development has been lauded as the Williamsburg’s “first ground-up commercial project” in over 40 years, and rumors floated that Amazon might claim some of the office space, but plans never materialized.
Temporary weekend pop-ups like Smorgasburg and Brooklyn Flea and events and exhibits like 29 Rooms and Beyond The Streets have occupied various floors within 25 Kent since its opening this year.
The weekend Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg, which operates on a 25,000 square-foot space on the 8th floor at 25 Kent, is scheduled to run through March 2020.
Bloomberg reports that the building developers Rubenstein Partners and Heritage Equity Partners are in talks with more potential tenants:
The firm is in talks with several more potential tenants, including technology companies and a brewery, Fronek said. The developers are aiming to fill the building, along the East River on Williamsburg’s northern edge, by mid-2021, Fronek said.
Trendy Brooklyn’s effort to transform itself into an office destination for tech firms has had mixed results. The borough has seen a 356% jump in startup growth since 2008, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future. While that’s helped spur scores of development projects and leases, Brooklyn still isn’t attracting the major global companies that are grabbing large swaths of real estate in Manhattan.