Brooklyn's Largest Office Tower May Rise Near Pacific Park

The footprint of Pacific Park (or, the Megaproject Formerly Known As Atlantic Yards) could be getting even bigger: Crain's reports that Greenland Forest City (a collaborative effort between Forest City Ratner and Greenland Holdings) is looking to build an enormous office tower near the Barclays Center, on a site currently occupied by a P.C. Richard & Son and a Modell's. In order to do so, the firm would need to secure air rights from a parcel of land in front of the Brooklyn stadium.

Right now, Greenland Forest City can build a 440,000-square-foot building on the site occupied by those two stores. But according to a spokesperson, plans may be afoot to transfer as much as 1.1 million square feet of air rights from a nearby area—including a triangle of land that sits in front of Barclays—to the Modell's site, making way for a 1.5 million-square-foot tower. In order to do that, GFC would first need to get approval from the Empire State Development Corporation, according to Crain's.

"We think the time is right for the borough to have an iconic office building for the new Brooklyn economy and the thousands of jobs it will bring to the doorstep of one of the city's largest transit hubs," a spokesperson for GFC said in a statement. If the building is approved, it would be the first office tower to go up as part of the Pacific Park megadevelopment, which currently has six residential buildings (including two designed by COOKFOX and SHoP's modular tower) in the works.

Curbed New York