A Dream Grows in Brooklyn

Rundown downtown becomes Metrotech. Being Built: a hotel.

When the Regional Plan Association published a study in 1983 arguing that the way to reverse the deterioration of downtown Brooklyn was to turn it into the city's third central business district...the outcome was anything but certain...Now the steelwork for a hotel, the first new one in Brooklyn in 50 years, is rising next to Metrotech, which has become a $1-billion, five-million-square-foot development...The latest building, known as Renaissance Plaza, will house a Marriot hotel with 384 guest rooms and large meeting spaces, as well as a 32-story office tower with a total of 1.4 million square feet of office space.

The Hotel will make the business district self-contained, since the companies located there will be able to house visitors and hold conferences without having to go to Manhattan, as has been the case in the past...

Indeed, there are those who think the business district in Brooklyn will continue to grow, as office space in Manhattan becomes more expensive..."We are talking 2.5 million people and 60,000 businesses with some of the best transportation links in the city," said Joshua L. Muss, whose Muss Development Company struggled with the hotel project's ups and downs starting in 1983.

"There were six professionals working on this every day for 13 years," he said. "It became an odyssey; we went through 7 or 8 formal financing interludes. Each time we thought it was set, something unraveled. and through it all, there was a constant refrain: a hotel in Brooklyn is a piece of pork in a kisher butcher shop, you cannot finance it."

In fact, at one point Mr. Muss took down a billboard saying the development was 'coming soon' after the sign had been up for six years with no visible progress.

Finally it all came together last year and the hotel-retail-office complex is expected to open next summer. It will occupy about a third of a long block bounded by Jay and Adams and Willoughby and Johnson Streets. The $230 million project will include, in addition to the hotel rooms and office tower, a fitness center, on-site day care, 20 conference and meeting roms including a ballroom that will be among the largest in the city and a 1,100-space underground garage.

City and state economic development authorities have provided a package of incentives that will make space in the office towers $12 a square foot cheaper than midtown Manhattan...The incentives include abatement of real estate taxes completely for 15 years...$1,000 a year subsidy for each employee relocated from manhattan...,energy rate savings from Consolidated Edison and an exemption from the state tax on the purchase of business equipment.