A prominent New York City developer wants to convert a 32-story Billionaires’ Row office tower into over 300 apartments, joining the city’s growing wave of office-to-residential conversions. As first reported by Commercial Observer, TF Cornerstone will convert Tower 57 at 135 East 57th Street into 350 apartments, 25 percent of which would be affordable to households earning 80 percent of the area median income. The project would take advantage of the state’s 467-m tax incentive program and new zoning tools included in Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes housing plan.
TF Cornerstone made the announcement after signing a new ground lease with the building’s landowner, 700 Lexington LLC, controlled by William Wallace. Jeremy Shell, principal at TF Cornerstone, declined to share the lease’s terms, including its duration and fees.
Constructed in 1988, the roughly 456,000-square-foot building was owned by real estate executive Charles Cohen from 1997 until his ground lease expired last year. Cohen ran into financial trouble two years ago, when his firm, Cohen Bros., defaulted on a $534 million loan from Fortress Investment Group. The loan was tied to several LLCs, including one that controlled Tower 57.
Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, 135 East 57th Street features a “sweeping, concave facade that wraps around a plaza on the corner of Lexington Avenue,” as the New York Times reported.
The building’s floorplates make it a strong candidate for residential conversion. Most office buildings force developers to create deep, minimally sunlit floor plans when converting them into residences.
With 12-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, natural light will flood the building’s floor plates, which range from 5,700 to 14,000 square feet—a rarity among office buildings. Typical city office towers have floorplates ranging between 30,000 and 50,000 square feet.
Additionally, most of the rooms in the new apartments will be situated on the perimeter of the building, giving them natural light. However, there may be a few that don’t have windows.
“What we love about conversions is that you’re usually inheriting great architecture with great features that you normally wouldn’t develop in a ground-up multifamily, mixed-income building,” Shell told Commercial Observer.
He continued: “We’re not afraid to look at buildings that have deeper-than-average floor depths. We’ve actually created a lot of product out of those types of spaces and we think they function quite well. This particular building is unusual, which is why we were drawn to it. It has a very properly dimensioned floorplate for residential.”
Shell says the company aims to secure permits this fall and begin construction on the residential conversion before June 2026, with completion expected in late 2028 or early 2029.
TF Cornerstone has already completed 15 office-to-residential conversions across the five boroughs, producing a total of 4,500 new housing units, Shell said. These include 45 Wall Street in the Financial District, 95 Horatio Street in the West Village, and 201 East 69th Street on the Upper East Side.
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