Terminal Warehouse Adaptive Reuse, West Chelsea

George Mallory’s 1891 freight warehouse occupies a full Manhattan block and has a rail tunnel running straight through the middle of it. That tunnel is the reason the building is famous and the reason the conversion is complicated. COOKFOX stripped and restored the brick shell, carved a courtyard into the block, and set a new six-story glass office pavilion on top of the twelve-story historic structure, bringing the whole thing to roughly thirteen stories and 1.3 million square feet.

Roughly 100,000 square feet of the result is outdoor space, including 29 private terraces. That number is not an amenity flourish. It’s what you get when you take the roof of a full-block 1891 warehouse and treat it as ground.

Project Scope

Restoration of an 1891 masonry freight warehouse and construction of a six-story steel-and-glass office pavilion above it, delivering about 1.3 million square feet of Class A office and retail. New Line Structures & Development is the general contractor. The project cleared review at the Landmarks Preservation Commission before construction. Equinox took 50,000 square feet and Convene Hospitality Group’s event venue The Mallory took another 50,000, both signed in October 2025, with the first opening targeted for 2026.

Why It Matters

New York has a lot of nineteenth-century industrial brick and a soft office market, which is normally a bad combination. Terminal Warehouse is the argument that scale changes the math: at 1.3 million square feet, the restoration cost spreads across enough rentable area to compete with new construction, and the building offers something new construction can’t — floor plates, ceiling heights and outdoor space no ground-up tower on that site would deliver. Whether the leasing follows is the open question. Two anchor tenants in one month is a reasonable start.

Project Team & Details