GOWANUS — A 162-room hotel with a pool and restaurants is in the works on Butler Street — just the latest hotel to be planned for the neighborhood, according to permit applications filed with the city.
Developer Sam Boymelgreen is planning a $6.7 million renovation to transform a four-story former printing plant at 255 Butler St. into a seven-story hotel that will overlook the end of the Gowanus Canal, near Nevins Street.
Boymelgreen's plans call for a restaurant and coffee shop on the hotel's ground floor, 41 rooms and a greenhouse and "garden walkway" on the second floor and 41 rooms each on the third and fourth floors.
On the fifth floor, Boymelgreen wants to put in seven hotel rooms, a private terrace and pool and another restaurant. The sixth and seventh floors would have 16 hotel rooms each, according to the plans.
Boymelgreen could not be reached for comment. He leased the site for 96 years in 2013, according to The Real Deal, and he's also the developer behind The Kestrel, a new condo complex at 33 Caton Place in Kensington.
The Butler Street project is one of several hotels in the works for Gowanus, where developers are turning industrial buildings and vacant land into new buildings.
Here's a map and and a breakdown of the plans:
► A 13-story hotel at 337 Butler St. by developer Miriam Chan. The 176-room hotel, first reported by the blog New York YIMBY, will have a restaurant and a health center on the first four floors, according to plans filed with the city.
► An 82-room hotel at 645-651 Union St. called the Gowanus Inn & Yard. This hotel is set to rise on a former parking lot across the street from Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, off Fourth Avenue. Backers include Matt Abramcyk, the restaurateur who once owned The Beatrice Inn, and developer Alec Shtromandel, who is also planning a hotel in Boerum Hill at 489 Baltic St., according to The Real Deal.
► A six-story, 58-room hotel at Third Avenue and Sixth Street. Globiwest Hospitality, the operators of the nearby Hotel Le Bleu, plan to build this hotel on an empty lot at 399 Third Ave.
► A 99-room, five-story hotel at 529 President St., just off Third Avenue. The developer is RJ Hospitality, which built the music-themed BPM Hotel in Sunset Park.
New residential development isn't allowed in Gowanus, but hotels are allowed under the neighborhood's manufacturing zoning, which is one reason so many are rising in the neighborhood now.
"What’s happening there is that real estate development pressure is still being felt, but since residential development is not allowed, people are doing other kinds of things to seek to maximize what they can get from their sites," City Councilman Brad Lander said.
"Hotels…are being built because property owners are looking to earn returns higher than what they can from most manufacturing and industrial uses."
Lander's Bridging Gowanus initiative, a proposed framework for future development in the neighborhood, would prohibit hotels as a way to preserve the neighborhood's industrial businesses. The proposal recommends creating a "super manufacturing zone" where hotels, big-box retail, storage facilities and nightclubs would be barred to protect industrial businesses. It also suggests that some residential development, including taller buildings, be allowed in a mixed-use zone in Gowanus.
