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The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Huge Tower Could Rise at Former Subway Inn Site After $300M Sale

By Shaye Weaver | October 21, 2015 10:36am
 Kuafu Properties is planning to demolish several buildings on East 60th Street and build a tower.
Kuafu Plans Tower
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UPPER EAST SIDE — Six low-rise buildings on East 60th Street, including the former home of the beloved Subway Inn bar, are slated to be demolished to make way for a new high-rise that could be one of the city's tallest, according to a broker.

World Wide Group, which owned the properties at 143 to 161 E. 60th St. between Lexington and Third avenues, recently sold them for $300 million cash to Chinese development company Kuafu Properties, according to Cushman & Wakefield, which brokered the deal.

Although Kaufu Properties declined to provide more information about its plans for the site, the demolition of the buildings will free up 282,925 square feet of buildable space, the broker said. The Real Deal first reported the news about the buyer.

Air rights from an inclusionary housing deal were also included in the sale, allowing the developer to build higher than current zoning would normally allow, according to the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The tower could potentially reach as high as 1,000 feet — or approximately 100 stories — Crain's reported.

The site "provides the opportunity to construct a global icon that will undoubtedly attract elite residential purchasers and draw top retail and commercial tenants from around the globe... and will become one of the city's tallest structures," Cushman & Wakefield said in a statement.

No plans have yet been submitted to the city's Department of Buildings, according to DOB spokesman Alex Schnell, but demolition permits for all six buildings were approved in December.

It was known from the time that World Wide Group purchased the site in 2006 that development was in the works, a spokesman for the company told DNAinfo in August 2014. 

It took World Wide Group 10 years to acquire all six properties, but once that was done, the entire package sold quickly, according to the broker.

"I have rarely seen a foreign buyer move so swiftly, yet carefully, to acquire such a major site," said Bob Knakal, Cushman & Wakefield's chairman of New York Investment Sales, in a statement.

The World Wide Group declined to comment on plans for the site.