Once the crown jewel of Newark, N.J., the Hahne & Co. department store has been brought back to its former glory and is breathing new life into the historic downtown.
After closing in 1987, the nearly 85-year-old department store stood vacant for almost 30 years until New York–based L+M Development Partners completed an adaptive-reuse of the building, bringing mixed-income housing and a mix of uses to its new role.
“We began aspiring for a building that could achieve multiple goals. It’s a city looking for 24/7 energy,” says Jonathan Cortell, vice president of development at L+M Development Partners. “We tried to solve it all in one building—office, retail, education, and residential programming all under one roof.”
Completed in February 2017, the Hahne & Co. Building includes 160 mixed-income apartments, including 54 units for households earning 60% of the area median income (AMI), 10 units for households at 40% of the AMI, and the rest at market rates.
The building offers much more than housing. The space includes a 50,000-square-foot home for Rutgers University’s Department of Arts, Culture and Media; retail, such as the city’s first Whole Foods Market, Petco, and Barnes & Noble College bookstore; a restaurant by celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson; and urgent care clinic CityMD.
Putting the capital stack together for the $123.4 million development wasn’t an easy feat. “This development was so much more about a community collaboration and resurrecting an icon than it was a purely economic endeavor,” says Cortell.
Cortell adds that the state and the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency were vital partners to making the development a reality. L+M utilized low-income housing, historic, New Markets, and New Jersey Economic Redevelopment & Growth tax credits; tax-exempt bonds; and a tax abatement. Private equity was provided by Goldman Sachs, Prudential, and L+M, and debt was provided by Citi Community Capital, Morgan Stanley, and three nonprofit Community Development Financial Institutions.
