By MICHAEL HINMAN
For the first time in nearly 50 years, the former home of gyms like Bally and 24 Hour Fitness will no longer be owned by the Straus family. The bigger news here, however, may not necessarily be the seller of the 1.3 acre site, but rather who owns it now.
Cactus of Harlem paid $ 20.8 million for the vacant building and parking lot across from Kingsbridge Library, where West 231st Street meets Tibbett Avenue, according to the city’s property records. The seller was Evelyn Wells, listed as the “surviving trustee” of Fred Straus Inc., the Yonkers-based real estate company that has owned the property since 1974.
The purchase is interesting for Cactus as 24 Hour Fitness closed the location a little over a year ago at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But Cactus isn’t a casual buyer.
Instead, the limited liability company appears to be part of Cactus Holdings, the Queens real estate company probably best known for its Western Beef supermarket chain.
Could this former gym be the first western beef location in this part of the Bronx? If so, supermarket chain executives say no. You did not return a request for a comment on Monday. But it’s likely that company officials are more interested in simply being a landlord.
That is exactly what Cactus seems to be doing with over 40,000 square feet of land it acquired in 2017 on the corner of West 230th Street and Broadway. This set of buildings – which excludes the standalone Dunkin location but includes the Kingsbridge Post Office building on Broadway 5517 – was purchased by Cactus and a consortium of other owners for $ 14 million.
A real estate portfolio that Cactus maintains on its website advertises this location with more than 100,000 buildable square meters for both residential and commercial properties. An image attached to this property is a representation of what appears to be a western beef market – a neighborhood version of the chain’s normally larger, high volume warehouses.
A then-listing for this property by commercial real estate agency Cushman & Wakefield found that none of the existing leases in these retail stores were for more than three years. But if Cactus had plans to turn those Mamas and Pops into a Western Beef location, it hasn’t filed any plans with the city.
The same applies to the former 24-hour fitness location. Cactus closed its deal with the Straus property in April, though the paperwork itself wasn’t closed until early July, according to real estate transaction records. Cactus has not submitted any additional filing to the city, and it appears the company is continuing to seek a tenant for the building, which is located on West 231st Street and instead faces southwest towards West 230th Street.
Cactus owns several other properties in the Bronx, but none nearby. Some of these locations are Western Beef locations while others have other commercial and retail tenants. According to its published portfolio, the company owns more than 2 million square feet of real estate in the New York City area and focuses on real estate in densely populated areas.
The 24-hour fitness location was one of more than 130 that closed in June 2020 after the California chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Though 24 Hour Fitness secured $ 250 million to reopen some of its clubs, then CEO Tony Ueber admitted that the coronavirus pandemic was a death blow to locations that were forced to close.
The West 231st Street location became a 24-hour gym in 2014 after its parent company bought 32 Bally Total health clubs – a company that suffered from two bankruptcies of its own before slowly selling all of its club locations, the last in East Harlem in 2016.
If Cactus were to simply use the existing building, it would have 125 parking spaces – a bonus in this part of Kingsbridge. However, the zoning on the property also allows anyone to build a mix of denser housing and retail, which could explain the high selling price.
By comparison, when Straus first bought the property in 1974, he paid the equivalent of $ 209,000 today.
