S. wrote a while back: “Curious to know what’s happening at 250 Church Street, the once HRA building that takes up the whole block front from Leonard to Franklin.”

And then G. noticed this week that the north side of the building has a new set of windows. Turns out that’s just the beginning. Tribecan and noted architect Rafael Viñoly is doing a full-scale transformation of the 16-story 1948 building — now called 101 Franklin — for Columbia Property Trust, which acquired the building in 2019. Plans are “still in motion” for it to become “premium boutique office space for discerning tenants and will benefit from very limited competing supply in the highly sought-after TriBeCa neighborhood.” It’s scheduled for 2023. Rendering below.

The lobby will eventually be on Franklin or Leonard, and there will be retail on Church, which will do a LOT for the streetscape there.

It was a bit of a rabbit hole to get here, which in the end would have been easy had I just googled “101 Franklin.”

The building was emptied in late 2019 and sold to Columbia Property Trust; the city’s Human Resources Administration and the Department of Social Services moved to Brooklyn. And ever since it’s had a sidewalk bridge along Church, which as we all know a total drag.

A few years before that, in 2017, the building’s then-owner had filed plans to convert it to a 107-unit residential building. But those were scrapped when the sale went through to Columbia Property Trust and boutique office was now on the table.

City records show there was a transfer of the property in 2021, among a group of six other properties in Chelsea and Midtown, worth $1.4 BILLION (I’ve never seen a number in the billions on ACRIS — it took me a minute to read it properly.) I thought the new owner was the investment management firm PIMCO, which one source said acquired Columbia Property Trust in 2021 for $3.9 billion. HOWEVER, the press agent for Columbia Property Trust and she confirmed that indeed they still own 250 Church.