A Bronx real estate investment and management company has acquired another well-maintained mixed-use property in Westchester County with roots in the county”™s industrial past on the Hudson River.
An affiliate of Bajraktari Management Corp., 530 West 136th Realty Associates LLC in early February closed on its $15 million purchase of The Atrium at Rae Park at 8 John Walsh Blvd. in Peekskill. The 121,000-square-foot complex includes professional office, retail, warehouse and light industrial space in the converted Fleishmann Co. distillery.
The Peekskill distillery was built in 1901 for Fleishmann”™s yeast manufacturing and dry gin production, which was interrupted by Prohibition and resumed in 1933 at the red-brick plant on the city”™s Charles Point.
The seller in the recent deal, RAE Park Associates Inc., is an affiliate of Esposito Builders Inc., a commercial and residential development and management company in the Lower Hudson Valley headquartered at 8 John Walsh Blvd. Richard A. Esposito, president of RAE Park Associates and CEO of Esposito Builders, in 1988 paid $225,000 to acquire the historic industrial property from the Peekskill Industrial Development Agency, according to Westchester County land records.
A leading apartment building owner and manager in the Bronx – where the company was launched in 1978 by two Albanian immigrants – Bajraktari Realty also owns and operates multifamily properties in Manhattan and Yonkers and has developed subdivision homes in Somers.
A Bajraktari affiliate in 2014 paid $18.1 million for a mixed-use commercial building in Dobbs Ferry that opened in 1927 as a Methodist Church publishing center, according to village historians, on the site footprint of a brewery that operated there under a succession of owners from 1853 to 1917. The approximately 160,000-square-foot building at 145 Palisade St. later operated as Columbia University”™s Hudson Laboratories, a naval research center that closed in 1969.
Another Bajraktari realty company affiliate last July closed on its $9.25 million purchase of 10 County Center Road, a 208,000-square-foot building next to the Westchester County Center in White Plains. The building, which straddles the border of the town of Greenburgh and city of White Plains, had a 55 percent occupancy rate at the time of the sale.
Harry Bajraktari, co-founder and president of the Bronx realty company, could not be reached for comment on the Peekskill property deal.
