How a Nazi Sympathizer’s Tribeca Garage May Become a Luxe Mansion
The 18th-richest man in the world (and India’s wealthiest oligarch) has purchased a forlorn Tribeca structure that he plans to upgrade into luxe urban mansion, complete with elevators, a basement swimming pool, and a rooftop patio with “walkable skylights.”
The building at 11 Hubert Street (corner of Collister Street) was bought last September by Mukesh Ambani, an industrial tycoon who regularly ranks as one of the 25 wealthiest people in the world (depending on the year and which net-worth tracker is compiling the list), and is by far the richest man in all of Asia. The purchase price of $17.4 million comes to slightly more than one one-thousandth of Mr. Ambani’s reported $116 billion net worth. (For comparison, this is the rough equivalent of someone who earns $100,000 per year paying $14.65 to purchase a home.)
In June, a team of architects representing Mr. Ambani presented their plans for the building to the Landmarks Preservation Committee of Community Board 1 (CB1). Because the building falls within the legally protected Tribeca North Historic District, any changes to its exterior require the approval of the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which first seeks an advisory opinion from the local Community Board.
Peter Pelsinski, of Span Architecture, explained, “we are recladding it in brick, so it is more compatible with the materiality of the Historic District. And we are enlarging slightly the rooftop bulkheads” to add a penthouse suite.
The new owner will have to live without one prized New York amenity. Although the existing structure contains interior parking, Mr. Pelsinski acknowledged, “we are obliged to remove the curb cut in front of the roll-up door, because we are converting the building to residential use. So, the garage will become part of the residential space.”
The existing structure at 11 Hubert Street has a tangled pedigree. It was built in 1946 by Dietrich Wortman, who was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1884, and emigrated to the United States, where he studied architecture at Columbia University. He was also a talented amateur wrestler, who represented his adopted country at the 1904 Summer Olympics, where he placed third. Two years later, he captured the U.S. national wrestling title in the welterweight division. Even after he retired from competition, Wortman remained active as a sporting statesman, pioneering competitive weightlifting in America, and later campaigning to prevent an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Many Americans, deeply troubled by the Nazi government’s persecution of Jews, had argued for pulling out of the games, which the German regime planned as a propaganda showcase to project the image of a newly invigorated and united Germany, while camouflaging its racism and growing militarism.
Leading the charge against the proposed boycott was Wortman, working through a German-language New York newspaper he helped found, Deutsche Zeitung, and his posts as president of the German-American Athletic Club and chairman of the German American Olympic Fund Committee. He argued that American athletes who competed in Berlin would “return as apostles of truth and justice for the promotion of friendship between our great countries.”
In the end, Wortman’s side prevailed, and American athletes participated in Berlin, although the Nazi propaganda victory was incomplete, at best: An African-American runner, Jesse Owens bested his Aryan adversaries and took home four gold medals, infuriating Adolf Hitler.
And Wortman, although criticized as de facto Nazi spokesman, continued to prosper in the years after World War Two. Based in an office at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street, he worked as both an architect and a builder. In 1946, a trucking firm, the Highway Transportation Company, bought a Lower Manhattan lot that had been vacant for almost a decade. Located at the corner of Hubert and Collister Streets, the site had once been a coal yard, which was replaced in the 1850s by a six-story building that housed a sugar refinery, and was later converted to a tin-can factory, which was finally demolished in 1937. On this parcel, the company wanted to erect a one-story garage, with loading bays for its trucks. They hired Wortman, who both designed and built the structure.
Wortman died in 1952, but his building was altered four decades later, when the Gold Wings Air Freight Company added two floors of office space above the garage, in the early 1990s. By the early 2000s, the offices had been converted to apartments, and 11 Hubert was the subject of a lawsuit between neighbors who each wanted control of the building. In 2014, both parties sold their interests to hedge fund impresario Adam Zoia, for $15.3 million. When Mr. Zoia’s 2016 plan to convert the building into a private residence languished, he tried to sell the property for $35 million. Eventually, he settled on a price of slightly less than $20 million, selling in 2018 to tech billionaire Robert Pera, who planned to expand the structure. But Mr. Pera’s plans came to nothing, and he flipped the property (at a loss of more than $2 million) to Mr. Ambani.
At the June meeting of CB1’s Landmarks Committee, the panel voted to recommend that the plan by Mr. Ambani and Span Architects be approved by the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, noting, “the proposal to re-skin the building in a handmade reddish brick is appropriate and ties it together with the neighborhood better than the existing stucco.”