Downtown Newark Department Store Gets New Life

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.

1 of 3

Courtesy New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency

Hahne & Co. Building in Newark, N.J., by L+M Development Par… Read More Hahne & Co. Building in Newark, N.J., by L+M Development Partners.

Agata Domanska

Newark mayor Ras Baraka touts the mixed-use development as &quot… Read More Newark mayor Ras Baraka touts the mixed-use development as "an example of how public and private partners can collaborate for the good of our city."

Sylvester Zawadzki

The building, which is listed on the National Register of Histor… Read More The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, retains many of its architectural features, such as the exterior's distinguished brickwork and facade and the interior lobby's glass atrium skylight. The skylight was dismantled, fully restored, and replaced piece by piece in the new retail arcade.

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.