Three and a half years ago, a developer announced a 200,000-square-foot research lab for the East 90s, complete with a rendering, a name honoring the Yankees legend who was born on the block, and a promise that it’d be finished by mid-to-late 2025. Walk past the site today and you’ll find the same 1927 loft building that was there before, wrapped in a sidewalk shed, with a sign on the fence still advertising a summer 2025 completion. The lab never showed up. Last week, the site changed hands.
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The property is 309 East 94th Street, between First and Second avenues, which sold last Thursday for $73 million, according to city records first reported by Commercial Observer. The seller was a group led by Taconic Partners. The buyer, LCOR, is a developer whose portfolio is overwhelmingly apartment buildings, including 25 Broad downtown and 1515 Surf in Coney Island, and whose commercial work runs to office buildings and JFK’s Terminal 4 rather than labs.Nobody involved has said what happens next. LCOR hadn’t responded to a request for comment by the time this article was published, and Community Board 8 told East Side Feed it hasn’t heard anything about the new owner’s plans. There aren’t any new filings for the site with the Department of Buildings, either.
We first covered the site in 2022, after Taconic and its partners paid the Karten family $70 million in cash for the loft building, its two-story garage and the auto shop around the corner at 324 East 95th Street. The $73 million sale works out to a $3 million gain on the land, before counting whatever was spent trying to develop it.
And plenty was lined up. The group secured a $79 million construction loan in 2022, and when plans and a rendering came out in March 2023, the developers said demolition and foundation work had already begun. The eight-story building was to be called Iron Horse Labs, after Lou Gehrig, whose first home was a tenement at this address. The pitch leaned hard on the tribute: a research building on the birthplace of the man ALS is named for, with his exterior plaque restored in the lobby and triangular sun shades on the façade meant to evoke stadium pennants. Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai and NYC Health + Hospitals were all cited as the neighbors who’d make the location work.
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Whatever happened in 2023 didn’t get far. The building is intact above the shed, with its windows in place. The ground floor is boarded up behind green plywood, and there was a worker on site when we stopped by, but nothing visible suggests a new building is going up. Commercial Observer described the project’s progress as uncertain, and The Real Deal reported that the loft building, the garage and the auto shop are all still there.The sale fits a pattern. In July, Taconic sold West End Labs at 125 West End Avenue, its much larger lab conversion across the park, to Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation, which plans to turn it into a brain research institute. Ackman himself said a slump in the life sciences sector is what made the numbers work, and the broader picture backs that up: leasing volume for lab space in New York City fell 84 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the quarter before, according to CBRE data cited by Commercial Observer.
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