DUMBO rooftop gardens with conference tables and a movie screen

Eye on Real Estate: Two Trees Management adds outdoor amenities to three office buildings

July 26, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

This is a new rooftop amenity space Two Trees Management built at 45 Main St. Photos by Matthew Williams courtesy of Two Trees Management

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And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Can you hear that refrain from Joni Mitchell’s song wafting on memory’s breeze?

The garden — or gardens, actually — that brought her song to mind are situated on the rooftops of three DUMBO buildings that belong to Two Trees Management, the Walentas family’s company.

Because these are office buildings, amenities like conference tables, banquettes for lunching or taking work breaks and a screen for showing outdoor movies are interspersed among gray birch, flowering dogwoods, hydrangea and other plantings.

Access to the rooftop gardens is limited to tenants of the buildings, which are 45 Main St., 55 Washington St. and 20 Jay St.

The rooftop spaces were designed by James Corner Field Operations. If that name rings a bell, it’s because the firm was the project lead for the High Line in the Meatpacking District.

“There are 400 companies in the three buildings, but they never intermingle. They never had a reason to,” David Lombino, Two Trees Management’s managing director of external affairs, told Eye on Real Estate when we visited the three rooftops recently.

“We want to give them a reason to congregate,” he said.

The combined cost of building the three rooftop amenity spaces was $4 million, Lombino said.

Up-close views of the Clock Tower penthouse

With our impeccable sense of timing, we arranged to see the rooftops on a blisteringly hot day. But even in the sweltering sun, the spaces were very inviting.

They have stellar views of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and Manhattan skyscrapers.

On the roofs of both 45 Main St. and 55 Washington St., we got up-close looks at the clock faces on DUMBO’s iconic Clock Tower penthouse.

On the roof of 20 Jay St., we could see the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building — and the landmarked Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg shoreline.
“In office buildings, most people don’t have a view,” Lombino said. “We want to give our office tenants access to the views DUMBO is famous for.”

The new rooftop amenities have an up-to-the-minute vibe, which makes them excellent additions to these former industrial properties.

Two Trees Management turned them into office buildings in the late 1990s — nearly two decades before other developers brought two new DUMBO office-conversion projects to market.

One of the new complexes is DUMBO Heights, a cluster of former Bible-printing plants the Kushner Cos. and its investor partners purchased from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It has a slew of tenant-friendly amenities.

The Kushner Cos. was headed by Jared Kushner until he became senior adviser to President Donald Trump.

The other complex is Empire Stores, whose office tenants include West Elm. The Cayre family’s company Midtown Equities put a publicly accessible rooftop garden on this cluster of former coffee warehouses.