The owner of a vacant building near Columbus Circle that once housed award-winning film processing company DuArt must now clear the vacant lot before building a new residential tower there. If all goes according to plan, around 40 residential units could hit the market and the building will have 12 to 17 stories. It was purchased from DuArt last June for $29 million by Mandelbaum and Mandelbaum, a New Jersey-based LLC.

The building at 245 W. 55th St. was originally put on the market by DuArt in November 2022 for $48 million. The only true reported, meaning the film processing company sold the property at a significant loss. The real estate blog also noted that over the years, DuArt has worked with directors such as Spike Lee and Michael Moore and has produced classic blockbusters such as Dirty Dancing And Forrest Gump.

Things got complicated for Mandelbaum and Mandelbaum, however, after the New York City Department of Environmental Conservation alerted the new owners that they would have a lot of remediation work to do. In other words, chemicals used by DuArt had seeped into the building.

DuArt, which ceased its film services in 2021, occupied the 12-story building from 1922 to 2011; the DEC estimates that volatile organic compounds have been building up in the site’s air, water and “soil gas” for about 90 years. The unhealthy “degreasing” and film cleaning chemicals used by DuArt include tetrachloroethene and a variety of trichloroethanes, the DEC said.

The DEC strongly encourages “public involvement” in the Brownfield Cleanup Program. This would require that information sheets be available at many steps of the process. The DEC says the documents for the W. 55th St. cleanup are on file at Community Board 5 and at the public library on W. 53rd St.

In a March document, the DEC pointed to “important” issues at the site that should concern the public, such as the aforementioned soil gas. The agency described a possible process of “soil gas intrusion,” in which accumulated cleanup chemicals from 245 W. 55th St. evaporate from the soil into “overlying buildings,” including those not directly beneath the site itself.

This “may cause concern for residents, homeowners, businesses and several community groups,” the DEC said.

A draft environmental work plan submitted on behalf of 245 W. 55th St. LLC, the Mandelbaum & Mandelbaum subsidiary responsible for the redevelopment, shows that the proposed conversion to residential units will not be completed for about four years. This may be an admission that the redevelopment and its approval by regulators and the public will delay the building’s conversion to residential units. The DEC approved the study work plan on June 14, which was conducted by another LLC called Environmental Logic.

That plan, submitted in May (as a revision of an April draft), also made it clear that developers plan to add six new floors to the building, which will reportedly happen after they remove the top floor.

A visit to the building by Straus News On August 12, the site was swarming with construction workers who covered the entire facade of the building with extensive scaffolding.