Supertall FiDi Tower Being Erected After DEC Says Brownfield Clean-Up Done
The prospective 64-story tower, known as 8 Carlisle Place, also has its fair share of internecine family drama behind its development. An underground petroleum spill in 2021 helped spur a long brownfield cleanup ordered by the DEC.
FiDi /
| 02 Jan 2026 | 06:20
An excessive amount of volatile compounds were detected on-site after an underground petroleum spill back in 2021. The DEC recently said the clean up complete, allowing construction of the proposed 64 story to being. (
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A 64-story residential tower (rendered above) is going up on Washington St., after a brownfield cleanup and some inter-family development drama. (
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A 64-story residential building is finally going up in FiDi after an extensive brownfield cleanup, not to mention some realtor family drama, as previously reported on by Straus News.
The massive 326,000 sq.-ft. project at 8 Carlisle Place will reportedly come with 462 new apartments, which will consist of a mix of luxury and more “affordable” units, plus various amenities including a lounge and a fitness center. It was originally set to only span 50 stories and house 400 units.
Located two blocks from One World Trade, the project could reach its full 789-ft. height by the middle of 2026, with tenants possibly moving in shortly thereafter.
Also known as the “Link Apartments,” the building is being developed by Grubb Properties and Pink Stone Capital, and is designed by Handel Architects. The lot was purchased for $89 million back in 2021, in a transaction inextricable from an ongoing inter-family dispute between a certain Richard Ohebshalom and his father, Fred.
The Ohebshalom duo co-owned the lot together as of 2011, when Richard Ohebshalom–who runs Pink Stone Capital– bought it out of foreclosure for $57.5 million.
A clause was intended to prevent Fred from pursuing the sale of the building without Richard’s consent, as well as cap Fred’s profits in the event of any such sale; nonetheless, Fred reportedly negotiated a sale of the building in 2017 without Richard’s knowledge, leading Richard to sue his father. (Fred’s brother Daniel, at one point named the “worst landlord in New York City,” was sent to prison over violations at two Washington Heights back in 2023).
The drama came to a resolution of sorts in 2020, when Richard (via Pink Stone) managed to buy out his father’s stake in the lot. Pink Stone’s 2021 sale of the building to Grubb Properties, spurring the current luxury development, then moved forward.
Yet the difficulties of familial developer drama was soon superseded by another obstacle: the clean-up of toxic contamination detected on-site.
Between the late 1800s and 1950, the lot housed various commercial buildings that didn’t exceed five stories. A six-story garage went up there in 1977, and was demolished in 2010. According to the aforementioned Straus News report from April 2023, the site was then “utilized for “the storage of metal containers, miscellaneous materials, and equipment.”
“In 2012, the Port Authority used it as a maintenance support yard for the World Trade Center. Until 2013, it housed stacked container boxes and construction waste. Since then, it has been vacant,” the report added.
In 2021, a 3,000-gallon underground petroleum tank spilled, leading to a sharp increase in contamination on-site.
City inspectors soon determined that the lot–otherwise known as 111-121 Washington St.–was a polluted “brownfield,” one that had accumulated excessive levels of petroleum-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) in its soil and groundwater.
SVOCs can have a particularly adverse effect on the human endocrine system, according to one Berkeley study, and can “interfere with the ‘synthesis, secretion, transport, activity, or elimination of natural hormones,’ which can cause a wide range of developmental and reproductive abnormalities.”
The remedial work that neutralized these toxins has since been completed, which allowed the ongoing construction of 8 Carlisle Place to begin.