New York’s iconic Bossert Hotel faces closure

Once one of the loudest hotels in the outer boroughs, with one also set to reopen as a luxury stay, this historic stunner is now facing foreclosure.

How the Bossert Hotel in Brooklyn Heights fell out of favor: The Montague Street beauty, previously dubbed the ‘Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn,’ received a $112 million pre-foreclosure notice after missing mortgage payments and accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

On April 13, Wells Fargo filed the opinion against the owner of the building, the Chetrit group, in Kings County Supreme Court, commercial site PincusCo first reported. The notice alleges the property developer owes more than $126.7 million on a $112 million loan from 2019.

Chetrit Group and Clipper Equity’s David Bistricer — the latter of which Chetrit bought out in 2019 — bought the 187,200-square-foot Italian Renaissance Revival-style property from Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2012 for $81 million, with the intention of transform it into a 302 -hotel room, Brownstone reported. Beyond its history as a hotel, the property has also served as the stage for a major local sports festival.

“Most of the rooms in the old hotel — where the Dodgers celebrated their only World Series title in Brooklyn before heading west — are now used as residences for Witnesses volunteers,” La Poste reports of the 14-storey building, which was built in 1909, at the time of purchase.

According to documents filed in April, the owners planned to reopen the storied accommodation as the Kimpton Hotel and succeeded in obtaining a temporary occupancy certificate for the building in January 2020, Brownstoner added. The hotel has been closed for years.

The bank says it sent a number of default notices to the owners, adding in the filing that it planned to sell the hotel to recover the outstanding balance of more than $126 million.

For a brief time it looked like it might reopen with a liquor license in August 2019 – a deadline that has come and gone. Last year, the hotel appeared on IHG Hotels & Resorts websites and other hotel booking sites with rates ranging from $246 to $303 a night — but the property still has no not open.

News of the foreclosure comes as family-owned Chetrit moves forward with other high-profile projects, PincusCo noted, including a $78 million development on the Lower East Side and a $290 million refinance. in the financial district.

Chetrit Group did not immediately return the Post’s request for comment.