It made a splash, now it wants cash.
A developer is selling Park Slope’s landmarked Fourth Avenue bathhouse months after it completed a multi-million dollar, two-year-plus renovation of the building in July.
Greystone Development is offloading the century-old structure currently occupied by gym Blink Fitness following a $5 million makeover of the site it purchased for $7.6 million at a foreclosure auction in 2014.
The Brooklyn Lyceum’s $10.5-million sale price does not include its valuable air rights, however, which the real-estate firm transferred from the bathhouse to a neighboring property where it is building a 13-story rental building set to open this summer.
“That was huge for us. We saw a lot of value there,” said Greystone’s development director Cian Hamill.
But the refurbished historic bathhouse at 227 Fourth Ave. between President and Union streets is still a sound investment in the nabe’s red-hot real-estate market, according to Hamill.
“It’s going to be a long-term play,” he said. “A buyer will hold onto it and watch the value appreciate, while bringing in a consistent rent.”
Blink Fitness’s lease at the Lyceum doesn’t expire until 2033, and includes an option to renew for five more years. Hamill claimed the building’s sale won’t affect the gym’s operation or lease in any way, and reps from Blink, which just opened a Sunset Park outpost, declined to comment.
City officials hired local architect Raymond Almirall to design the neo-classical Lyceum building, which opened in 1910 as part of an effort to promote bath-taking among residents of nearby tenement buildings that lacked indoor plumbing at the time.
But the need for public bathhouses quickly faded after indoor plumbing became mandatory in the 1930s, and not long after the Lyceum was reborn as a gymnasium, which it remained until it was abandoned in the 1950s.
City preservationists landmarked the building in 1984, forbidding its demolition and preserving its façade from development — but not the ravages of time, which brought the Lyceum to the brink of collapse by the time Greystone bought it.
The developer’s engineers found the bathhouse’s façade crumbling and rotting steel in its superstructure, necessitating a gut renovation that took nearly three years to finish.
