Two office buildings in Hell's Kitchen have changed hands without a conventional sale. ACORE Capital now controls 707 11th Avenue, once home to Kenneth Cole's headquarters, and 615 West 50th Street through a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. The transfer ends Beacon Capital Partners' effort to develop a 185,000-square-foot life-science project on the site and leaves its future use unresolved.
The transfer was reported by The Real Deal and closed after the owners fell behind on a $60 million debt tied to the properties. According to PincusCo, ACORE acted as administrative agent for a syndicate of lenders. Ownership of the Hell's Kitchen properties now sits with Wexford Investment Trust, an entity represented by ACORE Capital Managing Director Jason Mann, per the same PincusCo report.
A Decade-Defining Lab Project That Never Broke Ground
Beacon Capital Partners and Georgetown Company bought the two buildings from SL Green for $95 million in 2021. The partners planned a seven-story life-science facility with Zoe Life Sciences, a project that, according to YIMBY, would have been Manhattan's first ground-up life-science development in more than a decade. Beacon filed plans in 2023 to demolish the existing office buildings, but construction never began. The property later secured $60 million in debt before the deed-in-lieu transfer.
The main building at 707 11th Avenue was part of the site. Before Beacon's group bought the site, prior owner SL Green Realty shed it and other non-core assets to help fund stock buybacks, according to a 2022 report from Commercial Observer.
Public Investment and Other Hell's Kitchen Plans
The stalled project comes despite a substantial public-sector push to expand the city's life-sciences industry. According to NYCEDC, the $1 billion LifeSci NYC initiative is expected to create nearly 16,000 jobs by 2026, underscoring the scale of the city's investment in research, development and related innovation.
A separate proposal would bring a different mix of uses to the broader Hell's Kitchen waterfront area. The governor's office says a mixed-use development is planned for a 50,584-square-foot parking lot along Twelfth Avenue between West 45th and West 46th Streets, across from the Intrepid Museum, with housing and public amenities. Its location and proposed use distinguish it from the 707 11th Avenue lab plan, which centered on redeveloping existing office properties.
Extensions Ran Out on the $60 Million Loan
The loan backing the project became the subject of a default dispute. Georgetown Company sold its interest in the venture to Beacon Capital in early 2026, according to a Georgetown spokesperson. ACORE filed a pre-foreclosure lawsuit against a Beacon Capital affiliate in April after the owners fell behind on the debt, before the matter was resolved through this month's deed-in-lieu transfer.
A Sector-Wide Reset for Manhattan Lab Space
The collapse of the Hell's Kitchen project lands amid a broader slowdown in New York's life sciences real estate sector. New York leased just 27,000 square feet of lab space in the first quarter, with leasing velocity down 10 percent year over year and lab-space leasing plunging 84 percent from the prior quarter, according to CBRE data cited by The Real Deal. Regionally, commercial life science lab availability across the New York metro area reached a 30.8% vacancy rate by late 2025, as Hoodline previously reported, as speculative lab completions outpaced tenant demand.
Other stalled Manhattan lab bets are meeting similar fates. Taconic Partners sold 309 East 94th Street — once planned as life science space — to multifamily developer LCOR for $73 million, just $3 million more than the roughly $70 million that Taconic, Nuveen and Flatiron Equities paid for the site nearly five years earlier. Taconic also sold its West End Labs conversion at 125 West End Avenue to Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Foundation for $188 million in July, according to Commercial Observer, suggesting a systemic reset rather than an isolated failure.
The pullback comes despite significant public investment in the sector. New York City's LifeSci NYC program committed $1 billion toward biotech growth, with $430 million of that earmarked specifically for lab and incubator construction, according to NYCEDC. Nationally, the strain runs even deeper: lab and R&D space net absorption across the United States came in at negative 1.2 million square feet in the second quarter of 2026, pushing the national lab vacancy rate to a record 23.8%, per CBRE.
What Happens Next Along Eleventh Avenue
The Hell's Kitchen corridor remains active even as the lab project falters. Extell Development filed plans in March to demolish 14 commercial structures across seven tax lots between West 45th and West 46th Streets, a project Hoodline covered in earlier reporting on the block. What ACORE and Wexford Investment Trust ultimately do with the lender-controlled 707 11th Avenue site — whether they wait for a biotech recovery, sell at a discount, or pursue residential or another commercial use — remains an open question.
