North Hill Buys Carroll Gardens Site Out of Auction

A chapter in the long saga of a Carroll Gardens lot has finally reached its close.

Vlad Shneyder’s North Hill Capital Management won an auction for the site, 232-240 Smith Street, paying just $2.6 million after foreclosing on the lot’s previous owner, Louis Greco’s Second Development Services. PincusCo first reported the sale.

Between 2015 and 2018, SDS took out $12 million in loans on the property that were later consolidated by North Hill.

The lender sued SDS and some of its contractors in 2020, alleging that SDS missed payments on the loans, that its construction partner engaged in dangerous and unsafe practices, and that the group failed to complete the development on time. North Hill won a $30.8 million judgment.

SDS had purchased the site in 2015 in two transactions that totaled $6.3 million. The loans were to fund construction of a 15,000-square foot, three-story retail building for a single tenant — Crunch Fitness. The original estimated completion date was in 2016.

Carroll Gardens has been prime real estate for years, but the developers of 232-40 Smith Street have failed to cash in. Not only did Crunch Fitness never arrive, but neither did the building itself.

Losing the lot is a bitter pill for SDS, but it’s not the first for a developer at 232-240 Smith Street. Claire Palermo Barbuto and Vincent Barbuto’s Son Claire Realty had owned the site since 1980 before selling to SDS, and the lot sat empty after the demolition of a popular Argentinian restaurant in the mid 2000s.

A never ending stream of stop-work orders, complaints from neighbors and fines stalled development after the site was cleared. Son Claire Realty told news outlets in 2012 that it planned to sell the site to a bank, but that never materialized.

North Hill principal Alfonso Kimche signed the paperwork for his firm. North Hill and SDS didn’t comment by the time of publication.