Newark is Poised for its First Major Downtown Office Building in a Decade

NEWARK-The footings and support beams were put in place on the Downtown Newark site back in the late 1980s, but when the national real estate market went in the tank shortly thereafter, nothing was ever done with them. They’re still in place, and Gale & Wentworth of Florham Park, NJ, one of the state’s largest commercial real estate development companies, wants to use the site to build an eight-story, 350,000-sf class A office building.

Small and medium-sized firms have been gobbling up space in renovated pre-World War II buildings in downtown Newark for months, and with space drying up the market appears poised for new office construction. If the G&W project goes forward, it would be the first new Downtown office building in a decade. The last one was Hartz Mountain’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield building, built back in the early 1990s.

Gale & Wentworth co-founder Stan Gale has already indicated publicly that his company has been talking to several large space users regarding long-term commitments for a new building. Even in this tight market, it’s unlikely such a project would get off the ground without significant pre-leasing as a prerequisite for getting major lenders interested. According to Gale, “we are looking at several other projects in Newark, and have several large users working with us.”