The Starrett-Lehigh building is getting street cred with a new entrance, retail, restaurants and food hall under the new moniker Starrett-Lehigh Depot.
“Enormous and eclectic, the Depot offers an array of flexible spaces for food, fitness, retail, essentials, events and more” brags the brochure.
Driving by, it is easy to see that Scott Rechler’s RXR is redeveloping the ground floor on the eastern end of the full- block building at 601 W. 26th St., which has frontage on West 27th Street as well as Eleventh and Twelfth avenues — the latter being the West Side Highway.
Glass is already in place for the storefronts and a new entrance on Eleventh Avenue that will bring its 5,000 upstairs workers and other customers into a central 13,024-square-foot food hall.
Leaked plans show this entry hall is lined with garage-style doors on the north side that can be opened into a new 5,557- square-foot flexible Expo space for events.
The Expo is wrapped on the building’s 27th Street corner by a retailer or fitness facility of 10,563 square feet that sources said will be chosen once other deals are finalized.
The other deals include a new restaurant on the West 26th Street corner that will span meals from “brunch with an approachable price point” to late evening dining, a source said, as well as an experienced food hall operator.
The new entry will also link to the passenger elevators so all the high-heeled fashion and creative workers in the offices upstairs will no longer have to navigate the loading docks farther west on 26th Street.
A Newmark team is working on the retail along with RXR, which declined to comment.
